Six Names of Beauty

Citation preview

Six Names of Beauty CR ISPI N SA RT W E L L

ROUTLEDGE NEW YORK AND LONDON

RT5586_C00.qxd

5/28/04

2:04 PM

Page ii

Published in 2004 by Routledge 29 West 35th Street New York, NY 10001 www.routledge-ny.com Published in Great Britain by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE www.routledge.co.uk

Copyright © 2004 by Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper. 10

9

8

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sartwell, Crispin, 1958Six names of beauty/Crispin Sartwell. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-96558-6 (hb: alk.paper) 1. Aesthetics, Comparative. I. Title: 6 names of beauty. II. Title. BH85.S27 2004 111’.85–dc22 2004002082

RT5586_C00.qxd

5/28/04

2:04 PM

Page iii

For Marion, with love and with longing

iii

RT5586_C00.qxd

5/28/04

2:04 PM

Page iv

RT5586_C00.qxd

5/28/04

2:04 PM

Page v

Contents

Acknowledgments / ix Foreword / xi 1. Beauty English, the object of longing / 1 2. Yapha Hebrew, glow, bloom / 27 3. Sundara Sanskrit, holiness / 57 4. To Kalon Greek, idea, ideal / 85 5. Wabi-Sabi Japanese, humility, imperfection / 109 6. Hozho Navajo, health, harmony / 133 Coda / 152 Notes / 153 Illustrations / 159 Index / 163 v

RT5586_C00.qxd

5/28/04

2:04 PM

Page vi

RT5586_C00.qxd

5/28/04

2:04 PM

Page vii

Some say cavalry corps, some infantry, some, again, will maintain that the swift oars of our fleet are the finest sight on dark earth; but I say that whatever one loves, is. —Sappho

RT5586_C00.qxd

5/28/04

2:04 PM

Page viii

RT5586_C00.qxd

5/28/04

2:04 PM

Page ix

Acknowledgments

I thank Arthur Danto for many years of philosophical inspiration and teaching about beauty, as well as for the Sappho quotation that serves as an epigraph to this book. Karmen MacKendrick has helped guide me toward the slightly warped and problematic features of beauty that inform this book fundamentally. Glen Mazis provided personal and philosophical inspiration. Kevin Melchionne taught me that much of what most people do every day has a dimension of devotion to beauty. Way back when, Reed Whittemore taught me poetry, in particular the poetry of William Carlos Williams, of whom Reed was the biographer. The young artists of the Maryland Institute College of Art who have shared their work with me, and talked to me in the course on beauty that I taught there during the 2001–2002 academic year, provided fundamental inspiration. I’ve been living the last several years with a large painting by Chris Terry, which has helped a lot. The folks at Farmer’s Daughter, a garden store, have helped me make a garden and a home. Jane Winik Sartwell has taught me so much about love and life, as has her mother, Marion Winik.

ix

RT5586_C00.qxd

5/28/04

2:04 PM

Page x

RT5586_C00.qxd

5/28/04

2:04 PM

Page xi

Foreword

As is appropriate given its subject, making this book has been a great pleasure. I am by nature a critical person, and there is much in art and in life that I intensely dislike. But such a form of consciousness is a burden; barrages of vicious judgment are a variety of pain. I tried (though not entirely successfully) to suspend that consciousness for the length of this book, and it is intended to be an essay in universal appreciation. My goal above all was to experience the beauty of as many sorts of things as possible. For that reason, my conceptual treatment of beauty is both cursory (in order to make room for beautiful things) and as general and openended as I could make it. My feeling was that adequacy of definition was of less moment than creating an open structure into which as many things as possible could be drawn. As I wrote this book, I kept seeing things differently, and kept seeing the beauty of different things. I took to saying, as I walked or drove around my little part of the world, about a tree, or a motorcycle, or a field, or a bass line on the radio, or a billboard, or a rainstorm, “Hey, that’s beautiful!” Then sometimes I would go home and write about it. That is a good thing, and if I could represent one hope with regard to the dissemination of this book, it’s that it might give some readers similar moments. It is a book of moments, and can be dipped into rather than read straight through, though I also hope that the accumulation of moments displays a kind of structure that could yield a coherent set of experiences. xi

RT5586_C00.qxd

5/28/04

2:04 PM

Page xii

xii

Foreword

The book is organized around discussions of the words for beauty in six languages. beauty (English): the object of longing yapha (Hebrew): glow, bloom sundara (Sanskrit): whole, holy to kalon (Greek): idea, ideal wabi-sabi (Japanese): humility, imperfection hozho (Navajo): health, harmony As the words suggest, the dimensions of beauty that have been appreciated in the art and spirituality of different peoples have been remarkably various. Some may seem incompatible with one another. But bringing them together opens us with sensitivity to the possibility of beauty. Each culture has been driven by different environments, needs, and abilities, leading it to explore different aspects of the beautiful. For example, while the Greek to kalon marks an appreciation of the perfect human form, of illumination both literal and figurative, and of abstract concepts such as those of mathematics, the Japanese wabi-sabi celebrates the earthy, the particular, and the imperfect. So both the exalted architecture of the Parthenon and the humble pottery of the Kizaemon tea bowl claim a place in our inventory of the beautiful. These terms have been selected for their contrasts with one another, as well as for something fundamental toward which each word draws our attention. They could have easily been multiplied. But this is not a work of philology, and the terms and their inflections, though I hope I have treated them responsibly, are primarily starting points for associative moments. It is, I think, in principle possible to experience the beauty of anything, and the terms discussed have opened historically various dimensions of possibility, various objects and desires that remain as perpetual possibilities for the experience of beauty. In most cases, I develop some examples of beauty from the culture in which the term originates, and

RT5586_C00.qxd

5/28/04

Foreword

2:04 PM

Page xiii

xiii

then fly far afield into other cultures and contemporary objects (as well, necessarily, as the people who experience them). The possibility of finding things beautiful is inscribed in languages and the cultures they articulate and reflect, but the experience of beauty is not bounded by the vocabulary one possesses. Always our longings and what we long for are barely expressible or hover at the edges of our language, stretch our expressive capacities, or force us into using words oddly, devising new ones, or appropriating terms from other languages. Certainly one of the frustrations and pleasures of writing this book has been to feel my own vocabulary strained to the breaking point, of always feeling that I wasn’t quite able to say what I wanted to say. That is one reason why I resorted to other languages, which allowed me, in part, to escape the constraints and banalities imposed on English speakers by “beauty.” Indeed, as I discuss in the first chapter, the English word “beauty” has become somewhat cliche-ridden, and if we are to keep experiencing the beauty of the world we need a kind of refreshment from its linguistic exhaustion. That is one reason for the resort to alien vocabularies, for to say of a flower that it is beautiful is at best a mere commonplace, while to say of it that it is hozho at least arouses a useful puzzlement. And to say of it that it is hozho is not exactly to say of it that it is beautiful, though it is also to say that it is beautiful. And so there is the possibility that our own concept of beauty can still be enriched or shifted.

RT5586_C00.qxd

5/28/04

2:04 PM

Page xiv

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 1

1. Beauty English, the object of longing

My first crush was directed not at a girl in my class or my neighborhood but, as is frequently the case in the era of mass media, at an image on my television screen. “The Avengers” was a British show, half spy adventure, half surrealist cinema. The lead female character, foil to John Steed’s unflappable bowler-topped gentleman, was Mrs. Emma Peel, played by Diana Rigg. There seemed to be no Mr. Peel in the picture to interrupt the accessibility of the magnificent Mrs. Peel. She often wore skin-tight leather jumpsuits a la Catwoman (I also had a certain affection for Julie Newmar in the latter role), and she moved around the English countryside with a grace usually reserved for professional dancers. And she absolutely kicked ass; she was an early example of the feisty, selfsufficient, potentially violent heroines who are now a staple of everything from Disney animations to high literature. She met every dilemma with perfect composure and deep wit. And of course Diana Rigg was beautiful, all cheekbones and slim curves. At twelve I believed I was in love with her, and I pictured us together—not having sex, but just talking and perhaps sharing a chaste kiss. I read Diana Rigg’s personality from her performance, and fantasized that if she knew me, she’d love me, too. But it was safe to want her, because ultimately she was entirely inaccessible (and people who don’t realize that about their celebrity crushes mutate into stalkers). With a girl in my class, I might have had to 1

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 2

2

Six Names of Beauty

Diana Rigg as Mrs. Peel in The Avengers.

express myself. With Mrs. Peel I didn’t have to, and thus I could invent long conversations with her to be held as we walked hand in hand. I imagined helping her defeat evil, then enjoying a relaxing evening with her at home. Erotic longing of this kind leads to intense experiences of beauty, and I certainly had them. Diana Rigg remains forever young on the reruns, videotapes, and DVDs of “The Avengers,” but, of course, in life, many of the aspects of her loveliness and of my desire were fleeting. The fleetingness of youth and its particular variety of beauty provide a great theme of poetry and of life. Thus the poets advise virgins to make much of time. Diana Rigg ripened, and when next I saw her, twenty years later, hosting Mystery, she was still desirable, but in a different way. Her eyes still emitted that flash of wit; it had deepened into intelligence, and her charm into character. But I hate to say it: I felt loss. The relation of beauty to time and to loss is fraught with all of our feelings and ideas—and our repression of our feelings and ideas—concerning life and death. It must be very difficult for someone like Diana Rigg to age, and I congratulate her for doing

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

Beauty

2:05 PM

Page 3

3

so gracefully. But for “celebrities” or “sex symbols” to maintain unsullied their status as objects of desire they have to die young. James Dean, Marilyn Monroe; the great beautiful dead of rock ‘n’ roll: Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain. Some beautiful people (Monroe) kill themselves. Some (Mick Jagger, Jane Fonda) try to maintain themselves in a semblance of youth. Some finally relax into their age. But of course in the long run whatever they and we have—youth, beauty, love, possessions—we lose. **** The English word “beauty” derives from Old French “bealte” and eventually from the Latin “bellum.” In its earliest uses in written English, dating from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, it refers almost exclusively to women, and that is still probably the word’s most common application, certainly when the term is used as a noun. That is not surprising. We may assume that much of the early writing in English was done by men who liked women, for whom the women they called beautiful were the objects of perhaps their most intense desire. And through the history of Western art, the female nude is the most frequent subject, with the exceptions of Jesus and Mary. Many of its greatest masterpieces directly appeal to erotic desire, from Titian’s “Venus and Cupid,” and Velasquez’s “Rokeby Venus,” to Georgia O’Keeffe’s flowers and Andy Warhol’s obsessively repeated Marilyns. And though usually art that is called “erotic” represents some kind of direct expression of sexuality, the erotic plays much more widely in the entire arena of human desire. In that sense, art that depicts the powerful might express the desire for power; art that depicts Jesus might express spiritual seeking; art that depicts food might express an appreciation of the pleasures of dining; art that depicts nature might express a yearning toward the world. Though “beauty” has been defined very frequently and variously, it is also famous as a word that should not be, and perhaps that cannot be, defined. Nevertheless, beauty is the object of longing. I am less concerned to defend that as a definition than to use it as a basis for trying to find something common to certain kinds of human experiences and relations to things. Longing itself is an

RT5586_C01.qxd

4

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 4

Six Names of Beauty

enduring, which is also to say unsated, state of desire. So in the broadest sense, the experience of beauty is always erotic, is always a wanting. Since we all long, beauty is a universal object of human experience. But to the extent that different epochs, cultures, groups, or individuals have different longings, their experiences of beauty will have different objects. **** The philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto asks a simple question: why do we bring flowers to a funeral? What is the association of beauty with death, or with grieving? Perhaps, he says, we need a contrast to our grief, a small pleasure in the face of an overwhelming pain, a surcease from mourning that yields a kind of distance or perspective. But the relation of beauty to pain and in particular to loss is deeper and closer than that, I think. Beauty always bears within it the poignancy of loss, and the cut flower is not only an occasion of visual pleasure, but a symbol of what passes. The loss that lingers in every beautiful thing intensifies desire. Indeed if we did not age, if things did not disintegrate, the experience of beauty would be impossible. Without loss, desire could be fulfilled at will; things would exist for us as perfect resources, always potentially available for our use. That we can lose things, that in fact we are always in the process of losing everything we have, underlies the longing with which we inhabit the world. And in that longing resides the possibility of beauty. The flowers and the music at a funeral are meant to make grief more poignant, to bring everyone into full participation with the grief, by including in it the touch of beauty. There is always a doubleness or an irony for us in the vitality of the cut flower. But grief and death and beauty call on us to yearn, and perhaps they call on us to yearn impossibly, to yearn for an object that is always slipping from our grasp. **** The variety of the objects of beauty has been used as an argument for beauty’s subjectivity. As a matter of fact, we really cannot find some intrinsic quality that is shared by all things that people find beautiful. But our longing for these things does not make

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

Beauty

2:05 PM

Page 5

5

them beautiful. The claim that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is false because beauty is a feature of the situation that includes the beholder and the object, the situation in which longing is made that in turn makes us move or cry or love or come. The beautiful thing is not the retinal image of the sunset or the firing of neurons in the brain in response to that image, or even exactly the transport of the soul that is induced. We experience the beauty of the sunset itself. We give beauty to objects and they give beauty to us; beauty is something that we make in cooperation with the world. **** Shortly after contracting my crush on Mrs. Peel, I had my first profound experience of art. I grew up in Washington, D.C., with my parents dragging me to the National Gallery and other museums from the time I was a small child. Probably I oohed politely, but truly I regarded the works of art with an indifference appropriate to their status as monuments, things immune to childish regard. But one day, for reasons that remain obscure to me, I took a bus downtown and parked myself in the Dutch section. I was a little more interested by the paintings than I had been before, perhaps in part because I was following my own impulse by being there, and in gravitating to the seventeenth century and away from the Impressionists favored by my parents. I stared for some time at Vermeer’s tiny miracle, “Woman in a Red Hat,” a painting both respectful of visual reality and buffed smooth by light in Vermeer’s characteristic way. Several times I made up my mind to leave, then returned. Finally I had a feeling like falling, an almost romantic aesthetic swoon. It shocked me: I hadn’t thought myself capable of such a feeling. That experience motivated years of devotion to figuring out what art is and where that experience came from; it drives me forward still as I write this book. And though my feeling was deep, it was the painting, not the feeling that I loved, that possessed beauty. “Woman in a Red Hat” and I made that swoon together. **** The classic triad of ultimate values is truth, goodness, and beauty. Truth is built into belief: to believe something is to take it to be true.

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 6

6

Six Names of Beauty

Johannes Vermeer, Girl with the Red Hat.

Goodness is built into decision: to decide on a course of action (at least according to many thinkers) is to decide that it is best. And beauty is built into desire: what we desire we learn to find beautiful. **** My stepfather was an amateur carpenter and cabinetmaker. A Quaker, pacifist, and political radical, he was a conscientious objector in World War II. While working in a lumber camp where objectors labored in the Pacific Northwest, Richard contracted polio. He spent a year in an iron lung and emerged a paraplegic. He never moved very far again without the use of artifacts or tools: crutches, wheelchairs, specially adapted cars and electric vehicles. For that reason and also due to something intrinsic, he had an unusual relation to the artifactual environment. I never really understood the use or the aesthetic of tools until he came to live with us when I was 12. A couple of years later, we built a system of cabinets for tools and implements behind our house on Livingston Street. He taught

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

Beauty

2:05 PM

Page 7

7

me the use of the circular saw and other power tools, and in doing so he continually slowed me down and showed me how and why to work with care and to work in harmony with the tool. But even more than with the power tools, I was struck by the way he held and applied a hammer and the other simplest hand tools. He had great precision but also strength: he worked with care and decision. Each stroke of a hammer cost him a great effort, and so he made each stroke count, his weathered hand directing the tool with a concentration that merged eye, hand, and tool into a single system. Richard was never a connoisseur of tools in the sense of collecting them for their own sake or buying expensive things; the hammer I remember best from 1970 was the simplest possible, with a somewhat rusty head and a plain wooden handle. He still had that hammer when he died in 2002; I have it now. **** Ananda Coomaraswamy, the early twentieth-century Indian aesthetician and museum curator, said that “a cathedral is not as such more beautiful than an airplane, . . . a hymn than a mathematical equation; . . . a well-made sword is not more beautiful than a well-made scalpel, though one is used to slay, the other to heal. Works of art are only . . . beautiful or ugly in themselves, to the extent that they are or are not well and truly made, that is . . . do or do not serve their purpose.” The definition of beauty as suitedness to use is wrong, I think. Sometimes beauty shows wild excess to any possible use, and though a simple sword that is perfect for killing may be beautiful, so may be a fantastical blade that is suited for little but to be looked at. But Coomaraswamy’s definition also contains an important insight. We are surrounded by a world of artifacts designed to bring our desires to fruition. If these things are made truly and well, we experience them—whether they are buildings, pieces of furniture, vessels, or tools—as beautiful, because they help us realize our desires in a satisfactory way. They take up a place in the economy of our longings. Indeed, few objects are so simply and obviously beautiful as a well-made tool, the purpose of which is by necessity inscribed in its design, and craftsmen devote

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 8

8

Six Names of Beauty

Nicole Debarber, Hammer.

themselves not only to making the objects of their craft, but to an appreciation of tools, a love of the means by which they achieve their ends. In craft, means and ends become intertwined so that the process itself by which the crafted object is made is experienced as an end: the process itself is beautiful, like a dance. An excellent craftsman, at work on a pot or a cabinet, engages in a beautiful process that eventuates in a beautiful and useful object. The tool both expresses a desire and leads toward its satisfaction, and to that extent can itself be the object of longing. **** Plato, in the Symposium, made the key connection of beauty to eros, desire. He believed that worldly beauty, especially the beauty of sexually attractive people, could bring us toward a supernal beauty, a beauty that would consist of the purest, most abstract truth. Be that as it may, we cannot ignore the use of the term “beauty” to refer to the arts of makeup and coiffure: the whole arsenal of techniques supposed to render one desirable. The most widely appreciated “beauties” are models and movie stars. The history of cosmetics testifies to human ingenuity, to what can be accomplished by squads of technicians operating on overlapping generations for millennia, creating objects of yearning from Nefertiti to Lucretia Borgia to Mary Pickford to Lauren Bacall to Jennifer Lopez. Cosmetic artists, in fact, talk about “creating a face” on a human armature, and it is amazing how elaborate or even dangerous and bizarre the process of creating a face can be.

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

Beauty

2:05 PM

Page 9

9

Consider this list of ingredients in medieval makeup: “arsenic sulfide, quick lime, bat blood, bees’ wings, mercury, and slug slime for waxing, polishing, and whitening; decoctions of green lizards in walnut oil, sulfur, and rhubarb for bleaching.” An alchemical potion for eternal beauty recommends distilling young ravens and drinking off the product, a process that must have presented certain difficulties. The British parliament considered a law in the eighteenth century declaring cosmetics, perfumes, and artificial teeth to be witchcraft, to which, as the preceding formulae show, they were indeed closely related. The witchcraft of cosmetics always idealizes the body, smoothes over its singularities and idiosyncrasies in order to make of it an ideal object of desire. The beauty of Jennifer Lopez is supposed to be universal, a general representation of femininity, a kind of skinniest common denominator of nubile womanhood. It is universal also in the sense that it is normative for sexuality: it is supposed to display what all men want and what all women want to be. But if Plato thought that beauty pursued truth, the beauty industry argues against him. Beauty in the sense of cosmetics and coiffure devotes itself to artifice (its “falsity” again connects it to witchcraft), concealment, disguise, to manufacturing appearances. Beauty as the beautician understands it is not the reality underlying the appearance; it is the apotheosis of appearance. Oscar Wilde claimed that beauty is sheer surface, that what’s good about it is that it’s only skin deep, or not even skin deep. In the world of cosmetics and high fashion, the terms “nature” and “natural” appear continually and uncritically, but always “nature” is itself an artifice: “natural” refers to the style of Chanel in contrast with that of Dior, for example. We long toward the unattainable beauty of the human face or the human body perfected, smoothed over into a kind of screen onto which we project our desires. Even the perfect people depicted in films and magazines are not as perfect as their depiction, and there is art in making the images themselves impossibly beautiful.

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 10

10

Six Names of Beauty

Mae West in Go West, Young Man.

The perfection of the pinup, model, and movie star as sexual objects is completed by the fact that they are already lost to us, lost to us in the process of fantastic idealization even before we can attempt to attain them. In this way, they are ideal objects of longing. **** We also appreciate a seemingly opposite beauty: beauty of character, of saints and sages, or of people with more simplicity, serenity, or clarity than we ourselves possess. Though beauty seems to be a concept of perception—clearly connected to the visual, auditory, gustatory—so that something as elusive to sense as a “soul” or personality could not be beautiful, the conception of the beautiful soul or personality is quite familiar and is sensible to the extent that we understand perfectly well what is meant. It is in part a moral notion, and there is no profit, finally, in trying to keep moral and aesthetic ideas wholly insulated from one another—though certain strands of philosophy have tried to do just that—because morality, too, plays in the arena of human desire, though with different implications.

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

Beauty

2:05 PM

Page 11

11

There are two modes of the erotic: what we desire to have (or make love to, or give love to), and what we desire to be (what we aspire to, what we emulate). We experience both of these in popular entertainments such as novels or (especially) film and television, where glamour of character can have either effect or both simultaneously. If we consider the character of Jesus as beautiful, the ethic of Christianity becomes immediately clear: the Christian longs to emulate and to adore. A Christian morality is most easily expressed as the “imitation of Christ,” and this must be understood as a response to an appreciation of the beauty of Christ’s character. And the adoration of Jesus is a continual aesthetic expression; the three Magi brought beautiful things to Jesus, and, ever since, artists and ordinary people have been offering to him whatever they had of beauty. **** Beauty is almost always found in the world outside human consciousness, almost never purely within it. Realist art, which certainly presents us with some of the most intensely beautiful objects that people have made, acknowledges the limits of imagination. It is a kind of resolution to humility in the face of the infinite richness of the world. Elaine Scarry points out in her book On Beauty and Being Just that beauty calls for imitation, or representation: that beauty tends to be preserved, because people tend to cherish and repeat it. Realist art crystallizes this repetition, forms a way of expressing the dearness of the world, a way of showing our love for the actual. Often it is said that painstaking realism in art has been rendered unnecessary or uninteresting by the camera. But the opposite is the case. In circumstances where the world can be repeated mechanically, the handcraft of realism becomes all the more poignant and perverse, all the more deeply expressive of love for the world. To find again the world of things, to live and work in collaboration with that world, forms a traditional and a remaining task of painting The traditional genres of Realist painting—portrait, still-life, landscape—take an almost worshipful stance toward the real. They

RT5586_C01.qxd

12

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 12

Six Names of Beauty

depict, respectively, the human countenance, the immediate interior environment, and the natural surround: together they portray our lives and world. Their celebration of the world is proportioned to their craft, to the devotion with which they were created. Realist painting amounts to a kind of pantheist teaching: implicitly, it argues that the world itself is the most important thing, something to which you could devote a life to finding, exploring, understanding, and explaining. We also might think here of Rembrandt’s deeply truthful self-portraiture or the American hyperrealist still-life tradition of William Harnett and John Peto. No world, no imagination. To imagine, you need an external social situation and physical stuffs. In particular, art always comes from, uses, and returns to the real world. Realist art celebrates its own origin and return to the world and hence celebrates the world itself and our place within it: its beauty and our own. **** Traditionally, the senses are arranged in a hierarchy starting with vision and proceeding down to touch, possibly devalued because of its association with sexuality. But all the senses open to beauty, because each is a pathway into and through desire. If you don’t think the “lower senses” are capable of producing beauty, ask a perfumer, a weaver, or a chef. Ask M.F.K. Fisher or Brillat-Savarin. An excellent meal, whether haute cuisine or well-prepared simple fare, engages all one’s senses together. One sees, tastes, smells, and experiences textures; one hears the wine poured into the glass, the whisper of steam escaping from the soufflé, the crackle of crisp skin broken by a knife, or the aural accompaniments of music or conversation. A classic French meal, with seven or more courses graduated like pearls and timed like the stages of a siege, from the tiny amuse-gueule at the beginning to the glowing pool of cognac at the end, intends to stimulate and fulfill desire over and over until no remaining tendril of appetite can be teased out. First with appearance, then with smell, finally with tastes and textures, each dish arouses and then

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

Beauty

2:05 PM

Page 13

13

soothes. This rarefied experience of food’s beauty is just the most highly cultivated version of the same pleasure contained in a tall cold glass of lemonade on a hot day: all the silvery shades of clear in the liquid, the ice, the glass, the condensation on the rim. The chill in one’s hand, one’s lips, inside the mouth. The citrus scent. The tartness of the lemon, the sweetness of sugar. Perhaps because hunger itself is our most primal, original hunger, the beauty of the food and drink that satisfy it is all of these: easy to take for granted, inescapable, the foundation of its own art form, a sensual model for the others as well. We call our faculty of appreciation “taste.” **** Eating a good meal yields pleasure, of course, and when philosophers up until around 1900 considered the question of beauty, they invariably started out with the notion of the “pleasing,” though they had to go on to elaborate, qualify, distinguish. Most of the thinkers who have considered the matter have made that connection, and indeed, some thinkers have actually considered beauty to be a kind of pleasure. That would locate beauty purely in the beholder rather than in the object that is experienced as beautiful. But the association of beauty with pleasure largely accounts for the decline of beauty as a value. Before the 1990s, the last great set of thoughts on beauty were provided by Santayana and Croce a hundred years earlier. Of course, a question so venerable and elusive as the nature of beauty could not wholly be abandoned, and with or without any help from philosophy, people still experience it all the time. But for the most part, beauty came in the twentieth century to seem like a flimsy and obsolete or even trivial value, a kind of frippery, perhaps nothing more than a particularly poignant or elaborate prettiness. In a world dedicated to industrial production and its critique, in a world beset by war, genocide, and nuclear holocaust, beauty as an occasion for pleasure seemed frivolous and politically suspect. And if the art world had ever been dedicated fundamentally to the production of beautiful objects, that was over early in the twentieth century. The Expressionists or the Cubists tried to give us intense

RT5586_C01.qxd

14

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 14

Six Names of Beauty

experiences that altered or challenged our perceptions and emotions. Picasso and Pollock would have rejected the idea that they painted in order to give people pleasure; they painted to change the world. They tried not to please but to overwhelm. Pleasure, in other words, and beauty with it, have become banal. And now we face a crucial decision: whether to regard beauty as something that has been superseded, or to try to recover a sense of beauty or to inflect an understanding of beauty into something we could still use to decipher our experience. Either beauty died around 1895, except to refer to movie starlets and chrysanthemums, or it became much more difficult and strange, kept developing in a subterranean way. “Pleasure” best describes a sort of fuzzy generalized enjoyment into which you can lapse or relax; “pleasure” is the perfect word to describe a warm bath, for example. On the other hand, to say that good sex is pleasurable is sometimes true, sometimes not. Think about your most intense sexual experiences, and, at least in some cases, “pleasure” is the wrong word. It’s not necessarily that you “enjoyed” such experiences; extreme experiences can take you somewhere beyond enjoyment. If you roll over in bed and say “I enjoyed that,” it’s almost patronizing. In fact, the language of pleasure and pain fails to do justice to many kinds of very intense experience that people seek. Consider the difference, for example, between a sundae and hot Thai food. That is a truth that has been known to all the great ascetics; they knew that in turning away from pleasure they were turning toward a whole range of intense experiences in which pleasure was not even in question. The ascetic seeks renunciation or annihilation, lusts after it, as it were. In the religious ecstasy that may be the ascetic’s goal, and in the continual experience of self-overcoming that moves him toward that goal, he repudiates pleasure until it is simply no longer in question. He believes that the experience of pleasure is mundane, or perhaps sinful, that the intensity of life in the body begins at the moment at which pleasure is repudiated. The ascetic regards pleasure as a distraction and a temptation, tries

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

Beauty

2:05 PM

Page 15

15

to reach the point at which pleasure does not even need to be repudiated because it is not in play at all, tries to make himself over into a creature for whom questions of pain and pleasure do not arise. But that is not to say that the ascetic renounces beauty or the aesthetic dimension of experience. Quite the reverse. The ascetic orients his life around aesthetic values that are identical to spiritual values: simplicity, for example. The monk strips his environment of ornament and strips his life and consciousness of distraction, but that itself expresses a certain longing and hence a certain beauty. I once read that people are regarded as beautiful to the extent that their features are typical or average. So Brad Pitt and Christy Turlington’s beauty is of that kind: their noses aren’t too long. On the other hand, complicated, conflicted, or self-overcoming desires might correspond to more interesting beauties. Some beauties are fearsome or noisome or destructive or painful or bewildering. Some beauties are wrong or hateful or terrible or impossible. Really, the world is beautiful in all those ways. If we start rethinking beauty along these lines interesting things happen. For one thing, much of the art of the twentieth century might turn out to be beautiful. Picasso’s Guernica is a famous example of unbeautiful art: all those bodies being blown into distorted smithereens. It’s a post-Cubist rendering of a post-Cubist scene: its horrifying distortion creates a metaphor of the distortion it seeks to capture and convey. But someone wanted those people to be torn to bits, while they wanted not to be. And Picasso wanted to paint it. And we may want to experience Guernica; perhaps we too want to see people torn to bits and here we get to do it at a safe distance in representation, or we want to know what people go through under such circumstances. And we may want to own the Picasso as well: imagine what would happen if the thing came up for auction. Beauty, we might say, has an insane side, an unclean side, as perhaps one would expect since it is something people make with the world: people are ill and the world, putting it mildly, is impure. The longings expressed in my experiences of Mrs. Peel or “Woman in a Red Hat” are relatively straightforward and

RT5586_C01.qxd

16

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 16

Six Names of Beauty

innocent. But I have dark longings too, places in my head I would prefer to keep shrouded in darkness. If realist painting and the beauty of the world can bring us toward a love of the world, finding beauty in the darkness can bring us toward a love of ourselves. Guernica shows the darkness of human desire, but it also transforms that darkness into art. And in that transformation, the possibility is created of communicating our darkness to one another and finding the insane beauty of our own lives, even in their pain and rage. Picasso’s beauty is a disturbed beauty or a distressed beauty and a complicated or disgusting beauty. But whatever kind of beauty it is, it is the beauty of power. Picasso, as is well known, had a dictatorial streak: he was a “master” in the various uses of that term. Picasso’s aesthetic lionized the power of his will in the form that he imposes on us: as we look at his work, he is our master. I think one might say the same of many of the figures of high modernism in all the arts, whether T.S. Eliot or Arnold Schoenberg. The beauty these figures achieve correlates precisely with the scope of their will: they create beauty out of and as power. Guernica, which depicts a fascist massacre, displays with deep and harrowing mastery an event in which bodies are being pulled apart. It is also a revolutionary document or a document of resistance. The great figures of Modernism are virtuosi of their media, and though a gesture may be apparently random it is always recovered into an overweening intentionality . Their art makes a beauty that draws on a lust for power, and our experience of the beauty they created reveals our dark desire to be overwhelmed, as well as a reflection of our own sense of powerlessness or desire to resist and impose power. **** But along with the evolution of mastery in twentieth-century art came the sly development of art that was an easing or an abandonment or a destruction of constraint. These two strands correspond to two conceptions of freedom: Picasso achieves freedom in the sense that his external reality assumes exactly the form he

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

Beauty

2:05 PM

Page 17

17

desires and dictates. The other sort of freedom involves conforming your will to what is, or rather, letting go of will. The first is a kind of discipline of the self and others, the second is an ecstatic selfabandonment. I have in mind, for example, Andy Warhol, who simply drew our attention in a slightly altered way to objects already in homes or in our popular culture. It is an odd and potentially amusing experience to confront Elvis and Marilyn in the art museum, and the effect of that experience is to return us to our everyday entertainments with a renewed sense of the beauty that exists inside them. Warhol himself was famous for his blankness or self-effacement: he hardly seemed to be there at all, which was precisely the opposite of Picasso or Pollock, whose presence was superhumanly intense. We must release ourselves in response to Picasso’s power, but Warhol empowers our own mundane experiences. **** Late in my fourteenth year, I traveled to Nepal with my family. As we flew into Kathmandu, the Himalayas were higher than the plane. I had never even seen the Rockies or the Alps: my only experience of mountains was the blue/green Appalachians, which I loved (and love) inordinately. The Appalachians are large, but inhabitable: at the outer reach of the human scale. But the Himalayas are impossible: they dwarf us, and they reach up into a zone where life becomes more and more difficult, where the pines get smaller and more windswept until the mountains rise to places where nothing can grow. With a couple of other kids and two Sherpa guides/carriers, I approached those mountains through tiny villages. The culture was as foreign and rugged as the landscape; I was profoundly displaced among valleys with cobalt-blue rivers flowing through white stone, and Buddhist stupas overshadowed by the vast high peaks. We climbed to around 10,000 feet, and walking became laborious. At night, we ate with villagers, then walked out of their small homes and looked at the stars: millions upon millions of them, many times brighter than I had ever seen. I think through the

