BEAUTY, THE MYSTERY OF THE AGES

What is beauty, how do we come to see it, what gene triggers it or is it picked up through the oohs! and aaghs! of our parents which act as signals for our brain to register what they admire. Of course all this admiration can also progress onto believing you are the most beutiful being in the world and rely on your looks alone to get on in the world. Some of the most beutiful people are also the dumbest and I won’t go anywhere near blonde jokes at this point.

Technically these days its called BMI or Body Mass Index the indicator for beauty. Some like a BMI of 1 others of 50. The bigger the BMI number the more skin you’re likely to be fitted into. Last decade it was wafer thin girls with DD chests, today its buxom beauties with DD buttocks. Who pursuaded us that we should move from admiring what God gave us over to what Botox and Breast enhancements. Why did we move from a set of natural lips to those more likely to be a sexual attraction for a chimpanzee. Are those thick red lips just a visible stand-in for more exciting times.

The beauty of art is one of the hardest to pin down. We all admire (insert your own diety) well constructed rainbows or sunrises and sunsets but what makes some of us think a black background with one little white dot in the middle is preferable to the Moaning Lisa. That somehow the Pietre in Rome is more perfect than a concrete garden gnome, who probably has a bigger donk anyway. Art is most definately in the eye of the beholder and while some of us see the beauty in a lump of clay others see beauty in a dollop of poo.

Once upon a time all the world had were objects you banged, blew or bowed, the drum, rams horn and lute. Over the years these instruments began to proliferate into a thousand weird and wonderful inventions from the mournful trombone to the rattling lagerphone, stringed boxes under the chin up to those derivatives you stuck between your legs. The more instruments that gathered together the bigger the noise and the more varied the music from the gentile Bach to the boisterous Wagner.

Today we have as many forms of music as their are instruments and it is getting harder to work out what you like best. The reverberating feedback of heavy metal down to the lonely harmonics of the mouth organ, from country music to cuntry music, from rock and roll to middle of the road. (See sidebar). We have rock-a-billy, hill-billy and used to boil-a-billy, headbanging, rock opera, opera, light opera and bloody Gilbert and Sullivan. What tells our brain that any of this is good shit or do we just listen to all this crap because someone we admire or is more important than us does?

Beauty in the animal kingdom is used not just to look pretty, its a means by which women get men into the nest and vice-versa, attracting your girlfriend either by an extravagantly useless collection of feathers as with the peacock ‘Hey baby I’ve got more than the Follies Begere’ or by the simple act of dropping a blue milk-bottle seal into your bower. ‘Come to my room…..baby and look at my trinkets’. There’s the rhino with the biggest horn at either end or the tusks that elephants try hide from poachers, the range of bizarre male behaviour in the animal world is beyond counting and this applies to the human ones around you as well.

On a sad note however is the way that we have altered domestic animals like cats and dogs to suit us rather than their potential mate, the bizarre and cruel designs of dogs to the incredible range of cat furs all to make us happy and that in many cases lead to the early demise of the pet through its sheer incapacity to live its life naturally (see sidebar.)

A dog is a dog, a cat is a cat and a chicken is for dinner. We don’t mixup their genes and we should just let them be companion we want them to be.

SIDEBARS

* Middle of the Road Music is usually that noise coming from lifts but to me it means putting it in the middle of the street and letting a car run over it.

** Don’t get us started on the pet dressing up caper, althouigh occasionally I put a warm coat on my mutt. But far worse than that are those humans that believe that ‘Tinkles’ is actually their ‘Baby’. If I had a child that came out all covered in black fur I’d be inclined to run from the room and cut my own penis off.