Little Philokalia: A Beauty Makeover
(written
for a panel on beauty at Cooper Union, 3-31-01)
"What shall
we do with all this useless beauty?" —Elvis Costello
1. Beauty and the ideal
Beauty has been chosen for a 2500 year beauty makeover, to rescue
her from the
ideal, to rescue the ideal from the ideal.
The search for a satisfactory relationship to beauty has given little
satisfaction. Pieces
of thought on the subject bring occasional
odd satisfaction.
This is from Henri Bergson, as he connects the
condition of beauty
with radical freedom: "The feeling of the
beautiful is no specific
feeling, but...every feeling experienced
by us will assume
an aesthetic character, provided that it has
been suggested not
caused."
For Plato, beauty has a famous friendship with love and eternal
forms. In the Symposium,
Socrates quotes his great lady friend
Diotima who is slightly
wiser than he is; she reminds them that
people love what is
beautiful because they are longing for the
eternal good which
beauty stimulates in the soul. Though
physical beauty gives
access to it, the soul really wants the non-
physical beauty for
itself, which is why Socrates who has a
beautiful, buoyant
soul doesn't want to go to bed with
Alcibiades, who is
a handsome jerk with an ugly, narrow soul.
The dialogue does not offer
any conclusions about either love
or beauty except that
it is an unknown absolute that enables
the soul to improve
itself. Elsewhere, Socrates and Hippias try
to come up with a satisfactory
definition and what they come
up with is that beauty
is "beneficial pleasure."
Bothered about the ideal in general, John Ashbery does many a beauty
makeover:
You can't say it that
way anymore.
Bothered about beauty
you have to
Come out into the
open, into a clearing,
And rest.
(from
"And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name")
With his insouciant elegance, our prophet of odd glamour has
intercepted a great
truth about beauty and in this mini-ars poetica
he lets the ideal
slide away. In the constantly revised and cleared
out beauty of Ashbery's
aesthetic we have profound permission
to be not only ourselves
in an isolated way, and to be other in a
swirl of spontaneous
association, through the anti-beauty beauties
we can put in poems.
His method makes of beauty a biproduct of
experience rather
than an object, and it remakes itself in each poem.
Beauty is what draws
you to it right before you have to be yourself.
It is the extra that
keeps creation in motion.
Non-ideal beauty begins to work through surprise. Suppose one is
drawn
to Plato's ideal
beauty, expressed in the Phaedrus and elsewhere;
bound up with harmony
and good proportion, this ideal has taken
a lot from Pythagorean
notions of balance and symmetry, of
mathematical appropriateness.
Let's just add a little chaos to those.
Must there be a conflict
between symmetry, grace and harmony
and the other beauties
that don't go with Pythagoras?
What shall we put in our poems after Baudelaire, since the ideal
has to
be re- and remade?
What about...oh...stuff? Ashbery: "Now, /
About what to put
in your poem-painting: / Flowers are always
nice, particularly
delphinium." He teases the reader by replacing
one of the most overworked
words in the language, "flowers" with
the lyrically packed
"delphinium." It is enjoyable the way this word
"delphinium" remakes
the flower's beauty's interior making of it a
little building,
a quadrasyllabic parthenon.
Nothing in Diotima's speech at the Symposium suggests that the beautiful
toward which the soul
yearns can't include the raggedly unable: the
Violent Femmes,
The Waste Land, onion grass and banana slugs.
Idealizing the beautiful
doesn't seem impracical as long as you are
willing to idealize
in a very stretchy way which is the trick of the
poet, and not deidealize
in a mechanical way, which is a trick of
the narcisscist.
Many kinds of ideal beauty are embarrassing and boring not because
they don't last but
because they do. To remake the beauty ideal
with emotion the
intuitive faculties of inventors are engaged in
ceaseless revolutions
of style in the images of an age, now with
the bustle, now with
the empire waistline, now with the nose ring.
The story of someone coming up to Liv Ullman in the London airport
and saying, Didn't
you used to be Liv Ullman? Or this sentence
from the hotel guest magazine
in an article on Michelle Pfeiffer:
"She is as gorgeous
as ever and somehow more human for having
the odd minor flaw."
Minor flaw. How embarrassing for the
magazine editor. Just
as strictly ideal beauty is bad for women—,
producing the anorexic,
the pale face, the bound foot, the idea that
a wrinkle is a failure
of matter, so it is bad for literary activity.
2. Beauty and subjectivity
My girl told me a joke: If you have a bee in your hand, what do you
have in your eye?
Beauty, because beauty is in the eye of the bee
holder.
The remaking of beauty seems to have to do with process and with
the
organic nature of
surprise, with contrast. Anne Cheng writes: "The
moment of distinction
from beauty determines beauty," and writes
of the nature of the
experience of beauty as being "vertiginous,
launched by and launching
crises of identification in the eyes of the
beholder."
