Where there is tension, there is beauty.

 Where there is tension, there is beauty. 

I was catching up with someone yesterday, and said these words. Due to a strong reaction, I immediately walked it back a bit, saying "there is the potential for beauty." But the more I ponder the words, the more I have decided to double down on the original phrase:

Tension, ergo beauty. 

Even if you don't immediately recognize beauty in the tension between things, it's there. Hold tension in your mind's hand. Turn it over, inspect it. Peel back the rind of your experience, and discover the juicy fruit of beauty hiding within. Antinomy is, by its nature, beautiful. 

Great, that seems right. I have spoken truth. The only thing I still need to figure out is what the hell these terms mean. 

Tension seems easier to define. It's multiple objects existing in the same space. Two things that are contradictory or opposing (or maybe just unlike one another), but somehow both things seem true. It's two things pulling away from one another while somehow also moving in the same direction. 

Beauty, though. Oh beauty. What are you? I am someone who never shuts up about things being beautiful, but today I was arrested with the sudden realization that I have no idea what beauty actually is. I point at something and call it beautiful, but I have no idea what the term actually means. 

Here's what I've got so far:

• Beauty has something to do with the reality of a thing, but it also participates in a transcendence from reality. It's both real and abstract. 
• Beauty is a feature of creation, and is in some way related to essence and telos. 
• Beauty exists in relation to truth and goodness, but is also distinct from these concepts. 
• Beauty is objective: an a priori characteristic woven into all things, true for all. Beauty is also subjective: an a posteriori understanding that is unique to each person in each moment. 

It does not escape my awareness that in trying to define beauty, I introduced a series of tensions: real and abstract, truth and not truth, objective and subjective. 

Am I spiraling toward a tautology? Tension contains beauty because beauty contains tension. I could be, but I think there's something deeper going on here. This isn't just a meaningless equivalence; it's a meaningful ecosystem. Tension and beauty exist in relation to one another, each giving meaning to the other--a symbiotic relationship of meaning. 

This whole line of thought leaves me more confused than when I started, but I'm sure about one thing: where there is tension, there is beauty. 

p.s. A cool thought to leave with you. Synesthesia is a condition where perceptual wires get crossed. You hear colors, taste sounds, feel numbers. There are theories that babies experience the world primarily through synesthetic means, and eventually grow to distinguish perceptual media from one another. There is another theory that language itself is a form of synesthesia, where formations of visual lines induce involuntary correlations to collections of sounds, which in turn cause cognitive pathways to fire in the brain and form thoughts. But I digress.

All this is to say, synesthesia is a perceptual experience of tension. And the whole thing seems, earnestly, to be beautiful.