A thoughtful piece by Anja about things I have mulled over for many years too (and which Ted Chiang wrangled meaningfully in his short story “Liking What You See: A Documentary”.)

For me, the crucial pivot which supports the always-ambivalent weight of beauty is how it makes us behave. Does it enliven the spirit and make us better able to join in with life and with others? Or does it orient us towards control? I would ask, is a particular ideal of beauty putting an entire class of beings / people / art forms under a totalising gaze or controlling behaviour? For instance, the endless sharp tactics of the beauty myth for women in almost any time in so many societies, or the racialised ideas of beauty, whether about body shapes, artistic creations, or the relative position of rhythm to harmony in music. Many beauty standards do indeed spring like poisoned streams from colonialism and patriarchy.

And yet, profligate beauty is everywhere to be found in nature and in culture. Certain species of birds and mammals have been shown to have deeply held aesthetic preferences, of course, the bower birds of Australia spring to mind. In human life, intact living cultures are known for their abundance of beautiful arts, crafts, music and dance. The first impulse of authoritarian regimes, from The Puritans in The New World to the Taliban today, is to limit and proscribe some or all of these things, to deface an old culture or to destroy it, to build anew in a prescriptive manner. This happened in the Chinese Cultural Revolution and with The Nazis’ war against so-called ‘Degenerate Art’, or the mass destruction of an entire craft culture during the iconoclasm of the Reformation in Northern Europe, especially in England and the Netherlands where churches were whitewashed and all images removed.

I cannot prove this, but my hunch is that beauty is an essential thing, like love, which if codified and made too much of, or minimised completely, turns sour. Overbearing love of country becomes the nationalism which starts riots. Lack of any connection to place becomes the unrooted, uncaring, overclass (who parasitise those of us who live in place) who exist digitally and wouldn’t dream of risking belonging to a place, with all the being known by others and obligation to the land that implies. Similarly with beauty, which points the way to so much that is good, and is deemed as good in such a wide range of paths, myths, contexts and religions, we cannot wish this problematic property away. We will always be drawn to beauty, as humans will always seek love.

I would suggest that a healthy ecology of beauties, like a healthy biosphere, needs an abundance of types of life forms. When many varied things are deemed beautiful, some championed widely, others deeply appreciated by a handful of devotees, some rising through the layers of time to be reconsidered beautiful, others deemed harmful falling away, then I feel the pivot of ‘what behaviour is this causing?’ can allow a fluid, see-sawing of effects, none going too far.

What is the pivot, really? How do we bear the weight of beauty? Sometime we don’t. Sometimes I don’t. With me, one moment it’s all wabi-sabi, the next it’s overwrought guitar music and multi-part harmony vocals. I gaze at my beloved’s face and think, ‘This is the best face ever!’ I look at my wrinkling skin and see aging, remembering how I will return to soil. To remember this is just as beautiful is an act of beauty itself. To find the time to balance beauty is the do-re-mi of art. Some days, it’s a bubble almost bursting on my finger tip. Some nights it’s a ghoul, chasing me back to my laptop or my drawing to rewrite or redraw a line, yet again.

It is not dead, this ‘beauty’. It is too big for bad or good. It has lineage (like thought) whose travels can be traced both through time and distance, in the new curve of a brush stroke or a colour that takes an art-form by storm.

Love, beauty, goodness, power, the urge to ask questions: these are eternal human concerns which will never go away, they are the main subjects of Myth and we must live with them just as the gods did. How we weigh them in ourselves and live this balance in our actions is a good description of life.

Thanks to dear Anja for her thought-provoking piece today. I was supposed to be mixing bone white and hide glue to make a ground for metal-point drawing, but wrote this instead. Now I must go and drink coffee.