Anam Cara

2

W

HERE

D

OES

B

EAUTY

D

WELL

?

T

HE

A

FFECTION OF THE

E

ARTH FOR

U

S

Listen. Put on morning.

Waken into falling light.

W.S. GRAHAM, ‘Listen. Put on Morning’

THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH IS THE FIRST BEAUTY. MILLIONS OF years before us the earth lived in wild elegance. Landscape is the first-born of creation. Sculpted with huge patience over millennia, landscape has enormous diversity of shape, presence and memory. There is poignancy in beholding the beauty of landscape: often it feels as though it has been waiting for centuries for the recognition and witness of the human eye. In the ninth Duino Elegy, Rilke says:

Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window . . .

To say them more intensely than the Things themselves

Ever dreamed of existing.

How can we ever know the difference we make to the soul of the earth? Where the infinite stillness of the earth meets the passion of the human eye, invisible depths strain towards the mirror of the name. In the word, the earth breaks silence. It has waited a long time for the word. Concealed beneath familiarity and silence, the earth holds back and it never occurs to us to wonder how the earth sees us. Is it not possible that a place could have huge affection for those who dwell there? Perhaps your place loves having you there. It misses you when you are away and in its secret way rejoices when you return. Could it be possible that a landscape might have a deep friendship with you? That it could sense your presence and feel the care you extend towards it? Perhaps your favourite place feels proud of you. We tend to think of death as a return to clay, a victory for nature. But maybe it is the converse: that when you die, your native place will fill with sorrow. It will miss your voice, your breath and the bright waves of your thought, how you walked through the light and brought news of other places. When the funeral cortège passes the home of the departed person, is it the home that is getting one last chance to say farewell to its beloved resident or is it the deceased getting one last look at the home? Or is it both? Perhaps each day our lives undertake unknown tasks on behalf of the silent mind and vast soul of nature. During its millions of years of presence perhaps it was also waiting for us, for our eyes and our words. Each of us is a secret envoi of the earth.

We were once enwombed in the earth and the silence of the body remembers that dark, inner longing. Fashioned from clay, we carry the memory of the earth. Ancient, forgotten things stir within our hearts, memories from the time before the mind was born. Within us are depths that keep watch. These are depths that no words can trawl or light unriddle. Our neon times have neglected and evaded the depth-kingdoms of interiority in favour of the ghost realms of cyberspace. Our world becomes reduced to intense but transient foreground. We have unlearned the patience and attention of lingering at the thresholds where the unknown awaits us. We have become haunted pilgrims addicted to distraction and driven by the speed and colour of images.

I

N

W

ILD

P

LACES

L

IGHT

I

LLUMINATES

B

EAUTY

Today images abound everywhere . . . Appearances registered,

and transmitted with lightning speed . . . used to be called

physical appearances because they belonged to solid bodies.

Now appearances are volatile.

JOHN BERGER

I LOVE THE IMAGINATION OF LIGHT: HOW GRADUALLY LIGHT WILL build a mood for the eye to discover something new in a familiar mountain. This glimpse serves to deepen the presence of the mountain and remind the eye that surface can be subtle and surprising. Gathered high in silence and stillness, the mountain is loaded with memory that no mind or word can reach. Light never shows the same mountain twice. Only the blindness of habit convinces us that we continue to live in the same place, that we see the same landscape. In truth, no place ever remains the same because light has no mind for repetition; it adores difference. Through its illuminations, it strives to suggest the silent depths that hide in the dark.

Light is always more fragile at a threshold. An island is an edged place, a tense threshold between ocean and sky, between land and light. The West of Ireland enjoys magnificent light. The collusion of cloud, rain, light and landscape is always surprising. Within the space of one morning, a whole sequence of different landscapes can appear outside the window. Now and again, the place becomes dense with darkening, then a cloud might open and a single ray of light will drench a gathering of stones to turn them into oracular presence. Or light might tease the serious face of a mountain with a crazy geometry of shadow. Some mornings it seems the dawn cannot wait to break for the light to come out and play with the stillness of this landscape. Such light offers a continual feast for the eyes. Artists have always been drawn here in search of its secrets. The landscape curves and undulates. Each place is literally distinctive, etched against light and sea with vigorous and enduring individuality. Even the most untouched, raw places hold presence. No human has ever lingered here long enough to claim or domesticate them. They rest in the sureness of their own elemental narrative. Such places are wild sanctuaries because they dwell completely within themselves and can quietly draw us into their knowing and stillness. Almost without sensing it, the mind is gradually relieved of its inner pressing. The senses become soothed and the clay part of the heart is stirred by ancient beauty.

