Night Beetle ...

Friday, July 08, 2005


A little night beetle who visited my bedside in one of the warm nights.

Its such a small, very frail looking thing. But if you look carefully, you will see how exotic and exquisitely adorned it is. With a menacing Voodoo like mask a little above its forehead, and even a tiny white dot on top to go with it. The front wings evolved to thicker shells covering the light and delicate back wings that are folded in and invisible. And on its shells are carved some queer looking Gothic patterns, parts of which have very finely refined and curvy edges. Altogether an epitome of splendid seductive art.

Who sees this beauty?

It should mostly be a male beetle, given that except homo sapiens, in most species the male is the fairer sex. So maybe the female ones. So this, this appearance, the way this looks, should be something attractive to them. And it seems a generally acceptable fact that beauty attracts.

Are there any characteristics of beauty that is independent of how we sense and perceive it?

Say like the golden ratio, the ratio between the length and width of any pleasing looking rectangle, the ratio between the height and the height up to her navel of a beautiful looking woman and so on. You can find this ratio coming up in most normally beautiful looking creatures, things, patterns and all. And like the Fibonacci sequence, which again can be found involved in many natural patterns like leaf patterns, arrangement of seeds on the sunflower, the beehive-like patterns on a pineapple and more.

One is made inclined to believe that there can be found some attributes, or characteristics of beauty that not necessarily lie in the eyes of the beholder. One could at least hypothesize that there are some characteristics of beauty, or being beautiful, that hold with respect to the collective consciousness of life as a whole, life as it exists in this planet.

I have never seen an alien picturized in a normally beautiful looking manner ... :-)

And Calvin to end this :

0 comments: