Stealing beauty
by Bob on July 27, 2007
"Stealing Beauty" was a fascinatingly brilliant film of 1996 directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Liv Tyler played especially well in the film, as hoped, since she was essentially the centerpiece. The tag line of the film was "The most beautiful place to be is in love". No one would readily take a contrary position to that assertion.
The real question is again that of man-made images and whether they are mutable, owned, cherishable, or perfidious.
Usually a single right click on the internet browser can save an image from a website to someone's own disc drive. That's an amazing thing. Snapping up someone's image just like a magician's snapping his fingers and making a rabbit come out of a hat.
So fragile is the privacy of the image, indeed. So one must want others to have their images when they are put on the web.
We ask is this a real image ? It might not be. The image, like photo darkroom techniques of the day of paper photography, could have been doctored so the person in the image will look better or even worse than in reality.
In some so-called primitive cultures, the people forbid someone's taking their photograph or drawing as work of devilish spirits. They own their image. It's theirs, no one should mess with it. No one should steal it. If someone wishes, they should simply remember what the person looked like rather than recording it for posterity.
For we know that the word, to imagine, as John Lennon sang, is far more powerful than what we call reality and paper and computer pictures. We keep images in our mind for the rest of our lives. We should treat our heads as very expensive real estate and be careful what we watch and remember. What we see will likely be with us for a lifetime, if not in conscious thinking, if we follow Freud and others, but in dreams or even in the Collective Unconscious of Dr. Jung.
So we are warned by good conscience not to steal beauty but to appreciate it and remember it as such. No jpgs, gifs, tiffs or photo paper. Just remember in the wisdom of our hearts.
Don't steal beauty. For beauty is truth and truth is beauty and that is all we shall ever know said the poet John Keats in his "Ode on a Grecian Urn". Precisely, Keats said:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
No messing about with that formula. No right clicks on the mouse, either.