Beauty
The Ever-Present Beauty
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” — John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
There is beauty in this world. For those who have the eyes to see, it is always there. It appears clear, unobstructed and pure. The beauty of life is not to be lost in its trivialities, nor in its ceaseless movement. But sadly, it often is. When we have lost the perception of beauty in its wholeness, we find ourselves looking for it in appearances. We start looking for the shine on the surface.
Beauty is always there, waiting for our eyes to notice. Zooming into life magnified we see beauty creating an experience of the wonderous, the sublime. As I sit in a hostel in Mexico, I could see myself as someone who cannot write here, for this environment is chaotic, loud and does not inspire the calm I need to write; but there is beauty in this moment for I am around people—during a pandemic where many of us are isolated—who have their own lives, are living their own struggles, dreams, hopes and fears. They are all in this movement of life and when you are in the thick of it, there is nothing to stop you from feeling it all.
The Prison of Our Own Making
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin
When others look at me, they confine me to be only what they can understand me to be. What I understand myself to be is unknown, profound and ever-changing. However, when I feel confined to a persona, I become concrete, known, heavy and an entity that is fixed. Change is not part of how we perceive identity. It is static and a feeling of being someone in a snapshot of time, or time in a snapshot as this person. We often take the snapshot for the movie.
Just like we are conditioned to give ourselves and others a fixed identity, we also do the same with experiences, observations and things. Since we have become used to seeing ourselves as fixed beings who do not change and are static, we give the same qualities over to what we observe and identify with. A landscape becomes a photo on Instagram, an object becomes just what we use it for and experiences become memories which we use to escape the low-grade misery of our lives. We are reducing everything dynamic, ever-changing and fluid to something that is static, fixed and tangible. We are reducing all that is alive to all that is dead. In this process of objectification, not only do we lose contact with a living essence but we also become blind to real beauty.
The ancient Greeks knew something of this. Plato spoke of how everything we see in our world is but a shadow of its perfect form. Like how all the chairs we sit on are imperfect copies of the ideal chair that exists in a realm of pure forms. But perhaps we have misunderstood this wisdom. Maybe these perfect forms are not fixed ideals we should measure things against, but rather the living essence that flows through all things. When we see a chair, we can see just the wood and nails, or we can see the beauty of human creativity meeting natural materials in an eternal dance of form and function. Of course this is an exaggeration but for purposes of argument it must be done.
Beyond the Surface
“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colours, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, “Letters on Cézanne”
So how do we find this beauty? Because it does not lie in identity nor in identification. Real beauty lies in appreciation of the unknown, the unexplainable nature of all we experience. Somehow it transcends our rational understanding of the world, invoking a sense of awe and wonder into our souls. When we are in this awe, we do not find an object or an identification with anything but rather we find an experience—moving, flowing and changing. It is these qualities of experience that make it beautiful and it is our capitalist tendency to commodify experiences that kill the beauty in them.
The experience of beauty can only be dulled by our expectations and our explanations. Like a magic trick loses its brilliance when explained, the intellectual understanding of experiences of beauty seems to dull them down into a lower form of an experience. Why lower? Because it has been taken from the whole and reduced to its parts. While there is nothing inherently depreciating about this, experience is the whole and analysis reduces it to its parts. How we feel about our bodies comes from how all its parts are working together to create the sensation we call health. When a part of our bodies like the stomach, brain, eyes, nose and so on, don’t work as they could then we have a feeling of uneasiness. We call this dis-ease. While disease is not a necessarily beautiful experience it can lead to such and while health can behold beauty, we forget to perceive it as such.
The heart knows beauty most deeply when it has known suffering. Like how stars are most brilliant in the darkest night, or how a single flower growing through concrete can move us more than a whole garden. There is something profound in how suffering clears our eyes to see beauty more purely. The mother who has known loss loves more fiercely. The artist who has known emptiness creates more truthfully. The traveller who has known loneliness sees the beauty in small connections more clearly. Perhaps this is why beauty can bring tears to our eyes - because it touches both the light and shadow within us, reminding us that neither exists without the other.
The Eye That Sees Beauty
“The moment one gives close attention to anything, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” — Henry Miller
The movement of the clouds and the way the blue sky plays hide and seek with our eyes, dancing with different shades in the hue of the clouds. If we really look, we can see beauty in that. A complex and contrasting landscape of colours and shapes always changing above us with light that is not blue but seems to appear so just to delight our eyes, can it really get better than this? But this same scene can be seen as ordinary and as something that’s just ‘whatever’. And so we realise the maxim is true, beauty does indeed lie in the eye of the beholder.
In such a case, is there something to be said for cultivating this eye of being able to perceive beauty in its wholeness? Unclouded by perceptions, judgements and opinions this eye can see all as pure and seemingly perfect. I can only talk for myself when I see the beauty in life. Walking around in Oaxaca city—a city unknown to me—I do not seek the experience of a tourist, rather I notice the way houses are made, their designs and how they seem to just come together to form this city to give it its unique allure. The shapes of different streets uniquely marking the blood vessels of this city. Since my eyes are seeing all this anew, I cannot take this for granted.
As I write this, I look in front of me at a green courtyard full of plants, grass and a remaining essence that makes it seem like it comes from antiquity. The big white fluffy clouds dance above me and peeking from behind them is the deep blue sky. On the roof of this courtyard sits a deep blue water tank and whether by design or coincidence, the blue of the water tank almost exactly matches that of the sky peeking behind the clouds. This is my experience of beauty in the small everyday moments of life. In such a way, whether it is the streets, or the clouds or the children in the park, beauty is not an isolated experience. It is an exquisite melange of coinciding factors that make it mysteriously alluring and forever fascinating.
When we truly see beauty,
Time stands still like morning dew
Suspended on a blade of grass
Neither falling nor rising
Just being, in perfect presence