RT5586_C01.qxd

18

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 18

Six Names of Beauty

whole trek I was stunned into a kind of worshipful silence that was half dread, half delight. I was experiencing what philosophers call the sublime. We experience sublimity before something that overwhelms us but at the same time absorbs us: the classic example is a storm at sea, which endangers us even as we stare at it in horrified fascination. At its height, Picasso’s art of mastery is like that; it is sublime, overwhelming: the “genius” is the person who dwarfs us. Philosophers distinguish beauty and sublimity as objects of aesthetic experience, among other reasons, because while beauty is accounted for as calling forth a certain kind of pleasure, sublimity cannot be. Examples of sublime things would be an iceberg or a volcano (“The craters of Etna, whose eruptions throw up stones from its depths and great masses of rock, and at times pour forth rivers of that pure and unmixed subterranean fire,” writes Longinus in On the Sublime). Such things do not please; often, in fact, they overwhelm, they strike fear into your heart even as they call forth an aesthetic response. Ruskin says of the experience of looking at a mountain: “First, you have a vague idea of its size, coupled with wonder at the work of the great Builder of its walls and foundations, then an apprehension of its eternity, a pathetic sense of its perpetualness, and your own transientness, as of the grass upon its sides.” Whereas the beautiful conveys to us its fragility, the sublime conveys to us our own. Whereas the beautiful draws us into what passes, the sublime makes us aware of our own mortality. Thus the sublime is profound in a way that the beautiful is not, for it immediately raises existential questions about ourselves; it demands a reflection on life and death, whereas the beautiful brings us to life, or pulls us into participation. Most of the world’s art has been made for purposes that could widely be described as spiritual; that is as true of Western as of nonWestern art. The cathedral is a form that is devoted to a mediation or perhaps an immolation of the human into the transcendent. Each aspect of the cathedral materially echoes the spiritual, beginning

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

Beauty

2:05 PM

Page 19

19

with the altarpiece that depicts the dead Christ—his body rotting but his soul triumphant. **** The first of the Buddha’s Fourfold Noble Truths is that life is suffering. The second is that suffering is caused by desire. And the third is that desire can be renounced and transcended. The fourth is that to achieve this you must follow a certain “Way.” Of course, a significant portion of the world’s most beautiful objects have emerged from Buddhist traditions, from teeming, ravishingly colored murals of Bodhisattvas to absolutely raw, simple gestures in ink of Zen masters. Beauty can serve renunciation, though beauty always draws us into affirmation. Both Buddhism and Christianity respond to situations of great suffering: both consist, explicitly, of promises to sufferers. The sufferer yearns for the end of suffering and this can even lead to a yearning for annihilation. The most profound religious art crystallizes and treats the deepest, most focused, most total yearning. A yearning for a beautiful body, for a beautiful flower, for a beautiful vessel, for a beautiful sword seems trivial in comparison to yearning that is capable of renouncing them all. Purity of heart, says Kierkegaard, is to will one thing. **** My father was a writer, and a fanatic for the writing handbook The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. From the time I was young he advised me, in the words of that book, to “omit needless words.” That is a prose aesthetic and a view about truth, according to which truth gives the most simple representation of experience. And in that aesthetic, we might find the kernel of mathematics, logic, and empirical science. Mathematics and logic are beautiful with a hyperrational beauty. And they are most so where they are most comprehensive: in a system in which all the truths can be derived from a few simple principles. Euclid’s Elements provides the great model for this aesthetic form. The simultaneous simplicity and scope inherent in logic and mathematics also provide an aesthetic for scientific theories. To be compelling,

RT5586_C01.qxd

20

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 20

Six Names of Beauty

a theory must not only account for the available data, but must do so elegantly: it then compels assent. Newton’s and Einstein’s laws are among the famous exemplars of scientific and mathematical beauty. They have the greatest possible scope together with a pristine simplicity. One of the basic principles of scientific explanation is “Ockham’s Razor,” named for the medieval logician William of Ockham. His own formulation was “do not multiply entities beyond necessity,” and the principle is one of ontological economy: prefer the simplest explanation understood as the explanation that postulates the fewest sorts of things. It is an aesthetic principle, a criterion for the beauty of scientific theories, and a fundamental axiom of scientific reasoning. Ptolemy’s cosmology of cycle, epicycle, and epiepicycle accounted for the observable astronomical data, but it did so in such a Baroque fashion that it finally seemed capricious. It was aesthetics and not observation that refuted Ptolemy and led to Copernicus. The aesthetic of science is a classical aesthetic, an aesthetic of nobility, scope, and simplicity. There might be practices of explanation that would actually systematically favor more elaborate over simpler explanations, but these would lead to “theories” that in the end no one could grasp or make use of. A clean or classical science seems more useful for realizing our desires, for empowering us over our environment. Science in this sense serves technology, which we might define as the transformation of the environment and of the human body in the service of desire. **** Early in the twentieth century, Monet made a series of paintings of water lilies, in many ways the culmination of his career. At this point, reproductions of these paintings adorn countless McDonalds and Holiday Inns; they have come to seem as trivial and unchallenging in their beauty as any work of art can be. But if you can recover the paintings from the vulgarization of their repetitions, you will remember that they are beautiful. They capture and provide pleasure in mere seeing; visual pleasure, much more

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

Beauty

2:05 PM

Page 21

21

than lilies, is Monet’s theme, which is why people have seen fit to reproduce them to infinity. Even now that Monet’s art has mutated into a kind of wallpaper, been trivialized by sheer repetition and imitation, it yields a slight but sincere delight, especially in its color and in the loving sense of a scene taken over into a serene subjectivity. Contemplate, by way of contrast, a painting by the American painter Charles Sheeler: “Steam Turbine.” It displays great clarity, both of vision and of mind. It boldly delineates bold forms. It’s beautiful in a macho way. I have no doubt that most people get more pleasure from a Monet. In some ways the Sheeler is weird, disturbing, or even inhuman. It seems emotionless, for one thing, in a way no one would accuse Monet of being; there is no trace of sentimentality. One feels the artist almost to be a machine of the sort he is depicting. And if you don’t think the Sheeler is beautiful, that’s probably in part because its subject is a huge machine. I doubt that, had I just walked into the plant where this turbine was located, I would experience it as particularly beautiful. It might even have struck me as hideous. But Sheeler redeems the turbine—or at any rate its structure, its configuration, its visual aspect. He redeemed all sorts of objects this way: power lines, trains and tracks, industrial parks, ductwork. Sheeler experienced an almost religious rapture before what we might call the “classical” machine: the mechanical/industrial colossus of the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. He systematically reduces the machine to an almost abstract form (as, by an entirely different process and for an entirely different reason, did Monet with water lilies). And, of course, the sheer fact that Sheeler makes paintings is the ultimate abstraction: you do not have to deal with the noise such machines make or the pollution they emit when you are looking at them—miniaturized and squashed flat onto the picture-plane—in an art museum. Through the transformations to which art subjects machine in Sheeler’s work, his paintings have made me see machines differently. He has helped me reconcile myself to the machine, has

RT5586_C01.qxd

22

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 22

Six Names of Beauty

Charles Sheeler, Suspended Power, 1939. Oil on Canvas. 33  26  2 in.

made me see the simple, monumental beauty of a steam turbine. What is seductive about the machine is, precisely, its simplicity, even if, by the historical standards of human creation, the classical machine is fairly complex. In the best works of Sheeler there is hardly a single “natural” thing: not a plant, animal, cloud, rarely even a person. All of those things, in comparison to the machine, seem shaggy, messy, complicated, arbitrary. But the machine can, with some limitations, be encompassed all at once in a single visual act: made by people for people, it has a degree of complexity apportioned to our understanding. That quality can make the machine landscape seem monstrous or bleak: the machine landscape is broken by human will. But under Sheeler’s tutelage we begin to see that it has a certain beauty. Sheeler detects and celebrates the disturbing or

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

Beauty

2:05 PM

Page 23

23

annihilating loveliness of classical technology: the cleanness and clarity and simplicity that you don’t find in stuff that isn’t made by people. The sort of aesthetic put forward by Sheeler in his art subverts an aesthetic we might call “romantic”: essentially a nineteenthcentury aesthetic. Sheeler dissociates beauty from nature, or perhaps even declares that the further something departs from nature the more beautiful it is. One might see such an aesthetic operating even in the world of human beauty, where makeup, clothing, and plastic surgery could be conceived of as ways of transmuting the body into an artifact, making over the flesh into a machine landscape a la Sheeler: simplifying the complexity, the wrinkles, the arbitrary protuberances to make a comprehensible object of desire. But when I think of “beauty,” I usually think of it in a romantic way: trees, skies, birds, butterflies, and the female body. That is a standard understanding of beauty, at least since the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, before which there were a variety of modes, especially focusing on spiritual exaltation of the kind we might associate with gilded church furnishings. The paradigmatically beautiful objects in the romantic vein are natural objects, and then the art that reflects such objects: landscape painting, for example. Sheeler’s art and the cult of the machine subvert also the idea that art and beauty are useless or above the dirty little world of commerce. Sheeler attempts to demonstrate the beauty of utilitarian objects of a certain kind in a way that could have been congenial, for example, to the Bauhaus architects. Sheeler’s aesthetic compromises the purity of beauty, even as the machines he depicts pollute the beautiful natural landscape. There is the fearsome hint in Sheeler that what we think of as pollution might itself be a kind of monstrously beautiful humanization of the natural world, a sunset through smog. Charles Sheeler was born in 1883, only twenty years after the death of Henry David Thoreau. But the world into which he

RT5586_C01.qxd

24

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 24

Six Names of Beauty

matured was not Thoreau’s world. Thoreau felt the onset of industry, and sought to escape it even while accepting that to some extent it was inevitable. He always found beauty where there were no people, and regarded people themselves, or at least nonnative people, as a perpetrators of destruction. He tried to hold on to, or rather to invent, a preindustrial aesthetic. Sheeler, moving with a satanic American optimism, tried to make an aesthetic for the twentieth century. He tried to make us feel free in the machine landscape in which many of us seemed trapped, tried to make a beauty for industrial workers rather than farmers. Thoreau dignified the idea of a natural humanity. Sheeler began to conceive and paint our future as cyborgs. **** The steam turbine could not have been beautiful to me when it was made. To have the effect it had on me it had to recede into the past, had to be the object of a kind of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a longing that can turn almost anything into something beautiful because its object is an atmosphere of pastness that bathes everything embedded in it or emerging from it into the present in an aesthetic glow. But though the classical machine is becoming beautiful as it recedes into the past, it was from the start permeated by desire. In both the most specific and the most generalized way it expresses a longing for power: the desire that drives technology, the desire to take control of and transform the world, the desire to assert and exercise ownership. Beauty varies infinitely. We desire, and our beauties are as plural and unpredictable as we are. As our world changes— “naturally,” technologically, artistically—our desires take their origin and their issue in different objects. We can still find the Greek statue or the Inuit carving beautiful; but we can also imagine and experience beauties that the Greeks could not have. The real possibilities lie in opening ourselves to new beauties rather than in searching for ways to escape or annihilate them, but also in returning with renewed senses to the beauties that have already been experienced.

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

Beauty

2:05 PM

Page 25

25

When someone you love dies, you are in danger of having the life within yourself attenuated. The mourners at a funeral may lose their own will toward life; they are in danger of forgetting or renouncing desire. The flowers are there to show you what you have lost, what we are all always in process of losing, but they are also there, and in some way this is the same thing, to remind you that life isn’t only loss. The flowers remind us to reawaken into desire. The funeral, in its ceremonial beauty and dignity, enables our suffering and also intends to return us to life. It plays on our longing for desire itself, reminds us that we must start desiring again or relinquish the world. As we think about beauty as what arouses longing, we run into the paradox or redundancy that beauty reflects desire, but is also desire’s object. We want beauty itself. Desire in regard to beauty embodies, in part, its own object. But this is true of all the flavors of desire: we not only want to be satisfied; we want also to want. Desire is not always primarily trained on its own satisfaction, but also often on its own intensification. The aphrodisiac does not increase orgasm; it increases desire. Castiglione argued that looking at pictures of beautiful women made one want real women, that it intensified desire, and hence that the nude increased one’s love for world. Desire, in other words, seeks not only the future but itself. Beauty calls to desire in every possible configuration: the desire to possess, to love, to enjoy, to gaze, to use, to lapse into silence or unconsciousness, to let go. But desire characteristically is as much committed to its own intensification as it is to its object: in that sense, desire is a craft. To desire is to feel intensely the life within yourself. Everything that lives reaches or hopes. Our longing expresses our irremediable loss, but also our impossibly beautiful aspiration.

RT5586_C01.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 26

RT5586_C02.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 27

2. Yapha Hebrew, glow, bloom

The other day, I was struggling to explain the idea of money to my class in political philosophy. I assayed the following rather clicheridden approach. First, you have a barter economy. But that turns out to be inconvenient, because it’s hard to drag around bushels of corn or whatever you may have of value when you need to obtain things. So money is introduced as specie: something that has intrinsic value, such as gold. The economy is still essentially on a barter basis, only now gold coinage (for example) is introduced as a universal commodity that can be bartered for all others. The next stage is that specie itself comes to be represented by (perhaps) notes. Then the notes take on a life of their own, as money becomes more and more abstract. They don’t represent anything, but have value only as a matter of convention. Finally, even the physical notes are dispensed with and exchanges take the form of electronic transfers of nothing at all: a kind of complete vanishing or apotheosis of value into an utter abstraction. One of my students then asked a rather simple question: why gold? And I started down a familiar road: its scarcity, the relative steadiness of its supply. But a lot of things are fairly rare. And as the students kept pushing, I found myself resorting quickly to the aesthetic qualities of gold. Gold is lovely. Malleable, it can be worked into ornaments and jewelry, beaten into leaf, burnished until it seems to glow from within. Swapping pigs is not necessarily suited to 27

RT5586_C02.qxd

28

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 28

Six Names of Beauty

the drama and solemnity of such ceremonial occasions as rendering tribute, paying a bride price, or sacrificing to the gods. Similar things might be said of most things that seem to possess intrinsic value, and hence that can serve as mediums of exchange in that stage of the history of economics: the other precious metals, jewels, shells, gongs, beads, amber, feathers, ivory, and jade, among others. The original meaning of “yapha” is to be bright, to glow. So first of all, we might notice that the term indicates a quality of the beautiful thing or person rather than of the perceiver: a thing, as it were, sheds or exudes its beauty. Beauty is something the beautiful object emits, like a light: a thing is beautiful in virtue of what it gives. A possibly related Aramaic term means to burst forth or to bloom, which is in turn related to the Arabic “wadu’a,” to become beautiful, as well as “ward-un” (rose or blossom), and “warada” (blossoming tree). I have no evidence to support the assertion I am about to make, but it seems to me likely that the human aesthetic sense arose not, for example, from the awesome majesty of a forest, mountain, sunset, but by the sudden burst or blossom of energized color into the field of vision: the flower, the fruit, the butterfly, the bird (which, of course, also constitute an interlocking system). The environment as a whole, or large chunks of it, is something that is largely taken for granted by the time one reaches awareness, though the sense of its quality can be refreshed, but beauty arises first in what stands out from that environment because of its unusual shape, bright coloration: the arousal of the senses. Too, the sense of beauty, as we have seen, must be associated with loss, and the temporal boundedness of the flower, butterfly, bird, are proverbial. The beauty of what blossoms or flits is timebound, but it is also an implication of paradise, and Isaiah promises that “The desert and the parched land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom. Like the crocus, it will burst into bloom.” **** I love to show my two-year-old daughter Jane almost anything, because almost anything can be for her a source of wonder. My son Hayes, who’s now fifteen, said a year or so ago, “I never really saw the moon until I was showing it to Jane.” But I’ll bet he did see the

RT5586_C02.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 29

Yapha

29

moon, when he himself was small. My son Sam, now eleven, once crawled across a field at my mother’s house toward a huge full moon on the horizon, trying to put it in his mouth. I myself saw the moon differently that night, and am now capable in a pinch of seeing it that way again. But it is a sad and necessary truth about people that the things we experience often become commonplace, that the green of the tree behind the house can no longer be, for us, a cause of rejoicing unless we receive with it a refreshment of experience in general. We cannot always achieve such a refreshment, and the dullness of the world emerges from our own dullness, from the bluntness of our desires and the surfeit of sensation in the course of a life. But the extraordinary deep-red rose at the moment of perfect bloom, the monarch butterfly emerging wet and sparkling from the chrysalis into the full light, the indigo bunting streaking in utter, iridescent cobalt toward the feeder, bluer than anything else in the world—these arrest our attention and refresh our sensations. They remind us of the dearness even of things that don’t appear extraordinary, but also, like all the rest of these things, pass quickly or are already unrecoverable at the very moment we have them. People such as birdwatchers or flower connoisseurs can even devote lives to the mere prospect of seeing such things, which, in turn, can have the paradoxical effect of wearing out our palates even for the extraordinary. The search for extraordinary objects is a quest for innocence: not really for the flower’s innocence, but an innocence of eye that beholds them, the desire to draw something pure from the well of perception. **** Indigo Bunting (Passerina cyanea) Description: 5 1/2” (14 cm). Sparrow sized. Male in bright sunlight brilliant turquoise blue, otherwise looks black; wings and tail darker. Female drab brown, paler beneath. Voice: Rapid, excited warble, each note or phrase repeated. Habitat: Brushy slopes, abandoned farmland, old pastures and fields grown up to scrub, woodland clearings, and forest edge adjacent to fields. Nesting: 3 or 4 pale blue eggs in a compact woven cup of leaves and grass placed within a few feet of the ground among relatively thick vegetation.

RT5586_C02.qxd

30

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 30

Six Names of Beauty Range: New England to the Gulf states, west to Kansas and Texas. Winters chiefly from Mexico and the West Indies south to Panama. Indigo buntings (IBs) have no blue pigment; they are actually black, but the diffraction of light through the structure of the feathers makes them appear blue. These attractive birds are also found in rural roadside thickets and along the right-of-way of railroads, where woodland meets open areas. They are beneficial to the farmer and fruit grower, consuming many insect pests and weed seeds.

I’ve got a few quibbles with the IB description above from The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Eastern Region. First of all, the IB is never turquoise, which suggests a lightish blue-green: it is deeply and luxuriously blue. Lapis lazuli, the name of a blue gemstone that often has gold pyrite inclusions, is a better term, but, of course, closer to right for the IB’s cousin the lazuli bunting, which is a bit lighter and less stunning; with its light-to-rosy breast the lazuli bunting is similar to the eastern bluebird, though with a more gemlike head. “Indigo” is right because it refers to a dye—traditionally the most indelible of dyes, but also beautiful even as it fades (for example, in denim)—that produces a deep, burnished blue glow. The indigo plant is a legume that is grown not only for dye but to refresh the soil, and was traditionally cultivated mostly in the Gurjarat and Sind regions of India, and later in Bengal. The Greek term is indikum, which essentially just means something from India. The color—imported into Europe by among others, the East India Company—was a valuable trade commodity for centuries. Indigo was used as a pigment by the Egyptians in their mummy wrappings, and by the Greeks and Romans in paints. In medieval Christian iconography, the Virgin often appears wrapped in indigo-colored robes, suggestive of both purity and power. During the Crusades indigo became one of the valued “spices” that Italian merchants acquired in Cyprus, Alexandria, and Baghdad, endpoints of caravans from the east. Marco Polo described its cultivation in India, and it was the first commercial crop in Louisiana, though this was probably a native American relative rather than the Asian plant.

RT5586_C02.qxd

Yapha

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 31

31

American tribes had long employed indigo as a dye. They used it, among other things, to darken their hair. Indigo has also been used for eye shadow. The French colony of Saint Domingo in the Caribbean eventually became the largest producer of indigo in the New World. “Pigeon neck”—so called because of its prismatic colors—was the most valuable grade of indigo in the Americas, and during the American Revolution, small cubes of indigo were used for money when all forms of paper currency became worthless. The process of extracting dye from indigo is said in India to make women sterile. Descriptions of indigo production in Louisiana claim that the dye-producing process “repulsed livestock,” “killed fish in streams,” and was so “disgusting and disagreeable” that it “on average killed every Negro employed in its culture in the short space of five years.” The notion that indigo is toxic seems puzzling given that the indigo legume is often fed to animals in Latin America. Indigo dye is an “essence” produced by filtering and evaporation. And though we would in general associate the idea of essence with metaphysics or with scent, it refers to the product of purification, to the identity of what is at the center of a substance in any sense modality, including vision. Most indigo dye is now synthetic (the process was invented in Germany in 1897), though there is agreement that the synthetic dye is neither as beautiful nor as indelible as the plant essence. Back to the bird. Contrary to Audubon, the indigo bunting appears perfectly blue on a cloudy day as well as in full sun. It’s an interesting idea, though, that the IB is “really” black, when, I would have said, it is the single bluest thing I have ever seen. Perhaps we should say that its way of being blue, the situation in which it is blue, is different from that of some other blue things, being a matter not of “pigment” but of “structure.” But nothing is blue in the absence of a perceptual situation, and the situations in which an IB is juxtaposed with human visual apparatus is as blue a situation as any. Yet the IB’s way of being blue is nevertheless relevant, because the structure lends a depth, a glow that indeed seems pervasive rather than being a matter of surface, as if the IB were blue all the way through, permeated by indigo.

RT5586_C02.qxd

32

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 32

Six Names of Beauty

The description of the IB’s habitat is also relevant to this perceptual situation, because in almost every instance the description of the habitat makes use of human alterations to the environment, as in abandoned fields, railroad cuts, and so on. It’s as though the IB has resolved to maintain itself on the fringe of our awareness, or in the interstice between the wild and artifactual environment, as though to show us its blue and then conceal it: to give it and withhold it. And the bunting is elusive: though I have watched one at my feeder over the course of a day, it is always flitting off into the leaves and returning; its metabolism is incredibly fast and it flies in and out of the visual field as well as the meadow in such a way as to emphasize the preciousness of each moment of sight, even where real rarity is not an issue. Bird books, including volume 3 of The Audubon Society Master Guide to Birding and the Golden Field Guide, often feature the IB on their covers, in the latter case side by side with the eastern bluebird and the painted bunting, commonly described as “the most colorful of all songbirds.” I’ve glimpsed painted buntings on trips south, but always so quickly that I couldn’t quite take in the intensity and variety of colors: too small, too fast, too various in its reds, purples, greens, blues, elusive as some sort of tiny rainbow (an effect also accomplished by refraction). But in the books themselves buntings appear frozen in paintings and photographs, available for an aesthetic delectation that can never quite get going in the context of the actual tiny birds as they peck and perch and return. This has the effect of turning the experience of a continuous reception and loss into something you can have, always, or whenever you like. But, of course, that is opposed in many ways to the experience itself which motivates it, the fugitive moment of contact with a creature that lives at a faster tempo than we do, that holds our attention and evades our experience simultaneously. **** It is a nice question whether and how and what colors mean. Some people have worked out systems that correlate colors and moods, for example, as is enshrined in the phrases “the blues” or “seeing red,” and so on. Others have also worked out correlations between musical tones or progressions and colors, and there are even machines that interpret music as sequences of colors and

RT5586_C02.qxd

Yapha

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 33

33

shapes. I am skeptical of these correlations, and my view is that they attenuate in some ways the immediacy of the experience of something like the IB. To call blue a “cool” color, for example, seems very compelling. But yesterday I saw my IB playing or battling with a cardinal across my yard, in an astounding and continuously transforming juxtaposition of color, and I wasn’t thinking of hot and cold or happy and sad or Mahler: I was completely absorbed in the scene, working just to try to keep track, with no time for or inclination to interpretation: it was a call to the present moment. The great Duke Ellington standard “Mood Indigo” has been recorded by everyone from Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong to Charles Mingus and Thelonious Monk to Frank Sinatra and Patti Austin. “You ain’t been blue till you’ve had that mood indigo.” It is an elusive melody: so much so that you can listen to a whole disk of recordings of it (as I am right now) and not really experience, without considerable concentration, that it only contains versions of the same song. But they certainly all occur within a single mood, as the title indicates, a mood of melancholy, first of all, the state of mind called the blues. And yet the atmosphere is not merely melancholy; it’s sumptuous, as though one were taking pleasure in melancholy, welcoming it, relaxing into it in its familiarity, its gentleness, and the slow dissolution or expansion of consciousness that it promises. Rather than a “tune,” “Mood Indigo” is a place for exploration, and though almost all readings of it are slow, they also open up a space in which a piano or horn player can dart in and out. The “color,” we might say, is a matter of the structure rather than of pigmentation. It unfolds slowly, but that very luxuriousness is what suggests the possibility of unlimited improvisation. The improvisation is not on a theme, but is within a theme; it arrives as ornamentation for a theme that takes a very long time to develop. Each note, as it were, becomes a place of exploration, and you can experience the theme for its outline or structure, or instead as an environment, inhabited by birds. **** Water is perhaps the most beautiful and varied of all substances, even if it is the most common on earth. One aspect of this beauty is water’s receptivity, created essentially by its liquidity and

RT5586_C02.qxd

34

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 34

Six Names of Beauty

transparency. Sometimes a perfectly calm lake or even a puddle forms a second sky, a perfectly reflective medium. Sometimes, as at sunrise over the Atlantic, there is a glittering path of sun formed in the ripples that reaches to your feet. Water tends to take on the qualities of its environment, as we see in the turquoise, warm liquid that surrounds and forms Caribbean islands and, in turn, forms an environment for iridescent creatures. It takes the shape of its container—perfectly if the container is not permeable—and both creates and is contained by its channels. Indeed, the sound of a small, running creek or stream is the sound itself of peace. The human body itself is by and large water, and water is something we crave, a condition of life, a deep refreshment because of its connection with ourselves or its status as our own essence. Thunderstorms, created by the H2O cycle, are among the most impressive meteorological events, and a real killer gives you a rush of adrenaline that comes from a sense of your vulnerability to the world. Lightning and thunder in themselves are both surprisingly various in their forms, from the amorphous flash that lights up the whole sky vaguely to the perfectly definite cloud-to-cloud spark, from the long rumble to the overhead air raid. Once, at my girlfriend’s house when I was a teenager, lightning struck nearby and set her brother’s huge collection of matchbooks on fire. And once, hiking on the Appalachian Trail, I tried to make it over the next peak before the storm hit. There was lightning striking all around me; my hair was on end; I threw my backpack, with its metal frame, to the ground and dived under a bush. The thunder was a continuous roar, but I could still hear the rainwater on the ground hissing. It was one of the scariest, most mortal, loveliest moments of my life. There was no rainbow that day, though there should have been. Water in all its forms accounts for much human aesthetic appreciation, from sea and cloudscapes to ice mountains and glaciers. The diffusion of light caused by atmospheric humidity has been imitated in paint by many masters. Looking at condensation on a glass, and the feeling of the cool liquid entering your body in the heat is one of the signal human pleasures. Ice, which can be crystalline and jewel-like or

RT5586_C02.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 35

Yapha

35

opaque and dazzling, or scumbled-up and scarred, provides a medium for dance, an opportunity to glide effortlessly over the face of the earth, a symbol of release from all labor. Few things are as lovely as a girl, dressed in white with sequins, floating into a layback. **** The human attraction to what glitters and shines is obvious, nor should it be dismissed as tasteless or childish. Circuses exploit it to create a visual world that hints at magic: in sequined costumes, lurid red and yellow posters and props, clown clothes and face paint. Everything is exaggeratedly bright or uncontainable: excessive, shining, more vivid than truth. The flight of the trapeze artist or acrobat is lent a bird-like effortlessness and a superhuman quality by the intensity of the colors that are conveyed through the air; the glittering figure of the acrobat takes on numinous implications. Cheap souvenirs allow one to bring these colors home, at least for a short time: glittering wands and colored flashlights that are small reminders of a world of hyper-intense light and color. When I was a teenager, we used to get stoned in my attic, bathed in “black light,” with fluorescent posters on the walls that seemed to emit rather than reflect the ultraviolet spectrum. Then we’d put on some Jimi Hendrix and cultivate a “psychedelic” experience, a way of re-illuminating ourselves or transporting ourselves in an altered state to an altered world, more intense, especially in its coloration, than this one. Disco balls and strobes had a similar, though perhaps more communal effect, turning you as a dancer into something strangely illuminated, creating an environment of special light that suggested the possibility of intense experience. **** Donald Culross Peattie writes as follows: As the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leaves—the fern and the needled pine and the latticed frond and the seaweed ribbon—perceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. The flowers looking in from the walled garden through my window do not, it is true, see me. But their leaves see the

RT5586_C02.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 36

36

Six Names of Beauty light, as my eyes can never do. They take it, as it forever spills away radiant into space in a golden waste, to a primal purpose. They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements. They breathe upon the dust, and it is a rose. Say that this is done with neither thought nor passion, and by something other than will. True that a plant may not think; neither will the profoundest man ever put forth a flower. Of the use and beauty of flowering there can be no shade of doubt. It is a rare thought of which as much can be said.

