aes·thet·ic
[es-thet-ik or, especially Brit., ees-] 
Show IPA
ɪk Show IPA –adjective
1.
2.
Right here is my favorite definition and the only one that matters to me, but I put the whole dictionary entry in to be accurate and proper. This is the only one that really means what the word sounds like and looks like and feels like when you read it or sounds like when you say it.
3.
pertaining to, involving, or concerned with pure emotion and sensation as opposed to pure intellectuality.
–noun
4.
a philosophical theory or idea of what is aesthetically valid at a given time and place: the clean lines, bare surfaces, and sense of space that bespeak the machine-age aesthetic.
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Hi, there. I've been thinking of you for days. As you know, I've always liked you. I have funky paintings of you with a girl with a black bob. She's always looking sidelong at you. I don't know who created the paintings, but I feel like I know her from looking at you and that girl so often. I don't have them in my bedroom, though. In daylight, the sunny yellow background and your happy eyes make the images friendly. In the dark, though, there's no bright background and that girl looks pretty pale and I'm not sure I like the way she's looking at you...so I don't have those in my bedroom. My bedroom's painted the chocolate brown of a Hersey's Kiss, so you wouldn't look so good in there anyways.
I have that pin with you and your twin on it that I love to wear on my bag. You're definitely at your most intriguing in that tiny print.
I have images of you I've cut out of magazines and old books and posters. You can be hard to come by because you're a blackbird, not a raven. I even have a plate with you on it.
Those are things I've always loved, and there are more, but in the past few weeks, I just haven't been able to get you out of my head and until last night, I couldn't figure out why.
I put up a mural on one of my walls filled with your whole family. It's a tree of life and you and all of your brothers and sisters are perching on branches and flying to and fro and carrying little twigs in your beaks. Everything about that mural is black. I guess it's all in shadow or a silhouette. It's on my turquoise wall between two windows right above where the boys do their homework on the computer. It makes me happy to have you watching over them.
I took my favorite picture of you and started trying to draw it, but I don't draw well at all. So then I just skipped to cutting it out freehand. Over and over again but it just didn't look right. My son had been watching me. He loves to be a part of what I'm doing when I get into a deal like this. He watches and then he scootches up next to me and then he picks up a pair of scissors, too, and the first time he cuts out the image, it's perfect. I've been using it as a template. Sometimes, I keep trying to get it right and it starts out about 4'x2' and ends up the size of the tip of my thumbnail, at best...I cut and then the head's too flat so I have to make the curve and then compensate by shortening the body, requiring cutting down the curve underneath, and so on...as I've been saying to my husband and boys, "there's a thin line between a blackbird and a duck." Seriously...one wrong cut and you turn from an almost right blackbird into a horrible duck creature with a beak instead of a bill. Not pretty at all.
We had an old U.S. map that was laminated but had been folded so many times and to render it pretty useless. So I started cutting your shape, my friend, out of different states, with rivers flowing through your body and mountains climbing your tail feathers. I finally got one right when I cut you out of the North Atlantic Coast. Part of the words of "Atlantic Ocean" are printed along the curve of your breast. I think I might be most fond of this version of you.
Then came last night. I was up late, as usual, and from out of nowhere, it just popped into my head: I need the song. I had looked at you and tried to create you out of paper and pencil and scissors and any other way I could think of, but the two dimensional had to expand. It wasn't that the images of you weren't pleasing, it was that they needed rounding out by another medium.
About six months ago, I lost all of the music I'd ever downloaded. Now I'll think of a song and it'll make me so upset that I don't have it anymore or will never have the bootleg version of it or the live recording of the show I saw. Sometimes, though, I can get just what I'm after, when I've just got to have it. I did. I downloaded your song and I realized two things. I've missed hearing the Beatles croon and you tweeting in the background, hesitantly hopeful along with the lyrics. I am hesitantly hopeful.
The more important thing was that all of the thinking of you and searching for you and wanting to feel you is defined by one of my favorite words: aesthetic. The spelling of the word, the look of the letters on paper, listening to people try to use it in a sentence..."concerned with pure emotion or sensation as opposed to pure intellectuality." HA! Sometimes, that's just who I am. A lover of beauty.
You'll never believe this, Blackbird, but there's even a science of aesthetics. A science, as in a branch of knowledge or study dealing with a body of facts or truths systematically arranged...and so on. Who decides what is beautiful and what constitutes of "love" of whatever it is they come up with. This makes no sense to me but I don't care, not one iota.
You see, Blackbird, you taught me over the course of the past month that there are times when one medium of expression is not enough to create honesty and a whole. Integrity, that most valuable word I wrote about a couple of nights ago. Now I know that I was thinking of what you looked like because somewhere, I was remembering what you sounded like; what that song has meant to me in the past and what I knew it meant now, but had put it away in a box up on a dusty shelf in a dark basement. I've cleared the cobwebs, though, and I'm ready to listen.
I downloaded it and said to my son's, "your Uncle Pat can play that whole song on his guitar," and he can; so beautifully and softly it makes you feel like you'd never want to hear it any other way ever again. I got the Beatles, though, and I hit "repeat-one song" and listened to it over and over last night while I kept cutting away, out of fabric, now, because I'm not done with that yet, either...and I cried and cried until I couldn't cry anymore. I cried for your broken wing and sunken eyes. I cried for the moment you were waiting for to arise. You are just so brave in this song. Even if I never create the perfect rendering of you, I strongly feel that you can help me find my moment to arise, Blackbird, and I'd most humbly ask you to do so when the time is right.
I love you, Blackbird. Thank you for appealing to my aesthetic, my very own science of that concerned only with pure emotion and sensation, as opposed to pure intellectuality. I'm not sure I can ever be "purely intellectual" again. I think that ship has sailed. Aloha...
Blackbird
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
Black bird singing in the dead of night
Take these sunken eyes and learn to see
all your life
you were only waiting for this moment to be free
Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.
Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly
Into the light of the dark black night.
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise,
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
The Beatles
What, reader, appeals to your aesthetic sense? Crazy color combinations?stark, white minimalism? Soft velvet? What does that word-"aesthetic"-mean to you? Do you think it's as stunning a word as I do? Do tell...
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