on beauty for its own sake

Your desire to use creativity to serve beauty, to satisfy the senses and the heart rather than some grand or profound reflection can be embraced. You don't need to have anything to say, no need to seek and find a way to say things you don't mean. Beauty exists for itself, without an explanation, without you needing to sneak a narrative into it.

This is how we end up missing each other, looking at an other without ever seeing them behind the veil, if only their shadow. We miss each other by giving up on sharing the things we made simply because it feels good, when somewhere along the way, we start pretending to serve a cause or a purpose that just isn't ours. The desire to be perceived in a flattering light taints the offering of the one who doesn't even see themselves clearly, who doesn't allow themselves to exist in the space that it theirs to fill, trying to force a foot in a shoe that's too small, walking miles in it with a sore heel.

I will always make a case for beauty in art, and beauty for its own sake, beauty for no reason other than our existing in its midst, together with terror and confusion and wonder. Refuse to hear that caring for beauty is not caring the right way or that you should care about other things more, that you are indifferent and disconnected if you don't show you care the way others do — the way they wish you did — that your love isn't deep enough if expressed in a language of shapes and feelings and vaporous ideas. Art takes whatever shape your hand and your mind bestows upon it, and your mind even when shared and witnessed by another, only and always belongs to you.