3. Beauty and subjectivity, detail and paradox
Detail is the cure for and the manifestation of an ideal.I think
this is
what Adorno must
mean when he em-phasizes the particular.
An example of this
in art and nature can be found the tattoos
of Berkeley women
at the gym. Is there an innate sense of the
ideal tattoo that
would appeal to all, or are all our judgments
about the nature
of beauty culturally determined. It's clear that
what is beautiful
to one social class may not beautiful to another.
Tattoos depict the
re-creation of natures in private forms of
beauty; they are
among the body's most public revisionary
aesthetic gestures,
yet their symbolic significance remains totally
unavailable,
and in this they embody the heavenly forms
referred to
in the Phaedrus. Snakes, stars, totemic words,
salamanders, lilies,
flames, hearts— nature, art. Enacted on the
skin, the most beautiful
organ of a human body, like language in
our shared sentence.
Consider the navy and yellow 6 inch tattoo
of a beetle on the
back of the woman who does the rowing
machine. Even if
we are proud of our own tattoos, we are scared
of hers; hers is
a large, terrifying, unapproachable picture, a version
of stretchy, circularity
we cannot relate to. So, the subjective is a
given in any style
of any art, especially poetry, and takes some
of the pressure off
beauty not to have to speak for everything.
In recent work, I'm interested in a thump-thump broken lyricism,
the
mind at work on its
problem, polyphonic voices, manifest
through particulars:
the otherworldly in the quotidian, perceptions
of matter and the
material that collide in talking rocks, wretched
glitter, the transcendently
banal. The metaphoric function still
seems the essential
feature of the poetic imagination; the image
that includes its
opposing nature. Paradoxes between truths. The
significant feather,
peachy horror, ethereal formica patterns from
the fifties, motel
ashtrays. "Cannonball" by the Breeders, the
raindrenched woman
in jeans holding her atm card in her teeth,
the tiny himilayas
of acoustic tile on the dentist's ceiling, the sickly
yellow face of Leonardo's
Ginevra di Benci against her tree of
juniper. How does
the beauty we hunger for in life inform our
poetic judgments?
It's a mystery. The men I have loved have had
bad teeth. A girl
is reading Kant's Beautiful and the Sublime
while flying over
Colorado. The snowy peaks = the sublime. The
girl looking at the
snowy peaks = the beautiful. Is the beautiful the
second rate category
for Kant or he is just a typical mysogynist
of his time? I can't
keep Kant in my head (vowel sounds from
Singing in the Rain.)
But insofar as I understand him, Kant seems
to be trying to associate
the beautiful with Plato's sense of the
harmonious and the
sublime with what terrifies. Each generation
of beauty thinkers
in an art remakes the ideal and each age's
sense of beauty is
done through acts of defiance. If death is the
mother of beauty,
beauty is the daughter of death. Her father is
away on business.
Something of the Kantian sublime may be found in Clarice Lispector's
The Passion According
to G.H. but it is an inverted sublime, not
an alp but a valley:
"I was afraid of God's face. I was afraid of
my final nakedness
on the wall. The beauty, that new absence
of beauty that had
nothing to do with what I had been in the
habit of calling
beauty, terrified me."
In her poem "Beauty," Mei Mei Berssenbrugge also addresses the
problem of beauty's
ideal, and of how to see elements purely.
Her poem is a landscape
of shifting energies, shapes and
volumes coming together
in memory. She writes: "I can't
represent the ideal
beauty of a view through a break in the hills,
that is, distant
hill, light on yellow trees." For Berssenbrugge,
things hurry by in
color and abstract forms, in an uncaused,
ceaseless way. In
her lines, she creates an intimacy between
color, time, space
and the overlapping images—of a swan,
the hills, a glass,
a child's eyes. Her technique allows the solitude
and the interrelationship
of perceptions, a contract that goes
three ways, as it
does for Stevens in "Idea of Order at Key
West"—a triangle
between maker, receiver and reality. This
seems the main gift
of Coleridgean romanticism: emotion is
essential when we
look at nature, and nature includes everything.
This connects to what Jacques Maritain says of the relationship
between nature and
beauty in art: it is emotion with knowledge
that we seek; he
cautions against residing in the merely subjective
in any art, but notes
that revelation in poetry is dependent upon
each artist being
moved by universal beauty even as the individual
work manifests itself.
Intuition makes the beauty of an individual
work of art an end
in itself, and all true poems are
"unprecedented."
