Notes Toward Beauty
"I don't trust beauty anymore," I once wrote (and not so
long ago), "when will I stop believing it?" And elsewhere,
"because beauty (fixed, triumphant) isn't my friend, is it?"
That is part of the truth. The other part of the truth is that without
a notion of beauty, an embodiment of the possible beyond the abjections
of the mundane, I would not have become a poet, would not, perhaps,
have left behind the housing projects and tenements of the Bronx in
which I grew up. It is very fashionable, indeed almost de rigueur,
to condemn beauty as oppressive: at worst an ideological mystification,
at best a distraction from the real work. (Lenin, who in our supposedly
post-Communist world I persist in thinking a great man, couldn't listen
to music for this reason: he distrusted the power it had over him,
fearing it would enervate him and make him too soft to do the hard
things that had to be done). And simplified, distorted notions of
beauty have too often been deployed for vicious ends: the Nazi cult
of Aryan beauty is the most egregious example. (Though I am also reminded
that the sculptures of Arno Breker, Hitler's court artist, are actually
ugly. But Leni Riefenstahl's straining, triumphant Olympians are not.)
For me, having grown up in a poverty that I have contingently left
behind—materially, though never psychically—it was not only
possible to believe in the otherwhere that beauty proposed, it was
necessary. Its alterity proposed and continues to propose an alternative
to my own social and racial otherness.
It is common to confuse the beautiful with the merely pretty, an
ornamental irrelevance, to oppose the pleasing to some more exigent
or severe realm above and beyond the simply beautiful. This perspective
situates beauty at the mid-point of a continuum from the pretty to
the beautiful to the sublime: beauty is thus a form of mediocrity
or compromise. It was Edmund Burke who first distinguished between
the beautiful and the sublime as that which submits to us versus that
which overwhelms us, that which could destroy us but does not. Immanuel
Kant and (more recently) Jean-Francois Lyotard have elaborated on
this distinction. In this view, beauty reassures and comforts: it
supplies us with the already known, while the sublime crashes over
us like the waves of an out of season hurricane. But beauty is insistent;
it makes demands. It demands that we see it and acknowledge it, that
we acknowledge our seeing, that we be changed by the experience. As
Rilke wrote, beauty is the beginning of a terror that we are barely
able to endure. And as Francis Bacon wrote, there is no beauty that
hath not some proportion of strangeness in it. To quote Thomas Nashe's
"A Litany in Time of Plague," a poem that embodies the beauty
of annihilation, a poem whose speaker is, in part, dying of beauty,
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closèd Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die.
The terror that Kant equated with the sublime is synonymous with
Rilke's beauty: the sublime is beauty's true face, like Zeus revealing
himself to Semele in all his glory, like Yahweh whose back alone can
be glimpsed by the mortal eye. Beauty is not kind or benign; it is
a natural force, amoral, beyond good and evil. Beauty burns and devours:
we die to our old selves and rise reborn.
I have quoted and cited, referred and alluded, but I am still no
prophet. What do I believe—and which I, and at what time? Perhaps
this near-chrestomathy is evidence, however circumstantial, that beauty
is not merely personal or idiosyncratic. I have felt haunted by the
beauty of men that I did not possess and could not make mine (beauty
calls to beauty, after all, though beauty also demands an audience,
an audience that is presumably not beautiful: otherwise it would contemplate
itself), and felt crushed by the distance between myself and what
I wished to have, wished to become. I have felt both enraptured by
and utterly alienated from the beauty of nature, which was other to
me so fundamentally that there was no feeling of exclusion, but simply
pure alterity. There was no wish, no possibility, that I could be
a waterfall plunging into a gorge, though I have felt that vertiginous
urge to plummet into white water and shale. But there was, there is,
a wish to preserve that moment of apprehension. This is one of the
things poetry means to me: the possibility of mediating between being
and desire, of bridging alterity by articulating it. "To articulate"
also means, "to connect." One way a poem begins for me is
with the question, "How do these things relate to one another?"
Language itself is articulation in two senses: it speaks and it connects.
Liminal, nothing in itself but everything in relation, a bridge between
the material and the immaterial, between image and idea, signifier
and signified, all language is conjunction, copula, commingling. The
real waits in a corner, never to be spoken, but only spoken of…
Only connect, as E.M. Forster wrote.
I decided I wanted to be a poet (an asymptote, approached but never
truly reached, in that regard like beauty itself) because I was so
overwhelmed by the ambivalent, contradictory beauty of Eliot's "Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (the first poem I ever read: I was
fourteen) that it seemed not simply to speak to and of my life but
to replace it, if only fleetingly, with something better because more
meaningful and patterned. Amorphous misery had been made form, suffering
transformed to shape. I hated the poem for eluding me, for not surrendering
itself immediately to my understanding; I loved it for the enthrallment
it induced, the power of its fascination. I sought by becoming a poet
a share in that power, to be, if not a thing of beauty in myself,
then perhaps at least a source of beauty. As Frank O'Hara writes in
his "Autobiographia Literaria," "And here I am, the
/ center of all beauty! / writing these poems! / Imagine!" So
much for the unkind animals and the fleeing birds…
I wrote once that many of my poems constitute an argument between
beauty and justice, and it has long been the fashion to oppose the
two, as if the falsehoods of beauty were unmasked by the unsparing
eye of justice. But I believe, with Elaine Scarry and many others
in what is perhaps too lightly called the Western tradition, that
ultimately beauty and justice are one, that beauty presents us with
the possibility of things as they should be. In that sense beauty
does embody virtue, as Plato believed, and demands of us that we embody
that virtue: for who doesn't want to be beautiful, who wouldn't be
beautiful if he could? The presence of beauty reminds us of its all
too frequent absence, and demands that we remedy that absence to the
best of our ability, if only to salve the pain of lack. Again in Rilke's
words, there is no part that does not see you: you must change your
life. The rightness of beauty is a form of justice: just proportion,
just harmony (even in seeming discord), the just relation of parts
to the whole and the whole to the parts. In this sense beauty offers
an imago of the just society, and pain beauty often induces (beauty
is something we undergo, a passion) is the pain of the awareness of
the absence of such a thing in or as our lives, beauty's reminder
of our own inadequacy. Rilke's archaic torso is after all a fragment
of a god: beauty shines out in what remains, reminding us of a wholeness
just out of reach. As Adorno wrote, art presents us with utopia in
negation, an image Robert Scholes once characterized as a menu with
all the items crossed out as unavailable: we are invited to the feast,
but cannot eat.
Beauty isn't particularly good for anything, except perhaps helping
one get laid, and I like the idea of its uselessness. In a society
so over-ruled by instrumental reason, to be good for nothing is perhaps
simply to be good: in its inutility, beauty manifests what Kant called
the kingdom of ends, a world in which people and things exist for
their own sakes and not simply as the means to other ends (profit,
power). In Sartre's terms, beauty is the domain of the for-itself
and the in-itself. Beauty is gauche and inconvenient and often embarrassing
(or at least our responses to beauty are, making us lose composure,
lose our cool) and altogether in excess of what is required, what
is asked for, what is appropriate. I dwell among these visions of
excess, altogether inadequate to their demands, and hope that my complete
failure even to attempt a definition of the beautiful might be taken
as an instantiation of my title—beauty can only be approached,
but never actually reached—and thus as an assent to beauty's
refusal to be mastered by the understanding.
