Anam Cara

I

NTRODUCTION

It visits with inconstant glance

Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening, –

Like clouds in starlight widely spread, –

Like memory of music fled, –

Like aught that for its grace may be

Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon

Of human thought or form, – where art thou gone?

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’

T

HE

C

RY OF

O

UR

T

IMES

: T

O

A

WAKEN

B

EAUTY

WE LIVE BETWEEN THE ACT OF AWAKENING AND THE ACT OF surrender. Each morning we awaken to the light and the invitation to a new day in the world of time; each night we surrender to the dark to be taken to play in the world of dreams where time is no more. At birth we were awakened and emerged to become visible in the world. At death we will surrender again to the dark to become invisible. Awakening and surrender: they frame each day and each life; between them the journey where anything can happen, the beauty and the frailty. When the Celtic Imagination searched for the structures of shelter and meaning, it raised its eyes to the mountains and the heavens and put its trust in the faithful patterns of the sun, stars, moon and seasons. Long before them the Greeks too had raised the eye beyond the horizon and recognized the heavenly patterns of the cosmos. There they glimpsed a vision of order which was to become the heart of their understanding of beauty. All the frailty and uncertainty was seen to be ultimately sheltered by the eternal beauty which presides over all the journeys between awakening and surrender, the visible and the invisible, the light and the darkness.

The human soul is hungry for beauty; we seek it everywhere – in landscape, music, art, clothes, furniture, gardening, companionship, love, religion and in ourselves. No-one would desire not to be beautiful. When we experience the Beautiful, there is a sense of homecoming. Some of our most wonderful memories are of beautiful places where we felt immediately at home. We feel most alive in the presence of the Beautiful for it meets the needs of our soul. For a while the strains of struggle and endurance are relieved and our frailty is illuminated by a different light in which we come to glimpse behind the shudder of appearances the sure form of things. In the experience of beauty we awaken and surrender in the same act. Beauty brings a sense of completion and sureness. Without any of the usual calculation, we can slip into the Beautiful with the same ease as we slip into the seamless embrace of water; something ancient within us already trusts that this embrace will hold us.

These times are riven with anxiety and uncertainty, given the current global crisis. In the hearts of people some natural ease has been broken. It is astounding how this has reached deep into the heart. Our trust in the future has lost its innocence. We know now that anything can happen, from one minute to the next. The traditional structures of shelter are shaking, their foundations revealed to be no longer stone but sand. We are suddenly thrown back on ourselves. Politics, religion and economics and the institutions of family and community, all have become abruptly unsure. At first, it sounds completely naïve to suggest that now might be the time to invoke and awaken beauty. Yet this is exactly the claim that this book explores. Why? Because there is nowhere else to turn and we are desperate; furthermore, it is because we have so disastrously neglected the Beautiful that we now find ourselves in such terrible crisis.

T

HE

G

LOBAL

C

RISIS AND THE

V

IOLATION OF

B

EAUTY

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

RUMI

IN A SENSE, ALL THE CONTEMPORARY CRISES CAN BE REDUCED TO a crisis about the nature of beauty. This perspective offers us new possibilities. In parched terrains new wells are to be discovered. When we address difficulty in terms of the call to beauty, new invitations come alive. Perhaps, for the first time, we gain a clear view of how much ugliness we endure and allow. The media generate relentless images of mediocrity and ugliness in talk-shows, tapestries of smothered language and frenetic gratification. The media are becoming the global mirror and these shows tend to enshrine the ugly as the normal standard. Beauty is mostly forgotten and made to seem naïve and romantic. The blindness of property development creates rooms, buildings and suburbs which lack grace and mystery. Socially, this influences the atmosphere in the workplace, the schoolroom, the boardroom and the community. It also results in such degradation of the environment that we are turning more and more of our beautiful earth into a wasteland. Much of the stress and emptiness that haunts us can be traced back to our lack of attention to beauty. Internally, the mind becomes coarse and dull if it remains unvisited by images and thoughts which hold the radiance of beauty.

Hans Urs von Balthasar writes: ‘Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness. No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man . . . Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance.’

Coarseness is always the same relentless chafing; it makes every texture it touches raw and rough. There is an unseemly coarseness to our times which robs the grace from our textures of language, feeling and presence. Such coarseness falsifies and anaesthetizes our desire. This is particularly evident in the spread of greed, which to paraphrase Shakespeare ‘makes hungry where most she satisfies’. Greed is unable to envisage any form of relationship other than absorption or possession. However, when we awaken to beauty, we keep desire alive in its freshness, passion and creativity. Beauty is not a deadener but a quickener!