(Maritain, p. 56) Here is one of his clear insights
on nonrepresentational
form: "Modern abstract art...implies in no
way a repudiation
of beauty. On the contrary, if it divorces itself
from the Things of
Nature, it is with a view to being more fully
true to the creativity
of the spirit, that is, to poetry, and therefore
to tend toward beauty,
the end beyond the end of poetry, in a
manner more faithful
to the infinite amplitude of beauty." (Maritain,
p. 216)
Reading Berssenbrugge whose lingering, strange sentences overlap
with silences, it
seems beauty in such abstract art is about human
loneliness, about
the way we can't use purely human forms as
solutions but intimate
abstract statements can correspond to states
of being. Her use
of this overlapping technique reminds me of
Rothko. When I visited
the Rothko show, my life in was terrible
disarray. Standing
in the room with the soft and bold paintings
trying so earnestly
was like being in the heart of color's
temperature, much
like what Berssenbrugge enacts in "Warm rose
of the plane flaking
upward." Rothko's terrified shapes of symbolic
curvature seem to
make allowance for color as form in training.
There is a certain
blue at the edges of late paintings that meant he
stopped needing to
know things, an orange like taking a nap in
autumn the moment
the infinite has passed and the leaves' arsonist
has destroyed the
contract with his aristocrat. Rothko's beauty, a
much more tragic form
of Ashbery's abstraction, could blend with
a type of help if
only the human would allow it. A friend with cancer
noted that beauty
and suffering are exactly twinned in some
experiences. Seeing
Rothko, I experienced this as when I first read
"Ode to a Nightingale."
In American post-postmodernisms poets
continue the search
for home beyond beauty. "I died for beauty but
was scarce / adjusted
to the tomb / when one who died for Truth /
Was lain, in an adjoining
room," writes Dickinson, maybe talking to
Keats.
Cindy Sherman writes: "The world is so drawn to beauty I became
interested in things
that are normally considered groteque or ugly,
seeing them as more
fascinating than beautiful." (Morris, p. 79)
4. Paradox, weird gnostic beauty and the unknown
Speaking of Cindys, we like Cindy Crawford's mole better than we
like
Cindy.
When Ashbery writes that "the extreme austerity of an almost empty
mind" collides with
"the lush, Rousseau-like folliage" he may be
referring to the central
collision or agitation in English diction itself,
between Wyatt's plainness
and Donne's more latinate, more
ornamented inventions.
Mixtures of diction allow the inconsistencies that characterize
contemporary life.
I'm reading Longinus in the LAX trying to find
out what beauty is
while listening to an old Led Zeppelin tape in
my walkman. A guy
is checking his email on a net access port.
Above the port, a
little spear of Neptune that represents the god
helping him along.
The little sign is corny and beautiful. A woman
across from him is
writing a note. The tarnish of her thumb ring
where the cheaper
metal—alchemists would call it the base
metal—shows through
and is delicately querulous of existence.
She rubs the thumb
across the window of her cellphone. What is
the desperate, filmy
place right before realism? I associate these
beauty experiences
with a different soul activity and identify them
with gnostic thought.
Someone says into his cellphone, Fax it over
to the office and
I'll have Bruce sign it, Ok Andy Awright amigo. I
know a painter with
a debilitating illness who has lost her capacity
to hold a brush very
steadily but she draws roses when they are
dead. Longinus says
there are 5 factors that make a style sublime:
the command of full
blooded ideas, the "inspiration of vehement
emotions," the proper
construction of figures, nobility of phrase,
and "the effect of
dignity and elevation." (Longinus, p. 45).
It seems important to think of beauty in poetry as tied to the fear
of the
unknown. It is no
wonder that much of late 20th century poetry
sought this mystery
in surrealist and symbolist verse, in methods
that include the double,
the twisted, the illdetermined, their way to
non-closure, informed
by polysyntactic structures, so that we may
not know where syntax
means once it has have begun.
André Breton: "Let us speak out: the marvelous is beautiful, there
is even
only the marvellous
that is beautiful."
In the coptic Hymn of the Pearl, a prince goes searching for
beauty in
the form of a jewel
which is his soul. He understands neither the
nature of the pearl,
its location, nor its significance. He must bring
it back to kind of
darth vader king, whom he knows quite well.
When the unknown incorporates
the vaguely nauseating and the
surprising it is unsafe
and yet consistent with its own beginnings.
If beauty is the rejuvenated daughter of death, it is only one of
several.
The undefined mystery
that elides with the grotesque is also one
of the daughters.
I search in each poem I read for the place
where the poet doesn't
know the next move. That is the mystical
and earthly frame.
John Ashbery, "'And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name," from Double
Dream of Spring
Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, "Beauty," from A Four-Year-Old Gir,
Kelsey St Press, 1999
Henri Bergson, Essai sur les Données Immediate de la Conscience,
or Time and Free Will, 1889
Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, Princeton
University Press, 1965
Plato, Collected Dialogues
Anne Anlin Cheng, "Wounded Beauty: An Exploratory Study on Race,
Feminism and The Aesthetic Question," Tulsa Studies, 19:2,
(fall 2000)
Catherine Morris, The Essential Cindy Sherman, Harry Abrams,
1999
Hilton Guest Magazine, November, 1998
Longinus (trans. by W. Hamilton Fyfe) On the Sublime VII,
IV-VIII, 2
Patrick Wallberg, Surrealism, McGraw Hill