Perhaps because they are so much themselves, wild landscapes remind us of the unsearched territories of the mind. The light over a landscape is never a simple brightness; it is mixed and muted. Clouds love to play with light. A cloud can suddenly introduce shadow and reduce a glistening field to an eerie grey space. Or alternatively, a cloud-shadow can modulate the depth of colour a hillside receives. This alternating choreography can turn hillsides purple, green or even cream, depending on how the angle of light and the cloud’s shadow conspire with each other. The visual effect is often breathtaking. Light is the great priestess of landscape. Deftly it searches out unnoticed places, corners of fields, the shadow-veils of certain bushes, the angled certainty of stones; it can slink low behind a stone wall turning the spaces between the stones into windows of gold. On a winter’s evening it can set a black tree into poignant relief. Unable to penetrate the earth, light knows how to tease suggestions of depth from surface. Where radiance falls, depths gather to the surface as to a window. The persuasions of light bring us frequent mirrors that afford us a glimpse into the mystery that dwells in us. Sometimes in the radiance, forgotten treasure glimmers through ‘earthen vessels’.

The earth is our origin and destination. The ancient rhythms of the earth have insinuated themselves into the rhythms of the human heart. The earth is not outside us; it is within: the clay from where the tree of the body grows. When we emerge from our offices, rooms and houses, we enter our natural element. We are children of the earth: people to whom the outdoors is home. Nothing can separate us from the vigour and vibrancy of this inheritance. In contrast to our frenetic, saturated lives, the earth offers a calming stillness. Movement and growth in nature takes its time. The patience of nature enjoys the ease of trust and hope. There is something in our clay nature that needs to continually experience this ancient, outer ease of the world. It helps us remember who we are and why we are here.

The beauty of the imagination is that it can discover such magnificent vastness inside a tiny space. Our culture is dominated by quantity. Even those who have plenty hunger for more and more. Everywhere around us, the reign of quantity extends and multiplies. Sadly the voyage of greed has all the urgency but no sense of destination. Desire becomes inflated and loses all sense of vision and proportion. When beauty becomes an acquisition it brings no delight. When time seemed longer and slower, the eye of the beholder had more space and distance to glimpse the beautiful. There was respect for the worlds that could be suggested by a glimpse. A striking illustration of this can be seen in the traditional cottages in the West of Ireland. These cottages were often built in the most beautiful landscapes. Yet the windows were always small. There was certainly a practical rationale behind this. There was no central heating then and there was a lot of rain and cold. Yet a small window exercised a discipline of proportion in relation to the external beauty. It never offered you the whole landscape: instead, from every angle you looked, it chose from the landscape a unique icon for your eyes. The grace of limit suggested more than your eyes could visually grasp. But times have changed. People who now build here insist on huge windows that flood the house from every side with landscape. If one inquires about the particular rhythm of the place or the patterns of light the owners often seem baffled. The total view detracts from the eye’s refinement.

T

HE

B

EAUTY OF

O

PPOSITES IN THE

L

ITURGY OF

T

WILIGHT

IN THE WEST OF IRELAND THE LAND IS GENERALLY POOR. FARMING and survival have always been difficult and people have had to work hard for a living. In winter the weather shows little mercy. The endless rain tends to darken the spirit. Yet mysteriously there is an ancient conversation between the ocean and the stone on this coastline which is mirrored in the complexity of twilight. There is great beauty in how the light takes its leave of the day. From the first blush of dawn, the day is carried everywhere by the light. Time unfolds in light. In the morning, light clears all the outside darkness and the shape of each thing emerges in the brightened emptiness. Light identifies itself completely with the voyage of a day; its transparency puts the day out in the open. There is nowhere for a day to hide; it is exposed every minute to the revelations of light. Perhaps this is why twilight appears gracious; when light abandons the day, it does not believe that it will ever return and consequently permits itself an extravagant valediction in a huge ritual of colour. The silence of twilight is striking because the flourish of the colouring has the grandeur of music.