Here are some of the blossom colors listed in the Eyewitness Garden Handbook for roses: white, very faintly flushed lemon-yellow creamy white with peachy highlights white or palest blush-pink, opening to reveal golden stamens pale ivory to blush-pink at the center, faintly ambertinted blush-pink, opening from pale scarlet buds light pearl-pink soft coppery-pink, with buff and ivory tints coppery-bronze on a parchment ground, with brownish-pink tints pink and cream, deepening to coral-pink creamy-white, shading to cherry-pink at the petal edge, the color is deeper in warm weather

clear pink rose-pink, yellow-tinted, fading with age rose-violet, with a white center light pink, with a white eye and petal edge, and a paler petal reverse bright tomato-red strong vermilion-orange vermilion to pale scarlet deep, bright crimson-scarlet aging from coral-red through dusky scarlet to purplish-red vivid orange-scarlet creamy-white, edged and flushed carmine-pink bright orange-vermilion, with a silver-white eye and a silvery petal-reverse pure dark crimson rich cherry red clear dark ruby crimson clear and pure dark red bright beetroot-purple

RT5586_C02.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 37

Yapha

lilac-mauve, tinted blue in warm sun rich golden-yellow clear, pale yellow, but flushing pink in warm weather deep amber-gold warm yellow, flushed salmonpink soft apricot-yellow, opening from coppery-apricot buds butter-yellow soft buff-lavender coppery fawn, with buff-pink tints yellow at first, running through salmon-pink, top red, all colors present at once rich canary-yellow with red orange-yellow, suffused with pink pure white palest primrose-yellow lilac-pink to rosy-violet, with golden stamens crimson-cerise, with golden stamens, opening from scrolled buds blood-red honey-tinted pink rose pink, paling as it opens, with a yellow button eye

37

deep mauve-red, aging magenta-pink rich beetroot purple, with lilacgray tones, fading slightly to deep red-purple buff yellow, aging to pink, then slate-purple deep mauve, fading to a rich burgundy, the velvety petals reflecting sometimes to reveal a green button eye magenta-purple, veined violet, fading to grayish violet deep maroon-purple, with velvety petals and dark redbrown mossing pearl pink rich orange-red, with a yellow center rich, velvety scarlet-crimson with a paler petal reverse and irregular white markings orange-yellow veined with redpink milky white fawn, flushed with pink and red, darkening with age palest bluish-pink

Whereas the lily is proverbially pure, being an attribute of the Virgin, the rose is surely fundamentally sensual, a quality signaled by its scent and the profusion of its petal structures and the richness of its colors. Indeed, the literature of the rose is a sort of basting in the senses, a concentration and refinement of sensuality to the

RT5586_C02.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 38

38

Six Names of Beauty

Nicole Debarber, Rose.

point of exquisiteness or preciousness. It is worth noting that people collect, cultivate, and depict roses, that they are activity as much as object. The beauty of a rose is one we make by concentration, a concentration that bespeaks desire. It is worth noting how many of the colors listed above are designated by reference to other objects: the vocabulary of color is parasitic on the human experience of colored objects. Like beauty itself, of which they are a symbol, roses are a product of human interaction with the world: in this case, hundreds of years of breeding for the most elaborately or unusually or simply or perfectly colored and scented varieties. Roses served as religious symbols as early as the twelfth century BC in the Middle East and are mentioned by Herodotus and many other ancient historians. The Chinese depict double roses on their pottery at least as far back as 900 AD. Very early on, people started selecting unusually colored or shaped or scented roses for cultivation, and hence transformed occasional sports into varieties. Intentional hybridization emerged in Europe with the importation of the Chinese rose in 1789. The Empress Josephine was a rose collector, and in part responsible for the rise of the rose as the most beloved and carefully cultivated

RT5586_C02.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Yapha

Page 39

39

flower in history. Works in botany show this progress and the extent of the human influence on the rose: a work of 1597 enumerates fourteen varieties of rose; of 1663, twenty-four; of 1799, ninety; of 1820, 121; of 1906, 10,953. By now there are certainly tens or even hundreds of thousands of varieties. People—including myself—are a bit obsessed with roses, for a variety of reasons. They are incomparably sumptuous flowers, with elaborate urn-shaped or doublecup petals of a velvet texture. They bloom over a long period of time, and require more care than most flowering plants, which yields an opportunity to interact with them elaborately and know individual plants more truly than is the case with many species. And, of course, the incomparable intensity and variety of their colors contrasts with the deep green and thorned plants on which they appear, yielding an exquisite harmony. It is no wonder that there is a vocabulary of roses, and a poetry devoted to them from Shakespeare to Gertrude Stein, and it is no wonder that they mean love above all. And, of course, roses are as well famous for their scent, which seems somehow to correspond to their visual forms, so that the essence of a rose is both symbolic and a demonstration of the possibility of experiencing beauty in scent. Here, from the same volume as the colors, are some descriptions of rose scents: sweet, light, and delicate light, fresh, and sweet sweet and strong sweet but elusive sweet and enduring fresh strong and spicy very pleasing good rich and sweet faint but sweet strong and pleasing sweet, heavy

fruity rich, fruity, tea-scented reminiscent of sweet peas like passion fruit; heady musky delicate hay-scented strong, with fresh lemony notes none spicy, like myrrh clove-like exceptionally strong and sweet

RT5586_C02.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 40

40

refreshing and sharp vanilla-like sweet, delicate, and pervasive evening-scented, reminiscent of lily-of-the-valley excellent, rich, pervasive,

Six Names of Beauty

reminiscent of raspberries spicy, intense distinctly un-roselike fresh, of apples delicate, like primroses light honey

**** Graham Stuart Thomas—the great rose cultivator, artist, and author—points out that orchids, lilies, peonies, irises, and other flowers compare favorably to the rose in terms of pure visual beauty, and he concludes that the prestige of the rose rests on its scent, especially since the early varieties had fairly modest and quietly-colored blooms. The scents of roses are remarkably varied, as we’ve seen, and they are remarkably enduring, and for many centuries roses were cultivated primarily for their attar, a distilled rose essence. The use of rose and flower essences in general form the historical basis of perfume. And I don’t think there can be any serious doubt that the sense of smell can be a locus of beauty, and that works of art as well as horticulture can be made whose basic appeal is scent. Indeed, it is often said that the sense of smell is fundamental among the senses, which gains some plausibility if one considers the degree of sensitivity—much greater than the human—to odor among many mammals. In her book Essence and Alchemy the perfumer Mandy Aftel claims that “the olfactory membrane is the only place in the human body where the central nervous system comes into direct contact with the environment.” This would be a complex assertion to confirm, if only for the obscurity of the term “direct,” but responses to scents are surely fast, vivid, and automatic. And as the whole history of perfume demonstrates, the sense of smell is fundamental to human and mammalian sensuous experience and sexual desire. It is appropriate, then, that odors are volatile and elusive, being triggered by the dispersion of molecules through the air. The history of perfumes is by and large a history of purifications, of drawing pure scents out of mildly scented objects. Flower and botanical scents formed the basis of virtually all perfumes

RT5586_C02.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 41

Yapha

41

through the late nineteenth century, though there were also (and still are) uses of musks and various other ingredients derived from animal sources. The earliest records of the systematic uses of scents derive from the Egyptian priesthood, who pressed flowers and blended their scents with fruit pulps, tree resins, spices, ground seeds, wines, honeys, and oils to make unguents and incense. Such ingredients were valuable in the ancient world, and served as fundamental trade goods, as in the biblical frankincense and myrrh. According to Aftel, wealthy Romans used perfumed doves to scent the air, painted their walls with aromatic spices, scented their dogs and horses, and sprinkled petals on their floors. The idea of “essence,” which owes its philosophical origin to Plato and Aristotle, was elaborated into a technology by the medieval alchemists, who believed that by purifying substances one could arrive at their souls, what was eternal and most strongly efficacious about them. Though the scent of roses and some other flowers and spices can be arrived at by distillation and other techniques used by alchemists, the scents of jasmine, orange flower, and others are destroyed by distillation. These scents were made available in the Renaissance by Jacques Passy’s invention of enfleurage, which mixes flowers and fat and then screens and renders the mixture into an oil. From the eighteenth century on in Europe, perfume became a matter of connoisseurship, a hobby and an obsession of aristocratic ladies and celebrities. The basis was still floral scents, especially lily of the valley, lilac, magnolia, honeysuckle, narcissus, heliotrope, and violet, often mixed with civet (a yellow substance with a musk odor obtained from a genital pouch of an African mammal of the same name), or ambergris (a secretion of the intestine of sperm whales). The basic approach was to blend similar scents to create something with both clarity and subtlety. The period of ca. 1890–1920 could be termed the “Modernist” epoch in perfume, and Paul Jellinek writes of the perfumes of this period that they were based on contrast rather than similarity: Pungent herbal and dry woody notes were used alongside the soft and narcotic scents of subtropical flowers, the cool freshness of citrus fruits

RT5586_C02.qxd

42

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 42

Six Names of Beauty offset the languorous warmth of balsams and vanillas, the innocence of spring flowers was paired with the seduction of musk and civet. A sense of harmony was, of course, maintained in all this, but it was a harmony of a higher, more complex order. The sophisticated harmony of artistic creation had replaced the simple harmony of Nature.

Surely this development is parallel to that in the visual arts, in which the same period saw the birth of formalism as a program and pure abstraction as a practice. Even in the use of natural essences, the idea was to make something that did more than reflect or represent the natural world, but rather added to it, thus increasing the prestige of the artist as a creator rather than a mirror. The same period—not surprisingly, considering the aesthetic and scientific canons of the day—saw the beginnings of a synthetic perfumery, and synthetics today dominate the world of commercial perfumes because they are inexpensive and long-lasting, suited to mass production. The first synthetic ingredient appeared around 1870: coumarin, designed to imitate the scent of new-mown hay. It was derived from tonka beans, but was much cheaper than natural essence of tonka. The first modern perfume was Jicky, by Guerlain, based on coumarin. It also included a synthetic rose essence, and lemon, bergamot, mint, marjoram, and verbena, but despite the natural ingredients it was assuredly not an imitation of any natural scent, but rather an original formalist composition. Aftel, a fan of natural essences, emphasizes the limitations of synthetic scents, calling them “colorless,” and pointing out that they do not have the depth or complexity of natural substances. She points out that natural essences evolve or bloom on the skin, and hence enter an intimate relation with the body of the person who wears them. And she points out also that natural essences must be carefully crafted rather than mixed industrially, because the materials are not uniform and so no formula can really be given for a particular scent. The scent of jasmine, for example, is compounded out of the combination of hundreds of chemical substances, many of which have not even been named. A synthetic jasmine may present the dominant note,

RT5586_C02.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 43

Yapha

43

Nicole Debarber, Perfume Bottle.

but it cannot approach the natural essence in depth, subtlety, or mystery. But the qualities of uniformity and simplicity displayed by the synthetics allows them to be more easily blended and manipulated. It also allows the creation of very clear and definite scents, and since Chanel No. 5 (created by Ernie Beaux) was introduced, most people who use perfumes favor the synthetics. Chanel No. 5—which Aftel describes as “brusque”—was the first perfume based on the scent of aldehydes. François Coty introduced another fundamental element of modern perfume when he asked the Art Nouveau jeweler Rene Lalique to design his bottles. Since then, scents have been associated with jewel-like colored or transparent glass, which forms an image of the jewel-like essence contained within the bottle. Perfume now has to be considered an art both of scent and of sight. **** Beauty is a very old concept, and it is worn. I wonder whether you have found this chapter a bit dull so far, with its roses and birds. The observation that a rose is beautiful is surely as trite an observation as can be made, and it may be hard to focus on it even

RT5586_C02.qxd

44

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 44

Six Names of Beauty

long enough to decode it. Oddly, perhaps, that doesn’t necessarily make it difficult to experience a rose as beautiful; indeed, the reaction seems to me well-nigh autonomic. But it makes it extremely difficult to talk about the rose’s beauty or to find an adequate expression for the experience. Jacking up the volume and the hyperbole doesn’t really help: for all its brightness, a rose’s beauty is fundamentally pretty quiet. But we obviously come to it late in the history of human appreciation of the rose. The beauty of each rose passes, and that is central to its quality, but the concept of beauty, though it passes more slowly, also loses petals. But it’s still too early to write a book about beauty and not use the word “rose,” which is perhaps a sign of whatever remains to us of wholesomeness. Our jadedness, and suspicion of the simple or obvious, have not made experience impossible or completely separated us from our ancestors and our poets. Beauty is supposed to be “eternal,” and I’m not sure what, finally, I think about the historicity of concepts, or their relation to the languages that are used to express or capture them. Words obviously have histories. And so, or in part thus, our responses to or experiences of concepts have histories as well. The idea that beauty is eternal is itself one of the claims about it that we experience as trite. It may perhaps be a sort of empty honorific: just one of the things we conventionally say in praise, or when the importance of an experience swamps vocabularies for its expression. It is certainly false in that the very possibility of beauty depends on temporal boundedness and fragility, our own and that of the things we have or see or want. But perhaps the concept itself persists, or comes now to inhabit this or that thing, or comes to us now in this bird or blossom as in an incarnation. And then the question can be about our ability to find it there at a given moment, our exhaustion or the possibility lurking in each thing of a refreshment of our experience of it. The things we long for pass, and so do our longings and ourselves. But longing itself could, I suppose, be a condition of the universe, a way of saying its direction. Perhaps our longings are irremediable. Perhaps they should not be remedied. The universe longs

RT5586_C02.qxd

Yapha

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 45

45

for itself through us, in us. Of course, it would be sad to lose birds and roses as beauties. And in a way their loss is temporary, supposing it exists at all, because their loss as beautiful things would immediately make them available again. That is, if we feel ourselves losing the experience of the rose or bird as beautiful, we will yearn again for that experience and return it to ourselves, or take the first step toward such a return. The beauty of the rose is “pure,” and so on: again the empty honorific. But it is no empty honorific to say that we could find in a return to the rose’s beauty a purification of ourselves as people capable of experiencing such things; it is a very innocent experience, fundamentally decent. I would say simple, but the rose itself is not simple but extremely rich or actually inexhaustible in our experience. **** The sky is both a symbol of the eternal and of the ephemeral, and the cloudscapes that constantly cross our vision would be immensely impressive if they were more enduring, like mountain ranges. As it is, their constant metamorphoses both constitute and compromise their beauty. They lend the sky its elusiveness. This is a function not only of the fact that clouds consist of whimsical concatenations of water vapor, but of the endlessly varying conditions under which clouds can be illuminated—conditions that they themselves help to create and alter. There are Dutch landscape paintings in which four-fifths of the canvas is cloudscape: of necessity idealized because no actual cloudscape will sit for a painting. The significance of the night sky has surely faded with the evergreater provision of artificial environments that separate one from the sky or compromise our vision of it with light. But our ancestors experienced the stars and planets and comets as one of the most conspicuous and important aspects of life, and religions—even including the great monotheisms—are to a great extent cults of heavenly bodies. I do not place any particular credence in astrology, but it is in germ the correct approach to divination, as it correlates human events with states of the nonhuman universe, or displays the unity of human beings and our world.

RT5586_C02.qxd

46

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 46

Six Names of Beauty

The stars seen from the Himalayas, with almost no artificial light and little atmosphere, are miraculous, the Milky Way a river-cloud of yapha opalescence through the center of the sky. But everywhere the stars are legends, persons, guides, destinies. If the night is humid, they are diffuse and benevolent; in crystal clarity they seem cold and glittering; they take on a quality of diamonds: crystalline, silver-white. But, of course, unlike the jewel, the bird, the flower, they shine by their own light, which is why they seem both higher than all these other capturers of light and vision, why all these other things seem in a way symbols of stars—why, in fact, our world can be interpreted as their reflection. The stars seem to inhabit a region—commonly referred to as the “celestial”—above human desires, and they have served as symbols of what endures and is indifferent to the human. That renders them into paradigmatic objects of longing for creatures that are both blessed and cursed by their time-boundedness, though, of course, we also know that on celestial time scales—which, after all, intersect with our own—the stars also undergo changes. Such changes as became visible to us hence became portents, apparent abrogations of eternity. But much of our knowledge of the stars and all the other heavenly bodies (including, for example, the moons of Jupiter) derives from human need in navigation. Few longings are as perfect or profound as that of the sailor for harbor, and this gets expressed in an environment (the night on the ocean, in which the heavens are isolated from their common experiential context and hence take on an extreme conspicuousness). The stars in their pragmatic function as guides certainly retain a magical quality, and many sailors have attributed to them a supernatural presence as well as a significance for steering. **** “The fireworks were splendid,” Charles Lamb once wrote to William Wordsworth, “the Rockets in clusters, in trees and all shapes, spreading around like young stars in the making, floundering around in Space, (like unbroken horses) till some of Newton’s calculations should fix them.”

RT5586_C02.qxd

Yapha

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 47

47

In the United States on Independence Day, the United Kingdom on Guy Fawkes Day, India on Diwali, France on Bastille Day, and elsewhere on other occasions, people create their own stars, albeit of a fleeting variety. Probably invented in China, black powder was used in aesthetic applications before it was conceived to be a military asset, and the art of fireworks is now practiced worldwide to almost universal appreciation, an indication that yapha remains central to human aesthetic experience. Probably early Chinese fireworks consisted of black powder charges compacted into natural bamboo canisters. Originally displayed in Europe in relation to “machines”—huge temporary fantasy palaces and mansions—fireworks took the form of fountains and spinning wheels. One of the great works of art associated with pyrotechnics was Handel’s “Music for Royal Fireworks,” a masterpiece of late Baroque music in tribute to a huge display mounted by the royal family in England. A huge machine—410 feet long—was designed by Cavalieri Servandoni, the fireworks supplied by Gaetano Ruggieri, forebear of the great European fireworks manufacturing firm. As the show got underway, one wing of the machine exploded, which so enraged Servandoni that he drew a sword on the pyrotechnicians and was arrested. Several deaths occurred during the display. In fact, casualties related to fireworks have been considerable; in 2003, fatal incidents included an exploding truck in Florida and a conflagration at a Texas fireworks company caused by static electricity. (Laborers in fireworks plants are required to touch a grounded sheet of copper before entering any building in order to discharge their personal electricity.) There are few things worth dying for; fireworks are surely one of them. Contemporary sky fireworks are launched from mortars and fly into the air end over end for around five seconds in a trail of sparks to a height of between 500 and 1,500 feet. A time fuse ignites a bursting charge, which in turn lights up explosive cubes known as “stars,” which create the display as they blossom into a variety of colors and forms. Most of the fireworks that Handel wrote for were golden, the color of fire. But in the nineteenth and early twentieth

RT5586_C02.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 48

48

Six Names of Beauty

Melis Bursin, Fireworks Notation.

centuries a variety of chemical colors were developed, and now there is virtually no limit. The stars are arranged around the main charge in the form that will expand into the sky when the shell detonates. The variety of forms is larger than you may at first think, and though they are designated often by natural objects such as flowers, trees, spiders, and stars, pyrotechnics is primarily a purely abstract art, an art of sheer form, though this form is intrinsically illuminated and is accompanied by the sound of explosions, hisses, and whistles. According to George Plimpton, in his delightful book on the subject, Bernini, Michelangelo, and Leonardo Da Vinci are among the artists who tried their hands at pyrotechnics. Nevertheless (and this is in general true of all abstract art), the effect of fireworks does not depend entirely on their form. They have tremendous destructive force, and often mirror munitions. That is one factor that suits them for use on patriotic occasions, again such as the Fourth of July and Guy Fawkes Day, in which they are displays, among other things, of raw power and celebrations of the beauty of power. They suggest violence on a massive scale, and the danger associated with making and launching them (though it can be exaggerated) is part of the frisson with which they are greeted. A slight admixture of fear is part of many human pleasures, such as the amusement park or “extreme sports” or crimes of various kinds, which often have an aesthetic element or even motivation.

RT5586_C02.qxd

Yapha

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 49

49

The transformation of destruction into beauty, or the interpretation of destruction as beauty, is a characteristically problematical human accomplishment. And though beauty is perhaps more often associated with creation, destruction and creation are themselves related and in some cases necessary to one another. The explosion, too, is the momentary event par excellence, and though fireworks are often compared to stars, they are opposite in this respect, and fireworks are a call into immediate presence in experience. The fifteenth-century Sienese Vannoccio Biringuccio observed that fireworks “endure . . . no longer than the kiss of a lover for his lady, if as long . . . and thus should be reserved only for special occasions of rejoicing.” The Japanese term for fireworks, “hanabi,” means “fire-flower.” Plimpton’s Fireworks contains a description of a huge shell fired by the Japanese firework firm Mautamaya Ogatsu in the late 1970s. Almost forty inches in circumference and weighing in at 564 pounds, it was fired from a thirteen-foot mortar. A Japanese “fireflower master” worked on the shell for a year, and it was described as follows: “Ascending with Small Flower Brocade, first Silver, then Red-illuminated, with Configuration of Small Motives in Relief.” Launched over Tokyo Bay, the shell performed perfectly. Ogatsu himself wrote that it came out of its mortar with a “terrible thudding sound . . . as if caused by terrestrial trembling . . . . The floral petal formed at a circumference of two thousand feet, extending an umbrella above me.” He continued: “To my mind the height of ascent and size are matters of secondary importance. No matter how large a flower may open, if its shape is warped or disintegrating, that flower is valueless. If one of a thousand stars fails to appear, one missing star is a shame to the ‘fire-flower master.’. . . In this respect the largest ball ever of the world accomplished a metamorphosis into the most beautiful flower of the world.” **** The occasion at which fireworks are displayed most often in India, Diwali (which usually falls toward the end of October), celebrates the god Ram’s rescue of his wife Sita from the demon

RT5586_C02.qxd

50

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 50

Six Names of Beauty

Ravana, as described in the Ramayana. Fire in general is associated with Diwali, and hundreds of thousands of votive candles burn all over the country on Diwali. Fire is supposed to please the goddess Lakshmi and hence lead to wealth. Earthly fire is also related to “jyothi,” or sacred fire, which is represented by a phallus. A particularly delightful, colorful, and striking branch of Indian popular art is the fireworks wrapper, which often features religious iconography, but just as often resembles Indian movie posters, or employs (for some reason) images of animal attacks. Like many of the calendars and posters that are central presentations of Indian images, they are produced primarily in Sivakasi, a tiny town in the province of Tamil Nadu, which is renowned for particularly indigenous traditions in temple architecture, music, sculpture, and cuisine. Originating in the match industry, fireworks from companies such as Cock, Sri Krishna, Vijaya, and Sundar are extremely popular consumer goods, and the packages are some of the most whimsical and delightful images in the world. Themes include the gods, at their leisure, delighting in fire, and pretty girls fondling rockets, all presented in supersaturated pinks, blues, oranges and yellows of rare luridness. This is perhaps related to the centrality of vision to Hindu tradition as represented in the concept of “darshan,” or visibility: the visibility of the votive image, and one’s visibility to the god through the image. The teeming visual traditions of Hindu iconography make use of this link to the divine through visibility, a kind of explosive interchange of light that links the human to divine realms. **** One of the most widely appreciated varieties of object in the world must be the precious stone. For one thing, it is one of the richest and most varied sources of the experience of color. Few things on earth can be as beautiful as a polished piece of lapis lazuli, for instance, and ground lapis is a pigment as the whole stone is an adornment. Jewels, including lapis, emerald, ruby and so on, lend their names to colors, and the colors particularly of oil paints, which have a slight translucency and glow, and are often referred to as “jewel-like.” Such stones as sapphires, rubies, and

RT5586_C02.qxd

Yapha

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 51

51

opals, of course, are translucent and often seem to possess tremendous depth: they hold and release light in mysterious ways. Jewels have been used for currency, and include the hardest naturallyoccurring substances in the world. Because of their simultaneous hardness and workability, obsidian and jade have been used to make swords, axes, and other weapons and implements. Jewels are emblems of wealth and power, and in the latter capacity certainly have a magical history: the jeweled scepter is both an insignia of power and a kind of magic wand. Jewels and crystals are often associated with the supernatural and are said to have healing powers or to reveal in their depths images of the future. Some jewels and crystals systematically break light into the components of the spectrum. Stones such as almandine garnet and sapphire may present star forms, due to inclusions, and jewels are often described as terrestrial stars. This may in part account for their uses in divination. The fact that jewels and precious metals endure is part of our experience of their beauty, and it is central to their use in exchange. Of course, almost any rock lasts, and the value and even longevity of the jewel is in part a function in turn of its beauty, yielding a motivation for its preservation. Indeed, the pure jewel signals a kind of transcendence in its endurance, and a spirit in its translucency and glow. Flowers and birds are famous subjects of art, in part in order to preserve them against time. This can be fairly prosaic as in the use of the guidebook drawing, or even in Audubon’s art, but the depiction of jewels is almost otiose, though it can be intensely beautiful. Jewels endure as their own emblems. There is no possessing the flower itself, because it shifts continually. Jewels, on the other hand, are the proper objects of hoarding, and the element of temporality is induced precisely by their value, which makes it difficult to retain them in possession. And of course, these things are used, when they are used, predominantly as ornaments, and one of their many poignancies is the contrast between the permanence of the gold and jewels and the fleetingness of the beauty of the cleavage in which they rest. They enhance the beauty of women because they devote enduring

RT5586_C02.qxd

52

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 52

Six Names of Beauty

value to the flower-like incomparable value of what cannot be possessed, either as a quality of oneself or as something one can take, own, give. A woman adorns herself in an act that is partly autoerotic, and a man adorns a lover in a resolution of his impossible possession of her: the Song of Solomon, to which we will turn in a moment, is the fundamental written expression of this longing. Especially magnificent jewels are often believed to be cursed, which is not surprising considering the cupidity they arouse: theft and murder surround all types of valuable objects. Perhaps the most famous curse is associated with the Hope diamond, a flawless blue gem—uniquely, it glows blood red in some conditions—that originally weighed some 112 carats and is now in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Stolen from the Temple of Rama Sitra in Burma, the stone was sold to Louis XIV in 1668 by a trader named Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who bought it from another French trader, who in turn died at sea; his remains were found on the beach being devoured by dogs. Louis had the diamond cut into a heart shape and gave it to his mistress Mme. de Montespan, who was promptly accused of practicing black magic. It was incorporated into the French crown jewels, and as the “French Blue” became a symbol of wealth and decadence. It was later given by Louis XVI to his wife Marie Antoinette; both were beheaded by the revolutionary government in 1793. The French Blue was stolen from the GardeMeuble repository during the revolution, and next appeared in Amsterdam around 1830 (though rumor placed it in possession of the British royal family in the interim, during the height of King George III’s madness), where it was recut into its present oval shape at 44.5 carats. It was stolen by the son of the jeweler who handled it, who then, it is said, hung himself in shame. It was then sold to the Hope family. They subsequently lost their fortune. In 1904 the stone was bought by the French diamond broker, Jacques Colot, who later committed suicide in an asylum. The Russian prince Kanilovsky gave it to his mistress, the actress Mlle. Ladue. Kanilovsky later killed Ladue, and was himself stabbed to death in the street as he fled the scene. It was briefly owned by the

RT5586_C02.qxd

Yapha

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 53

53

sultan of Turkey, Abdul Hamid III, who was then dethroned in a revolt. Thence it passed into the hands of a merchant named Habib Bey, who sold it but drowned before he was paid. A Greek dealer named Simon Montharides sold the Hope, after which his carriage plunged off a cliff, killing himself and his family. It was sold by the house of Cartier to Evalyn Walsh McLean, whose eight-year-old son was killed in a car crash. Her husband, the publisher Ned McLean, died in an asylum. In 1946, their daughter committed suicide. I did not make any of this up, which, of course, does not mean that it’s all true. **** The jewel has its opposite—and hence its complement—in fire. Fire is the most fleeting of elements, and it is probably right to say that it never assumes a moment of continuity or stability as an object of sight, though it displays variations on elusive periodic patterns. That perhaps makes us and all who change understandable in terms of fire, as Heraclitus understood us, thinking we who change burn at different speeds. “The world-order, the same for all, no god made or any man, but it always was and is and will be an ever-living fire, kindling by measure and being extinguished by measure.” Or again: “All things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things; as goods are for gold, and gold for goods.” Fire here becomes not only our underlying reality, but a symbol both of destruction and of aspiration, as fire always, in consuming its fuel, tries to rise. Fire varies by its fuel and atmospheric conditions such as altitude, wind, and humidity, and though the “cool” colors of the spectrum are relatively rare in fire, they are present. Fire, like a star, glows by its own light, and of course in some sense the sun and stars are fires. But fire is exquisitely tuned to its environment, varies with it at every moment. Or rather there are no moments, only process. Most of the common definitions of “life” end up counting fire as alive, in virtue of its movement. Nevertheless, fire shares with jewels an ethereal quality: translucency, crystallinity. And it is traditionally thought of as an intercessor between flesh and spirit, as in practices of burning corpses, as

RT5586_C02.qxd

54

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 54

Six Names of Beauty

well as in sacred pipe ceremonies among Plains Indians, in which the smoke carries truth to the power. Plotinus, who believed that fire was the most beautiful of earthly things, wrote that “Fire itself is splendid beyond all material bodies, holding the rank of Ideal-Principle to the other elements, making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near to the unembodied; itself alone admitting no other, all the others penetrated by it: for they take warmth but this is never cold; it has color primally; they receive the Form of color from it.” This focuses our attention, among other things, on fire’s role in illuminating everything else, and hence making visual beauty in the world. When our light was provided by flame, the sight of jewels must have been truly haunting and lovely, as the play of moment over eternity, of life over perfection. There really ought to be connoisseurship of fire, one that’s not merely a mental illness. There ought to be small societies of fire aesthetes, trying Adirondack oak in the late fall, say. It’s a difficult task to make a great fire, tend it, and appreciate it. It requires a lot of concentration, but it is a rewarding hobby. Surely such arts have their artists and their audiences, but building the fire and the fire’s consumption of the fuel are among the most temporal of arts, an image of what passes and how it gets destroyed. And so its appreciation has its own rigor. Though the depiction of fire is a traditional challenge to painterly skill, in that the depiction of something that glows with its own light and is ever in process is fundamentally impossible, it is actually a fairly rare subject of visual arts (an exception is film, itself an art of light). Yet it is primordial both as reality and as an idea: like water it is one of the fundamental conditions of life, and obviously the mastery of fire was a signal moment in human history, one of the things, actually, that marks an emergence into the human. In its task of providing warmth and light and a treatment for raw meat, fire is fundamental, though fire is as well a primordial fear, an image of hell. Fire is a creative and destructive principle: a dance, a power, love, hatred; a color, a test, a truth. Its

RT5586_C02.qxd

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 55

Yapha

55

absence in art corresponds to its incomparable scope as a symbol: home, and the Apocalypse. **** Of all the books of the Hebrew Bible, the Song of Solomon is among the most intensely felt, and perhaps the very oddest. It is certainly a passionate evocation of sexual love, though it may also, as many interpreters have insisted, be a metaphorical description of the mutual spiritual love between God and his believers. (In this it would resemble the ecstatic Sufi poetry of Rumi, describing a ravishment by God that is both sexual and spiritual.) It is notable because it is a dialogue, and because one of the interlocutors is a woman. And it is notable also for its compression into a few pages of virtually all the modalities and occasions of beauty in human experience, or at least all of those that were available when it was composed. I myself think of it as an ecstatic evocation of love for the world, for its stuffs, its scents, its animals, its trees, its mountains, its people: love of both the wondrous and the ordinary. Its emphases are those of a society organized around agriculture and herding, both its realities (perfect lambs, bountiful crops) and aspirations (precious metals and heaps of jewels: leisure). And above all it associates beauty with glow and shine: the aura of health and youth and the value of precious ornament. I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots. Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels, thy neck with chains of gold. We will make thee borders of gold with studs of silver. . . . A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts. My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of En-gedi. Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold, thou art fair; thou hast doves’ eyes. Behold thou art fair, my beloved, yea, pleasant: also our bed is green. The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.

Such outpourings must indeed have some spiritual significance, else they would not appear in the Scriptures. The green bed

RT5586_C02.qxd

56

5/28/04

2:05 PM

Page 56

Six Names of Beauty

may be the world, where we live with God. But the path to God is presented as an affirmation of the world’s real beauties, a delight taken in its health and sweetness, an immersion of the senses in God’s creation, one aspect of which is sexuality itself, which after all gets pretty explicit (consider “My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him. I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh, and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock. I opened to my beloved . . .”) Certainly the book is indeed a song, with its incantatory rhythms, a stylized love lyric that takes much of its momentum from its flow and return, its repetitions. The Song of Solomon is in one way an utterly bewildering, not to say incompetent piece of writing, and represents perhaps the highest flourishing of the mixed metaphor. Indeed, the descriptions of the beloved become well-nigh monstrous. (“His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven. His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set. His cheeks are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers: his lips like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh. His hands are as gold rings set with the beryl: his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires,” etc.). But the very excess of the prose is an image of the experience it intends to capture: a kind of overwhelming of consciousness by beauty that beggars description, a beauty and a faith beyond belief. One must speak or be silent, and if one speaks, one must speak to excess, to the very limits of the possible. And so the author(s) simply emit, produce a total outpouring that tries to find in words the firing of the senses that arrives with ivory overlaid with sapphires, in a world where beauty and God are omnipresent.

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 57

3. Sundara Sanskrit, holiness

As people mature, their experience of longing deepens and generalizes, so that eros can be experienced in relation to the world or the divine. Often (as for me) the spiritual quest begins in late adolescence as desire becomes more profound and amorphous. The route from Emma Peel to God seems obscure, but it is direct, as many great spiritual texts (such as the Song of Solomon, the poems of Rumi, Plato’s Symposium, and the testimony of St. Teresa of Avila) attest. Beauty is fundamentally connected to spirit in every culture, and every religion expresses its spirituality in some of its most exquisitely made objects, which are offered to God, or to the people as a way to achieve contact with God. A few years ago, I entered a medieval Catholic church on the Venetian island of Burano, which is known for its lacemaking and its intensely-colored houses. The structure’s campanile appeared to tip dangerously, in the Italian manner. I entered as a pure tourist, and the last thing I expected was a spiritual experience. For one thing, I have never been a fan of the sort of hierarchy represented by the Vatican, feeling more affinity to the austerity and individualism of Luther or even Thomas Müntzer—the anarchistfor-God of the Reformation—than to the pope. The church’s interior was lit only by candles, and it seemed that both the walls and the atmosphere were darkened by smoke. In the obscurity, broken by small flames, I began to make out the images on the walls as my 57

RT5586_C03.qxd

58

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 58

Six Names of Beauty

eyes became accustomed to the darkness. I could not clearly see the altarpiece, but it reflected the flame in burning gold. There were a few women praying. I don’t believe in God, but I felt a presence that found a silent place inside me. Perhaps I touched the yearning toward God of centuries of worshipers. **** Religion, I think, is fundamentally arbitrary. Its epistemology is perverse. Someone gets appointed messiah, or a series of dogmas develops that have a thousand equally plausible alternatives. But once a religion is established, it brings with it its own canons of justification, so that it will always tend to be confirmed. For example, Kierkegaard (and perhaps Luther, and Pascal) regarded Christianity as worthy of belief precisely because it was paradoxical. That God the eternal has come to exist in time and been killed: that’s not merely odd, or hard to defend rationally; it is logically impossible. That means that it requires the strongest passionate faith, the greatest trial, the most rigorous exercise in belief. It requires also a kind of complete self-abandonment in which one ceases to make the effort to justify or make sense of what one believes. That selfabandonment is the attitude of reverence at its most profound. Once you begin to accept, for example, a Hindu view of the world, it can take you into the most impossibly profuse iconology, in which multihued, multiarmed gods and goddesses cavort with one another in their infinitely multiplied manifestations of the one true reality. In fact, the lush Catholic world of saints, trinities, realms of the afterlife and so on, is almost minimalist in comparison with the teeming Hindu systems. The structure of belief receives so much apparently arbitrary elaboration that it is not even clear to outsiders how it is possible to believe it. And yet within the strictures given at its founding, the elaboration is sensible, or even in some sense inevitable. By the time there is a history of thousands of years, you have a system that is mind-boggling in its depth and in its absurdity. And though there are reactions— such as the Buddhist reformation of Hinduism or the Protestant Reformation of Catholicism—which attempt to simplify, clarify,

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

Sundara

2:06 PM

Page 59

59

and clean things up, attempt to bring the basic worldview back to its fundamentals, as likely as not these too start on the road to the limit of profusion of which the mind is capable. This perversity and profusion is an aesthetic. In fact, it is a systematic attempt to pit aesthetics against rationality; it conceives beauty as the teeming opposite of simplicity. In the service of the irrational it pits art against science and common sense, so that the most extreme possible universe is believed, and it is filled with beauty that overwhelms or overfills one into a state of silence. Adoration is longing that has the incomprehensible as its object. And of course, as there are austere spiritualities, there are austere spiritual arts. In this way as in many ways, a spiritual orientation entails an aesthetic, and vice versa. In the Indian tradition, for example, there are no clear separations between literature and scripture, between architecture and the creation of sacred spaces, between ornament and armature. In traditional Hindu ethics, there are four purposes of human life: kama (pleasure), artha (material goods), dharma (duty), and moksha (enlightenment). A first reading of these would arrange them in a hierarchy, and it is fair to say that there are distinctions in status between them in the tradition (for example, they are related to the caste system). But for the most part they are all recognized as legitimate aims, aspects of a complete human life, and of a balanced religious life. Each arena of endeavor has its scriptures; each area can be approached from a variety of perspectives from sheer greed to impartial knowledge. In the higher reaches of Indian mysticism, however, which has a tendency to radical monism and the collapse of dualisms, the distinctions melt, and the four purposes of life become identical, so that, for example, pleasure could lead us to enlightenment. If we treat the four purposes as a way of categorizing the objects of human desire, we should expect to find that they are each capable of providing objects of longing, and hence beautiful things. And this is obviously the case. The most obvious place to begin is, of course, kama, since pleasure and desire are conceptually interconnected. And indeed, perhaps the first place to go for the

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 60

60

Six Names of Beauty

Indian treatment of beauty is the Kama Sutra. But even in the mystical traditions, it is important to see that it is moksha that absorbs the rest, that all longing, even sexual longing, is directed at transcendence, or is a kind of transcendence. The Kama Sutra is, of course, regarded as an erotic classic and handbook of sexual positions. But it is in fact really a sutra: that is, a scripture. And though there is no doubt that at least some of its techniques increase the pleasure of sex, that goal itself is connected in the text to spiritual exaltation. The effect of various illustrations is certainly prurient, but the Kama Sutra also calls for certain varieties of abstinence and asceticism, including the prescription of sexual acts that require iron self-control as well as an overall approach that entails a great degree of mastery over one’s desires. And it is not only devoted to eroticism, but to the cultivation of the cultured pleasures and the arts. There is, for example, an enumeration of the sixty-four arts to be mastered by a civilized person (these include “cheating,” disguise,” “alchemy,” “decoration of wagons with flowers,” “teaching intelligent birds how to talk,” and “reciting tongue-twisters.”) A typical passage says: “In the evening, having attended a musical concert, return home in the company of friends, light some incense, recline, and together wait for the ladies of the night to arrive.” The Kama Sutra’s sexuality is spiritual and its spirituality is erotic. The aesthetic is, we might say, rococo, an indefinitely

Nicole Debarber, Karma Sutra Sex Position.

