Both And

Yes I touched the rail

but who of us avoids it

stumbling in darkness

No for me it was

the Power who suddenly

surged up through my feet

Pretty Is But Doesn’t Do

Beauty signifies something more than a high degree of prettiness because ‘pretty’ and ‘beautiful’ can differ by category. We say “beauty is only skin-deep” but ‘beautiful’ can also describe character, what a person does and why. On the other hand ‘pretty’ can only be skin deep.

There’s nothing new here; the ancient Greeks thought phenotype and virtue were correlative (and that’s just one place to start). And/But in the eye of the beholder we maintain our postmodern pluralistic relativity. Your pretty/beautiful is valid but may not be my pretty/beautiful. We judge character and attractiveness differently according to our individual peculiar standards and we get them just as confused as love and lust.

Even so: embedded underneath the details of our glossy, high-res, gendered, digital standards of ideal faces and bodies – I think we really believe “beauty is as beauty does.”