Sadly, whether from resentment, fear or blindness, beauty is often refused, repudiated or cut down to the size of our timid perceptions. The tragedy is that what we refuse to attend to cannot reach us. In turning away from beauty, we turn away from all that is wholesome and true, and deliver ourselves into an exile where the vulgar and artificial dull and deaden the human spirit. In their vicinity we are unable to feel or think with any refinement. They cannot truly engage us because of their emptiness; they pound our minds and feelings because they lack the coherence to embrace the inner form of the soul. They are not a presence but an absence that evicts.

It has become the habit of our times to mistake glamour for beauty. This concern is expressed trenchantly by Robert C. Morgan: ‘Beauty is not glamour. Most of what the media . . . the fashion world . . . Hollywood . . . the art world has to offer is glamour. Glamour, like the art world itself, is a highly fickle and commercially driven enterprise that contributes to . . . the “humdrum”. It appears and disappears . . . No one ever catches up to glamour.’ This is reminiscent of what Denis Donoghue once wrote about some lines of poetry that were the work of Fancy, not Imagination: ‘the first effect of the lines is the only effect they will ever have, no amount of pondering will make them glow’. Glamour too has but a single flicker. In contrast, the Beautiful offers us an invitation to order, coherence and unity. When these needs are met, the soul feels at home in the world.

I

F

B

EAUTY

W

ERE

I

NVITED

OUR TIMES ARE DRIVEN BY THE INESTIMABLE ENERGIES OF THE mechanical mind; its achievements derive from its singular focus, linear direction and force. When it dominates, the habit of gentleness dies out. We become blind: nature is rifled, politics eschews vision and becomes the obsessive servant of economics, and religion opts for the mathematics of system and forgets its mystical flame. Instead of true leadership which would be the servant of vision and imagination, we have systems of puppetry which are carefully constructed and manipulated from elsewhere. We never know who we are dealing with; hidden agendas operate to deepen our insecurity and persuade us to be hopeless. Our present dilemma is telescoped in this wonderful phrase from Irish writer and visionary politician Michael D. Higgins: ‘This acceptance of inevitability in our lives is consistent of course with the suggestion that there is but one vision of the economy, an end of history, the death of ethics, and an appropriate individualism that eschews solidarity and any transcendent public values.’

Yet constant struggle leaves us tired and empty. Our struggle for reform needs to be tempered and balanced with a capacity for celebration. When we lose sight of beauty our struggle becomes tired and functional. When we expect and engage the Beautiful, a new fluency is set free within us and between us. The heart becomes rekindled and our lives brighten with unexpected courage. It is courage that restores hope to the heart. In our day to day lives, we often show courage without realizing it. However, it is only when we are afraid that courage becomes a question. Courage is amazing because it can tap in to the heart of fear, taking that frightened energy and turning it towards initiative, creativity, action and hope. When courage comes alive, imprisoning walls become frontiers of new possibility, difficulty becomes invitation and the heart comes into a new rhythm of trust and sureness. There are secret sources of courage inside every human heart; yet courage needs to be awakened in us. The encounter with the Beautiful can bring such awakening. Courage is a spark that can become the flame of hope, lighting new and exciting pathways in what seemed to be dead, dark landscapes.

L

ET

B

EAUTY

S

URPRISE

Y

OU

The arts, whose task once was considered to be that of

manifesting the beautiful, will discuss the idea only to dismiss

it, regarding beauty only as the pretty, the simple, the pleasing,

the mindless and the easy. Because beauty is conceived so

naively, it appears as merely naive, and can be tolerated only if

complicated by discord, shock, violence, and harsh terrestrial

realities. I therefore feel justified in speaking of the

repression of beauty.

JAMES HILLMAN

WHEN WE AWAKEN TO THE CALL OF BEAUTY, WE BECOME AWARE of new ways of being in the world. We were created to be creators. At its deepest heart, creativity is meant to serve and evoke beauty. When this desire and capacity come alive, new wells spring up in parched ground; difficulty becomes invitation and rather than striving against the grain of our nature, we fall into rhythm with its deepest urgency and passion. The time is now ripe for beauty to surprise and liberate us. Beauty is a free spirit and will not be trapped within the grid of intentionality. In the light of beauty, the strategies of the ego melt like a web against a candle. As Frederick Turner puts it, ‘Beauty . . . is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action. It enables us to go with, rather than against, the deepest tendency or theme of the universe.’