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

Sundara

2:06 PM

Page 61

61

extended pantheon of variations, a kind of eccentric taxonomy of possibilities, a sexual algorithm capable of infinite ramification. Indeed, Kama is a god: the god of erotic pleasure. He is pictured as the ideal of male beauty, and he induces waves of pleasure by shooting one with his bow, strung with black bees. His consort, Rati, also a divination of beauty, rides a golden swan and also pierces us with the arrows of longing, like the servants of Venus. One of the central themes of the Kama Sutra, as well as more extreme but related Tantric texts, is the intensification of desire, and the deferment of its satisfaction, so that one might think of these as manuals for the transformation of desire into longing. **** Ancient and medieval India possessed a range of aesthetic terms, often used with great subtlety and variety. For example, the term “kalyani” can mean “beautiful,” but its primary meaning is “fortunate,” or “blessed.” This captures the idea that physical beauty is at least in part a gift of heaven rather than an accomplishment, and it connects the idea of beauty with the idea of flourishing or happiness. “Rasa,” which gets elaborated by various Indian philosophers into an entire taxonomy of emotional effects, derives from “flavor,” and indicates an enduring emotional state, like a flavor lingering on a palate. It is perhaps possible to understand it as the proper effect of a great work of art on a mind fitted to receive it; an emotional disturbance transformed into tranquility by the aesthetic situation. “Ramyani,” too, focuses on the experience of beauty, an experience that leads us into love and through a cycle of incarnations. The primary Sanskrit term for beauty, however, is “sundara.” All of these terms have a spiritual valence, and the Hindu sage and writer Visvanatha remarks that the experience of beauty is “the twin brother of mystical experience, and the very life of it is supersensuous wonder.” Thus the connection of beauty and spirit in the history of India amounts very nearly to identity, nor are these dimensions of human experience distinguished on the subcontinent in any firm way until the Western domination of India. This distinction is welcomed by some thinkers as a bit of progress toward

RT5586_C03.qxd

62

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 62

Six Names of Beauty

clarity, but is reviled by others—Coomaraswamy, for instance—as an unspeakable impoverishment of both the spiritual and aesthetic life of India. The idea that the worship of God and the experience of earthly beauty could be actually the same thing is indeed profound. It coaxes us from our senses and their world toward the mystery that cannot be sensed. It affirms the world as spiritual and the spirit as worldly. Here, I make it the occasion of a meditation on some of the connections between beauty, sensuality, and spirit. **** Popular music was perhaps the dominant art form of the twentieth century. And of all the feats of the power of music in the century—starting with the practically universal diffusion of music originating in the styles of African America (ragtime, blues, jazz, soul, disco, hip-hop)—one of the most remarkable was the career of Bob Marley, Rastafarian messiah and revolutionary truth-teller. In the 1920s, Marcus Garvey’s African nationalist movement emerged from Jamaica. In his home island, which was at that time still a British colony, Garvey’s message resonated widely, and he came to be seen as a sort of John the Baptist figure, who had the gift of recognizing the messiah. Garvey supposedly prophesied the coming of a black, African emperor who would lead black people out of bondage and oppression and call them home. When Haile Selassie (Ras Tafari Makonnen) was crowned emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, some Jamaicans (and others in the African diaspora) regarded that to be the fulfillment of this prophecy, and they called Selassie Jah Ras Tafari, God incarnate. When Selassie toured the Caribbean in 1966, he was greeted by literally adoring crowds, and many people (including Bob Marley’s wife Rita) claimed to have seen stigmata in his hands. Rastafarians preached dietary restrictions (emphasizing unprocessed foods), and predicted the destruction of “Babylon,” the system of Western oppression that had brought the slaves out of Africa and that still controlled the world. By the 1960s—as a teenage ska singer named Bob Marley emerged from Trenchtown, the now-legendary Kingston slum built near the town dump—Rastafarianism had matured. Adherents

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

Sundara

2:06 PM

Page 63

63

withdrew into rural collective compounds and attempted to establish an undisturbed, direct, and peaceful existence in a back-tonature movement. They grew dreadlocks, smoked ganja as a sacrament, and played ceremonial nyahbingi drum music, one of the sources of the reggae, a style that developed by the end of the decade. Reggae was also inheritor of popular music styles that had emerged since the 1961 independence. Putting it too simply, ska (1961-1968) was a propulsive, horn-dominated, syncopated dance music; rock steady (1968-1969) was a slowed-down ska; and “roots” reggae (1969-1982 or so) was a slowed-down and lilting rock steady that served the contemplative and dance needs of heavy smokers of marijuana. These styles—all still in use all over the world—have in common not only a rhythmic structure (though the hypnotic emphasis on the afterbeat was emphasized more and more as reggae matured in the 1970s), but also an origin in a synthesis of American rhythm and blues, British folk and religious music, African religious festival, Caribbean styles such as calypso and salsa, and something elusively, indigenously Jamaican. Marley made the transitions between these styles as a very young recording artist, and was one of the instigators of the systematic slowdown. He quickly emerged as the reggae’s preeminent artist; indeed, in the 1970s most Americans knew reggae only through Marley’s music and the soundtrack of The Harder They Come, along with covers or imitations by, for example, Eric Clapton (who had a hit in 1974 with Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff”). Marley had a quality of universal accessibility: a tuneful voice, a deeply touching vulnerability, and a resolution to speak with power and honesty about his life, his religion, and the liberation of his people. Songs such as “Trench Town Rock,” “Burning and Looting,” or the transcendent “Redemption Song” are some of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century music. Other excellent Jamaican reggae artists, such as Burning Spear, Augustus Pablo, and Culture—as well as lesser-known performers who seemingly emerged out of every Rasta community on the island and by the dozen in Kingston—were less accessible for one reason or another. Marley was at once a writer of excellent popular

RT5586_C03.qxd

64

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 64

Six Names of Beauty

songs and a messenger of something within which people immediately recognized something that connected to their own lives. Marley was an unprecedented figure: the messiah as rock star. He managed to convey the essence of Rastafarianism to much of the world, and since his death from cancer in 1982 his effect has spread even further. There are Rastas in Africa, where Marley-style reggae has become a dominant musical form, in Europe, and the U.S., including among white people and the Hopi Indians. As much as anything else, this spread is due to Marley’s incredibly intense and open expression of political and spiritual longing. One longs for, through, and as Marley as one listens to his records. And as affective political documents, Marley’s recordings have few equals (though one might think of Bob Dylan at a certain moment or Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet). Marley’s advent was made possible by recording and broadcasting technology that allowed everybody to hear his actual voice rather than just, say, read his texts. That experience is powerful, especially when it comes with a volume control and expresses a dedication to liberation of oppressed peoples all over the world. With Marley, one suddenly realized that the mass dissemination of specific performances was a medium as powerful as the one invented by Gutenberg; it was, for one thing, a victory for the accessibility of scripture, for that is what both the Bible in vernacular language and the works of Marley are. Indeed, the Lutheran hymnal might be historically as important as Luther’s translation of the Bible into German, but the hymnal displays a structure that can be reproduced in your own voice and that only becomes powerful when it is reembodied. Marley’s music exists essentially first as recording, as something that drives rhythm into religious experience and displays that explicitly, or gives it to you totally. Of course Marley’s music is a variety of gospel; it is essentially religious: religious in its inception, religious all the way down. And it is a music that arises from and gives rise to contemplation as well as celebration. **** I bought East of the River Nile, a reggae instrumental suite by Augustus Pablo, around the time that it came out, maybe 1978.

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

Sundara

2:06 PM

Page 65

65

I probably didn’t listen to it more than a few times, but it has waited for me for a quarter-century. The melodies are simple, serene, meditative, profound, with just a touch of half-speed klezmer. This became known as the “far east” style. Pablo was a melodica player—the melodica being a keyboard wind instrument with harmonica reeds that was, in the 1960s, used to teach music to Jamaican schoolchildren. In fact, Augustus Pablo is perhaps the only professional melodica player I’ve ever heard, or heard of. Pablo was a deceptively basic sort of player, and there were never any technical fireworks, only a studied simplicity and naivete. I’d compare Pablo’s melodica work to the trumpet of Miles Davis or the voice of Billie Holiday, for which the point is not technical facility, but expressive intensity achieved by constriction of means. If you don’t think instrumental music is capable of embodying a spiritual message or creating a spiritual atmosphere, go back and listen to Bach. East of the River Nile, like the other best Pablo records (notably Original Rockers), is so quiet in its intensity, so still at its heart, that it embodies a rigorous Rasta religious discipline. And to listen to it is to recapitulate the spiritual experience that created it. Pablo, like a Shaker, creates without a trace of ego; the point is never to impress you, only—quietly—to affect you. And that makes you realize how rare egolessness is in music, or among professional musicians. Pablo plays with tremendous restraint, with a kind of thorough spareness that is meant to create a place of the spirit. And so his is an ascetic and beautiful music. Each song seems somehow to have begun at an arbitrary place in an infinite progression, and to stop just as arbitrarily, and so become an access to eternity. That’s the stillness at the music’s heart: every song sounds like a sample of infinity. **** All music makes use of repetition. The fugue structure, for instance, is a structure of growth within repetition. But the structure of reggae is extremely repetitive: as repetitive, probably, as any musical style that has ever existed. A song structure such as the blues, for instance (which has had a fairly direct effect on reggae),

RT5586_C03.qxd

66

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 66

Six Names of Beauty

is twelve bars long, with repetitions, and possibly a bridge two thirds of the way through the song. And this structure itself is repeated across songs and across repertoires, to the point at which Elmore James, for example, could essentially make a career out of slight variations on a single song: Robert Johnson’s “Dust My Broom.” But the progression from ska to reggae is a serial divestiture of influences and adornments, intended to leave nothing but the repetitive gesture. By the time “dub” arrived in the late 1970s, there was almost nothing left but drum and bass, along with studio effects. Usually the idea was to use rhythm tracks from previous recordings, over which poets and emcees would “toast.” DJ Kool Herc migrated from Jamaica to New York, and hip-hop—which was also at the beginning characterized by extreme emphasis on bass and repetition—came into existence, and hip-hop is also an international style. But reggae consists essentially—the whole song, but also every song: the whole history of the style—of a single rhythm. In this sense it is a chant or mantra, which is thematized explicitly in the music. Some of the music is based on Rasta chants that were already traditional, as the songs made evident. “We gonna chant down Babylon kingdom, yeah, chant it down, Jah man. We’re gonna chant down Rome in pieces.” The chant is, first, a contemplative form in which concentration leads, ideally, to transcendence, and the form is restricted inversely as the dilation of experience it engenders. But it is also a “work” rhythm or a march or a dirge, something that shapes a social as well as existential unity. As ska becomes rock steady becomes reggae at the end of the 1960s, the beat slows down and collapses into an almost pure throb; it becomes mesmeric. Repetition is an expression of seriousness; you’re sticking to your guns or saying over and over, “No, I’m telling you.” You’re insisting. Nor is this incompatible with the hedonic functions of repetition, its sexual hint or pumping quality: in fact, sex or pleasure can be serious. But then, each possible structure of repetition over time is also a template for development, and each run-through takes on a different significance. Even each perfect repetition in

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

Sundara

2:06 PM

Page 67

67

music achieved electronically represents a decision, and a different decision than its neighbors. The length of the whole is also meaningful. And in a structure of a few repetitions each is differently significant; it possesses a definite place in the unfolding structure. But where the periods of repetition become very short as the overall structure of repetitions enlarges, each repetition becomes more predictable, and each thus becomes somewhat harder to invest with a distinct significance. It is at that point that the sound becomes a mantra, at which it begins to mesmerize, to tip you over the lip into something else. As every rhythm is a structure of repetition, repetition is itself the very principle of unity for beings who are condemned to live in time. As life swings around through its days again and again, it develops structure, becomes rhythmic. What is spiritual in music is above all tempo: the structure of its development and return through time that becomes our own development and return. Thus music itself is an exemplar, an agent, and an element in union, showing its beauty. It is always a return, and always a sequence of returns. But when these returns are as emphatic as a heartbeat and almost as simple, we get the sensation of seeing the center of unification itself that we long for, and of coming to be, moving or dancing with it. Perhaps every culture uses music as part of its ceremonial cycle. And any music has a spiritual aspect when it concerns or effects unions of the hearer with the world, other persons, God. Social unions can themselves be political, or religious, or celebratory. But unification is also possible between human beings and natural objects; in fact, such mergings take place continuously on a mundane level with foodstuffs and the other objects and conditions of perception. At bottom, too, the rhythms of our bodies, the patterns of our repetitions, as waking and sleep, are coordinated with the rhythms of the world, as day and night. And the ecstatic unification with God (if any) is effected also through perception invested with repetition, a repetition of ritual and season, and the repetition of holy phrase in chant.

RT5586_C03.qxd

68

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 68

Six Names of Beauty

Indeed, if repetition is always musical, then perhaps all of our spiritual pursuits—our prayers, our cycle of holidays, our rituals, and our ecstasies—are, in the end, music. **** African-American gospel music is a deeply spiritual and explosively emotional form that was transferred perfectly into the secular realm as soul music, which expresses not spiritual but sexual longing. The movement was made by people like Sam Cooke, who provided both an expression and an object of longing in both his religious and secular phases. In songs like “Sexual Healing,” Marvin Gaye was both preacher and lover. Often the object of longing and unification is less directly relevant to the experience than is its character of self-transcendence, so that sexual and religious experience and intoxication can all seem phenomenologically similar. **** The Australian bullroarer, or “voice of God,” sends people into ecstasies, or heals them. It yields the voices of the dead, or provides a point of contact between the temporal and eternal. The bullroarer consists of a block of wood at the end of a cord or thong, which is spun around the body to produce a very peculiar noise, a kind of simultaneous buzz and hum that seems to occupy all frequencies simultaneously. It varies slightly in volume and timbre as it orbits one’s body, filling the atmosphere with living sound. The temporal structure of the noise is a simple cycle, as the spatial structure is spherical. It is a version of the chant or mantra, and it defines a circular contemplative space as well as a cyclical contemplative sound. **** The alchemist Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (usually referred to as Paracelsus) wrote this: “The inner stars of man are, in their properties, kind, and nature, by their course and position, like the outer stars. . . . For as regards their nature, it is the same in the ether and in the microcosm, man. . . . Just as the sun shines through a glass—as though divested of body and substance—so the stars penetrate one another in the body. . . . For the sun and the moon and all planets, as well as all the

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

Sundara

2:06 PM

Page 69

69

stars and the whole chaos, are in man.” This is, in general, conceived to be a “magical” (prescientific, superstitious) view of the world. And so it is. But it also can be read as a simple though poetic account of perception, saying that to see or hear something is to be penetrated by it, to let a piece of it into yourself through the medium of light or sound. It asserts a joining of ourselves and our universe through perception and hence an elaborate and continual complicating of the human self and human possibilities. But for a slight period flavor of the words, even in the translation, it could have been written by Emerson or, moving in the other direction, by the author of the Bhagavad-Gita. The legendary Vyasa, author of the Mahabharata and hence the Gita, and Paracelsus, and Emerson, were ecstatics, persons who felt and tried to convey a sense of identity with things, a physical and perceptual and spiritual union in which the self is at once expanded and relinquished. What is recorded is not (merely) an alchemical technology, but a set of real experiences in which connections come into awareness. Light and sound are real physical things that bring the external world into our bodies. For Paracelsus, the beauty of the stars is our own beauty, it flows into us and through us, so that we become as transparent to light as glass. The sky appears again in us. **** Americans and Europeans often find the belief structures of Jamaica rather quaint. Indeed, last time I was down there, a child offered to show me where the duppies (ghosts) live, and the Christianity of many Jamaicans is mixed with alchemical elements. Miss Verlin Parchment of Billy’s Bay gave up making bread twenty years ago, when she forgot how. Baking had been her frequent task since girlhood. But one day when she was baking a bad nor’easter blew up. Fishing boats were caught out; there were children to shelter and people to account for. By the time she remembered her oven, Miss Verlin’s bread had burned to ashes, and that burning burned the knowledge of how to make bread out of her. She never baked bread after that. An experience like that is real magic. You can’t tell Miss Verlin that she really did

RT5586_C03.qxd

70

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 70

Six Names of Beauty

remember how to bake bread after that; the psychical effect is real, as are the effects of that effect in the real world (less bread). The burning of that bread did not happen only in the oven, it happened in Miss Verlin. Sometimes the world flows through you, and sometimes you flow through the world. Or: the sensorium is a zone of visitation, a zone of interpenetration. We possess the equipment to forget our separateness, that is, to recall our connections; we long for this. And each experience by which this purpose is accomplished is a powerful riddim. **** The aesthetic expressions of a people are ways the world moves through them. It is a familiar point, that art reflects the climate, vegetation, and so on of the place where it was made. Taking a walk through the town of Black River, Jamaica, you’ve got to be struck by the way the sun saturates (right now) and bleaches (over time) all colors, and the way these facts inform the palette of decoration, the colors of the buildings and posters and clothing. It’s hard, perhaps, for someone who sees poverty and its squalor on irregular sojourns not to aestheticize squalor, not to try to jack up its dignity with the only thing it really has left: a desire for beauty. It is perhaps a horrible thought, but no less true for that, that suffering, too, can be experienced as beautiful, as the privileged yearn toward its reality and intensity. Even a crucifixion can be beautiful. This is a way to relieve one of the obligation of taking any concrete steps to help anyone. But it is also worth saying again that squalor aestheticizes itself, that until folks are actually naked, shelterless, and starving, they are finding ways to orient their surroundings and themselves toward beauty. In Black River, half the clothing is American-style streetwear and the other half is more rustic garb. Guys are walking around talking on cell phones, or on the other hand grinning without teeth. Some women are dressed like L’il Kim; others are carrying baskets around the market on their heads. In this, they are not far from everywhere, because virtually everywhere has become a kind of blend of franchises and global

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

Sundara

2:06 PM

Page 71

71

pop culture with ways that were there when that stuff arrived. And yet reggae comes from listening to Babylon’s radio, among other things, while Babylon’s radio is always out there swiping its art from “indigenous” populations. Even the mall that is fluorescently lit and always 72 degrees is a place where the world moves through you and makes art; and what it comes out with is, maybe, Britney Spears: perfect craft and no guts, no soul, no suffering. But even Britney is affected by what they’re playing at carnival in Brazil or something, which lends even her music the semblance of life: the life has to come from somewhere, though she will still have that body, enhanced and reconstructed, at least for a while. **** The idealization of the human body that constitutes, in many ways, the history of Western representation, expresses itself in two intertwined subject-matters: the spiritual and the erotic. Consider, for example, Grünewald’s altarpiece at Isenheim, perhaps the supreme representation in a certain strand of Christian spirituality. When closed, it displays with hideous exaggeration the brutalization of Christ’s body. The depiction goes well beyond realism into a total immersion in suffering. The crucified Christ is horribly distorted (the hands, in particular) and discolored. The body is covered with sores and wounds in a manner that surpasses even the most gruesome previous treatments of the subject. Joris-Karl Huysmans wrote about Grünewald’s Crucifixion, with no overstatement, that “Dislocated, almost torn out of their sockets, Christ’s arms look as if they were pinioned from shoulder to wrist by the twisted cords of the muscles. . . . The hands [are] wide open, the fingers contorted in a wild gesture in which were supplication and reproach, yet also benediction. . . . Purulence has set in. . . . Rivulets of pinkish serum, of milky matter, of watery fluid the color of gray Moselle, ooze from the chest, soaking the belly and the twisted loin-cloth below. . . . The feet have begun to putrefy and were turning green beneath the rivers of blood. . . . The clenched toes contradict the imploring, benedictory gesture of the fingers, clawing viciously with their blue nails at the ochreous earth,

RT5586_C03.qxd

72

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 72

Six Names of Beauty

impregnated with iron like the red soil of Thuringia.” And Huysmans then shows very precisely the theological upshot of all this sadism: “This was the Christ of the poor, a Christ who had become flesh in the likeness of the most wretched of those he had come to redeem, the ill-favoured and indigent, all those in fact upon whose ugliness or poverty mankind wreaks its cowardly spite.” Thus Grünewald’s Crucifixion expresses our fear of degradation by showing us its outermost extreme: tortured slowly to death and then heaping indignities upon the corpse. Nevertheless, the intensity of the degradation of the body is treated in the overall composition as preparatory. It corresponds to and is necessary to the ideal beauty of the Resurrection as depicted on the right-hand panel of the open altarpiece. It is a way of increasing the need for a resurrection—Christ’s and ours—a way of cutting to the heart of

Mathias Grünewald, Crucifixion, a Panel from the Isenhei Altar, ca. 1515.

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 73

Sundara

73

our fallen condition and the promise of redemption before us. The beauty of the risen Christ, which strikes the soldiers before the tomb dumb with silence, ravishes them until they cower, could not have the same effect except in contrast to the Crucifixion. But the profundity and beauty lies not in the opposition itself but in the reconciliation of its elements in the harmony of the whole. The central panel of the reversed view is known as the “Concert of Angels,” and shows angels (possibly including Satan!) serenading the Virgin and Child on sixteenth-century string instruments. And the Isenheim altarpiece was the inspiration for one of the signal works of twentieth-century music, Paul Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler.” The suite begins with the concert of angels, and though the movement indeed sounds like the work of angels, and specifically refers to lush moments of the Romantic tradition in music, it also

Mathias Grünewald, Resurrection, a Panel from the Isenheim Altar, ca. 1515.

RT5586_C03.qxd

74

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 74

Six Names of Beauty

develops a tension that corresponds to the life and resurrection of Christ. It celebrates the birth of the Savior, but it does not turn away from the Passion, from the power and truth of suffering and the possibility of its transcendence. Both the painting and the music directly connect violence to the body with its idealization. Christ’s body appears in the Resurrection etherealized, as an ideal human body that now expresses spiritual overcoming of the world, that is, of the physical. The Isenheim altarpiece invites the viewer to identify with this process, to see suffering as a purification of the physical that is capable, finally, of volatilizing the body in an ecstatic moment into the realm of pure spirit. The body of the crucified Christ is utterly and intolerably particular; each wound is applied precisely. The body of the resurrected Christ is purged of all particularity. It is whitened to the point where specific features of physiognomy cannot be discerned, and it floats free of the earth in a balloon-like ascent. But the altarpiece also provides a kind of yin-yang understanding of the ranges of human life, so that transcendence depends on suffering and suffering on transcendence. God becomes man in Christ, and man becomes God. The most deeply disturbing and profound experience one could have of the Isenheim altarpiece would be one that found the whole thing beautiful, that one found beauty even in the crucified Christ. The work was painted for a German monastery early in the sixteenth century, where the monks learned to yearn toward suffering-forthe-sake-of-transcendence, which, whatever its value in moving us toward an actual transcendence, is, of course, an actual yearning toward suffering. I can understand the desire to want what is our inevitable lot, to affirm both our suffering and its surcease. The resurrected Christ of Grünewald is conventionally, though intensely, beautiful. But it’s the connection of that beauty to the repulsiveness of Christ’s death that gives the work its intensity. **** One characteristic of the spiritual art of the last half-century is that it breaks the issue out of the picture and into reality, or rather

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

Sundara

2:06 PM

Page 75

75

that it collapses this distinction. The characteristic postmodern representations of the body actually use the body as a medium. There have, of course, always been forms of art produced in or on the human body. Dance, for instance, uses the body as a medium, as does vocal music. But the radical recent move has been to turn the body into a picture, or to turn pictures into the body, so that the distinction between representation and reality—for example, between represented violence and actual violence—breaks down. Chris Burden’s early works consisted of a relentless attack on his own body. The notion of the suffering artist has been central since Romanticism. The suffering of the lonely artist is his Christlikeness: the voluntary pain that signals transcendence of the physical. Burden enacted this role in his early performances. For example, in “Trans-Fixed” (1974), he had himself crucified on the back of a Volkswagen, and driven around a bit. Nails were literally driven through his hands. Here, he sought to become Grünewald’s Christ. Now in one sense, this is solidly, or rather hyper-intensely and hyper-consciously, in the tradition of Western religious art, where, again, a key moment is the identification of the artist with the sufferings of Christ. Burden’s act is both postmodern Christian art and a derangement of the entire idea of a Christian art. Burden accomplishes this derangement simply by moving the act out of the realm of depiction and into the realm of the actual, where even a mild version of Christ’s suffering is revealed as a great violation. Or rather, what happens in “Trans-Fixed” is that the artist becomes the picture. As soon as representation collapses into reality, the violence in the representation comes home. In the identification with Christ that is suggested by Grünewald, there is present the medieval festival of suffering, which the Renaissance dedicated itself to “rationalizing.” This rationalizing consisted largely in a meticulous distinction of image from reality, in a mitigation of the magical or religious power of the image that was connected to the revival of Greek antiquity. By the time of Burden’s

RT5586_C03.qxd

76

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 76

Six Names of Beauty

work, this mitigation had been so thoroughly produced that the only way to retrieve the power of the image was to make the image actual. Burden had himself shot. What was supposed to be a flesh wound turned out to be more serious. He had himself electrocuted. He spent five days in a locker, and twenty-two days on a platform above a gallery, without eating. This carnival of masochism would be playful if it were not for the seriousness that had to be mustered in order to accomplish these works. Burden’s work is a violence performed on himself, but it becomes truly equivocal or perhaps criminal in its enlistment of others to perform the violent acts. And Burden has even elicited the assistance or assault of the average “art lover.” In one performance, he lay on a table next to a pincushion, with a sign above him that said “please push pins into my body.” Here, the art viewer is identified not with Christ, but with Christ’s tormentors. Indeed, in his later works, which deal with weapons such as warplanes and submarines, he connects the assault on the body in Western depiction with the technology of killing produced in the masterpieces of defense technology. Burden has been particularly fascinated with the neutron bomb, a weapon the attacks bodies and leaves buildings intact, producing an environment cleansed of the pollution of life. None of Burden’s work is what we would directly call beautiful, because all of it wallows in suffering and degradation. But there is also in all of it a call to transcendence of the sort that Grünewald would have understood, and the suffering itself is engaged in as a form of longing. What is most disturbing about Burden’s work is that this longing never gains an object within the work itself, and so the hope it embodies is always implicit. It could move toward beauty, but very purposefully it refuses to do so; it is a disillusioned, skeptical art, which is most obvious in its omission of beauty. **** Many of these themes are taken up in the work of the French artist Orlan, in whose work the erotic and spiritual run together in disturbing ways. Almost all of Orlan’s work has involved Christian

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

Sundara

2:06 PM

Page 77

77

religious imagery, but it has enlisted this imagery in ironic ways. Her early performances included acts of measurement in which she assessed the scale of her body in relation to a cathedral and an art museum. She also did a series of tableaux vivants in which she photographed herself as “Saint Orlan” in a variety of artistic styles. These works were (perhaps parodically) religious, with a charged erotic overtone. For example, she would expose one breast from beneath her vestments. But the work for which Orlan has become notorious is her own body. She began in 1990 a series of seven plastic surgery operations designed to turn her into a sort of compendium of Western treatment of the female body. By the end of the process, she is to have the chin of Botticelli’s Venus, the forehead of the Mona Lisa, the mouth of Boucher’s Europa, and so forth. She thus becomes an anthology of fetishes; she is selfconstructing and self-destructing into a pure object. The process by which this is accomplished, however, becomes a series of works in its own right, as surgery becomes videotaped performance complete with costumes, music, and props, including crosses and habits. She has even used her own flesh—removed by liposuction and placed in vials—in relics of the performances, and of the woman—now transformed—who performed them. Orlan practices a technique of idealization that is as old as the Greeks: taking the best parts of several bodies and combining them. As Leone Battista Alberti puts it: “it will help to take from all beautiful bodies each praiseworthy part . . . for perfect beauty is not in one body alone, but [beautiful parts] are dispersed . . . in many bodies.” Orlan makes her own body the medium of representation of the female body in Western art; like Burden, but with more persistence and more permanence, she violates the rationalist distance between representation and reality, collapsing them both into her own body. She is both artist and work, object and subject of desire, idealized sexual image and masturbatory fantasist. Above all, she makes of herself the violation that is both a cause and effect of the representation of the body in Western art. Like Grünewald’s Christ, she martyrs herself to transfigure herself. Her work shows

RT5586_C03.qxd

78

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 78

Six Names of Beauty

the connection—obvious but often repressed—between the “selfimprovement” that motivates plastic surgery, and the self-loathing that motivates the self-improvement, or between crucifixion and resurrection. Women in Western culture inhabit a form that is supposed to be the ideal of beauty, but also learn self-loathing by the failure of their actual bodies with regard to that form: they are celebrated and demeaned simultaneously in the artistic tradition. Thus, Orlan has both been seduced and become a seductress; she is, finally, the seductress of herself. She says: “Being a narcissist isn’t easy when the question is not of loving your own image, but of re-creating the self through deliberate acts of alienation.” Hence we might say she is the last picture, the final representation of the female body in the West. She transfigures herself into a picture and seeks entrance into the flattened, stilled ontological dimension of images. In doing so, she seeks to traverse the states that Grünewald depicted: to ascend, as it were, into some kind of purity or godhead. But she remains a particular body: flesh and blood and bone, and the end of her work will not be her ascension (which is already complete), but her death. **** A central expression of the unity of the spiritual and the erotic in the West is Teresa of Avila’s testimony: “Beside me on the left appeared an angel in bodily form. . . . He was not tall but short, and very beautiful; and his face was so aflame that he appeared to be one of the highest ranks of angels, who seem to be all on fire . . . In his hands I saw a great golden spear, and at the iron tip there appeared to be a point of fire. This he plunged into my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails. When he pulled it out I felt that he took them with it, and left me utterly consumed by the great love of God. The pain was so severe that it made me utter several moans. The sweetness caused by this intense pain is so extreme that one can not possibly wish it to cease, nor is one’s soul content with anything but God. This is not a physical but a spiritual pain, though the body has some share in it—even a considerable share.”

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 79

Sundara

79

And in turn, a central expression of this union in the form of art is Bernini’s sculpture of Teresa, and perhaps even more strongly, what is perhaps Bernini’s final and finest piece: The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni at San Francisco a Ripa, Rome. Surely the sexual aspect of Ludovica’s experience could not have been lost on Bernini or his viewers. The saint clutches her own breast; her face is transported in orgasm. The sheer sensuality of the statue itself is meant to be ravishing as well as a tour de force of skill and a celebration of worldly stuffs. The depiction of fabric in marble has never reached the degree of virtuosity that Bernini achieves here. He manages to convey the softness of Ludovica’s bed and pillow in a way that contradicts the sheer fact that they are actually made of marble. That transubstantiation of materials in turn provides an analogue for the transubstantiation of sex into spirit and of pain into pleasure. These transubstantiations are achieved by and satisfy the intensity of longing: Teresa’s or Ludovica’s for the affirmation of and simultaneous transcendence of the flesh; Bernini’s for Teresa or Ludovica, for things and his own mastery of them, and for an experience of identity with God and his worshipers through creation: an ecstatic reception and artistic communication of desire and its surcease in universal love. **** The Protestant Reformation was a spiritual revolution. But as well, and in direct connection, it was an aesthetic revolution.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Beata Ludovica.