As absolute servant, light conceals itself inside its own transparency. Yet confronted at evening by the finality of darkness, it turns on every last lamp of colour. It proclaims the eternity of each tree, stone, wave and countenance which it had accompanied during the day. At twilight the light succumbs to wonder and reveals the inner colour with which daylight had vested each object. Before the day is lost, twilight applies this huge poultice to draw out all the passion of colour. Then, all the colours finally gather into a red host which the incoming darkness receives. The heart of darkness can be neither cold nor blind, infused as it is with such lived radiance. Indeed, this is also the rhythm of that threshold at the heart of human interiority. The light of our thought is always excavating our rich inheritance of darkness. The cradle of origin whose mysteries arise with the dawn, darkness is also the secret homeland where the slow harvestings of twilight return to become woven into the subtle eternity of memory:

The messenger comes from that distant place

Beside us where we cannot remember

How unlikely it is that we are here

Keepers of interiors not our own

Strangers in whom dawn and twilight are one.

Twilight is a fascinating threshold for it is then that light finally falls away and the dark closes its grip on the world. This is a frontier of tension; it is at once beginning and end, origin and completion. Here is where two opposing forces reach towards each other to create a vital frontier filled with danger and possibility.

T

HE

S

OUL AS

T

WILIGHT

T

HRESHOLD

The beautiful can exist at the edge precisely

because it has nothing to lose and everything to give away.

FREDERICK TURNER

OUR TIME IS HUNGRY IN SPIRIT. IN SOME UNNOTICED WAY WE HAVE managed to inflict severe surgery on ourselves. We have separated soul from experience, become utterly taken up with the outside world and allowed the interior life to shrink. Like a stream that disappears underground, there remains on the surface only the slightest trickle. When we devote no time to the inner life, we lose the habit of soul. We become accustomed to keeping things at surface level. The deeper questions about who we are and what we are here for visit us less and less. If we allow time for soul, we will come to sense its dark and luminous depth. If we fail to acquaint ourselves with soul, we will remain strangers in our own lives.

When we begin to awaken to the light of soul, life takes on a new depth. The losses we have suffered, the delight and peace we have experienced, the beauty we have known, all belong together in a profound way. One of the greatest treasures in the world is a contented heart. When we befriend the twilight side of the heart, we discover a surer tranquillity where the darkness and the brightness of our lives dwell together. We gain the courage to search out where the real thresholds in life are, the vital frontiers, the parts of our life that we have not yet experienced. Beyond work, survival, relationships, even family, we become aware of our profound duty to our own life. Like the farmer in spring, we turn over a new furrow in the unlived field. We awaken our passion to live and are no longer afraid of the unknown, for even the darkest night has a core of twilight. We recover within us some of the native integrity that wild places enjoy outside. We learn to befriend our complexity and see the dance of opposition within us not as a negative or destructive thing but as an invitation to a creative adventure. The true beauty of a person glimmers like a slow twilight where the full force of each colour comes alive and yet blends with the others to create a new light. A person’s beauty is sophisticated and sacred and is far beyond image, appearance or personality.

Beauty is substance and is never present merely as a naïve apparition in the vicinity of things. She is not a ghost who dwells in the preserve of daydream to lull us away for a while from the harshness of life. Beauty is not the mistress of nostalgia or avoidance; she is not flimsy. The greatest minds of antiquity, the medieval world and of modernity were not simply indulging themselves in their portraiture of beauty. They sensed that beauty was the soul of the real. Beauty is the grandeur and elegance of experience that has come alive to its eternal depth and destiny. True beauty can emerge at the most vigorous threshold where the oppositions in life confront and engage each other. The philosopher Schopenhauer said: ‘Opposites throw light upon each other.’ Beauty does not belong exclusively to the regions of light and loveliness, cut off from the conflict and conversation of oppositions. The vigour and vitality of beauty derives precisely from the heart of difference. No life is one-sided; the life of each of us is animated by the inner conversation of forces which counter and complement each other. Beauty inhabits the cutting edge of creativity – mediating between the known and the unknown, light and darkness, masculine and feminine, visible and invisible, chaos and meaning, sound and silence, self and others.

B

EAUTY AND THE

C

ELTIC

I

MAGINATION

:

T

HE

B

ALANCE OF THE

M

IND AND THE

S

ENSES

THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH IS A CONSTANT PLAY OF LIGHT AND dark, visible and invisible. We perceive and participate in that beauty through the interplay of senses and spirit. Our senses are lanterns that illuminate the world. Beauty is never simply in the mind alone. Beauty awakens for us through what we hear, touch, taste, scent and see. The great traditions have always recognized that beauty is a mysterious presence. Beauty envelops the heart and mind. In beauty’s presence there is no longer any separation between thought and senses, between heart and soul. Indeed, the experience of beauty confirms the intricate harmony and creative tension of senses and thought. Without the senses, we could never know beauty. Without thought, beauty would seem transient and illusory.

