BEAUTY AND TRUTH
Keats's oft-quoted line about Beauty being
Truth and Truth Beauty ... is really no different than Devil the Mother hyped
as God the Father in Judaism, as what I have tended to regard as the 'best of a
bad job' starting-point for civilization - always fundamentally barbarous - as
we know it and have long known it in terms of the Judeo-Christian tradition, a
tradition that, by today's global standards (more openly barbarous) is
decidedly anachronistic and something that few if any of the truly contemporary
(feminist-dominated proletariat) take seriously. But Keats was of course
Anglican rather than Judaic, and at the time of writing that line of his a
rather young man with not much longer to live.
It has been said, and even by so distinguished
a musician as Frank Zappa, that Beauty is a lie. But it is actually a fact, and
a metachemical fact above all else. When Beauty is
hyped as Truth, on the other hand, one certainly has a lie, the Keatsian lie that parallels, as noted above, the Old
Testament lie of Devil the Mother (representing Beauty) hyped as God the Father
(representing Truth), and, as a kind of fiction, that should be distinguished
as much from fact as illusion or, rather, delusion from truth, both of which
are equally, if antithetically, false.