RT5586_C03.qxd

80

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 80

Six Names of Beauty

Indeed, the aesthetic, ethical, and religious aspects of it cannot be distinguished. And they cannot be distinguished firmly, it seems to me, in the life of any culture. The aesthetic way of formulating the objection to Catholicism is that the use of imagery and luxury, the displays of wealth in art that were characteristic of the Vatican and its works, constituted waste and idolatry. There were certainly ideological differences concerning the status of individual believers with regard to the church hierarchy, the sale of indulgences, etc. But much of the vituperation of Luther and others was reserved for the use of wealth to try to bewilder people into adoration, and the stripping of resources from Europe to accomplish this end. Thus the cathedral, the altarpiece, the representations of the Madonna and the saints became the flashpoints of the Reformation, and iconoclastic riots broke out dedicated to the destruction of images. Indeed, the more beautiful an image, the stronger its power of seduction to idolatry, so that in a certain way the Reformation pitted itself against beauty itself. But it is better to say that it pitted itself against a certain understanding of beauty as elaboration, against beauty that made use of a profuse iconography. The response was not anti-aesthetic; rather it deployed a very specific aesthetic of devotion: simplicity, directness, function. It deployed an ethics of money in which it was to be used in charitable work for the poor rather than luxuries for the priesthood, but it also relied on a spiritual aesthetic of minimalism. This involved the shaving off of a pantheon until one arrived merely at a spiritual God and his incarnate son rather than a profusion of saints and intercessors: it was a spiritual ontology similar to that delivered by the more austere forms of Buddhism and Islam. And of course it ramified into an entire transformation of the artifactual environment: there is a Protestant architecture, Protestant furniture design, Protestant urban planning, Protestant decorative arts. **** Surely the apotheosis of this idea is found in the design arts of the Shakers, a sect founded on a tiny scale in England by Mother Ann Lee, and then transported by her to the United States in the

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

Sundara

2:06 PM

Page 81

81

late eighteenth century, where it eventually had some 6,000 followers living in utopian communities of celibacy and Christian communism stretching from Maine to Kentucky. It was the largest and most durable of the myriad American experiments in utopian living. The Shakers cultivated beauty with great focus, but they wanted to separate it from vanity, from empty display, or from purposeless ornamentation that connoted pride or frivolity. In her book Shaker: Life, Work, and Art, June Sprigg quotes a Shaker sister: “The rose bushes were planted along the sides of the road which ran through our village and were greatly admired by the passersby, but it was strongly impressed upon us that a rose was useful, not ornamental. It was not intended to please us by its color or its odor, its mission was to be made into rose-water, and if we thought of it in any other way we were making an idol of it and thereby imperiling our souls.” Though the asceticism of such a view may seem to be a rejection of beauty, it is in fact a turning from some beauties toward others, and a conscious attempt to join beauty intrinsically with other values—utility, spirit, truth—and these values to one another. The rise of the Shakers coincides with and opposes the rise of Romanticism and aestheticism: the idea that beauty can be divorced from other values, which pollute it, and achieved in mere form. In Shaker aesthetics, beauty and use are always intrinsically connected. The Shakers are, of course, famous for their furniture and other design arts, though the transformation of Shaker design into a “style” is problematic because it disjoins the physical object from its meaning. But as Sprigg says, “The humblest, most mundane objects—a coat hanger, a clothes brush, a wheelbarrow—reveal a concern for excellence and grace. Many Shaker products are distinguished by a subtle beauty, derived from the simplest of elements: thoughtful proportions; graceful line; cheerful, bright color.” Mother Ann issued the following dictum: “Your hands to work and your hearts to God.” For the Shakers, work was a form of worship, which is just one aspect of their view that life as a whole is devotion. Since all property was held in common, there was no

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 82

82

Six Names of Beauty

Nicole Debarber, Shaker Chair.

external motivation for excellence or productivity. Indeed, the “millennial laws” of the early nineteenth century specify that “No one should write or print his name on any article of manufacture, that others may hereafter know the work of his hands.” Shaker craft, then, was pursued not for wealth or reputation, but as an goal in itself. The Shakers were pacifists and perfectionists; they believed in original sin, but also that it could be overcome in the course of this life, that one really could live one’s life on the model of Christ. All of these factors combined to create an atmosphere of perfect craft: of, as it were, the perfect dovetail. They marketed many items, and were successful because of the quality and honesty of their work and commerce. But they also furnished their own lives: making places to live, worship, and work, and populating these places with items characterized by simplicity, ingenuity, austerity, and integrity. The presence of these things added to the atmosphere that

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

Sundara

2:06 PM

Page 83

83

made more of them possible. By devotion, they created spaces for devotion. Indeed, “devotion” denotes both the attitude of the worshiper and that of the crafter, and is a way of showing that these two functions were the same in Shaker communities. There is a beauty, of course, in simplicity and function: whole aesthetic movements have emphasized that, though others have rejected it outright. But sheer craft—summarized in Mother Ann’s dictum to work as though you have a thousand years to live and as if you will die tomorrow—is enough to lend an item beauty. It arouses our admiration and also satisfies our needs better than shoddy production. The various handcrafts—pottery, blacksmithing, weaving and sewing, furniture making, and so on—are traditionally central to the survival and flourishing of a community. Human admiration of hand skill extends in one direction to the product in which it eventuates, and in the other to the person who possesses it; obviously, great craft requires great virtue: patience, intelligence, seriousness, even love. Little wonder that among the most beautifully-made Shaker products are tools and workbenches. The central message of the Bhagavad-Gita is that each person must do his part in the process by which the world at every moment comes to be: it recommends the way of work (karma yoga) as the path to enlightenment. To know your function and perform it expertly and in devotion is the enlightenment offered by the Gita, and by Mother Ann.

RT5586_C03.qxd

5/28/04

2:06 PM

Page 84

RT5586_C04.qxd

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 85

4. To Kalon Greek, idea, ideal

Compared to many areas of human inquiry, philosophy is messy. Questions such as “What is the right way to live?” not to speak of “What is beauty?” have given rise to intellectual histories of thousands of years, and to a bewildering variety of mutually incompatible answers. Nor does there seem to be any procedure by which we could adjudicate between these answers, no criteria by which theories on these matters could be tested. Or rather, these criteria are themselves the subjects of long and tortured debate. The works of many of the greatest philosophers—Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, and Nietzsche spring to mind—are extraordinarily difficult and support a number of—again mutually incompatible—interpretations. But from one point of view, this messiness is acceptable or even desirable. It makes philosophy rich and open-ended; there is work to be done, even if none of it will lay anything to rest. The questions are radically open, so radically open that you can answer them for yourself, because there is no agreement on what would constitute real expertise, aside from being human and thinking hard. But this situation can also be frustrating, and sometimes one feels one’s efforts to be futile. It’s as though Jackson Pollock’s paintings depicted a real world, and you just walked into it: it’s bewildering; it fills your head with noise; at any given moment you don’t know where you stand. Now if you lived long enough in a Pollock, you might pine to move into a Mondrian, all clean lines 85

RT5586_C04.qxd

86

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 86

Six Names of Beauty

and primary colors. The Pollock is like a forest, perhaps, but the Mondrian is a rational architecture, a home in which you could find ease: its floor plan is evident, its clarity refreshing, especially if you have been living in a Pollock. Of course, if you haven’t been living in a Pollock, you might feel walled-in and bored in the Mondrian. When I started graduate school in philosophy in 1981, I came because I had been thrilled by Nietzsche since high school. I loved Nietzsche’s spirit of rebellion, his desire to attack all of received wisdom and the entire philosophical tradition. That Nietzsche was at times internally contradictory, and at all times difficult to interpret plausibly, were things I respected about him: signs of his profundity and defiance of convention. And I loved the existentialists— Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Camus, for example—who went right at the most difficult questions human life presents and dwelled there, often with a resolve to make them more difficult than they appeared to be, to belabor them until they induced utter bewilderment. That moment of bewilderment, as the Zen masters also taught, could be the moment of enlightenment, the moment when something happens to your head that changes your life. But at Johns Hopkins, no one was teaching Nietzsche or Sartre. Indeed, it was widely rumored that their work was, literally, meaningless, and everyone seemed to agree that it was at least silly and without profit. The sort of philosophy that was going on at Johns Hopkins is called “analytic.” It has its origins in the logic developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. It tackles philosophical questions through a technique known as “dissolution”: the idea is that if you analyze the logic of the language used to address metaphysical questions, you will come to understand that they aren’t questions at all, that they are “pseudo-questions” because the terms in which they are posed are empty. Thus, most of the traditional problems of philosophy could be made simply to dissipate, like a fog. Of course, some of the traditional issues—such as the place or possibility of human

RT5586_C04.qxd

5/28/04

To Kalon

2:09 PM

Page 87

87

consciousness in the natural world—remain outstanding. But these are in general referred to the procedures of empirical science: they will admit finally of logically defensible and empirically verifiable answers. I came quickly to respect and even love analytic philosophy, and despite the fact that I no longer practice it, I still respect it, and I still return to some of its great texts (for example, W.V.O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” or Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity) when I stand in need of refreshment. There is great beauty in clarity, rationality, and simplicity, though such clarity is in part a fleeing from or negation of life: rationality, we might say, is inorganic. If you look at organisms such as we are—all messy guts and bristling hair, messy sex and improbable dreams—we seem to be anything but clear and simple. Yet that is precisely why we yearn toward simplicity and clarity, and why we create worlds of simplicity and clarity in which we can dwell, though perhaps only briefly. When the Greeks invented what we know as mathematics, logic, and science (it is a simplification to attribute all these inventions to the Greeks, but let it stand for the moment), they were responding as much as anything to an aesthetic need. What they deployed as a mode of knowledge was an aesthetic strategy: an aesthetic system that also had as an effect the actual simplification of the world. Greek art at its height is clearly articulated and profound, and Greek science and mathematics— which emerged initially among the “pre-Socratic” philosophers such as Thales, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras—allowed a grasp of and control over the world that actually has helped break the world to our wills, that has simplified it into something we can use. Thales is often considered the first philosopher, and though he supposedly died by falling into a well while contemplating the heavens, he proposed that the world consisted entirely of water in different states. This hypothesis is at best proto-scientific, and it is not clear how it could have been verified or falsified. But it displays several impulses that we might associate with science. First, it has some basis in observation: in the Mediterranean basin, water is an extremely pervasive substance, and it commonly assumes a variety

RT5586_C04.qxd

88

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 88

Six Names of Beauty

of states, as in ice and steam. And second, the idea that all things are water is obviously put forward in order to make experience comprehensible through unification: it provides a simple explanation for complex phenomena, a structure of understanding that is always at the heart of science. The fundamental impulse has been to make something in which we can find relief from the mess, to clear a space in which we can breathe. This is both a cognitive and an aesthetic strategy: it intends to provide maximum comprehension at the least possible cognitive cost. But it also creates an environment with a certain satisfyingly simple appearance. As Quine famously puts it, “I have a taste for desert landscapes.” **** The Greek words for beautiful (kalos) and beauty (to kalon) have moral as well as aesthetic force. They refer to “nobility” as well as what we would think of as direct visual beauty. But these terms also have an epistemic dimension; they are connected to the idea of knowledge. All of these meanings might be brought together in a notion of “illumination”: the kalos is above all, we might say, what is drenched in light. The noble soul is the clearly illuminated soul, and such a soul will be beautiful. So one thing we might notice immediately is that various dimensions of value are not as clearly distinguished for the Greeks as they would later apparently become; ultimate values are unified in that sense, and all the dimensions of value have an aesthetic aspect. In the Symposium, Plato relates beauty to eros. Beauty is the end of desire, both its purpose and its satisfaction. Desire drives us toward immortality, both in sexual reproduction that allows us in some sense to continue ourselves into future generations, and in an acquaintance with the eternal Forms, the perfect, general concepts of all the kinds of things. Hence, beauty and wisdom are erotic and also the satisfaction or surcease of the erotic. As the Symposium says (in Percy Shelley’s translation) “What then shall we imagine to be the aspect of the supreme beauty itself, simple, pure, uncontaminated with the intermixture of human flesh and

RT5586_C04.qxd

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 89

To Kalon

89

Melis Bursin, Parthenon Floor Plan.

colours, and all other idle and unreal shapes attendant on mortality; the divine, the original, the supreme, the monoeidic [we could gloss this word as “conceptually coherent”] beautiful itself? What must be the life of him who dwells with and gazes on that which it becomes us all to seek? Think you not that to him alone is accorded the prerogative of bringing forth, not images and shadows of virtue, for he is in contact not with a shadow but with reality; with virtue itself, in the production and nourishment of which he becomes dear to the Gods, and if such privilege is conceded to any human being, himself immortal.” Among the many sweet aspects of this thought is its connection of truth and knowledge to eros; its acknowledgment that rationality itself is an object and a satisfaction of desire.

RT5586_C04.qxd

90

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 90

Six Names of Beauty

Perhaps the most famous passage in Plato is the parable of the cave, from the Republic. In it, he pictures us, the ignorant nonphilosophers, as prisoners shackled in a dark cave. The only illumination comes from a fire, and we are chained so that we gaze in its direction. Guards move back and forth in front of this fire, holding objects that we see only in silhouette. That is an image of the extent of our illumination and of our knowledge on this earth. But if we are freed, and emerge from the cave into the world, and see real objects as illuminated by the sun, then we know what things are really like. This is analogous to an ascension to the realm of the Forms, in which (perhaps after death) we achieve true knowledge of true things. And then, finally, there is an acquaintance with the source of light itself: the sun: truth/beauty/goodness in the highest reality, the realm of the Forms. **** The first profound advance in logic since Plato’s student Aristotle was made by Gottlob Frege in his Begriffschrift, or conceptual notation. He introduced predicate logic and quantification, for the first time reaching inside sentences to reveal their logical form, and hence made possible a much greater range of inferences than can be generated in Aristotelian, or “syllogistic” logic. It was Frege’s methods of displaying the logical structure of language that led to the possibility of analytic philosophy, to Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine, Kripke: a whole century of thought and a whole world of ideas. A remarkable feature of Frege’s conceptual notation is that it is a graphic display of logical relations, using horizontal and vertical lines as well as simple curves to represent various logical relations. This way of presenting logic is, in its own way, extremely clear and economical, indeed, conspicuously more clear and economical than most of its competitors, including the notation of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, which became canonical. But the basic visual presentation also largely accounts for the fact that Frege’s advances were neglected for decades. For the visual language of the Begriffschrift is very difficult to set in type, and its

RT5586_C04.qxd

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 91

To Kalon

91

Gottlob Frege, An Example of Conceptual Notation.

unfamiliarity makes it difficult also, at least at first, to master. The Russell/Whitehead notation makes use of the normal typographical symbols, albeit in unusual configurations. But the graphical representation of the Begriffschrift is profound. It seems to transport us into the realm of logical relations, to make a visual array that we can enter: to take us into a Platonic abstract realm, a Mondrian of the mind. It emphasizes the distinction of concept from reality: the world of the Begriffschrift is a realm of purity and simplicity and abstraction that Frege made, or as he would have it, discovered. (Frege was a “Platonist”: he thought of abstract realms such as that of mathematics as real, as something discovered rather than stipulated.) But it also brings this world to us in a visual array: it makes possible our transportation from the realm of concrete visual experience to the realm of pure abstract relations. Frege’s language is, hence, a Platonic illumination, a glance at the true

RT5586_C04.qxd

92

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 92

Six Names of Beauty

sun. Or it would be, if Plato was right about the nature of knowledge. **** James Turrell is one of the most important artists of our period. All of his work involves light: it is not too much to say that though some art uses light, Turrell’s work is light, that he makes his work out of light in the way that other sculptors use metal or wood. He has employed fluorescent light and the light from television screens, lamps, and projectors, among other sources. But perhaps his most profound and beautiful works are made of natural light and darkness; they create contexts in which natural light can be experienced anew, in which we suddenly come to see the light that is always all around us. Turrell’s most famous work, one which is to be realized over a period of many years, is the Roden Crater in the Painted Desert of Arizona. An extinct volcano, it is fitted out with locations and contexts for experiencing the sky. The arrangements of elements are designed, among other things, to constitute a naked-eye observatory of the sort developed by the Renaissance astronomer Tycho Brahe, as well as by ancient monuments that are related to celestial cycles, such as Stonehenge. Thus the spaces are coordinated with cycles of the solstices and equinoxes, as well as with lunar and solar eclipses, which the Roden Crater could be used to predict. For example, there is a tunnel in which the moon appears at its southernmost set. Another room captures the southernmost sunrise, and yet another allows sun projections only on the solstices. One chamber is a camera obscura that projects the sky onto the floor. Indeed, the Roden Crater project is one of the largest modern works of art that is not, strictly speaking, a work of architecture. It displays the sort of concentration on the vault of the sky and the things that appear there that was characteristic of many ancient cultures, which conceived their gods as celestial bodies, and human fate as bound up with the movements of the heavens. Light was for these cultures, and perhaps particularly for the Greeks, a sort of ultimate metaphor, standing for knowledge, truth, fate: for

RT5586_C04.qxd

5/28/04

To Kalon

2:09 PM

Page 93

93

cyclical time and our knowledge of it and existence within it. Light in this sense was unification; it accounted for and served as an image of the unity of experience and of the cosmos. Light appears in all those ways in the works of Plato (for example, as we have seen, in the parable of the cave), but it also appears in all these ways in the work of Turrell. But Turrell’s context—our context—is, of course, very different. We have to rediscover and recover our connection to light or our experience of light. Light, for one thing, has been made artificial, and it has been made into something that can be bought and sold: light has become for us a commodity that circulates through the economy in the form of electricity. This fact brings light to us, brings us to light, makes light continually accessible to us, but it also cheapens the experience of light and reduces it to an equivalence to all the other things that can be bought or sold. Thus light, among other things, is secularized; it loses its mystical and divine qualities, though, of course, light continues to be central to our experience. We might think of Turrell’s work as a remystification of light, as bringing light back to us as something mysterious, pervasive, fragile, ephemeral, and true. Light in Turrell’s work, whether it is natural or artificial, recovers a quality of holiness and profundity. In order to achieve this effect, Turrell usually proceeds through a systematic simplification of our experience of light: by isolating us and concentrating us in relation to its sources. He illuminates us, or brings us into the light, enlightens us. Thus he will project a pure green rectangle onto the wall of a darkened room and will invite us in. Or he will design a bench on which we can lie at our ease and gaze at the sky above the desert. Or, finally, he will make chambers in which we can sit and view the sky cycles through an aperture in the ceiling. The most beautiful of Turrell’s works, I think, are the “Skyspaces,” naked-eye observatories that bring the sky into a room and bring you from a room into the sky. They consist of rooms with openings, rooms in which you are invited to sit and contemplate.

RT5586_C04.qxd

94

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 94

Six Names of Beauty

The openings isolate a portion of the sky so that, across time, you gain knowledge through the experience of light. You are meant to have the sensation of finding out, perhaps even for the first time, what the sky looks like, how it changes through time, what blues, blacks, grays, whites, purples it musters, in what ways it is variegated and in what ways uniform. The rooms are, above all, contemplative spaces, monastic cells, as it were, in which one invariably eventually finds illumination. And of course the experience is shaped by the work, by the form of the room, of the support on which you can sit or lie down, the materials out of which each element of the room is constructed, its size, and also the size and shape of the opening. Turrell shapes your experience even as he attempts to (and really does) display the sky as it merely is. And the experience Turrell intends to give you is one of purity, simplicity, and serenity. Now there are different moods and modes of religious experience, which may be shattering, sudden, disruptive, or destructive of the personality. Religious experience can be volatile, and it can call out extreme desire. It can drive people to self-loathing, despair, self-immolation. But of course religious experience can also be peaceful, contemplative, edifying: it can bring you from perturbation and desire to stillness and peace. Turrell’s work is religious in this latter sense. And like Brahe’s naked-eye observatories, Turrell’s work occupies the cusp of religion and science. It is the world itself, rather than God per se, that Turrell shows us: he gives us empirical knowledge even as he alters our conscious state. But this too is compatible with the mood the Turrell creates. Our quest for knowledge is in part, as Plato knew, a quest for peace. Indeed, the technology that science makes possible, and which in turn makes possible the buying and selling and the transshipment of light, is an attempt to control our environment so that we will not be disturbed or destroyed: our furious technology is, ultimately, a quest for peace. But whereas Brahe’s observatory brought together religious and secular experience at the point at which the latter was emerging

RT5586_C04.qxd

5/28/04

To Kalon

2:09 PM

Page 95

95

from the former, Turrell accomplishes their reintegration in a situation in which they have been separated. He seems to tell us that we have lost our capacity for wonder in illumination, that we have lost contact with light even as we have come to control it. Turrell returns us to this wonder but also brings us through it to a place of serenity, a place at which illumination brings us peace. The experience is at once empirical and mystical, secular and spiritual, an embodiment of desire and a machine for achieving its surcease. We might think of Turrell’s Skyspaces as Platonic constructions. For Plato, the ultimate achievement of knowledge and truth is represented by an emergence from the cave into the pure light of reality. Turrell’s works figure this emergence, or actually constitute caves that yield paths into the light and hence into truth and peace. **** Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science establishes that very complex systems can emerge from the repetition or iteration of simple principles. The experiments that confirm this result are performed on computers, and they yield visual arrays of great variety, of varying complexity, and of striking beauty. Indeed—and this is really the point—fairly simple procedures can yield patterns of a complexity that are analogous to nature or the universe. Wolfram tries to establish that it is possible that underlying nature and serving as its explanation, there could be a single systematic principle, a “simple program.” This result is Platonic, though it takes a form that Plato could not have envisioned. More closely, we might say that Wolfram’s result suggests that the universe could in some sense “consist of” procedures that are expressible in very simple terms. The ancient Pythagoreans, whose own views were secret and arcane, but who apparently held the universe to consist of numbers, or to be underlain by harmonies out of the range of our hearing, constructed a system similar to Wolfram’s. And the Pythagoreans, in turn, had an influence on the later Greeks. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the Pythagorean view as follows: “they thought that the principles of mathematics were the principles

RT5586_C04.qxd

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 96

96

Six Names of Beauty

of all things. . . justice being such and such a modification of numbers, soul and reason being another. . . . Seeing, further, that the properties and ratios of the musical consonances were expressible in numbers, and that indeed all other things seemed to be modeled in their nature upon numbers, they took numbers to be the whole of reality, the elements of numbers to be the elements of all existing things, and the whole of heaven to be a musical scale and a number.” Wolfram’s view is not exactly that the universe consists of numbers, but that it is generated by simple mathematical procedures. Eventually, he hints, the basic principles of nature, such as e  mc2, could be replaced with simple rules for generating complex phenomena. But in the idea that reality ultimately reduces to a set of simple principles, the Pythagoreans have much in common with Wolfram’s approach. And it is worth noting that the Pythagoreans’ basic idea of the world is at bottom what we would call religious and moral. The notion that the universe was governed by numerically

Stephen Wolfram, Cellular Automaton.

RT5586_C04.qxd

5/28/04

To Kalon

2:09 PM

Page 97

97

expressible harmonies led to various hermetic practices of worship, and justice was held to be itself a harmony, which is the way, finally, that Plato and many other philosophers have conceived it. But perhaps that is to reverse the order of priorities. In fact it was the hunger for justice and understanding that produced a worldview that was at once esoteric and “rational,” on which the world made sense and was constituted an object of worship under the auspices of the quite new canons of abstract reason. Let us consider the simplest of the systems that Wolfram constructs, the systems that brought Wolfram to his initial discoveries: cellular automata. The most basic cellular automata make use of a grid in which every square must be either black or white. They start with an initial condition—say a single black square—and then fill the grid according to a specific principle. It turns out the range of all possible cellular automata of this sort can be exhaustively specified with eight rules, though often the principle can be formulated in a much simpler way in natural language. Each of the eight rules specifies whether a cell should be black or white in the next row down, given its own color and the colors of its neighbors in the present row. The “experiment” consists in running this procedure over a certain number of steps, perhaps many thousands. For example, if the rules specify that a cell should be black if either of its neighbors is black in the previous step, a simple triangular pattern is generated. But other rules yield more complex patterns, including “fractal”-type patterns that consist of intricately nested repetitive forms in various sizes. Quite surprisingly, however, some sets of rules of exactly this degree of complexity generate patterns that seem actually random: which over many thousands of steps never settle into a recognizable or graspable form. In fact, computer analyses of some of these patterns suggest that they really are random, that there is no comprehensible pattern hidden in the form, though there are usually recognizable discrete structures that appear and disappear as the pattern proceeds. The basic tool of analysis that Wolfram applies to these patterns is the eyeball. He sorts cellular automata into four categories

RT5586_C04.qxd

98

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 98

Six Names of Beauty

that are based essentially simply on looking at the different sorts of forms. In class 1, the automaton quickly generates a uniform state: the grid turns all black or all white. In class 2, it produces simple repeating structures. Class 3 automata produce seemingly random structures, though discrete forms are often embedded in them. In particular, triangles of various sizes appear. And in class 4 automata, randomness is replete with structure: the patterns resemble braided curtains or hanging macramé of extreme complexity: knots that sweep downward in unpredictable ways. Class 4 automata are, for my money, the beautiful automata, and they suggest that beauty can be understood as order amid complexity, or perhaps even as some determinate ratio of order to complexity, which is one of the traditional strategies for the definition of beauty going back to the Greeks. Though there are some mathematically interesting differences in the classes of automata, the groupings are, as I say, informal, based essentially simply on how the structures look. But this is actually an important way of ordering them, or one might even say it is a scientific way of ordering them. After all, our sense of the order of the universe is based on our experience of it. And the universe displays a kind of extreme combination of randomness and pattern. This has led, for example, to one form of the debate over the existence of God. Those who use what is called the “argument from design” emphasize the degree of order that is displayed in the universe, which is indeed conspicuous. The organization of planetary systems, or organisms, for example, is obvious, and suggests to some folks that such systems are ordered intentionally. And also there may seem to be a kind of moral order in the universe, in which goodness is rewarded and evil punished, or in which vice destroys and virtue nurtures. At a minimum, we might say that the universe has some moral content, and the argument is that such content can only emerge from agency or intention. On the other hand there is indeed great evil and disorder in the universe as well: there are apparently chaotic systems such as cloud formations, and of course the moral order seems anything but perfect,

RT5586_C04.qxd

5/28/04

To Kalon

2:09 PM

Page 99

99

and often the moral content of the universe seems entirely random. One’s sense of what sort of place the universe is, one might say, affects one’s beliefs about its source in randomness or intelligence. And it also affects one’s ideas about its beauty: one can find beauty in order or in chaos, but more relevantly and commonly, one finds beauty in certain combinations of order and chaos. Perfectly ordered systems are merely boring, and perfectly chaotic systems are merely bewildering. But combined systems are arenas of desire in which one might intervene to impose order or attack it, in which one might introduce organizations or contribute to their disintegration. Such systems, we might say, are political: they can yield to transformations. In systems of extreme order, we long for disintegration, while in systems of extreme disorder we long for organization. Thus the sort of systems in which longing can arise and be satisfied are systems of mixed order and disorder. And the procedures by which we judge whether a system is well-ordered or not are essentially informal: they consist simply of experiencing the system in relation to ourselves rather than, for example, computer modeling. That is why Wolfram’s ultimately informal taxonomy of cellular automata is important: because it corresponds to our experiences of order and disorder in the real world. And one compelling feature of cellular automata is that they can, on the basis of eight rules, yield systems that remind us of worlds, that create patterns of such intricate complexity—or combinations of order and chaos—that they resemble environments or natures. This, of course, suggests that underlying the beauty of the universe there is a single principle by which structures are generated and by which they peter out or disperse. In cellular automata where the initial state is random, and which grow in two dimensions rather than one, some rules generate snowflakelike structures of complexity and variety amid order. Other rules lead to uniform states, and still others to incredibly elaborate combinations of order and chaos that resemble worlds. Nor are such effects peculiar to cellular automata; Wolfram is able to generate similar results with a variety of systems. One rather shocking fact,

RT5586_C04.qxd

100

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 100

Six Names of Beauty

informally expressed, is that more complex rules and more complex initial conditions do not necessarily yield more complex patterns over the long haul; indeed, some of the most complex systems emerge from very simple rules and initial conditions. Or more accurately, it appears that extremely simple rules yield extremely simple patterns, whereas slightly more elaborate rules can yield arrays as complex as any that can be constructed. Plato would have loved this result, insofar as it establishes that there could be a coherence, a single form, that generates all experienced structure, and that is the “Form,” or the mathematical structure of the universe as a whole, and which is the principle of beauty. Wolfram’s results, which, after all, consist only of computer models, cannot establish that the universe is this sort of Platonic or Pythagorean arena, but I take them to establish that this is possible. This is a very serious limitation, and though the universe may be produced by the iteration of simple rules, it may be produced by very complex rules, or the idea of rules might itself be just the wrong metaphor or it might simply be false as an explanation of the universe. Even more seriously, and though Wolfram’s results are extremely suggestive, as he builds complex forms like those of nature by the repetitive application of simple rules, it seems to me that there is simply no way in which the hypothesis could be clearly demonstrated to be true. In the absence of a dialogue with God, we will not be able to get a diagram of the rules on which the universe is based, and any such diagram will remain hypothetical, though the actual generation of forms might turn out to be extremely suggestive or compelling. Finally, though, the preference for the simplest rule that serves our explanatory purposes—a preference to which all of Wolfram’s work is dedicated—is aesthetic rather than strictly empirical. The preference is something we bring to rather than derive from the data. It will allow clean and graspable explanations, so the aesthetic preference has cognitive effects. But it is not itself an empirical result. And we might say that finally, Wolfram’s analysis is, like

RT5586_C04.qxd

5/28/04

To Kalon

2:09 PM

Page 101

101

the Pythagoreans’, moral, that it asserts a kind of balance and simplicity and harmony in the world that satisfies our thirst for justice. Thus, Wolfram’s system is at once scientific, aesthetic, and moral: it connects the ultimate values of the true, the beautiful, and the good into a coherent foundation. And the ferocity with which Wolfram has pursued simplicity in complexity through experiments that sometimes generate billions of patterns are a testimony, finally, to the human longing for order in disorder, for a place of peace at the bottom of a chaotic experience. **** Light plays differently in our experience, depending on where we are and when we are: the time of day, the latitude, the altitude, and the atmospheric conditions, the consistency and composition of the air. In a dry climate, when the light is intense in the middle of the day, it picks out each object perfectly, or moves each object into our experience with seeming purity; it becomes invisible as a medium, a pure revelation. On the Caribbean islands, the light is liquid because it is suffused with water. It moves through water and onto water, into which it is captured and from which it is reflected back through our experience. The light is intense (equatorial) but diffuse, and it tends to conjoin experience or unify it across space and time; it is a mood. It is hard, on the south coast of Jamaica, to maintain a sense of separate things and of one’s separation from things; the primordial experience is of unity, in which one must work toward, or drag oneself toward, focus in order to tease out distinct objects. I sit looking at extremely pink blossoms through a slatted window, as they move with the wind and return. But the distinction of one blossom from another, or of the plant that possesses the blossom from those around it, or of myself from all this, is an inference, something I must labor to produce rather than something self-evident. In some environments, one constructs a cosmos from an array of discrete objects; in others, one constructs the array itself from the experience of a unity. Light, in other words, gives rise to ontologies. And ontologies give rise to ways of living, so that in an

RT5586_C04.qxd

102

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 102

Six Names of Beauty

experience of things as separate from oneself and one another they are, for example, offered to one as tools or as things to be transformed by tools, which presupposes their separation. But it is a familiar point that, in a tropical climate, one “lapses” into the heat and the light, one’s alertness is compromised, and with it the capacity to take things and use them, to work. The “lushness” or “profusion” of the tropical environment winds things around each other, makes them more complexly intertwined. It limits the vertical and emphasizes the horizontal. It joins things into a world, not as the collection of all things that exist, but as a unity in which they appear. In such a world, one expects that knowledge arises all at once or not at all, in a coherent system or its negation: a total affirmation or an extinction. As Derek Walcott says of getting a classical English education in St. Lucia, “Either the breadfruit tree and the sunlight became unreal because of the Latin, or the Latin became unreal because of the breadfruit tree and the sunlight.” In a northern environment where the light is thin or the atmosphere dry or both, knowledge arises through composition; one organizes discrete elements toward a unity; the victory would be a principle that makes all things coherent. In the tropics, the coherence is given, not achieved, and one must drag one’s head into a degree of differentiation that can keep one living and working. The northern climate in winter is a classical environment, simplified or crystallized into determinate masses, arranged with economy and bathed in an unmediated light. The tropical climate is Baroque: the space is filled or stacked and the colors and forms must be inferred from the primordially unified array. But it should be said that unity and profusion form a circle, and that at its most unified a design is profuse or, as it were, just this side of profuse, and vice versa. Greek classicism emerges from a context in which the light etches each object with great clarity. But it seeks through further clarifications to find a perfect unity: always the classical is marked by the longing for coherence, conceived as the composition of discrete elements. On the other hand, the Baroque’s extreme profusion of effect emerges from the nondifferentiation