Yet beauty is always more than the senses can perceive. While it attracts and gladdens the senses, it also raises and refines what we touch, taste, scent, hear and see. Beauty awakens the soul, yet it is never simply ethereal. Beauty offers a profound psychological and indeed mystical invitation. The dream of beauty is the self drawn forth to its furthest awakening, where the senses and the soul are utterly alive and yet in a harmony, brimming with presence. Unity such as this seldom occurs. In some instinctively creative way, Celtic thought and imagination recognized the lyrical unity that beauty effects and requires, and managed to link huge differences together within a unifying embrace. It avoided the dualism that separates soul and senses. This false division blinds us to the presence of beauty.

The Celtic Imagination often expressed spiritual insight in poetic form, as in ‘The Deer’s Cry’ from The Confession of St Patrick:

I arise today

through strength in the sky:

light of sun

moon’s reflection

dazzle of fire

speed of lightning

wild wind

deep sea

firm earth

hard rock.

I arise today

With God’s strength to pilot me:

God’s might to uphold me

God’s wisdom to guide me

God’s eye to look ahead for me

God’s ear to hear me

God’s word to speak for me

God’s hand to defend me

God’s way to lie before me

God’s shield to protect me

God’s host to safeguard me.

(translated by John Skinner)

For the Celtic Imagination all of these images held a numinous and sacred resonance. This poem evokes the beauty of creation and the beauty of God as a single helix of presence. At its deepest level, beauty holds everything together as one pervasive presence. Nature and self have beauty because they participate in and express the presence of the one who is beautiful to know, the one whose fiery passion creates, sustains and welcomes everything. The incantatory ‘I arise’ brings out the mystery of awakening. The self does not awaken to find itself trapped in an isolated subjectivity, rather it awakens to ultimate participation; it is a living threshold between nature and divinity, a presence that is wild, free, diverse and indivisible.

There is a wonderful passage in St Bernard of Clairvaux in which interior beauty illuminates the sensuousness of human presence:

when the brightness of beauty has replenished to overflowing the recesses of the heart, it is necessary that it should emerge into the open, just like the light hidden under a bushel: a light shining in the dark is not trying to conceal itself. The body is an image of the mind, which, like an effulgent light scattering forth its rays, is diffused through its limbs and senses, shining through in action, discourse, appearance, movement – even in laughter, if it is completely sincere and tinged with gravity.

This is a touching and passionate image of beauty filling up the heart and then overflowing to render body, language, gesture and laughter radiant. The mind and the senses unite in the experience of beauty.

T

HE

T

HOUGHT

O

F

B

EAUTY

A

ND

T

HE

B

EAUTY

O

F

T

HOUGHT

WHILE THE BEAUTY OF NATURE AWAKENS AND FILLS OUR SENSES, the Eros of the human mind always desires to make a deeper voyage and explore the forms in which beauty dwells among us. It is one of the lovely ironies that our thinking about beauty has also revealed much about the beauty of thought itself. Thought is an amazing thing: it can be a mirror, a lens, a bridge, a wall, a window, a ladder or a house. There is nothing in the world that has the cutting edge of a new thought. It is fascinating to watch the clearance it can make and the new life it can bring. Often, without knowing it, we are waiting for a new idea to come and cut us free from our entanglement. When the idea is true and the space is ready for it, the idea overtakes everything. With grace-like swiftness, it descends and claims recognition; it cannot be returned or reversed. It becomes more forceful than any single action could be. Indeed, it becomes the mother of a whole sequence of new feeling, thinking and action. Though we live mostly in the visible world and our personalities, roles and work distinguish and identify us externally, we dwell more forcefully elsewhere. A person can dwell inside a thought. Sometimes a thought is the most intimate and sacred temple, a place where the silence of the earth is wed to the fire of heaven.

Many of the most intimate presences in our lives dwell within us in the form of thoughts. Though you might live with the one you love, he remains only physically adjacent to you; however, the thought of him can enter into the centre of you and become as intimate to you as yourself. In one of his poems, Rumi explores the approach and encounter of two lovers but then concludes: ‘We were inside each other all along.’ The suggestion is that ‘being inside each other’ is what brought them together outwardly in the first place. The converse is also true: when a relationship between two people dies, they stop being inside each other though they may still live side by side. The same is true of family, friends and God: all enter us and remain with us through thought. Thought is more penetrating than light, it can travel further inwards to create an intimate world within the mind. This is at once the terror and the beauty of thought. Indeed, beauty itself can enter us as thought. In his poem ‘The Arrow’, Yeats says:

I thought of your beauty, and this arrow

Made out of a wild thought, is in my marrow.