The wonder of the Beautiful is its ability to surprise us. With swift, sheer grace, it is like a divine breath that blows the heart open. Immune to our strategies, it can take us when we least expect it. Because our present habit of mind is governed by the calculus of consumerism and busyness, we are less and less frequently available to the exuberance of beauty. Indeed, we have brought calculation to such a level that it now seems unsophisticated to admit surprise! One of the great modern philosophers of Beauty, Immanuel Kant, spoke of the joy we take in the Beautiful as a ‘disinterested delight’. The animation of the Beautiful is so immediate and fulfilling that we simply enjoy it for itself; it never occurs to us to ask what purpose it serves. Our joy in the Beautiful is as native to us as our breath, a lyrical act where we surrender but to awaken.

Though we have become more helpless and hopeless, we have grown keenly aware of the urgency and necessity for real and positive change. We grow increasingly deaf to the worn platitudes of staid authority. Their forced, didactic tones no longer reach our need. Now we want the experience itself, not the analysis or the membership card to some new syndrome. Notions of self-improvement have become banal and wearisome. The zealots of analysis have become blind. In contrast, beauty offers us refreshment, elevation and remembrance of our true origin and real destination. In this sense, the Beautiful is the true priestess of individuation, inviting us to engage the infinite design that shapes our days and dreams. She does not force on us any manufactured coherence towards which we must falsely strain; this is the diametrical opposite of all forms of fundamentalism. She invites us to surrender so that we can participate in the forming of a new and vital coherence that is native to our desire. In such unsheltered and uncertain times we yearn for this order and coherence, which brings the emerging forms of our own growth into rhythm with the concealed order of creation. Hans-Georg Gadamer catches this need beautifully when he says ‘the experience of the beautiful . . . is the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things, wherever it may be’. Indeed, it is part of the disturbance of the Beautiful that her graceful force dissolves the old cages that confine us as prisoners in the unlived life. Beauty is not just a call to growth, it is a transforming presence wherein we unfold towards growth almost before we realize it. Our deepest self-knowledge unfolds as we are embraced by Beauty.

‘T

HE

I

NVOCATION OF A

W

HOLE AND

H

OLY

O

RDER OF

T

HINGS’

THIS BOOK PRESUMES THE EXISTENCE AND AUTONOMY OF THE Beautiful as a threshold which holds the real and the ideal in connection and conversation with each other. It does not set out to ground this philosophically; that would be the task of a purely philosophical work. Rather it is intended as a series of encounters with various forms of the Beautiful. The majesty of beauty is its gracious wholesomeness. The Beautiful unifies feeling, thought and dream. The form of this book endeavours to mirror this at-one-ment. This acquaintance coaxes the soul to the land of wonder where the journey becomes a bright path between source and horizon, awakening and surrender. Perhaps, through awakening our hearts to beauty, we can all come to know more intimately what John Keats meant when he wrote: ‘I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds’ (Letter, 18 Oct. 1818).

Kathleen Raine says: ‘Strangest of all is the ease with which the vision is lost, consciousness contracts, we forget over and over again, until recollection is stirred by some icon of that beauty. Then we remember and wonder why we ever forgot.’ Beauty is an endless and elusive theme. What beauty is can never be finally said. This exploration is limited and tentative, yet the hope is that this series of little icons of the Beautiful may compose their own mosaic to become a book that you might dream into . . .

S

WANLIGHT

I.M. TONY O’MALLEY

If it could say itself January

Might brighten its syllables on the frost

Of these first New Year days whose cold is blue.

Meanwhile in this corner of its silence

A weak winter sun lowers down behind

The moor that rises away from the lake.

Beyond reach of light, the shadowed water

Succumbs to this darkening of spirit

That would deny the bog today’s twilight.

All of a sudden something else breaks through

To appear at the far end of the lake

In two diagrams of white, uneven light.

I have never seen white so absolute

And alone, glistening in awkward form

Dreaming across the water a bright path.

As it stirs and changes I see what it is:

Two swans have found the mirror in the lake

Where a V of horizon lets light through

To make them light-source and light-shape in one.

Now they swim and fade through windows of reed

And disrobe the lake of apparition.

I look and look into their vanishing

See nothing. Departing that perfect ground

I knew I had been hungry for blessing.