RT5586_C04.qxd

5/28/04

To Kalon

2:09 PM

Page 103

103

of elements: their unity. A canvas by Rubens or Renoir or Pollock famously has an “all-over” quality that emerges from repetitive gestures, a kind of continual addition of similar simple elements into an extraordinarily complex system. The Baroque at its height is a kind of rebellion against simplicity that builds complex systems out of simple elements. **** It may be that the idea of justice arises with the development of mathematics. Or, at least, the idea of justice may arise with the necessity for balance in transactions. It is no coincidence that justice is represented by a scale. A just transaction at its most rudimentary is one in which like is exchanged for like. And yet no one would trade a certain quantity of grain for an equal quantity of similar grain. So exchanges require abstraction, embodied in the idea that a certain quantity of one substance is worth a different quantity of another. This immediately generates the notion of value, which could be expressed as a ratio of the quantity of one stuff to another quantity of another stuff. This procedure, while useful in limited cases, will also quickly generate incredibly complex calculations as soon as a variety of trade goods exist. That fact, in turn, suggests the usefulness of some measure of value that can apply to all sorts of items and adjudicate exchanges. That, in its turn, suggests a numerical system simultaneously with a concept of just or fair exchange. And hence, we might speculate, mathematics arises together with justice. The origins of “criminal” justice should be sought in the trade in harms. Justice of this kind consists of a balance of injuries, a schedule of payment in mutual destructions. Criminal justice arises in the attempt to make vengeance rational. Sheer revenge is a lashing out in response to perceived injury that fundamentally knows no notion of balance, that in fact tries to repay harm with greater harm. But criminal justice is vengeance on a schedule of compensations: it is a rationalization or mathematicization of pain. It tries to establish a balance not of goods but of acts, and it immediately suggests concepts of mathematical hierarchies, and ratios

RT5586_C04.qxd

104

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 104

Six Names of Beauty

between them. The ideal ratio is, of course, 1:1, in which the balance is perfect. But because trade is fundamentally conceived as an exchange of different substances or different harms, justice requires a fundamental abstraction from concrete merchandise and concrete sensations. It tends to suggest that ideally every substance and every sensation can be measured on a single scale, or that the universe is governed by a single mathematical principle by which all things can be measured. This requires systems of maximum scope but also of maximum simplicity: the cognitive task is immense and for that very reason demands the simplest means. The simplest explanation requires the least expenditure of cognition, and hence is to be preferred as one faces the daunting possibility of measuring wheat or land against cattle, or cattle against murder. It is thus that Ockham’s Razor, the principle that the ontologically simplest explanation is to be preferred, takes on its status as a canon or axiom. The simple explanation quiets us like a minimalist living room, costs us the least, leaves us free most quickly to go on to the next task or problem. The simple explanation gives us peace. On the other hand, these same features can be oppressive. Order that is too pervasive is, obviously, limiting. And thus art history, for example, can be conceived—as Heinrich Wölfflin, for example, conceived it—as a dialogue between the classical and the Baroque, as the imposition and the breaking of boundaries, as the bringing of order to chaos, and then the breaking of order by chaos. If one thinks of the aesthetics associated with Hinduism (as opposed to that of Zen Buddhism, for example), one sees the extreme opposite of Greek cosmology. One multiplies gods almost beyond measure, and one introduces multiple avatars of the same god: Shiva appears in many forms, corresponding to functions and moral moods, to creation and destruction, love and hatred, and the states between. There are intermediate states between every incarnation: every god has many arms and innumerable traits. One responds to the profusion of reality by a conceptual profusion that varies with it and reflects it. Ontologies become maximally lush in response to an infinitely lush reality: dualities such as good and

RT5586_C04.qxd

5/28/04

To Kalon

2:09 PM

Page 105

105

evil, simplicity and chaos, creation and destruction, are broken down, or rather every possible intermediate state is explored and embodied and used as an occasion for imagery. The aesthetic of medieval Catholicism, including the Gothic, is similar in spirit, if different in visual effect. Each element receives a multiplying differentiation, as in the Gothic pointed-arch window, which is a relatively delicate form into which further differentiations are introduced. Comparing a cathedral to the Parthenon is a very simple way to see this difference, but so is comparing a pantheon of saints to the austere Christianity of the Reformation, especially in the most extreme expressions of the latter. This is clear, for example, in radical Anabaptism, in which there is as little as possible between the believer and God: no priests, no sacraments, no virgin intercessor, no images (altarpieces, for example), no cycle of complex ritual. Catholicism is capable, in fact, of an anti-classicism as profound as Hinduism, as in cases of what is sometimes called Mexican ultra-Baroque, but which might better be thought of, in relation to its self-concept, as a ultra-Gothic. In an ultra-Gothic church, everything is done to achieve profusion, to create a visual experience that is bewildering, that bewilders one to adoration. Every surface is encrusted with ornament, and every ornament has meaning. Putti swarm like bees; everywhere you look there are suffering Christs or crowned Virgins, lurid wounds and golden haloes. Every color in every shade appears in juxtaposition. The aesthetic is lush because the cosmology is lush, and we can speak of an insane beauty in direct contrast to the hyperrational beauty to which the Pythagoreans and Plato pointed the way. **** We love unity and rationality, yearn for it. But we also focus obsessively on the possibility of a release from it. One symptom of this fact is our fascination with anomalies: literally, things that defy the laws, or at any rate the regularities, of the universe, things that appear singular and inexplicable. This leads to the fascination, for example, with freaks, monsters, and mysteries. As Ricky Jay says of his own obsessions in Jay’s Journal of Anomalies: “Siamese twins, for

RT5586_C04.qxd

106

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 106

Six Names of Beauty

example, [are] worthy of discussion only if balanced on their heads, reciting goliardic verse and providing their own accompaniment on violin and dulcimer.” Hugely fat people, gigantically tall ones, and bearded women are traditional attractions. And though the traditional freak show has lost some of its allure, we still gaze obsessively on the weird. Television shows such as Jerry Springer or America’s Funniest Home Videos serve as modern versions. Even the fascination with extreme physical specimens in sports, or in the world of supermodels, is a version of the appreciation of the anomalous. It is not, of course, that a bearded woman or a person who’s almost eight feet tall or who is astoundingly attractive is literally anomalous, literally violates the laws of nature; it’s just that their singularity makes us wonder about the regularity of the universe, makes us feel that maybe we could be freed from the law into an anarchistic world where anything is possible. And it is not that a bearded woman is beautiful, though if you pasted bin Laden whiskers on Cindy Crawford, you might get something presentable, or at least interesting. But a bearded woman is obviously not simply repulsive in some commonplace way, either, since Barnum or whoever can actually charge admission. What I’m saying is that she becomes an object of longing in that she promises to free us from the mundane constraints of biological gender. We might conceive the classical as digital and the Baroque or Gothic as analog: as principles of continuity in which every apparent gap can be occupied, as an infinitely divisible aesthetic space. In the interstices of the familiar taxonomy lurk monsters, magics, every possibility. Jay’s Journal of Anomalies provides information on the following beasts, displayed at one time or another at fairs, sideshows, and circuses, no doubt to the considerable edification of onlookers. The Bonassus: “a newly discovered animal Comprising the head of an elephant; the horns of an antelope; a long black beard; the hind parts of a lion; the fore-parts of the bison.” The Bovalapus: “Most Monstrous Bovalapus, The Stupendous! The Terrible! Horned, Hoofed, Maned, Hairless.” The Lycaon: “This extraordinary animal has the head of a wolf, the beard of a Goat, the ears of a Horse, the

RT5586_C04.qxd

5/28/04

To Kalon

2:09 PM

Page 107

107

nails of his fingers are like those of a Tiger, his shoulders, breast, stomach, fingers, wrist, knees, legs, and the rest of his body, are like those of a man.” The Bactaranus: “It stands nearly nine feet high, is of the most docile nature, and with the size of the Elephant and the strength of the Lion, it combines the agility of the Horse, and the sagacity of the Dog.” The Zimbo: captured on “the Keane Expedition in the Exquimoux.” The Cynocephalus: “a fabled race of dog-headed men.” And of course, the “young beaver which grunts like a pig. &c. &c. From Canada.” Inevitably, the monsters are assembled out of the nodes of the familiar taxonomy: the monster is the midpoint between categories and suggests the possibility of unnatural matings between the familiar species. **** Perhaps the greatest occupier of the interstices was the nineteenth-century acrobat and freak Harvey Leach, who toured the world as, among other things, the world’s shortest man. He was not a dwarf or a midget, but an extremely well-muscled and normal man from the waist up, with nothing below besides tiny feet. He performed as the world’s first “human fly,” clinging to walls and bouncing around cages with aplomb. Apparently he could run down stairs on his hands faster than any other person could do it on his feet. He had a propensity for violence, and was many times in court for assault, which he accomplished by launching himself into the air and punching his adversary in the face while aloft. One witness described him in court as “a very malignant scurvy little dog.” A reviewer said of his performance that “it was very surprising, but not particularly edifying.” He performed, among other things, as “the gnome fly,” “Hervio Nano,” “The King of the Bees,” “The SorcererGenius,” “Bibbo the Patagonian Ape,” “Le Papillon” (complete with metamorphosis from caterpillar to resplendent winged creature), “The Extraordinary Metempsychosian Actor,” “Sapajou, Baboon to the Prince of Tartary,” “the Queen Bee,” “The Vampire Bat,” “The Son of the Desert and the Human Changeling,” “The Wild Man of the Prairies,” and “The Demon Dwarf.” His end was unfortunate. Appearing in London in his final manifestation as “WHAT IS IT?,”

RT5586_C04.qxd

108

5/28/04

2:09 PM

Page 108

Six Names of Beauty

the monkey-suited missing link between the orangutan and the human, he was greeted by an old friend, who insisted on giving him a Masonic handshake. Thus exposed, he withdrew in disgrace, and died soon thereafter in a garret of despair. In all, the fabulous gnome fly was the ultimate human Baroque, a one-man bestiary of monsters and a continuous sapient embodiment of the continuum. **** The distance between a Greek beauty and the beauty of the freakish or the hyper-Gothic is inestimable. And yet, at the point where the bewilderment is complete, the experience emerges suddenly into coherence. An absolutely fine differentiation is indistinguishable from unity. We find diversion in bewilderment, within certain limits, but we find peace in the simple explanation. Thus, the classical aesthetic of Ockham’s Razor yields an experience that is like the wabi-sabi experience I am about to discuss, wherein we find serenity. Whereas the wabi-sabi experience is concerned to leave things as they are, the kalos experience is technological: it is an experience of grasping and ordering. To kalon, like all of the deepest concepts of beauty, entails a comportment to the world, and emerges from one. The world of to kalon is an ordered world, a world that could be reduced or modeled, grasped and explained, used and simplified. One might also say that the kalos world is a just world, a world that displays a moral order. But in addition, of course, this order, which arises fundamentally in a thirst for justice, is an epistemological and aesthetic order: it is a cosmos, a world that on every level is in principle comprehensible to us because it is ultimately simple enough to admit of explanation. We cannot justify the claim that the world is a cosmos: the canons of reason by which a justification proceeds themselves bring into play the whole structure of reason that they are called upon here to undergird. That the universe can be explained in simple terms, that the ideal of justice and the classical ideal of beauty—things which are, finally, identical—have any purchase at all in the real world, are matters of faith. And they are real faiths, things people actually believe, because they are objects of longing: they are things we want or need to be true.

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 109

5. Wabi-Sabi Japanese, Humility, Imperfection

I started playing the harmonica (harp) when I was fourteen. My brother Bob showed me the basic riff from “You Got to Move” by the Rolling Stones. It’s a good blues lick, adaptable to a lot of songs. Bobby actually moved the harp on my lips to show me, and we both laughed the first time I got it right. For months that was the only thing I could play. The basic structure of the blues is almost always the same and the repertoire of riffs fairly limited. Indeed, part of the richness of the blues derives from its narrowness: any slight deviation takes on great significance within a system that is so restricted, in which the expectations of the listener are so determined. The arc of the song becomes evident from the first few moves. The expressive intensity of the blues derives from its roughness and simplicity. When you no longer have to focus on what the next change will be, you focus on how to express yourself within it, how to exploit it emotionally. Spontaneity follows on and reflects discipline. I’d like to say that the first time I heard the blues I was walking down Beale Street or hanging out on the south side of Chicago. But, actually, I was in Nepal. My cousin Lizzie put on “The London Muddy Waters Sessions.” My scalp prickled. I heard Muddy Waters and knew that was what music should sound like, or, at any rate, I knew that was what my music should sound like. The most impure possible context for the blues: in a country where there were no 109

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 110

110

Six Names of Beauty

Nicole Debarber, Harmonica.

Black or White people, really, thousands of miles from the American South. Maybe I needed to hear the music out of context, somewhere where it didn’t sound normal, where the music in the bazaar sounded jangly and incomprehensible. I still own a copy of that disk. The damage on its surface—its crackles and skips— traces my intense relation to it, and gives it a kind of old-timesounding authenticity. But even with all that displacement—in Kathmandu listening to British guys play southern American Black music on a recording—the blues seemed to me like an absolutely inevitable syntax, as though I was hearing my own voice the way I wanted it to be. The first time I put a harp in my mouth, a couple of months after I returned from Nepal, it was a piece of wood and metal I stuck between my lips; my mouth didn’t know how to make its shape. I didn’t know how to find the holes in the harp with the breath stream from my lungs to the external air and from the air back into my body. The harp had numbers on each hole, and I would remove the harp from my mouth to see what holes I was blowing. Not able to force the harp to make any sense, I had the idea, common when you pick up a new instrument, that it would always seem alien to me. In learning to play the harp, body and instrument emerge into a system. The harp is a particularly excellent instrument for that: for one thing it’s tiny: you can carry one wherever you go. You can play it while you walk down the street, you can cup it in your hand; it is about the same size as your mouth. Its timbre is very much the timbre of the human voice and the sounds you produce with it

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

Wabi-Sabi

2:10 PM

Page 111

111

come to feel like a voice. Notes can be “bent,” so that you are not, as on a keyboard, limited to the tones that the instrument is designed to emit. You can gradually pull a note up or down in a continuous tonal circuit. The tones are made by freely vibrating reeds in a column of breath, truly the most flexible and intimate musical system of body and body: you’re doing exactly one thing at a time, simply working the object with your mouth. A traditional Marine Band harp has a wooden mouthpiece that is tongued as you play. This is divided into ten holes that open into the reed plate and through which the air must pass. The lips rest and move on metal wafers that are nailed to the reedplate. Within the reedplate, the reeds—just tiny rectangles of metal— vibrate. Some are set to vibrate when air is blown over them, some when air is sucked back across them, so that blowing and sucking produce different tones. Each hole is large and separate enough from the others to be sounded individually. But the holes are close enough together that one can find chords by playing two or more simultaneously. You can also place the tongue on one or two holes and play the surrounding holes on one or both sides, and get a peculiarly satisfying and bluesy effect by slapping your tongue on the holes, suddenly stopping the flow of air to some of them but not to others. By shaking your head very quickly back and forth, or shaking the harp, you can get a kind of high-speed trill. When you really connect to the reeds you can make them wail, sing, squawk, speak. Soon I was playing all the time. At first not because I loved the noise I was making, the noise was not so good. But I wanted something in my mouth; the harp was my teenager’s pacifier. You blow and suck on a harp; you never need to stop. The music and the breath are the same thing: you coat the harp with spit and it bathes you in sound. I would walk to and from school blowing almost randomly. When I got home I would put on a blues record—Sonny Boy Williamson or Little Walter or Muddy Waters again—and listen to what was happening through the harp. Slowly my playing acquired form. Soon I could play some of the songs I heard note

RT5586_C05.qxd

112

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 112

Six Names of Beauty

for note. Eventually I was playing without thinking about how to play or what I would play next or even how it sounded. I do not try to play songs anymore, and I don’t play the same way twice with the same song; it is all improvisation. The freedom of improvisation is made available by the directness and simplicity of blues syntax. I am improvising out of a very limited range of licks I learned from the masters and a few I devised myself. Within this utter constriction I am perfectly free, I am not trying to play correctly or to play a song the way it should be played; I am simply releasing my body into the song and living there, at least on a good day. The blues itself is a tolerant form; mistakes often sound intentional; or even if they don’t they sound “bluesy,” they give a sense of unrehearsed, unpolished expressiveness. There’s a Rolling Stones song called “Down Home Girl.” At the end, Mick Jagger plays a couple of riffs on the harp. They’re much rougher than anything even Keith Richards would acknowledge as professional guitar playing, but they serve to locate the song in the rough and rural American South, a necessary shift of geography by boys from London playing the blues and singing in simulated drawls. Indeed, the impression of naivete and spontaneity, and the impression of countryside, are often conveyed by the harmonica. I think it is fair to say, for example, that Bob Dylan intentionally never learned to play the harmonica, or learned to simulate incompetence. A truly slick display of technical proficiency on the harmonica, though of course admirable, is almost annoying; it contradicts the simplicity and amateur status of the instrument, which lies on the spectrum somewhere between the saxophone and the kazoo. **** The Japanese language possesses a vocabulary of aesthetic experience that is or ought to be the envy of the West. These words admit of no direct translation into European languages, but they make articulate varieties of beauty to which anyone can have access. “Shibusa,” for example, is usually translated, with radical inadequacy, as “elegance.” The word “elegance” for us connotes a kind of upper-class aesthetic of designer clothes and designer utensils,

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

Wabi-Sabi

2:10 PM

Page 113

113

though admittedly it picks out something “tasteful” as opposed to loud or overly elaborate. Things that are shibui (the adjective form) are refined in the sense of not being gaudy. There is another use of “elegance” that gets somewhat nearer to shibusa, however: Proofs in mathematics and logic, as well as scientific theories, are sometimes called “elegant” if they are conspicuously economical. And such proofs and theories, as the previous chapter discussed, are beautiful in proportion to their scope and simplicity. Shibusa as an aesthetic is elegance in that sense, but also picks out a quality that is reflective, understated: things that are shibui are created or experienced with a kind of meditative restraint. Thus the term denotes both a quality of objects and a quality of experience. ‘Shibui’ can also mean ‘true,’ ‘simple,’ or ‘chaste.’ It captures a quality that is at once aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological, that can be an aspect of what we make, what we are, and what we assert or express. It bespeaks an economy or directness and purity of means as well as a gentle achievement of ends. Shibusa is a way and a place to live. “Yugen” means both obscure and profound, also mysterious and elusive. An almost cliche example is catching a glimpse of the moon behind scraps of silvering clouds, an experience of darkness in light or of dark illumination. In one sense, yugen is shibusa’s opposite, suggesting the infinity of darkness or the abyss as opposed to quiet dignity. Yugen invites you or seduces you to tumble into it, to lose yourself. We can consider it an aspect of the sublime, though its effect can be created within art and on a small scale. But it has in common with shibusa that it does not move toward a conception of perfection; rather, it seeks a kind of suggestiveness in absence: in holes, in emptiness. But let’s focus on two other terms: “wabi” and “sabi.” These merge into a single aesthetic or kind of beauty—wabi-sabi—that is related both to shibusa and to yugen, but which has a different emotional tone. Wabi is most directly translated as “poverty,” and initially in its history had all the negative connotations of that state. The life of the peasant—hard, humble, and bare—is wabi. Wabi as an aesthetic term refers to the sort of roughness that one might

RT5586_C05.qxd

114

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 114

Six Names of Beauty

find in a peasant hut: to everyday, inexpensive wares, to things still in use long after they are worn and cracked. Wood for the fire is wabi, as are the stone hearth and the fire itself. Wabi as beauty is humility, asymmetry, and imperfection, a beauty of disintegration, of soil, autumn leaves, grass in drought, crow feathers. For such reasons, an appreciation of wabi is an affirmation of the world and a certain sort of refusal of its transformation for delectation. Wabi as an aesthetic is a connection to the world in its imperfection, a way of seeing imperfection as itself embodying beauty. Sabi means “loneliness,” again originating in a word that is largely negative. In part, one might think of sabi as the subjective state that is appropriate to the experience of wabi: a kind of desolation or meditative depression that can be sweet. But it also refers to solitude both as a state of aloneness in persons and as a spareness of objects. Japanese flower arrangements (ikebana), for example, can have a sabi quality in comparison with Western styles, because they deploy extreme economy of means, perhaps only a few stems, with as much emphasis on a branch or leaf as on a blossom. Sabi is a quality of stillness and solitude, a melancholy that is one of the basic human responses to and sources of beauty. Loneliness arouses a yearning for companionship, but it is also something that can be relaxed into or, perversely, continued in the face of opportunities for its relief. Thus, wabi-sabi is an aesthetic of poverty and loneliness, imperfection and austerity, affirmation and melancholy. Wabi-sabi is the beauty of the withered, weathered, tarnished, scarred, intimate, coarse, earthly, evanescent, tentative, ephemeral. As Leonard Koren says: “the closer things get to nonexistence, the more exquisite and evocative they become.” Wabi-sabi is a broken earthenware cup in contrast to a Ming vase, a branch of autumn leaves in contrast to a dozen roses, a lined and bent old woman in contrast to a model, a mature love as opposed to an infatuation, a bare wall with peeling paint in contrast to a wall hung with beautiful paintings. **** The beauty of wabi-sabi is associated with the tea ceremony, and in particular with the great sixteenth-century tea master Sen no Rikyu,

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 115

Wabi-Sabi

115

who did much to define and propagate the ceremony that continues today. Every aspect of the Rikyu way of tea is wabi-sabi. The approach to the tea enclosure is made along a stone garden path. The enclosure is plain and small with exposed wood; it is based on peasant dwellings. The decorations in the “tokonoma,” or niche, which often include a scroll of calligraphy in rough but flowing script and an ikebana, are spare. But there is perhaps most emphasis on the implements. The most famous tea bowl in the world, known as the Kizaemon tea-bowl after one of its owners, is priceless, but it is also plain and obviously flawed, ordinary Korean crockery of the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Brown, with a sandy texture and cracks in the glaze, not perfectly round, it seems a thing beneath notice. The philosopher of craft Soetsu Yanagi, who saw the bowl and handled it in 1931, said it was “made by a poor man; an article without flavor of personality; used carelessly by its owner; bought without pride; something anyone could have bought anywhere and everywhere. That is the nature of this bowl. The clay has been dug from the hill at the back of the house; the glaze was made with the ash from the hearth; the potter’s wheel was irregular. . . . The work had been fast; the turning was rough, done with dirty hands; the throwing slipshod; the glaze had run over the foot.” But, he adds, the Kizaemon tea bowl is plain, unagitated, uncalculated, harmless, straightforward, natural, innocent, humble, modest. “More than anything else,” writes Yanagi, “this pot is healthy. Made for a purpose. Made to do work.”

Nicole Debarber, Kizaemon Tea Bowl.

RT5586_C05.qxd

116

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 116

Six Names of Beauty

It is essential to grasp how radical a break it was with tradition for Rikyu and other tea masters to select and cherish such items. A semi-ceremonial tea had already been traditional in Japan for many years, and the favored implements were Chinese: immaculate porcelains, flawless and immensely costly objects that graced the tables of the wealthiest noblemen. Rikyu no doubt tired of such things after long use and turned instead toward the humble implements of the peasantry. This was in part because of Rikyu’s Zen Buddhist orientation, which sought enlightenment in the ordinary, or identified ordinary life (“getemono,” or the practical) with the highest life. For Rikyu, the tea ceremony amounted simply to “boiling water, serving tea,” and he tried quietly to emphasize the ordinariness of the ceremony. Indeed, this probably was one factor in his eventual death by hara-kiri, as demanded by his noble patron, many of whose most prized possessions were devalued by Rikyu’s aesthetic. But there is no doubt that Rikyu was a connoisseur. One might ask Yanagi why, if the Kizaemon bowl is so ordinary, or even indifferently made, it was when he encountered it kept within five boxes and shown only to experts. Of course, by the time Yanagi saw it, the bowl had grown old, and for that reason accumulated some value. But why and even how should such an object could be exalted beyond all others, beyond a thousand similar bowls, for instance? As an arbitrary emblem of the ordinary, in some sense any ordinary bowl would do. The very imperfections of the Kizaemon bowl are its aesthetic strengths or the source of its beauty: it is more ordinary than an ordinary bowl. And yet there is something graceful about the way the lip of the bowl sweeps, for example, something perfect or right about its form, that is all the more striking for being artless. The Kizaemon tea bowl achieves beauty without self-consciousness, merely in the engagement of practical concerns. Connoisseurs such as Rikyu and Yanagi long most for the quieting of self-consciousness, surely also the goal (or the goallessness)

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

Wabi-Sabi

2:10 PM

Page 117

117

of Zen. But self-consciousness is at its most intense in persons of Yanagi’s stripe: an aesthete who continually submits his experiences to a canon of taste of his own articulation, and who regards himself as a repository of his culture. The self-consciousness of the aesthete is itself a form of pain or even disease: there is no release from the interior monologue that judges all things and thus sets one apart from all things. We might say of such people that they are tortured by taste. Thus they develop a taste for the ordinary, constructing a connoisseurship precisely to quiet the connoisseur in themselves, to let go into the everyday. Compatibly with its Zen orientation, their taste is itself a koan. Truly, we have no particular reason to select the Kizaemon bowl and venerate it. And what is worse, placing it in five boxes and exalting it beyond price destroys the ordinariness of which it is an emblem. As soon as the tea masters began to venerate ordinaryseeming wares, master potters began to use wabi-sabi as a set of guidelines for their own work, which eventuated in raku ware and also in the sheer imitation of “the ordinary” by extraordinary artists. The ordinary became something simulated by intense application of self-consciousness, like artificially weathered blue jeans or distressed furniture. Yanagi loathes the objects made in this way, loathes the mannerism of the everyday. But it’s hard to see how the everyday can resist becoming a mannerism once the connoisseurs get at it. So the tea ceremony itself lapsed into orthodoxy: where Rikyu sought effortless grace, sought to make the ritual inevitable but also spontaneous, later tea masters thought it more important to observe the forms that Rikyu had established. Wabi-sabi is a kind of trap, an ever-intensifying consciousness of the need for a lapse of consciousness, an ever-broadening exaltation of the ordinary in which the ordinary loses its ordinariness. But though wabi-sabi has a contradiction at its heart, it is also a way to transcend the paradox by immersion in it. At its deepest, broadest reach, wabi-sabi is a form of beauty that overcomes the dichotomy of beauty and ugliness, even as it overcomes the dichotomy of ordinary and extraordinary. We might think that

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 118

118

Six Names of Beauty

beauty and ugliness, like good and evil, only make sense in relation to each other. But once one finds the beauty of the Kizaemon bowl and other such objects, once one starts to see mud or the blues as beautiful, one is pursuing an affirmation that can lead to the thought that all things are beautiful, that all things can be exalted. That would be a Zen state or a state of no-mind, in which dualisms are overcome and one finds the beauty beyond beauty or makes peace with ugliness as itself a variety of beauty. **** Few things are more directly beautiful than winter trees: stripped of all ornament, clearly etched against the changing sky, moving in the stiff manner of wood into and then back against the wind. If leaves can be compared to clothing, then the deciduous tree in winter is naked. If clothing can be deceptive, then the tree in winter is true. If leaves represent an extreme profusion of form that is more finally articulated than the eye can register, much less language describe, then the form of the tree in winter is stark, particularly against the steel gray monochrome of the sky as snow comes. But the form of a winter tree, though it may be stark and withered, is liable also to be extraordinarily complex. The bare bark is

Nicole Debarber, Winter Trees.

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

Wabi-Sabi

2:10 PM

Page 119

119

channeled and cracked, and the directions of growth frozen into the form of each branch include saggings, twistings, splinterings, angles at which the branch has reached out or up. The form of the tree is a register of its history. The coloring, too, becomes as subtle as our approach is proximate: all the grays, blacks, and browns of wabi, with perhaps the weathered white of dead lichen or the blasted green of last year’s moss. In the winter, I wake to the sight of three oak trees outside my window, perhaps 150 feet away from the house. They are about a hundred feet high and I would suspect about the same age as I am. I look up at the crowns from the second floor, so that the enduring oaks are framed against the volatile sky, swept by clouds and burnished in sunrise. On a frozen morning with no humidity, the oaks seem to retain every contour on their journey to my eyes. I had watched them and experienced their beauty as serenity every day for months before I realized that they were beautiful. The trees are again beautiful as they release a cloud of amorphous green in early spring, when that green deepens and matures into early summer, and when the browns and yellows spread from the inside to the edges of each leaf in the fall. **** Art, both in Japan and in the West, is traditionally accounted for as a mimesis of the world. That can mean an imitation of the world, but the act of mimesis, more broadly, captures and presents the world. Mimesis represents things, manifests them, brings them to presence. In the West, we see this in the traditional categories of painting: landscape, still life, portraiture, history, genre. These capture and display aspects of the world, and they also show something about how the West articulates a world: into nature, artifact, person, action. Since Plato, the West conceives representation as ontologically distinct from what it represents: an unreal representation of the real world, a reflection or mirror image, perhaps a sheer deception. But the basic principle of representation in Japanese arts is different: we might call it an encapsulating or crystallizing. Consider “suiseki,” for example, the art of landscape stones. You collect

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 120

120

Six Names of Beauty

Nicole Debarber, Suiseki Landscape Stone.

stones in the form of miniature mountains and display them in ways that draw them into a miniature landscape. The stone of a region consists of fragments of the mountains of that region, and the mountains are composed of stone. A weathered stone has inherent wabi-sabi: the look of natural wear, earth tones, infinity in finite space. In suiseki, nature is used as an imitation of nature, earth of earth, reality of reality, truth of truth. Plato’s critique, in which he condemns representational arts as deceptive, is entirely out of place. The suiseki stone exists on exactly the same level of reality as the mountain, and we might say that the suiseki really is a very small mountain, or the mountain a very large suiseki. The relation of the artist to the work is also entirely different than in Western painting and sculpture: fundamentally, the work is found rather than created. **** The same is true of Japanese gardens, and of ikebana, the art of flower arrangement. Rikka, the most ancient of the styles of ikebana, is designed to capture a landscape in a vase. The vase represents the source of life in earth, and is itself made of earth. The surface of the water represents the earth’s surface. Pebbles and foliage systematically correspond to landscape elements, and are designed to create a perception of indefinite depth. Where Western flower arrangements often employ perfect greenhouse blossoms in uniform bunches, ikebana uses foliage appropriate to the season, striving to convey the qualities of the natural foliage in the composition. In winter, one might even display bare branches.