A prophetic thought claims its own future; it awakens, disturbs and brings transformation. Such a thought is a gift of the imagination. It is not an abstract ghostly cipher. In such a thought, spirit and sensuousness cross at the frontier of their richest tension and exposure. A great thought is a sense–spirit object. It takes on a life of its own. We are familiar in our history with certain frontiers where such thoughts awakened. At a personal level, each of us is aware of certain threshold times in the lives of our hearts when such thoughts arrived and changed everything.

B

EAUTY

A

S

T

HE

P

ERFECTION

O

F

T

HINGS:

T

HE

M

EDIEVAL

V

ISION

BEAUTY EMERGED EARLY IN HUMAN REFLECTION AND HAS BEEN the inspiration and passion at the heart of human creativity ever since. Some of the most profound reflection on beauty was developed during medieval times. The secret dream of thought is to enfold everything within the contour of the idea. This is the Eros of thought: to desire everything. It wants to leave nothing out. Thought is curious and is driven by the desire to know. It wants to draw aside the veils of illusion and see what reality conceals. Words, images and ideas are its instruments of illumination.

Yet each individual who thinks is limited and confined within his own mind. The poignancy of thought is that it can never bridge the distance between the self and the world. The medieval mind filled in that interim distance with the interesting presence of the five Transcendentals: Being, the One, the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Being is the deepest reality, the substance of our world and all the things in it; the opposite would be Nothingness, the things that are not. The One claims that all things are somehow bound together in an all-embracing unity: despite all the differences in us, around us and between us, everything ultimately holds together as one; chaos does not have the final word. The True claims that reality is true and our experience is real and our actions endeavour to come into alignment with the truth. The Good suggests that in practising goodness we participate in the soul of the world. The fifth is the Beautiful.

Every act of thinking, mostly without our realizing it, is secretly grounded in these presences. If the One, the True, Being, the Good and the Beautiful were to vanish, the thought in the mind would have no pathway out to the world. Put simply, these presences guarantee our sense of meaning and sustain the sense of order, truth, presence, goodness and beauty in our world. For the medieval mind beauty was a central presence at the heart of the real. Without beauty the search for truth, the desire for goodness and the love of order and unity would be sterile exploits. Beauty brings warmth, elegance and grandeur. Something in our souls longs deeply for that graciousness and delight. When we advert to the presence of beauty, the direction, rhythm and energy of our lives become different.

The medieval mind did not believe that beauty was either the result of a mental attitude that longed to see beauty or a surface presence in Nature or a product of the artistic mind. They did not believe that a human person could simply create beauty. In the medieval view reality was a series of symmetrical levels issuing from God and culminating in God’s perfection. All beauty derived ultimately from the beauty of God. Thomas Aquinas was the towering figure in the thought world of the Middle Ages. His system of thought is a magnificent architecture. In saying that beauty was a transcendental, Aquinas was claiming that beauty dwells in the depth of things. The same notion is also put memorably by Yeats in his poem ‘The Rose upon the Rood of Time’:

Come near, that no more blinded by man’s fate,

I find under the boughs of love and hate,

In all poor foolish things that live a day,

Eternal beauty wandering on her way.

Come near, come near, come near – Ah, leave me still

A little space for the rose-breath to fill!

CLARITAS:

W

HEN

T

HE

F

ORM

O

F

B

EAUTY

S

HINES

Each object is in reality a small virtual volcano.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

THE MEDIEVAL WORLD LOVED SYMBOLS. IT OFTEN PROBED THINGS so deeply to discover their supernatural reality that it ended up losing sight of the sensuous presence of the thing itself. But the thought of Aquinas is remarkable in its continuous insistence on the real, sensible presence of things. Each stone, tree, place and person was in its depths the expression of a divine idea. Consequently, each thing had a unique form. No thing is accidentally here. Nature is not dispersed chaos but a series of individual forms. The form is at once the structural principle of a thing and its essence and vital source. Aquinas had an understanding of nature and experience as dynamic, as constantly unfolding. His philosophy is a hugely intricate poetics of growth and becoming. Beauty was to be understood as the perfection of a thing. Perfection is not static or dead, it is the fullness of life which a thing possesses: this is what constitutes the adventure of knowing in the system of Aquinas. To know a thing is to awaken to its depth, complexity and presence. According to him, each thing secretly and profoundly desires to be known. Consequently, his notion of beauty is grounded in that deep knowing. This is how the beauty of a thing shines out in claritas of form. Beauty is magnetic because it calls forth a thing’s presence.

