I want to tell the story that I should have told

Isabel Daniel | Fall 2021

I want to tell the story that I should have told Hikmat. The story to make her fully understand me so that she would never have looked at me with those eyes. Those eyes of love (love undirected at me, pooled and pooling over, unexisting in the world until she created it, all by herself in that quiet laboratory and the many rooms before the laboratory which she made into places of discovery simply by attention to things that no one ever had)— those eyes of love shadowed over with fear. If she had really understood me, the fear would have had no room to make its place. It’s my fault she didn’t understand me. She had the necessary quality to, the love of the invisible and the beyond and the fragile, and the grasp of the total malleability of the entire world. She had this, this quality that takes many words to describe, unlike the quality of courage and the quality of shyness, so many words it takes because despite all the human lifetimes that have turned over into each other, and all the human beings who have carried this quality in the core of their being, often unearthed but sometimes exposed, through loneliness or trauma or a particular emotional constitution, to the air and stinging like an naked nerve in a world without the atmospheric composition to soothe it— this quality like a stone that cannot be described, because it is simply like the most beautiful stone, and that— what that is— is different to everyone, and the particular look of the stone is of the utmost importance, but only to the individual and the ones who love them— this quality she had is the real essential thing needed to fix the entire world and bring it— not back into line, there has never existed a baseline of beauty, but bringing it forward into beauty so that everything is beautiful all the time. The real essential thing is that if it was not beautiful we would not love it. And if it was not beautiful we would not be able to bring our hearts from calm into quickness, or from quickness into calm. That is the thing about beauty. It never inspires a series of effects belonging to one category like stimulate and depress. It is not the driving force of the universe, but it should be. A harsh line can be drawn across anything in the world. Dark and light, and clean and unclean, salty and sweet, universal and particular. Every single one of these lines can be contested, every single line is created, but once drawn it is still real. They can be drawn anywhere, at the seven-tenths mark or the sixteen-fifty oneths mark. But they are drawn. And while they are contested, it can never be contested that we cannot communicate without these lines, and that beauty is what lives in between. Beauty is not the middle, mediocrity, but the endless turning over and dying and living again. Beauty is tense and crouching. Beauty is the fundamental category of the human mind, and until the world is recreated in its image, the human mind will ache from the dissonance between mind and world. And it can be done. Now, it has been done. Thank you for your sacrifice. 

I should have said all of that to Hikmat. But I couldn't find the words. Everytime I opened my mouth, the trickle that was released could not have slaked the thirst of the thiolava or some other smallest creature of the world. (Creature is a strange word. It suggests creation and I can’t imagine a mindful beginning to all this mindlessness. But still I love the word creature, and am trying to make the world where everything is creature, created. Wanted, called forth into this life, having a calling.) But in my head I carried more than anyone else I had known before that point. This is not a vain thing to say, only a true thing, and not a product of some self-perceived superior intelligence, but the mathematical reality of my long long life. My longest of lives. Opening my mouth to speak before her, I could only manage the vaguest platitudes about how I love beauty and I do not love the unbeautiful world. And how I have lived so long and seen people turn it uglier and uglier. And it turn uglier and uglier. A graceless ceaseless cycle crying out for grace and ceasure.

I tried to put it into the language she loved best, that of founding a world of science. And how beauty is compatible with a world of science. Humans' deepest desire for beauty, and the highest faculty being rationality— these are both essential facts, compatible lenses, obverse languages. But I should have just spoken my language instead of assuming she could only understand me through her own. People can learn new languages. I wish I had known this. But I had given up on speaking truly about my life until I met her, and had not the time to unlearn it in her lifetime. I should have remembered the reason why I chose her to be the first person I explained my existence to in thirteen thousand years. That look in her eyes at the conference. I am so stupid to think I needed to translate from my little used command of my language into the even less used command of her language and expect her to assemble from these fragments a robust grasp of my language. 

All this to say— I should have trusted her with my heart.