The Beautiful Realm

Of course our stories must be beautiful, and what follows necessarily is that our heroes must be too. The very act of this, poetry-writing, story-telling/writing, is the production of 'aesthetic'. This, I find, applies even to those explosively vulgar creations so common of our age. In fact such creations, it may be argued, deal more dishonestly than Romance with life's ugliness, taking the ugliness itself and lying with it. These creations are fond of disguising their Romance with raw, honest, meaning-making. What is more Romantic than presenting excessive filth as 'art', insisting that there is value in confronting those most bestial aspects of the human condition without shame?

My question, then, does not attend to whether or not stories are about the beautiful, for there is no question about that. The Realm of Art is perilous for precisely that reason. All is faerie within. Even the raw, gritty, supposedly honest stuff. My question is about the role of meaning in all this, now the revelation has descended. For when we extract the moral of the tale, once we have caught the abhorrent message within what we inexorably must denounce as propaganda afterward; what is the value of such art except to feel beauty, what is the function of those creations which deliberately set out to not do so, except to make us feel beauty. Feel, not see, because to be true such things can only be true to something in us, something which after all, is not spirit, but still within.