INTEGRITAS:

T

HE

D

ESTINATION

O

F

G

ROWTH

Part of what it means to be, is to be beautiful. Beauty is not

superadded to things: it is one of the springs of their reality. It is

not that which effects a luscious response in perceivers; it is the

interior geometry of things, making them perceptible as forms.

FRANCESCA ARAN MURPHY

For Aquinas beauty also included the notion of integrity, integritas. He understands that each thing is alive and on a journey to become fully itself. Integrity is achieved when there is a complete realization of whatever a thing is supposed to be. Integrity is the adequacy of a thing to itself. There is here a sense of achieved proportion between a thing and what it is called to be. Creation is always in the heave of growth and becoming and when a thing journeys towards its own perfection or fullness of life, it is also secretly journeying towards the divine likeness. The integrity of beauty is that inner straining towards goodness and completion. There is a wonderful urgency within things to realize the dream of their individual fulfilment; nothing is neutral, everything is on its way.

The light of a great thought is eternal. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of years after it dawned, it can still illuminate our world. Aquinas insisted that goodness, truth and integrity belonged essentially to beauty. In light of this, we can see that much of the current cultural breakdown can be understood as failure of vision with regard to beauty. Imagine: if the mind of the politician and developer could awaken to the ancient integrity of landscape, it would become more and more difficult to damage the beauty of nature. If architects and planners could recognize how ugly surroundings damage and diminish the mind, then building might recover a sense of beauty. If religion could put the beauty of God at its heart what refreshment and encouragement it would give and what creativity it would awaken. If the beauty of kindness were to become attractive, it would gradually create an atmosphere of compassion which would help the weak and wounded to transfigure their lives. Plato expressed this pithily: ‘The power of the good has taken refuge in the nature of the Beautiful’ (Philebus, 65A). Aquinas’s notion of beauty as the integrity and completion of a thing offers us both a wonderful lantern and a generous mirror to glimpse how we might bring the great ideas alive through our love of beauty.

Aquinas is careful not to overlook the sensuous element in the beauty of things. He says: ‘Pulchra sunt quae visa placent’, i.e. those things are beautiful which please when they are seen. He speaks of delectatio, the surge of delight and joy we feel when we experience beauty. We are taken beyond the dullness of habit and daily familiarity. Something breaks through the shell to release excitement in us. When we see beauty in sensible things, we are grasping their secret, living form. While the experience of beauty has a wonderful immediacy, it is not something that simply happens. Because the medieval mind had such a refined sense of how deeply complex even the simplest act of knowing is, experience was never understood as a sequence of non-stop epiphanies. The task of true knowing is slow and difficult; yet when pursued, it often opens us to the delight of being surprised and overtaken by beauty. This is where Aquinas speaks of the peace that beauty brings. Peace is the tranquillity that comes when order is realized. Struggle and desire are deftly subsumed in the experience of harmony.

B

EAUTY

E

VOKES

E

LEGANCE

A

ND

D

IGNITY

Radiance belongs to being considered precisely as beautiful; it

is, in being, that which catches the eye, or the ear, or the mind,

and makes us want to perceive it again.

ETIENNE GILSON

THE MEDIEVAL MIND RECOGNIZED THAT WHILE WE CAN participate in beauty, we can never possess it. If we attempt to own beauty, we corrupt it. When soiled or damaged, beauty can turn negative and destructive. It is ultimately a sacred manifestation and should not be trespassed on by our lower hungers. In the presence of beauty, we are called to be gracious and worthy.

Beauty makes presence shine. It brings out elegance and dignity and has a confidence, an effortlessness that is not laboured or forced. This fluency and ease of presence is ultimately rooted below the surface in surer depths. In a sense, the question of beauty is about a way of looking at things. It is everywhere, and everything has beauty; it is merely a matter of discovering it. The most profound statement that can be made about something is the statement that ‘it is’. Beauty is. The word is is the most magical word. It is a short, inconsequential little word and does not even sound special. Yet the word is is the greatest hymn to the ‘thereness’ of things. We are so thoroughly entangled in the web of the world that we are blind to the unfolding world being there before us. Our sleep of unknowing is often disturbed by suffering. Abruptly we awaken to the devastating realization that the givenness of things is utterly tenuous. Even mountains hang on strings. The ‘isness’ of things is miraculous: that there is something rather than nothing.