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

Wabi-Sabi

2:10 PM

Page 121

121

Bare branches with a single bud or blossom might express the coming of spring. The three basic stems of the Rikka style are meant to capture the growth principle of plants, in which a shoot initially rises straight up (the “shin”), another grows behind it in the shade and curves toward the light (“soe”), while another emerges horizontally from the shade (“nagashi”). The great flower master Senno in the sixteenth century prescribed a host of basic principles, all designed as a way to capture and convey nature. For example, the stems of a large plant should be left longer than those of a small plant. But in ikebana, nature itself is the material whereby nature is imitated. The practice of composition becomes an immersion in or meditation upon nature, a way of bringing it into the home, concentrating on it, and contemplating it. **** Bonsai uses living things as its medium, working with them to create beauty. The idea is to create a tiny tree that represents a huge tree. A good bonsai yields an impression of power and vastness. A bonsai master shapes a tree with the utmost care, and, in fact, such a tree may be cultivated by generations of masters. And so it endures, though it also changes and grows at each moment of its existence. It is a living representation or capturing of life as well as an expression of the will to work with life and never against it, always moving with the “ki,” or flow of energy of the tree but also with the ideal of the master. **** In a small and amateurish way, I have sampled all of these arts as a practitioner. But I do not try to make things that look “Japanese”: the point is to make something that encapsulates my own world. So my suiseki are American, because I collect American rocks. And of course I use American trees, flowers, ceramics, and so on, though all of these have been affected by an interaction with Japan, so that I find cherry blossoms and terra cotta bonsai pots in Pennsylvania. Ultimately, all of these art forms are designed for contemplation, for a total immersion in the beauty of the world that moves beyond or underneath the opposition of beauty and ugliness. In each case, the artist stills the spirit, contemplates the object, and moves it slowly

RT5586_C05.qxd

122

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 122

Six Names of Beauty

in the direction of the ideal. This is in part a training in seeing the world. Suiseki make one see mountains, bonsai trees, ikebana flowers and foliage, in a different way. They heighten the sense of the beauty of the world to a point of utmost poignancy, until one sees everything as art and art as not-art, but as spontaneous nature. **** The art of Wolfgang Laib often seems displaced in the institutions in which it is installed. But to me there is no more beautiful body of work in contemporary art. Laib’s simplicity is achieved in an arduous process of devotion; he works through immense complexities to arrive close to emptiness, to serenity. Laib’s family lived both in Germany and India as he was growing up, and though Laib started out to be a doctor, he was also pursuing a unique approach to art that made use of his split heritage and proclivity for asceticism. His first works consisted of stones, either pebbles or boulders, which he painstakingly smoothed into ovals in an imitation of the natural processes by which stones are worn in rivers. Laib has always studied world religions, and in the early 1970s he immersed himself in Sufism, a variety of Islam that teaches ecstatic union with God through music, poetry, dance, and even sexuality. The poems of Jalaludin Rumi, the thirteenth-century founder of the Mevlevi order of whirling dervishes, express that ecstasy elaborately and also simply. On the 700th anniversary of Rumi’s death, in 1973, Laib placed a large, smooth, egg-shaped, red marble stone outside his tomb. A sort of cult has grown up around this stone, and women come to touch it in the belief that it will make them fertile. Then Laib developed his milkstones. These square slabs of white marble are worked so that the upper surface is slightly indented. Then Laib pours milk onto the stone to achieve a smooth white surface in which the liquid cannot be distinguished from the stone. These appear to be minimalist sculptures, and have a certain glossy art world elegance. But they are evanescent and must be continually renewed: repoured each day, lest the milk curdle and stink. The identity of the enduring marble with the

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

Wabi-Sabi

2:10 PM

Page 123

123

ephemeral milk is the theme of the object, though the work is also formally beautiful as a simple white square. Laib also uses pollen as a medium, and spends the springs at his house in Germany collecting it from flowers and trees. Though all the pollens are yellow, they range from almost white to almost orange, and thus create different effects. Laib sifts the pollen into squares on the floor, often choosing worn stone surfaces for the installation. But he also displays pollen in mounds, jars, or shallow dishes. Laib’s later works include rooms and enclosures made of beeswax, which, like the pollen installations, are fragrant. And where the pollen tends to disperse in the slightest breeze, the beeswax tends to sag in heat. The work is monkish: it is a discipline both of renunciation and of affirmation. It is reductive in the sense that it always strips to essence as a meditative practice. It is ecstatic in the sense that it expresses the merging of the artist with the material, and the essentiality of the material to the world, so that finally a yellow square with dissolving edges and the faint scent of spring is a synecdoche of all things. In one way, nothing could be more common than pollen: the stuff is released in clouds by spring plants and pervades the atmosphere. In another way it is a rare substance: Laib’s labor to gather a jarful of hazelnut pollen verges on the absurd; it takes weeks of work. Where shibusa moves toward the essential through simplicity, wabisabi emphasizes that the essential is also the typical, that the purity we find inherent in the world is not an abstraction from it. Pollen is a substance, though an ethereal one, and it is an essence of life by which life is reproduced. It is made by and eventuates in the flower, which is a kind of slow explosion or abundance of life. So pollen is as much a process as a substance. To gather and display it, especially in loose piles or flat surfaces, is a participation in and disruption of the process as well as a celebration of it. In Laib, the sabi element is profound: his art has a pervasive atmosphere of solitude. But it is shibui in its simplicity and chastity. And it is wabi because its materials are typical and the use of them initially underwhelming; there is no display of skill for its own sake, no

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 124

124

Six Names of Beauty

fireworks of virtuosity, pretension, or ego. There is only a discipline of making that is conceived as a part of the universal making. This immersion is no doubt passionate, full-fledged. But it also eventuates in stillness, in poise and peace. At the point of complete immersion, making is intuitive, spontaneous, actually easy. The discipline is engaged in for the sake of the moment when the discipline dissipates and one finds ease. Laib’s mounds of pollen, which he calls mountains, are made with great care but seem effortless. Both the care and the effortlessness are essential to the effect on the viewer; they lead to what we might call naturalness, a participation of the artist in the materials and processes that he is employing. This is a variety of beauty: one feels eased, brought to stillness and simplicity, brought to awareness, in the work. The question is no longer about what the artist is saying or

Wolfgang Laib, Laib Working with Pollen.

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

Wabi-Sabi

2:10 PM

Page 125

125

expressing—in fact there is no question any longer—but only a sense of the object as a site where one’s awareness is centered. **** The gravel garden is a peculiarly Japanese art, an art of wabisabi because of the humbleness of gravel and its relation to the earth. It’s also wabi-sabi in the paradox at its heart, because the apparently random effect of a gravel garden requires constant tending and its spontaneity arises through discipline: the gravel is constantly cleaned and raked into patterns. It is the sound of gravel I want to explore here. Lucinda Williams put out an album, something of a masterpiece, called Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which is a phrase evocative of the rural. The title song focused on the sounds of the South in mid-century. But one also hears it as an image or reflection of Lucinda’s voice: its roughness, its apparent unstudiedness, as if the voice was an unintended consequence of truth, as the sound of wheels on gravel is an unintended consequence of travel. A sound like gravel under tires resists description, but not memory: I know you know what it sounds like. It is possible to come into sudden awareness of the sounds around you, especially when they evoke the past and call out a nostalgia: the sound of a typewriter, rain on a tin roof, wind in trees or bamboo, a hand saw, a starling; common sounds or once-common sounds that acquire a patina of symbolism by long presence or long absence or both, sounds that seem rural, old, or over. They have a roughness that scratches the auditory surface. They are mundane sounds, common sounds, unmusical. The sound of gravel underfoot, for example—usually described as a “crunch”—is really an auditory reflection of one’s walking: a grist that lasts as long as the foot moves in contact with the gravel. You make it in a spontaneous collaboration with the gravel, and its character depends equally on the quality of the stone and the style of your walk. The sound of car tires on a gravel road also varies. It shifts according to the size of the gravel and its shape (pea gravel, for instance, sounds completely different than rougher varieties), its material (what actual stone composes it), its depth on the road

RT5586_C05.qxd

126

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 126

Six Names of Beauty

(which in turn reflects how recently it was applied), the weather conditions of the past few hours, what you’re driving or hearing driven, how fast, in what style (hot-rodding rural teen vs. elderly farmer), and so on. That the sound of gravel could be moving, evocative, or beautiful, something one looks forward to or misses, is perhaps a testimony to the strength and perversity of the human aesthetic faculty, but it is testimony as well to our ability to be moved unexpectedly, to find the greatest beauties in the least expected places. **** The English word “patina” derives from the Greek term for dish. It initially referred to the tray, often bronze, used to distribute the host during the Eucharist. Because such trays became venerable objects—not necessarily because of any intrinsic value or even beauty, but because of their association with the body of Christ—they were preserved over long periods of time. And because they were preserved, they developed the signs of age: the particular mottled green surface of old bronze, along with the signs of use and wear. These signs of age on bronze came to be referred to as its “patina,” which in turn came to be valued as something beautiful, to the point at which bronze workers and sculptors found ways of reproducing it on new work. And then by extension, “patina” came to refer to any surface situation that arose through age, use, or weathering, as opposed to a surface applied, as a glaze or paint. The patina of a bronze tray turned the tray from a utensil into a relic, into something that had a spiritual significance. The tray became venerable because of its age and employment, like an elder or an object associated with a saint. Old things are venerated, collected, and displayed in many cultures. That is in part because they stir the historical imagination: we imagine their use by many people, many hands, over a period of decades or centuries or millennia. Perhaps we associate the object with some person or era that has our respect, or perhaps the object is passed down within a family or a village, and comes to represent the history of that particular group to its contemporary members. The sign that the object is old and cherished is its patina, unique to it. A patina is always detailed, as opposed, for example, to

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

Wabi-Sabi

2:10 PM

Page 127

127

a newly-lacquered surface; it can be absorbing because of its random richness, its blossomings of rust and its scratches. The patina of an object emerges through the interaction of its material with its world. It is in part the emerging of the nature of the material: its selfexpression. Bronze has a typical almost powdery green expression that can be expected to emerge under certain conditions because of the nature of bronze. The way an object makes a patina is a Zen discipline, a long process or apprenticeship by which the object settles into itself. We might think of patina as the integrity of an object: its surface comes to reflect its depths, its real nature and history. I have a molded stoneware crock: plain, without maker’s mark or signature. Brown-glazed sometime in the mid-nineteenth-century, it is now almost black, and the glaze has silvered and deepened into something that makes the surface of this humble object mysterious. It seems to have a swirling depth floating under the brownish glaze that is not something that could simply be painted on. If you look closely in the right light, it reveals a thousand diamond points of reflection, like a night sky. It is intended for canning, not hand thrown but molded carelessly, certainly glazed carelessly—the glaze just poured on, spots missing, having different thicknesses in different spots. Stoneware crockery is fired at a high temperature for a long time. In the process, this particular crock emerged with bubbles and malformations. It was never intended to be an aesthetic object, and I can imagine the look on the face of the people who made it if I told them I found it beautiful. But age has deepened the object, has extruded what was within it and taken in what was around it. The surface of the crock has become deep in a plain way. Old painted wood is a particularly lovely thing. Paint is not a patina, a freshly painted object being the opposite of a patinated object. But the way paint wears in the weather introduces a patina, as in the old red barns that adorn much of the American countryside. As the paint flakes and the metal fittings rust, or even as the barn falls apart, it introduces a yearning that is part nostalgia, part pure visual pleasure. As the barn ages it becomes more visually rich. It settles into the countryside and becomes more and more

RT5586_C05.qxd

128

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 128

Six Names of Beauty

a natural object rather than an artifact; it reminds us that we too are natural, that our work uses natural things and returns to them. The patina responds to the world, to the way the object is used and the conditions under which it is stored or displayed. The green powdery patina of bronze streaks in the rain, and wears in certain patterns under certain environmental pressures. It is the effect of oxygen on the metal, though this effect is combined with that of various other substances in various cases; the object comes to be what its surroundings make it; it shows the traces of what touches it. We see this especially in cases where what touches it is human beings: in stone stairs worn from long use, or wooden, metal, and ceramic objects that have been handled innumerable times through generations. In the stone art of suiseki, a certain patina is highly valued, and though the process can be abbreviated, the favored approach is to rub the stone daily with bare hands for a period of thirty to fifty years; the oils of the hand give the stone a glow that appears to saturate it. An object is its history. We might think of physical objects as slowly unfolding events rather than as stable bits of the world. Old glass has a feel and look that is hard to describe: it has flowed and separated into differently-reflective and translucent/transparent portions. To hold an object in your hands and know it’s old is to have a different experience than to hold a similar new object; it unites us to a history of things and of persons of indefinite duration. This is not to say that a patina cannot be simulated, and distressed surfaces have a sort of vogueishness. But the objects that persist across generations actually bring the times of their persistence to us, offer time to us in a physical embodiment. A British wag remarked in 1933 that “what Americans lack is patina.” What he meant was that Americans displayed a certain brashness and crassness that might rub off with time. And in a physical and a metaphorical sense, persons too gain patina in the course of their lives. They become more intensely themselves, their bodies come to express who they are and what they have experienced. There is the flawless beauty of youth, the nubile nineteen-year-old at the peak of attractiveness. But there is also—potentially also

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 129

Wabi-Sabi

129

sexual—a mellowness of age expressed in crow’s feet, a voice with some gravel and bottom, a knowing look in the eye. **** Perhaps the most basic insight of Zen is that enlightenment is found where we already are. The great monk and painter Bankei taught that we are all already Buddhas, so that satori would be achieved simply by allowing ourselves to be. And the Zen arts are ways of immersing oneself in the everyday world at ever-deeper levels, or perhaps consist of the insight that there are no deeper levels. Then the barriers to getting what we want would be things like this: we can’t become or relax into what we already are, because we yearn to be something higher or better; we can’t allow ourselves to lapse into the world because the world causes us pain or provides us with objects of desire. Then Buddhism embodies the desire to cease desiring, and Zen consists in a connoisseurship of what is left after that. Zen literature, notably the death poems of Zen masters and the haiku of, for example, Basho, are profound in their simplicity and transcendent in their immersion. It is hard to think of poetry in the Western tradition that achieves this particular variety of beauty. The sonnets of Shakespeare bristle with passion and metaphor; Milton’s work with erudition and extreme, evident craft; T.S. Eliot’s with elaborate “poetic effect” that embodies a theory of poetics. But at his best, William Carlos Williams is our poet of wabi-sabi and even of enlightenment, of a total immersion in and love for this world, a longing to let oneself go utterly into the actual. Williams was a doctor as well as a poet, and so perhaps had less at stake than T.S. Eliot, for example, in being regarded as a literary giant. And where Eliot was an Anglophile and eventually an expatriate, Williams, whose biography was titled Poet from Jersey, was happy in New Jersey. Indeed, New Jersey is a good way to think about wabi-sabi. Here is Williams’s poem “Pastoral”: When I was younger it was plain to me I must make something of myself.

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 130

130

Six Names of Beauty

Older now I walk back streets admiring the houses of the very poor: roof out of line with sides the yards cluttered with old chicken wire, ashes, furniture gone wrong; the fences and outhouses built of barrel-staves and parts of boxes, all, if I am fortunate, smeared a bluish green that properly weathered pleases me best of all colors. No one will believe this of vast import to the nation. This is a direct expression of wabi, a kind of delectation of poverty. If it were only that, it would be perverse or perhaps even deeply wrong: poverty is not romantic. But “Pastoral” performs the entire cycle of Zen. Let us consider the first three lines. They place the observations of the poem in a personal context. When Williams thought he must make something of himself, he would have been too busy, too distracted, too preoccupied with self-transformation to see what he is seeing. The relaxation into oneself that comes with our ripening allows us to lapse into the world and to experience it, allows us to walk, and to see where we are walking. Williams comes into a state of mindfulness or attention to the mundane that is at once humble and exalted, that finds exaltation in humility. We might say that he recognizes that what he longs for is not to be transformed by wealth and fame or to transcend his mundane humanity, but precisely to

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Wabi-Sabi

Page 131

131

lapse into peace. Often, when young, we think that acquiring this or that, achieving this or that, will fill the hole in our souls. Williams learned to find peace where all along he already was. Let us also consider the last three lines, which would find an echo in Williams’s most famous poem: so much depends upon the red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens. A lot of ink has been spilled trying to figure out “so much depends,” perhaps because the wheelbarrow and the chickens do not seem very profound. But that is, of course, the point of the exercise, that interpreting a wheelbarrow with the whole belligerent machinery of literary interpretation is impossible—or, if possible, sad. Everything depends upon the red wheelbarrow, or everything depends on the moment when interpretation is thwarted by the obvious. “So much depends” and “No one will believe this of vast import to the nation” are, first, gently humorous. They are a way to break the perfectly familiar into consciousness with a grin. They give the poems the flavor of a koan. These are also serious assertions. Our lives, in fact, consist largely of the mundane: most lives are lived in the sort of squalor, urban or rural, that Williams describes. What is typical or obvious is hard to bring into consciousness but it is the world in which we are living all the time. As the Great Poet composes verses about God in his colossal skull, he’s all the while negotiating the rocks or the furniture, else he bangs his shins, cusses, and forgets God. The earth is where we live, and Williams’s poetic flights take him back to the earth, and us with him.

RT5586_C05.qxd

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 132

RT5586_C06.qxd

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 133

6. Hozho Navajo, health, harmony

I lived in the house on Livingston Street in D.C. from the time I was born until I was eighteen, when my parents kicked me out. They had excellent reasons, but ever since then I’ve been longing for home. In that quarter century, I’ve never been able to stay someplace more than three or four years. The word “home” means the most intense human relation to place. It promises return and repose. I seem finally to have found one again, and I’ve been thinking about what makes a place home. Ownership has something to do with it, and raising children. But to me, it has to do above all with planting, with working with and working one’s way into a piece of earth. Home is a ground. My garden has grown bigger each year, and this year’s reflects the work of all the previous ones on the soil, as well as accumulating knowledge of what grows here and how. In the work of the garden, I keep track pretty closely of the weather and the change of seasons. I know the microclimate now: how we can get a frost on top of this hill even when there’s none a hundred yards down, how in spring the trees up here can be a full ten days behind the ones below in their leaf, how the west wind bends everything slightly and dries everything out. The soil up here is obnoxious: essentially stripped down to stone, so that digging is a true pain in the ass. There is as much old flaky granite up here as dirt, and the dirt is nearly as hard as the stone. It is land with a tendency toward summer drought. 133

RT5586_C06.qxd

134

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 134

Six Names of Beauty

But, worked, it yields. This year—which so far has been particularly wet and cool—we’ve eaten strawberries, basil, mint, rosemary, tomatoes, carrots, blueberries, raspberries, pole beans. And each year I’ve planted more flowers, and cut them and brought them into the house: red and white roses, pansies, cornflowers, butterfly bush, daylilies, and many wildflowers. We moved here in June of 1999. In late September, the pear and apple trees that lined the driveway were unusually heavy-laden and we were visited by a vicious windstorm. Branches and whole trees snapped; we could hear them cracking inside the house. The wood of fruit trees is dense, but brittle, and on the exposed dry rise they were a bad choice by the former owners. The next spring I bought a chain saw and took down the dead trees. I dug up some tiny maples from the woods out back and planted them near the stumps. We burned the fruit wood over the next winter. The following spring, I took some birch, hemlock, and beech seedlings from my friends Shelley and Pete’s place in the mountains, and, in a gratuitous attack on native plants, ordered a dawn redwood off the Internet to see how it would do (so far, so good). I transplanted a row of cedars to try to make a windscreen for the house, so the windows don’t rattle and the heat stays in, but whether I’ll be around in fifteen years or so when it becomes effective is anyone’s guess. I know each of the older trees as well, for the most part scrubby hardwoods twenty to thirty years old, and I pay attention to the ways they develop and take damage from season to season. Planting trees is a kind of perverse speculation; perhaps in fifty years, when I’m dead as a doornail, there will be big trees here that I worked with. I can imagine living here for a long time and day by day watching the trees I planted grow large. Or I can imagine moving away and then coming back and seeing those trees in thirty years with pride and sadness. Or I can imagine coming back and seeing those trees removed, and feeling angry. Or I can imagine never coming back at all, but thinking about those trees several times every year. When I put them down, I rooted myself to this place, and in the process I learned its stone, its rain, its wind. The feeling I get now in

RT5586_C06.qxd

5/28/04

Hozho

2:10 PM

Page 135

135

a drought or in an ice storm is physical discomfort, even if I’m inside warming myself by the fire or sucking up conditioned air. A few weeks ago I drove by the house I grew up in and felt its draw, not as an abstraction but as a myriad of aspects, objects, persons—a saturated memory of what made me. It has changed a lot but it is still my place; I had the delusory sense that I knew every crack in the sidewalk around there. One of the most complimentary things you could say about people is that despite our slight mobility we’re a bit like trees. **** Of the various names of beauty we have touched, hozho is the most comprehensive, which we might explain by saying that the Navajo way of life is aesthetic at its base. But we also should simply say that beauty is not, for the Navajo, an aesthetic concept: it’s not primarily about the way things appear—though it includes appearance as an aspect of what things are. It refers equally to a state of human beings, a state of the objects around them, and a state of the universe as a whole. It is usually translated into English as “beauty,” though also as “health” or “balance,” “harmony,” “goodness.” It means all these things and more. It refers above all to the world when it is flourishing; it refers to the community, flourishing in the world; it refers to things we make, which flourish and play a role in the flourishing of other things; and it refers to ourselves, flourishing as makers, as people inhabiting a community that inhabits a world. It is a word for the oneness of all things when they are joined together in a wholesome state. As Gary Witherspoon says in his lovely book Language and Art in the Navajo Universe, “Hozho expresses the Navajo concept of beauty or beautiful conditions. But beauty is not separated from goodness, from health, from happiness, or from harmony. It is not an abstractable quality of things or a fragment of experiences; it is the normal pattern of nature and the most desirable form of experience.” And, of course, our experience is itself part of the normal pattern of nature. In traditional Navajo culture, most people were artists as we would understand the term: designing and weaving blankets;

RT5586_C06.qxd

136

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 136

Six Names of Beauty

composing and preserving and performing songs; making ritual sand paintings. Indeed, according to Witherspoon, a person’s wealth was measured by the songs she created, which are bound to her identity in the way some cultures use names. Songs can actually be exchanged and form a kind of currency. Gladys Reichard reports that some songs are public, and must be shared if known, because they will have ritual efficacy and can benefit the community. Others are private to their maker and secret. The arts are integrated into every aspect of culture, and in particular are central to healing and ceremonial practices (“sings”), as well as practical activities organized around food, clothing, and shelter. In my view, this integration of values and activities is simply an expression of the universal fact that human beings are connected to environments and to each other: it makes explicit an integrated system no one can evade. That is, hozho is a Navajo concept, but a cross-cultural truth. The arts of “the West” are as much a reflection of our culture and as much a utilization of environmental materials as anybody’s, and they change the world as much or more as well. Hozho has many things to teach, but it teaches first that beauty is one thing: everything. We, too, are literally surrounded by and interpenetrated by art. Right now I’m listening to Heather Myles on the CD player, looking around a room surrounded by photographs and masks, looking out into the sun through the architecture: the edges of cultivated flowering shrub, the whole suffused with innumerable degrees of light—trellis shadow, rail, wickers, window—registering in my body. This is most often true of all human abode: art is as early as the tool, and is in the tool as well. **** One remarkable feature of Navajo arts is the confluence of cultures they embody. There is no such thing, really, as cultural purity anywhere, and every culture is developing in contact with others. But this is even more true of the Diné (“the people,” as they refer to themselves), than most. They were originally nomads, though now their reservation encompasses some two million acres in northeastern

RT5586_C06.qxd

5/28/04

Hozho

2:10 PM

Page 137

137

Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southern Utah. Pueblo Indians escaping the aftermath of a revolt against the Spanish in the 1680s fled into the maze-like valleys along the upper San Juan River to the Dinetah, or traditional Navajo homeland, where they helped introduce more settled agricultural communities, as well as arts— including weaving—for which the Navajo would become widely celebrated. This in turn depended on sheep-raising to produce wool (cotton was in short supply). Blacksmithing was introduced, probably by Mexicans, in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the Navajo began to engage in silver work, later incorporating turquoise and other stones. Basket making and pottery, in both of which the Navajo excel, are essentially indigenous to the Diné, but though they themselves designed their large, flat ceremonial baskets, they were, traditionally, mostly produced by Utes and Paiutes because of ritual taboos. And now, even experts cannot always distinguish Navajo from Paiute work. The design and use of ceramics—originally extremely simple and rough, often with pointed bottoms intended to be set into the ground—changed dramatically in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and included ceramic imitations, for example, of European and American metal coffee pots as well as Hopi vessels and decorative motifs. Later, beautifully incised polychromatic pots with pinon gum glazes were produced as trade goods, and the commercialization of all Navajo arts has affected their designs, by no means always for the worse. Indeed, sale is merely an example of the practicality of all Navajo arts. The master jeweler Gibson Nez says that “it beats the hell out of driving a truck,” and even master weavers have been known to stop suddenly when they have an opportunity to do something more lucrative. Though sand paintings—perhaps the most widely-celebrated Navajo art objects—were always destroyed in the course of the sing in which they were employed, means have been developed to preserve and hence sell the designs, including the use of glue boards, conventional paintings employing sand-painting designs, and weavings incorporating such motifs—some of them of astounding complexity and craft.

RT5586_C06.qxd

138

5/28/04

2:10 PM

Page 138

Six Names of Beauty

The graphic traditions of Navajo weaving are particularly striking, and include abstract diamond and overlapping linear forms that nevertheless have some representational content, as well as more recent pictorial rugs, often including tree of life and storm motifs. There was even a style, associated with the trader J.B. Moore, who operated out of the Crystal trading post, influenced by Persian rugs, while other weavers cite art deco influences and many others. Vegetal and native dyes were developed fully only in the twentieth century, and were associated with the Wide Ruins trading post. Thread counts of the weft often exceed eighty per inch, and a single blanket can spend months on the loom and require hundreds of hours of labor. Traditionally used in all the ways blankets are used except to decorate a wall, the blankets’ designs are comprehensible at a distance and show great sophistication of form, delight in and play with symmetry and color. The loom itself is an image of creation, employed in many myth-cycles to denote the divine weaving of a world. Then the blanket becomes not only an individual piece of clothing but a way of understanding both the order and the unraveling of the order of the world, as well as a connection between the human process of making and the universal process by which the world is generated and then held into some degree of equilibrium even in its dynamism even as it disintegrates. Navajo weaving possesses these qualities to a remarkable degree: it is profound as well as lovely as well as useful. Designs are almost never written down but are held in the mind, like a Navajo song. **** I wonder whether it is a sensible assertion that the universe is beautiful; and, if it is sensible, I wonder whether it is true. First off, of course, we cannot quite say that every single thing in the universe is beautiful, without ‘beauty’ losing whatever meaning it had. But a beautiful thing can have unbeautiful parts, and it may be that the cosmos as a system or even as a mere concatenation is beautiful, though many parts of it are not. I suppose the question on my account would be whether the universe as a whole can be an object of longing. If it were, of course, it would include that

RT5586_C06.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 139

Hozho

139

Jerry Jacka, Navajo Blanket.

which longs. One form this might take, I guess, is literally wanting everything, or at least a kind of amorphous or unfulfillable desire that keeps stretching out toward things and inward toward the self. The latter is certainly a possible though not a ubiquitous state. Or one might want identity, oneness, the loss of the fact or illusion of oneself as a distinct entity into all that is. In that sense the universe as a whole can be an object of longing, and perhaps we might say that all other longings are reflections or symptoms of this: the longing to see, to possess, to believe, to die, or to keep living. Reichard points out that some Navajo terms are “bipolar”: “a word may have a meaning obvious in a particular context, and in another setting the opposite.” And though this is true to some extent in Western languages as well (even sarcasm displays this structure of meaning), it suggests a fundamentally different approach to conceptual oppositions. So beauty and ugliness could be conceived as opposites that lend one another meaning, as in Western traditions; they are perhaps aspects of a single experience, or even a center in which opposites are overcome as opposites or emerge into harmony. This is true, for example, of aesthetics within the Confucian tradition of China, which likewise uses what would

RT5586_C06.qxd

140

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 140

Six Names of Beauty

appear to Westerners to be moral, aesthetic, and health-related notions interchangeably. So while the universe may not sensibly be described as beautiful, perhaps it is nevertheless hozho. On the other hand, hozho is something that can be lost by a person, or by a community, or by the world. It is the normal or balanced or desirable state of the world, but it is not every state of the world, and, again as in Confucianism, all these microcosms and macrocosms reflect and affect one another, so that the correct ritual action can help construct a balanced cosmos, while the ceremony itself reflects the condition of the universe at a point of equilibrium. But perhaps the moment of real equilibrium is precisely the moment in which oppositions are overcome, or suspended, or transcended. In Navajo myth, the trickster/demon Coyote is responsible for the configuration of the stars, which he scattered randomly, in keeping with the chaos to which he was continuously trying to subject the universe. But I wonder whether anyone actually believes that the stars would be more beautiful if they were arranged in a grid. The chaos of the stars, we might say, is their order and their beauty. **** It ought to be obvious by now that I have no time for distinctions between beauty and use, or art and craft. Nowhere is such a distinction less in order than in the Navajo arts, in which a sand painting—created, used, and destroyed in the course of a sing—is conceived to be just as practical and just as beautiful as a perfectlythrown pot or a weaving. And such “craft” objects are made as beautiful as well as useful: or rather, the distinction cannot even be formulated. The only thing a distinction between beauty and use will do is impoverish the experience of beauty and isolate it, whereas if the Navajo are right, or, rather, since they are right, the experience of beauty is available to us at all times, not least in our engagement in processes of making. **** The relation of beauty to health is vexed. There are evolutionary-biological accounts of beauty that make it primarily an aspect of mate selection, and relate it directly to health: the most attractive

RT5586_C06.qxd

5/28/04

Hozho

2:11 PM

Page 141

141

mate is the one who bids fair to produce the healthiest offspring. I am, I must say, not a big fan of evolutionary biology as a strategy for the overall explanation of human behavior, though it’s obvious that evolutionary factors affect human behavior and belief in numerous ways. But just to take one example: bright colorations and exaggerated shapes in birds and butterflies may in some cases increase their conspicuousness to predators. But mate selection depends on these factors. Now one can explain the configuration of the creature by saying that it is selected in mating. But the reasons that it is, at least apparently, run directly counter to an evolutionary biological standpoint. The hip-hop artist Sir Mix-a-Lot is famous for liking big butts, and it’s possible that big butts and the associated “child-bearing hips” bespeak promising reproductive capacities. But then it would be hard to explain the pin-thin, towering Valkyries of model culture. No doubt if one assumed a priori that there must be some sort of evolutionary explanation, one could generate one. But I don’t assume that. Indeed, the relation of beauty to mental illness, suicide, abuse—though culturally circumscribed—ought to give us some pause. And if we seriously tried to derive all our appreciations from biology—from flowers to the night sky to the voice of Tammy Wynette—in terms of biology, we’d be in for a very long implausible haul. One observation we should certainly make is that evolution has consequences in excess or opposition to its own uses, so that various adaptations have what one might term “unintended consequences,” some of which might be counterproductive to adaptation overall. This is certainly true, for example, of human consciousness, which probably ought to be understood in terms of adaptation and which provides many adaptational advantages to the conscious organism. But consciousness is perhaps typically subject to various derangements, and it can disable the conscious organism in an emergency as well as enable it. To the extent that beauty depends on consciousness, it partakes in these derangements. In other words, we might say that even in faculties or abilities that can be given evolutionary explanations, we should not

RT5586_C06.qxd

142

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 142

Six Names of Beauty

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Detail from A Man of War.

assume that in every application, or even in very common applications, they yield adaptive behaviors. **** One of the funniest and best paintings in the Western tradition is Bruegel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” from around 1555. The story is, of course, one of the archetypes of our tradition, and appeared in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, though it was already probably traditional by then. Bruegel’s immediate source, however, may have been Ship of Fools, a book of moral instruction and edification that had very wide distribution in the Europe of the late Middle Ages. Icarus, son of the great inventor Daedalus, swiped a pair of wings fabricated out of wax and feathers by his father and, when Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wings melted and he plunged back to earth. It is a cautionary parable about pride or ambition. At the time Bruegel painted this picture, the tradition of pure landscape in Europe was just beginning. But the painting, which is almost a parody of Renaissance classicism, comes close. Certainly incredible devotion is lavished on the landscape details: distant peaks, cities, fortifications, a lovely treatment of ocean and cloud and sunset and wheeling birds. In the foreground a farmer, a shepherd, and a fisherman—all essentially anonymous though relatively huge (especially the farmer) in the composition, ply their trades on land perched over water. And in the water, a lovingly

RT5586_C06.qxd

5/28/04

Hozho

2:11 PM

Page 143

143

detailed man-of-war appears... and Icarus’s flailing legs (the rest of him is under the waves). The parable is—though displaced wittily into a tiny detail—if anything even more clear than in Ovid, as the entire world proceeds with its work or its existence, oblivious to the man who just fell out of the sky. For all his daring, Icarus is simply a tiny feature of the landscape, embedded in it like everyone else. What Icarus is is described by his relation to the environment: just another little-bitty anthropoid, now dead. And though Icarus has fallen, there is still land to be plowed; there are sheep to be tended; there is dinner to be fished up. Bruegel, who had recently returned from Italy when he made the picture, makes little attempt to simulate the ancient world, though the landscape could possibly be something of an imagination of the Greek peninsula. But the people he paints, and their activities, are Flemish types, employing contemporary technology. The farmer in the foreground is reduced to an abstraction of planes of color—his face is not visible—and there is no narrative, rather the swallowing of the Icarus story into a storyless world: the world at a specific moment. And the attempt, really, is to swallow Icarus into infinity: the landscape makes itself felt as infinite, disintegrating into the distance in atmospheric perspective into the not-quite-visible. Icarus distorts or defies the order of nature by flying, but Nature reclaims her balance. Or rather, the idea is that the balance of nature—and the human place within it—was really never very disturbed by the momentary aberration. **** One of the central concepts of Confucianism is li (ritual), and Confucius is represented in the Analects both as emphasizing the rites as an ethical and political basis, and as highly concerned with ritual and its associated arts of music and dress in his person, so that famously he refused even to be seated unless his mat was oriented in the ritually prescribed direction. Confucius’s philosophy has been well characterized as fundamentally aesthetic. His ideal gentleman is compared to “a piece of jade carved and polished,” and Confucius himself is characterized as a master of the lute. His follower Hsün Tzu

RT5586_C06.qxd

144

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 144

Six Names of Beauty

asserted that music was the key to social organization, both developing the idea of harmony as a political metaphor and specifying which modes and melodies led to social cohesion, and which to social disintegration. (This is not a particularly alien concept, as we see in the various patriotic and normative uses of music, as well as in the condemnation of, for example, gangsta rap.) There is in Confucianism, then, a unity of art and politics, and the best political order and the best order of the arts are held to be identical. Chu Hsi (1130–1200) developed what quickly became the orthodox synthesis of the elements of Confucianism, and this synthesis looked to unity on an even grander scale. The universe for Chu Hsi was held to be ordered by an abstract entity known as the “supreme ultimate” (t’ai chi), which lent to each object in the world its principle (li). Then goodness came from the observance in each thing of its principle: disaster resulted from the principle’s distortion. This was true no less of persons than of any other objects, and in a version of one of the most ancient philosophical traditions of China, Chu Hsi held the order of the cosmos to correspond to the social order, so that a proper social ordering can help preserve the order of nature, while social disorder can be reflected both in natural disasters and in personal health problems. The picture is of an embedded order of microcosms. One important result of this would be that the close observation of anything is the close observation of everything, that one could learn the truth about the world by knowing any part of the world. Each kind of thing has its own li that makes it the sort of thing it is (indeed, each thing also has its own li, that makes it the individual it is). A single stalk of bamboo contains within it, and displays outwardly, the li of bamboo, the principle that distinguishes bamboo from all other things. And each stalk of bamboo also contains within it the li of the cosmos, the principle by which everything is ordered. We might put this in somewhat more familiar vocabulary by saying that bamboo grows according to the nature of bamboo, and has within it the genealogical heritage that distinguishes bamboo from all other plants. But each piece of bamboo also grows according to

RT5586_C06.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 145

Hozho

145

Nicole Debarber, Bamboo.

the conditions of its environment, according to the conditions of the earth, and according to the physical laws that govern the universe. It depends on the soil and weather and the climate, but also on gravity, energy, and so on. In principle, a complete understanding of a single stalk of bamboo entails an understanding of everything. Perhaps the greatest critic of Chu Hsi in the Confucian tradition is Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529). Legend has it that when he was a boy, Wang took Chu Hsi’s strictures on close observation of the microcosm with extraordinary seriousness, and actually looked at a bamboo stalk for seven days without a break. He became ill, and felt that he knew no more about bamboo when he was finished than when he began. This led to Wang’s epochal identification of

RT5586_C06.qxd

146

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 146

Six Names of Beauty

knowledge and action. It isn’t enough, according to Wang, to look at the bamboo: one must interact with it in every modality that a person can. In other words: plant bamboo, dig up bamboo, disassemble bamboo, make flutes from bamboo and play them, hike through bamboo, etc. Then one will know it: its li emerges for us in an interaction with our own li; its truth is available to us through our own truth. One direction to take this would be toward what we would think of as experimental science; another is toward an identification of self with the world that would be more associated with Taoism and Ch’an Buddhism than with Confucianism. (Indeed, Wang was accused by Confucian contemporaries of being a Taoist in disguise, and had studied Taoism and Buddhism in his youth.) “The reason that the great man is able to be one with Heaven, Earth, and all things,” writes Wang, “is not that he is thus for some purpose, but because the love of his mind . . . makes possible this union.” The primary epistemological principle in Wang’s philosophy is love, fueled by empathy, so that by knowing what one has in common with persons, animals, plants, and even inanimate objects, one comes to know and love them in the same act. The way we come to know the world is by loving devotion to the world that issues in action, and this loving devotion connects all things to ourselves, or rather displays and makes conscious the connections that already exist. This idea that love can connect us to everything, or show us the connections we already have to everything, opens up the possibility of a world of beauty, a world in which we can long literally for each thing because we are connected to each thing, share the principle of each thing, form a world with each thing, a world characterized above all by its connections in love. This takes Chu Hsi’s idea of an ordered cosmos of which we partake and makes it particular and practical and affective in every situation, so that li is something we experience in relation to each thing and hence to the world as a whole through emotional affinities, through desires and the actions that follow upon them. Wang, we might say, replaces us in the world and collapses cognitive and emotional connections to it into a single experience of activity, identity, and love.