‘B

EING

H

ERE

I

S

S

O

M

UCH

’

THE HUMAN MIND IS IN ITSELF A WORLD WITH HUGE MOUNTAINS, deep valleys and forests of the unknown. Given the private depths, deep strangeness and wonders of our interior life, it is amazing that we can reach out towards the world and to each other with such intimacy and understanding. More amazing still is our ability to make everything so familiar and normal that we actually succeed in forgetting how strange and wondrous it is to be here. Rilke said: ‘Being here is so much.’ We turn the mystery and strangeness of this world into our private territory. We make a home out of the world. Life becomes predictable and we function automatically within our frames: route to work, colleagues, friends, patterns of thinking and feeling, the faces of the family, etc. Without sensing it, we become lost inside the automatic traffic of functioning. It is only when something goes wrong that we are hauled back to the edge. Quite abruptly the familiar map has melted and territories that were sure ground an hour ago don’t exist any more. Heidegger said that it is only when a hammer does not work that you suddenly realize that it is a hammer.

It is tragic that something has to go wrong before we can realize the gift of the world and our lives, gifts we could never have dreamed or earned. When something goes deeply wrong, the realization it forces is inevitably learned at the grave of loss. If we were able to live in a deeper state of awareness and wisdom, our days on earth would find a new frequency: spaces would open naturally for beauty to touch us and we need beauty as deeply as we need love. Beauty is not an extra luxury, an accidental experience that we happen to have if we are lucky. Beauty dwells at the heart of life. If we can free ourselves from our robot-like habits of predictability, repetition and function, we begin to walk differently on the earth. We come to dwell more in the truth of beauty. Ontologically, beauty is the secret sound of the deepest thereness of things. To recognize and celebrate beauty is to recognize the ultimate sacredness of experience, to glimpse the subtle embrace of belonging where we are wed to the divine, the beauty of every moment, of every thing.

Beauty loves freedom; then it is no surprise that we engage beauty through the imagination. The imagination always goes beyond the frames and cages of the expected and predictable. The imagination loves possibility and freedom is the ether where possibility lives. Uncharted territories are always beckoning. Beauty is at home in this realm of the invisible, the unexpected and the unknown. It emerges from its own depths, sure in poise and generous in possibility. Yet there is a certain disturbance in the call of beauty, a displacement. As T.S. Eliot says in ‘Journey of the Magi’: we can no longer be at ease in the old dispensation. We are forced to recognize something new, something that shows up the limitations we have accepted and our subtle but deadening compromises. Beauty calls us beyond ourselves and it encourages us to engage the dream that dwells in the soul.

One time in Atlanta, Georgia, I noticed the constant presence of a certain weed by the roadside. I asked what its name was. I was told that it was the ‘kudzu’ weed which could grow a foot long in a day. When I returned home and reflected on my trip, the kudzu struck me as a precise metaphor for consumerism. Most of us move now in such a thicket of excess that we can no longer make out the real contours of things. Where there is entanglement, there is no perspective or clarity to make out the true identity of anything. We need to make a clearance in order to begin to see where we are and who we are; then we can discover true proportion. And without a sense of proportion, we cannot recognize beauty.

T

HE

L

EGEND

O

F

T

HE

GLAS GABHNA

IT IS INCREDIBLE HOW BLINDNESS AND HABIT HAVE DULLED OUR minds. We live in the midst of abundance and feel like paupers. Our lonely emptiness seems to be the result of our desire to turn everything into product. Only if it becomes a product does a thing become real. Like the surrealistic sculptures of Jean Tinguely, we reduce beauty to contorted shapes that bring us neither shelter nor invitation.

Yet the world we have inherited is teeming with possibilities. If we could but see it, each moment offers us a richness which invites our care and graciousness. There is an old story from County Clare about the Glas Gabhna. In the mountains near Carron, there lived a smith who had a magical cow. When she was milked, she could fill any vessel. The smith knew how valuable she was. He had seven sons and one of them always ‘stood to her’, or in other words watched over her. Over a long period of time, she gave an endless supply of milk. Even today one can see in that landscape certain bare patches where nothing grows. These were the places the cow was said to have lain down. Her fame and magic spread everywhere. One day, while on his watch, one of the sons fatally fell asleep. An old woman came by and saw the magical cow unguarded. She had a sieve with her and she began to milk the cow into the sieve. She milked and milked. The milk flowed endlessly onto the earth until the cow fell down. When the son awoke, he saw the ground white with milk beneath the fallen cow. He went to call help. When the father and sons returned, the cow had gone away. She was never heard of again. Then some time after she had departed, seven streams broke forth from the spot where she had been milked. These are to be seen there today, the Seven Streams of Taosca.