RT5586_C06.qxd

5/28/04

Hozho

2:11 PM

Page 147

147

**** Perhaps the greatest—and weirdest—application of such principles to the arts occurs in a famous treatise on painting by the landscape painter Shih T’ao (ca. 1630– ca. 1717). Shih T’ao appears to be confused between the cosmos as a whole and his own art, so that the treatise amounts to an identification of the work of art with the world and of the artist with the creative principle of the world. In Earle Coleman’s translation (slightly adapted), Shih T’ao says that “the oneness of brushstrokes is the origin of all things, the root of all form.” To create such a stroke, the painter holds the hand fairly rigid, representing the yang (male) force, while the wrist, which provides both the definition and the improvisation, is held loosely in order to achieve responsiveness in the yin. Thus the painter’s activity mirrors the activity that generates a world by a reconciliation of opposites, even as the painter’s work reflects that world. “The art of painting,” he says, “is a manifestation of truth. With regard to the delicate arrangement of mountains, streams, and human figures, or the natural characteristics of birds, animals, grass, and trees, or the proportions of ponds, pavilions, towers, and terraces, if one’s mind cannot deeply penetrate into their reality and subtly express their appearance, one has not yet understood the fundamental meaning of the oneness of strokes.” The painting is to hold dear the distinctness of each thing, its particular nature, while also displaying, through the one-stroke method, the unity of all things. The term being translated as “reality” is “li.” The movements of the painter, he says, “are like water flowing naturally downward and flames burning upward. . . . All of these actions possess a living spirit, and their methods are always integrated. All things become real.” The painter is engaged not, as in the Greek view, in a mimesis of the world, but in a creation of the world. And yet he creates the world that already exists by placing his participation within it, by responding to it as already part of it, by bringing himself into the world and the world into his wrist. The great Chinese landscape paintings are, of course, based around suggestion, a capturing of the overall feel of the land that shows the unity

RT5586_C06.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 148

148

Six Names of Beauty

of the world. But the technique is engaged in showing that unity is present in the actual movements of the painter as he applies the ink. **** The idea of the connection of everything in, as it were, a telescoping universe, is familiar within the Western tradition as well. Leibniz, in paragraph 67 of the Monadology, says this: “Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants and like a pond full of fishes. But each branch of every plant, each member of every animal, each drop of its liquid parts is also some such garden or pond.” And Emerson’s great essay “Circles” gives perhaps an even more profound version: The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle whose center was everywhere and its circumference nowhere. We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms. One moral we have already deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action. Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on midnoon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.

I say that perhaps Emerson’s version is more profound because it connects human perception to the rest: it starts with the eye. But Emerson’s version is also not “idealist” in the philosophical sense: he’s perfectly clear about the external reality of the circles, only he understands that we ourselves are the center of our own experience of these things. It connects human values as well to the circular structure of cosmos in experience, an insight, of course, of the great Eastern religions marked in colloquial English in the sentence “What goes around comes around.” But then there is aspiration as well as karma, so that each experience, each piece of knowledge, each self, is something that can be exceeded without

RT5586_C06.qxd

5/28/04

Hozho

2:11 PM

Page 149

149

end, or something that aspires to exceed itself and continue. Leibniz’s passage shows a manner in which all things are connected, and points out that the structure of the whole is mirrored in the parts: this certainly has to do with the great advances of both telescopy and microscopy in Leibniz’s day that were making the structure of the universe available in many different levels simultaneously. But Emerson’s passage makes evident not only the connections of all things to one another, but their connections to human knowledge, values, art, and so on: the connection of all to what Emerson denotes as “truth.” Or rather, truth refers to that very connection. It is a beautiful picture of the world and of ourselves within the world: rich but coherent; an aspiration. **** A reasonable criticism of such worldviews is that they are too neat. There is not enough arbitrariness, disturbance, destruction, or asymmetry in them to be the world we know. There is not enough difference, not enough uniqueness of every person and thing. There is not, we might say, enough Coyote. The analogies of microcosm and macrocosm are striking, but so are the disanalogies; even the laws by which the world is governed do not themselves admit of adequate explanation, and the idea that there could be a universe governed by different laws is a sensible idea, so that the question of why this universe is as it is, or even, in the traditional formulation, why there is something rather than nothing, is a sensible question. Or, if it is not exactly sensible, it is also not exactly answerable. A drop of water is much like a pond that is much like a lake that is much like an ocean that is much like a universe. But then again, they are very unlike, too. A universe of absolutely neat embedded analogous bits is not as absorbing as a universe that contains both similarities as we move up and down the scale or from place to place and unique zones, strange occurrences, truths that cannot be quite assimilated. Only such a universe yields the holes, lacks, and absences that make longing possible: the perfect telescoping order of microcosms is too neat for beauty. Understanding on any level cannot be

RT5586_C06.qxd

150

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 150

Six Names of Beauty

perfect, and that is what draws us forward and keeps us alive. It is the fact that we cannot grasp that keeps us groping, that we cannot have that keeps us lusting, that we cannot be that keeps us becoming. **** In the Yoruba language of West Africa, “iwa” refers to the nature of each thing: its essence, principle, Confucian li: its creative force or the creative force that moves through it. This is, in turn, understood as the reception in each thing of “ase,” or the life force emitted by the god Oludumaare. A key phrase in Yoruba aesthetics and cosmology is “iwa l’ewa,” which might be translated as “the nature of each thing is its beauty.” From this follows, among other things, an entire practice of the arts, according to which the task of the work is to locate, understand, and express the essential nature of what it concerns or depicts: insofar as it does this, the work will be beautiful. It is very important to see, however, that there is room for the interruption of beauty in beauty itself, because even terrifying, evil, and conventionally ugly things have ase and hence ewa, so that they can be taken up into human aesthetic experience and also be beautiful. **** Beauty is the string of connection between a finite creature and a time-bound world. Beauty is an artifact of our jointure with the world, as well as our inextricability from it, our being trapped, our inability to achieve a transcendence or an eternal satisfaction. It may be a dark thought, but perhaps we bring cut flowers to a funeral or yearn after the momentary perfection of the young Diana Rigg as a celebration of death, the fact of our mortality and our continuous irremediable experience of loss—our boundedness and the permeability of our boundaries—that opens us into the beauty of the world. Though death itself is often ugly, we must be grateful to it as the source of the possibility of beauty. The human experience of the world as beautiful would not be possible without the condition of mortality, ours and its. Or we might say in the most general terms that beauty is made possible by temporality, as loss is made inevitable by it. Loss, we might say,

RT5586_C06.qxd

5/28/04

Hozho

2:11 PM

Page 151

151

is an experience of the asymmetry of time, its Coyote suddenness and torpor, its imbalances and gaps, both the world’s evil and the source of its goodness, its need. The experience of beauty is both fundamentally alien and exactly ours: a flight outward and a returning, a migratory rhythm that is itself home. We can get into a relation of longing with the whole world because we are aware that in some sense we will “lose” the whole world, and at the same moment return to an identification with it. To lose and merge into the world simultaneously is both our desire and fear, both omnipotence and death, truth and emptiness. Our ontology is a matter of convention, but whatever objects we recognize or pick out from the stream of experience—as opposed to the pure fictions of eternity and immutability or even perfect symmetry—are also caught up in the temporal and hence are mortal. Hence we face two sorts of loss: the loss of “it” as it deemerges back into the stream of existence and the loss of ourselves as we do the same. This has the potential to bring us to a point at which each moment and its things and our experience becomes unutterably precious. Heraclitus argued that the world was a fire, and we might say that the consumption and hence the loss of everything and of ourselves—entailed by our alteration and by our dissolution—is a fundamental condition. Hence we might say that beauty itself cannot be separated from existence, that beauty is entailed by existence itself within time and the consciousness of it, with no other necessary conditions whatever. No doubt specific longings have specific origins, as in our hormonal setup, the evolutionary process, and the sexual desire that is the form of all longings for creatures such as ourselves. And no doubt these longings can only be described in terms of massed specificities: you actually have to do the science and the phenomenology to get to their heart. But the condition of longing itself is given within the very form of temporal existence, so that the possibility of beauty is everywhere all the time, and beauty can encompass even ugliness, even terror, even evil. Beauty is the consciousness of temporality. That consciousness, in turn, is an

RT5586_C06.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 152

152

Six Names of Beauty

awareness of longing and a drive forward into longing or caused by longing. Beauty is finitude. Coda Beauty has a thousand names. The point, obviously, is not to nail it down or make it ours (for example, by writing about its names), but to expand into it. That is an exercise in awareness, a way to keep finding what we’ve lost. But then, too, there comes the loss of awareness at the moment of its real expansion. The things I find beautiful with especial ease or sincerity are, of course, helped in our making of them by words; they are both culturally produced and, in combination, idiosyncratic to me. Maybe you can’t share all of them, or I yours, but we feel the tug of lingering desire anyway. The names of beauty are cultural and more-than-cultural, are inventions and also inherent in the nature of things. There is a world out here, real as we find it and real as we make it. It is external to ourselves and incorporated within us; it envelops and exceeds us. We long into it, and so longing moves within us and against the surfaces of ourselves and away, into everything.

RT5586_Notes.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 153

Notes

Chapter 1 Pp. 3–4, Etymological information is from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). P. 4, “Why do we bring flowers to a funeral?” Arthur Danto, “Beauty and Morality,” Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1994). See also the extremely sharp The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2003). P. 7, “a cathedral is not as such more beautiful than an airplane. . .,” Ananda Coomaraswamy, “The Part of Art in Indian Life,” Traditional Art and Symbolism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 75. P. 8, Cosmetics: see, for example, Nathalie Chahine et al., Beauty: the Twentieth Century (New York: Universe, 2000). “arsenic sulfide. . .,” p. 43. P. 11, Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). P. 12, Food: see Jean Anselme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, trans. M.F.K. Fisher (New York: Counterpoint, 2000 (1949). P. 18, “The craters of Etna,” Longinus on the Sublime, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), chapter 35. “First, you have a vague idea of its size. . .”, John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. 5 (New York: Classic Books, 1919). P. 20 ff., Karen Lucic, Charles Sheeler and the Cult of the Machine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

153

RT5586_Notes.qxd

5/28/04

154

2:11 PM

Page 154

Notes to pages 28–59

Chapter 2 P. 28, Etymological information from A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English (London: Macmillan, 1987), and Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary (Nashville: Nelson Reference, 1996). P. 28 ff., Quotations from the Hebrew Bible are from the King James version. P. 29, Indigo Bunting entry, John Bull and John Farrand, Jr., The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Eastern Region (New York: Knopf, 1977). P. 30, Information on indigo dyes from the following websites: http://www.chriscooksey. demon.co.uk/indigo/ http://www.chennaionline.com/artscene/craftpalace/history/indigo.asp P. 36, Donald Culross Peattie, Flowering Earth (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 4. P. 36 ff., Eyewitness Garden Handbooks: Roses (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1996). P. 40 Graham Stuart Thomas, The Graham Stuart Thomas Rose Book (Hong Kong: Sagapress/Timber Press, 1994). Pp. 40, 42, Mandy Aftel, Essence and Alchemy (New York: North Point Press, 2001). P. 41, Paul Jellinek, The Practice of Modern Perfumery (London: Leonard Hill Ltd., 1959). Pp. 46–50, Including quotes: George Plimpton, Fireworks: A History and Celebration (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984). P. 49, Luigi Giannuzzi and Gavin Aldred, Cock: Indian Firework Art (London: Westzone, 2000). Pp. 52–53, Information (?) about the Hope Diamond gathered from various websites, including: http://history1900s.about.com/library/weekly/aa071300a.htm http://hopediamondcurse.com/ P. 53, Heraclitus: John Mansley Robinson, An Introduction to Early Greek Philosophy (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1968). P. 54, Plotinus, The Six Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna and B.S. Page (London: Britannica Great Books, 1952), p. 22.

Chapter 3 P. 59, On the purposes of life, see Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), still perhaps the best comprehensive treatment of Indian philosophy, particularly ancient.

RT5586_Notes.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 155

Notes to pages 60–104

155

Pp. 60–61, See Barbara Burn, The Kama Sutra Illuminated: Erotic Art of India (New York: Harry Abrams, 2002). Pp. 62–67, On Bob Marley, Rastafarianism, and reggae, see Timothy White, Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley (New York: Owl, 1998); Leonard Barrett, The Rastafarians (Boston: Beacon, 1977); Barry Chevannes, Rastafari: Roots and Ideology (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994). Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, Reggae, the Rough Guide (London: Rough Guides, 1997) is an amazingly comprehensive and reliable treatment of the subject. Pp. 68–69, On Paracelcus, alchemy, and magic, see Arthur Waite, Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Paracelcus (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2002). Pp. 71–75, On Grünewald: Joris-Karl Huysmans, The Damned: La-Bas, trans. Terry Hale (New York: Penguin, 2002). Pp. 75–76, Chris Burden, Chris Burden: A Twenty-Year Survey (Los Angeles: Orange County Museum of Art, 1988). Pp. 77–78, Kate Ince, Orlan: Millennial Female (Oxford: Berg, 2000). Pp. 78–79, Saint Teresa of Avila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila, by Herself, ed. J.M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1988). P. 79, Maurizio Fagiolo, Bernini (Rome: Scala, 1981). Pp. 80–83, June Sprigg, David Larkin, Michael Freeman, Shaker: Life, Work and Art (New York: Abradale Press, 2001).

Chapter 4 Pp. 88–89, Plato, Symposium, trans. Percy B. Shelley (Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, n.d). Pp. 90–92, Gottlob Frege (ed. Terrell Ward Bynum), Conceptual Notation and Related Articles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Pp. 92–95, Peter Noever, James Turrell: The Other Horizon (Vienna: MAK, 2001). Pp. 95–101, Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science (Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media, 2002). Pp. 96–97, Aristotle on the Pythagoreans, Metaphysics 985b-986a, trans. W.D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 1559. P. 102, Derek Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999). P. 104, Heinrich Wöllflin, Principles of Art History, trans. M.D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950).

RT5586_Notes.qxd

5/28/04

156

2:11 PM

Page 156

Notes to pages 105–135

P. 105, On the radical Reformation: William Roscoe Estep, The Anabaptist Story (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996). P. 105, On the Mexican ultra-Gothic, Ichiro Ono, Divine Excess: Mexican Ultra-Baroque (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1995), an excellent little picture book. Pp. 105–108, Ricky Jay, Jay’s Journal of Anomalies (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2001)

Chapter 5 Pp. 112–114, Etymological information is from, among other sources, Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets, and Philosophers (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1994); Makato Ueda, Literary and Art Theories in Japan (Ann Arbor, MI, Center for Japanese Studies, 1967); Kokuza Okakura, The Book of Tea (many editions, for example, Boston: Charles Tuttle, 2000). Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1990). Pp. 115–116, Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1990), p. 191. Pp. 119–120, On suiseki, see Willi Benz, The Art of Suiseki: Classic Japanese Stone Gardening (New York: Sterling, 1996). Pp. 120–122, On “ikebana,” see H.E. Davey and Ann Kameoka, The Japanese Way of the Flower (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2000). Gustie Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Flower Arrangement (London: Souvenir, 1987 (1958). Pp. 122–124, On Laib, see Klaus Ottman, Wolfgang Laib: a Retrospective (Stüttgart: American Federation of Arts and Hatje Cantz). Pp. 124–126, Leonard Koren, Gardens of Gravel and Sand (Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2000). Lucinda Williams (CD), Car Wheels on a Gravel Road (Polygram, 1998). Pp. 129–131, William Carlos Williams (ed. Charles Tomlinson), Selected Poems (New York: New Directions, 1985); Reed Whittemore, William Carlos Williams, Poet from Jersey (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin).

Chapter 6 P. 135, Etymological information is from Gary Witherspoon, Language and Art in the Navajo Universe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977);

RT5586_Notes.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 157

Notes to pages 136–150

157

Gladys Reichard, Navajo Religion: A Study of Symbolism (Princeton, NJ: Bollingen, 1963). Pp. 136–138, On Navajo art, see, for example, Lois Essary Jacka and Jerry Jacka, Enduring Traditions: Art of the Navajo (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland, 1994). Pp. 142–143, See Ovid (trans. A.D. Melville), Metamorphoses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Phillipé Robets-Jones and François Robets-Jones, Pieter Bruegel (New York: Harry Abrams, 2002). Pp. 143–146, On Confucius, Hsün Tzu, Chus Hsi, and Wang Yang-ming, see The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation, trans. Roger T. Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr. (New York: Ballantine, 1998); Hsün Tzu (trans. Burton Watson), Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963): Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, Volume 2, trans. Derk Bodde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953). Pp. 147–148, Shih T’ao, Philosophy of Painting, trans. Earle J. Coleman (The Hague: Mouton, 1978). P. 148, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, G.W. Leibniz’s Monadology, ed. Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991). Pp. 148–149, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles,” Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983) p. 403. P. 150, On the Yoruba aesthetic vocabulary, see Henry Drewal, Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (New York: Museum of African Art, 1988).

RT5586_Notes.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 158

RT5586_Illus.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 159

ILLUSTRATIONS

Diana Rigg as Mrs. Peel in The Avengers. Courtesy of Canal  Image, U.K. Johannes Vermeer, Girl with the Red Hat. Image Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Nicole Debarber, Hammer. Courtesy of the Artist. Mae West in Go West, Young Man. Photograph Courtesy of the Everett Collection. Charles Sheeler, Suspended Power, 1939. Oil on Canvas. 33  26  2 in. Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Edmund J. Kahn. Nicole Debarber, Rose. Courtesy of the Artist. Nicole Debarber, Perfume Bottle. Courtesy of the Artist. Melis Bursin, Fireworks Notation. Courtesy of the Artist. Nicole Debarber, Karma Sutra Sex Position. Courtesy of the Artist.

159

RT5586_Illus.qxd

160

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 160

Six Names of Beauty

Mathias Grüenewald, Crucifixion, a Panel from the Isenhei Altar, ca. 1515. Eric Lessing Art Resource, NY. Mathias Grüenewald, Resurrection, a Panel from the Isenhei Altar, ca. 1515. Eric Lessing Art Resource, NY. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Beata Ludovica. Scala Art Resource, NY. Nicole Debarber, Shaker Chair. Courtesy of the Artist. Melis Bursin, Parthenon Floor Plan. Courtesy of the Artist. Gottlob Frege, An Example of Conceptual Notation. From Conceptual Notation and Related Articles, Edited by TerrellWard Bynum (Oxford, 1972), p. 181. Courtesy of Oxford University Press. Stephen Wolfram, Cellular Automaton. From A New Kind of Science, by Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram Media, 2002), p. 239. Courtesy of Wolfram Research, Inc. Nicole Debarber, Harmonica. Courtesy of the Artist. Nicole Debarber, Kizaemon Tea Bowl. Courtesy of the Artist. Nicole Debarber, Winter Trees. Courtesy of the Artist. Nicole Debarber, Suiseki Landscape Stone. Courtesy of the Artist. Wolfgang Laib, Laib Working with Pollen. From Wolfgang Laib: A Retrospective, by Laus Ottman (New York: American Federation of Arts and Hatje Cantz, 2000), p. 179. Courtesy of the Artist.

RT5586_Illus.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 161

Illustrations

161

Jerry Jacka, Navajo Blanket. From Enduring Traditions: Art of the Navajo, by Jerry Jacka and Lois Essary Jacka (Northland, 1994), p. 4. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Detail from A Man of War. Nicole Debarber, Bamboo. Courtesy of the Artist.

RT5586_Illus.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 162

RT5586_Ind.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 163

Index

A Abell, Richard, 6–7 Aftel, Mandy, 40, 41, 42 Alberti, Leone Battista, 77 anomaly, 105–8 Antoinette, Marie, 52 Appalachians, 17, 34 Aquinas, Thomas, 85 Aristotle, 41, 90, 95–96 Armstrong, Louis, 33 asceticism, 14–15, 80–83 Audubon, John James, 51 Austin, Patti, 33 “Avengers” (television show), 1–3

B Bacall, Lauren, 8 Bach, J.S., 65 Bankei, 129 Barnum, P.T., 106 Baroque, the, 20, 60–61, 102–103, 104, 105, 106, 108 Basho, 129 basket making, 137 Bauhaus, 23 bealte (Old French), 3 Beaux, Ernie, 43 bellum (Latin), 3 Bernini, Gianlorenzo, 48, 79, image 79 Bey, Habib, 53 Bhagavad-gita, 69, 83 Bible, 28, 55–56 bin Laden, Osama, 106 Biringuccio, Vannoccio, 49 blacksmithing, 137

blues music, 109–12, 118 bonsai, 121–22 Borgia, Lucrezia, 8 Botticelli, Sandro, 77 Boucher, Francois, 77 Brahe, Tycho, 92, 94 Brillat-Savarin, Jean Anselme, 12 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder, 142–43, image 142 Buddhism (and the Buddha), including Zen, 17, 19, 58–59, 80, 104, 116–18, 127, 129–31, 146 bullroarer, 68 bunting, indigo, 29–32, 33 Burano (Venetian island), 57 Burden, Chris, 74–76, 77 Burning Spear, 63

C Camus, Albert, 86 Castiglione, Baldassare, 25 Catholicism, 57–59, 80, 105 ceramics, 114–18, 137, 140 Chanel, 9, 43 character (beauty of), 10–11 Chu Hsi, 144–46 circles, 148–49 circuses, 35 Clapton, Eric, 63 clouds, 34–35, 98–99 Cobain, Kurt, 3 color (and meaning), 32–33 Colot, Jacques, 52 Confucianism, 139–40, 143–46, 150 Cooke, Sam, 68 Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 7–8, 62–63

163

RT5586_Ind.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 164

164 Copernicus, 20 cosmetics, 8–10 craft, 6–7, 25, 81–83, 140 Crawford, Cindy, 106 Croce, Benedetto, 13 cubism, 13 Culture (reggae artists), 63

D Da Vinci, Leonardo, 48, 77 dance, 75 Danto, Arthur, 4 Davis, Miles, 65 Dean, James, 3 definition of ‘beauty,’ xiii, 3–4, 150–52 design, argument from, 98 Dior, 9 Dylan, Bob, 64, 112

E Eliot, T.S. 16, 129 Ellington, Duke, 33 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 69, 148–49 enfleurage, 41 eros and the erotic, 1–4, 8–10, 11, 14, 55–56, 66, 68, 76–78, 78–79, 88–89, 151 ethics (and aesthetics), 5–6, 10, 98–99 Euclid, 19 Expressionism, 13–14 eye of the beholder (and the subjectivity of beauty), 4–5, 13, 28

Index gravel, 125–26 Grünewald, Matthias, 71–74, 75, 76, 77–78, images 72, 73 Guerlain (perfume company), 42

H Hamid, Sultan Abdul, 53 Handel, George Frideric, 47 harmonica, 109–112, image 110 Harnett, William, 12 health, 140–42 Hegel, G.W.F., 85 Hendrix, Jimi, 3, 35 Heraclitus, 53, 87, 151 Himalayas, 17–18, 46 Hindemith, Paul 73–74 Hinduism, 58–61, 104 historicity of concepts, 44 Holiday, Billie, 65 home, 133–35 Hope diamond, 52–53 hozho (Navajo), xiv, xv, 135–36, 139–40 Hsün Tzu, 143–44 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 71–72

I Icarus, 142–43 ikebana, see flowers indigo (color, dye), 30–33 Islam, 80 iwa (Yoruba), 150

F

J

fire, 46–50, 53–55, 90, 114, 151 fireworks, 46–50, image 48 Fisher, M.F.K., 12 flowers, 4, 25, 28, 29, 36–43, 49, 51–52, 114, 115, 120–21, 141 food, 12–13 Frege, Gottlob, 86, 90–92, image 91

Jagger, Mick, 3, 112 James, Elmore, 66 Jay, Ricky, 105–8 Jellinek, Paul, 41–42 Jesus, 3, 11, 17–18, 70, 71–74, 82, 105, 126 jewels and gemstones, 50–53, 55 Johns Hopkins University, 86 Johnson, Robert, 66 Josephine, Empress of France, 38–39 justice, 95–97, 100–101, 103–104, 108

G gardening, 120, 125, 133–35 Garvey, Marcus, 62 Gaye, Marvin, 68 George III, King, 52 gospel music, 68 Gothic, the, 105, 106, 108

K kalos, see to kalon kalyani (Sanskrit), 61 Kama Sutra, 59–61

RT5586_Ind.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 165

165

Index karma, 148–49 Kierkegaard, Soren, 19, 58, 86 Kizaemon tea bowl, xix, 115–18, image 115 koans, 117, 131 Kool Herc, DJ, 66 Koren, Leonard, 114 Kripke, Saul 87

L Laib, Wolfgang, 122–25, image 124 Lalique, Rene, 43, image 43 Lamb, Charles, 46 landscape painting, 11–12 Leach, Harvey (The Gnome Fly or Demon Dwarf), 107–8 Lee, Mother Ann, 80–81, 83 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 148–49 li (Chinese), 143–46 light, 92–95, 101–3 Little Walter, 111 logic, 19–20, 87, 113 Longinus, 18 Lopez, Jennifer, 8, 9 Louis XIV, King, 52 Luther, Martin, 57, 58, 64, 80

M Mahabharata, 69 Mahler, Gustav, 33 Marley, Bob, 62–64 Marley, Rita, 62 Mary (the Madonna), 3, 80 mathematics, 19–20, 87, 95–101, 113 Michelangelo, 48 Milton, John, 129 mimesis, 119–20 Mingus, Charles, 33 Mondrian, Piet, 85–86, 91 Monet, Claude, 20–21 money, 27–28 Monk, Thelonious, 33 Monroe, Marilyn, 3, 17 “Mood Indigo,” 33 moon, 28–29 Moore, J.B., 138 Morrison, Jim, 3 Müntzer, Thomas, 57 Myles, Heather, 136

N Nefertiti, 8 Newmar, Julie (as Catwoman), 1 Nez, Gibson, 137 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 85, 86 nostalgia, 24

O Ockham’s razor, 20, 104, 108 Ogatsu, Montamaya, 49 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 3 Orlan, 76–78 Ovid, 142, 143

P Pablo, Augustus, 63, 64–65 pantheism, 12, 148–49 Paracelcus, 68–69 Parchment, Verlin, 69 Parthenon, xiv, image 89 Pascal, Blaise, 58 Passy, Jacques, 41 patina, 125, 126–29 Peattie, Donald Culross, 35–36 Peel, Emma (Rigg, Diana), 1–3, 15–16, 57, 150, image 2 perfume (and essence, scent), 9, 40–43 Peto, John, 12 philosophy, 85–88 Picasso, Pablo 14, 15, 16–17, 18 Pickford, Mary, 8 Pitt, Brad, 15 Plato, 8, 41, 57, 85, 88–90, 91–92, 93, 94–95, 97, 100, 105, 119–20 pleasure, xiii, 13–16, 59–60 Plimpton, George, 48–49 Plotinus, 54 pollen, 123–24 Pollock, Jackson, 14, 17, 85–86, 103 Polo, Marco, 30 portraiture, 11–12 Presley, Elvis, 17 Protestantism, 57, 58–59, 79–83, 105 Ptolemy, 20 Public Enemy, 64 Pythagoras and Pythagoreanism, 87, 95–97, 100, 105

RT5586_Ind.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 166

166

Q Quine, W.V.O., 87, 88

R ramyani (Sanskrit), 61 rasa (Sanskrit), 61 Rastafarianism, 62–65 ravens, distillation of, 9 realism, artistic, 11–12 reggae, 62–68 Reichard, Gladys, 136, 137 Rembrandt van Rijn, 12 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 103 repetition, 65–67 rhythm, 65–68 Richards, Keith, 112 Rigg, Diana, see Peel, Emma Rikyu, Sen no, 114–15, 116 rock steady, 63, 66 Rolling Stones, 109, 112 romanticism, 23–24, 81 roses, 29, 35–40, 43–44, image 38 Rubens, Peter Paul, 103 Ruggieri, Gaetano, 47 Rumi, Jelalludin, 55, 57, 122 Ruskin, John, 18 Russell, Bertrand, 86, 90, 91

S sand-painting, 137, 140 Santayana, George, 13 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 86 Scarry, Elaine, 11 Schoenberg, Arnold, 16 Selassie, Haile (Ras Tafari), 62 Servandoni, Cavalieri, 47 sex, see eros Shakers, 65, 80–83, image 82 Shakespeare, 39, 129 Sheeler, Charles, 20–24, image 22 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 88 shibusa (Japanese), 112–13, 123 Shih T’ao, 147–48 Simone, Nina, 33 Sinatra, Frank, 33 Sir Mix-a-Lot, 141 ska, 63, 66 sky, 45–46, 140

Index “Song of Solomon,” 52, 55–56, 57 Spears, Britney, 71 Sprigg, June, 81 Stein, Gertrude, 39 still life, 11–12 Stonehenge, 92 storms, 34 Strunk, William, 19 sublimity, 17–19 Sufism, 55, 122 suiseki, 119–20, 121–22 sundara (Sanskrit), xiv, 61–62

T Tantrism, 61 Taoism, 146 Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste, 52 Teresa, St. of Avila, 57, 78–79 Thales, 87 Thomas, Grant Stuart, 40 Thoreau, Henry David, 23–24 Titian, 3 to kalon (and kalos; Greek), xiv, 88–90, 108 tools, 6–7, 101–102, image 8 trees, 118–19, 133–35, image 118 truth, 5–6, 9, 54, 101, 113, 118, 147, 149, 151 Turlington, Christy, 15 Turrell, James, 92–95

U use, beauty and, 6–7, 140

V Velazquez, Diego, 3 Vermeer, Jan, 5, 15–16, image 6 Visvanatha, 61

W wabi-sabi (Japanese), xiv, 108, 112–18, 123, 125, 129–31 wadu’a (Arabic), 28 Wang Yang-ming, 145–46 Warhol, Andy, 3, 17 water, 33–35, 87–88, 142–43 Waters, Muddy, 109–10 weaving, 135, 138, 140 West, Mae, image 10

RT5586_Ind.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 167

167

Index White, E.B., 19 Whitehead, A,N., 90, 91 Whittemore, Reed, 129 Wilde, Oscar, 9 Williams, Lucinda, 126 Williams, William Carlos, 129–31 Williamson, Sonny Boy, 111 Witherspoon, Gary, 135–36 Wittegenstein, Ludwig, 90 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 104 Wolfram, Stephen, 95–101, image 96

Wordsworth, William, 46 Wynette, Tammy, 141

Y Yanagi, Soetsu, 115–18 yapha (Hebrew), xiv, 27–28 yin yang, 147 yugen (Japanese), 113

Z Zen, see Buddhism

RT5586_Ind.qxd

5/28/04

2:11 PM

Page 168