This legend perfectly highlights what can happen when we abuse the sacrament of abundance, we drive away graciousness. The generosity of the cow was unfailing, she would fill any vessel. In terms of abundance, we could read the vessel as the form which receives the gift. Once the form becomes false and manipulative, the gift is destroyed. It would be lovely were we more awake to our gifts: we could engage them with a form proportionate to their generosity. Sadly, much of our inner riches are wasted and lost; perhaps we remain scattered and empty because we tend to use the ‘sieve’ rather than the ‘vessel’. Greed damages what it desires and the gift of abundance always tests us. It invites us to a sense of proportion in how we see, feel and act. Without proportion, there is no balance, and the force of imbalance ultimately brings destruction. Since classical times, it has always been recognized that beauty demands proportion and balance. When they are neglected, beauty and graciousness recede and the flow of gifts dries up. When we dwell in graciousness, we are never without the gifts we need; there is plenitude and abundance. Graciousness dignifies human presence and when it is present, it brings out the best in people. It opens a perspective which enables us to see the gifts that we have. It creates an atmosphere which awakens nobility of mind and heart. A gracious mind has compassion and sensitive understanding. It is without greed; rather than concentrating on what is absent or missing, it is able to celebrate and give thanks for what is present.

T

O

W

ALK

G

RACIOUSLY

T

HROUGH

L

IFE

To think that we have at our disposal the biggest thing in the

universe, and that it is language. What one can do with

language is . . . infinite.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

GRACIOUSNESS IS A QUALITY OF MIND THAT DOES NOT SEPARATE truth and beauty. Talk of truth always makes it sound as if truth were the cardinal virtue. Yet without beauty, truth becomes blind and can be turned into a blunt and heartless imperative. When we hold beauty and truth together, truth will always have a sense of compassion and gentleness. Sometimes the so-called ‘facts of a situation’ actually tell us little or nothing about the heart of an experience. Only in the light of beauty can we come to see what is really present. This is true also of the way in which we view our own life. If we were to describe our life strictly in terms of its factual truth, most of its interesting, complex and surprising dimensions would remain unmentioned. The gracious eye can find the corners where growth and healing are at work even when we feel weak and limited. It is no wonder that Jesus said: the gentle shall inherit the earth. When we succeed in being gracious and gentle with ourselves and others, we begin to truly inherit the inner kingdom.

In his book Crossing Unmarked Snow, William Stafford has the following inspiring sentences, according to which one could live an honourable life:

The things you do not have to say make you rich.

Saying things you do not have to say weakens your talk.

Hearing things you do not need to hear dulls your hearing.

And things you know before you hear them – those are you,

Those are why you are in the world.

We are not as near each other as we would like to imagine. Words create the bridges between us. Without them we would be lost islands. Affection, recognition and understanding travel across these fragile bridges and enable us to discover each other and awaken friendship and intimacy. Words are never just words. The range and depth of a person’s soul is inevitably revealed in the quality of the words she uses. When chosen with reverence and care, words not only describe what they say but also suggest what can never be said.

Bill Stafford suggests that these things which dwell out of reach, beyond words, are the things that make the soul rich. The in-expressible depth in us is our true treasure. In our endless social chatter and psychological labelling, we frequently cheapen its beauty. We need to learn the art of inner reverence and never force the soul out into the false light of social gratification and expectation. To observe an appropriate silence regarding our interiority means our talk will never be weak. In a culture where there is a morass of second-hand chatter, we need to mind our hearing; otherwise it becomes dull and deaf to the voice of what is real and beautiful. To practise the discipline of reverence which Bill Stafford recommends means that we remain always secretly ready to receive the words that could illuminate our destiny.

B

EAUTY

A

VOIDS

THE

S

IREN

C

ALL

OF THE

O

BVIOUS

A beautiful thing, though simple in its immediate presence,

always gives us a sense of depth below depth, almost an

innocent wild vertigo as one falls through its levels.

FREDERICK TURNER

THE EXPERIENCE OF BEAUTY HAS FOR THE MOST PART A particular force. It envelops and overcomes us. Yet there are times when beauty reveals itself slowly. There are times when beauty is shy and hesitates until it can trust the worthiness of the beholder. Human culture seems to build its temples of meaning in the wrong places, in the garish marketplaces of transient fashion and public image. Beauty tends to avoid the siren call of the obvious. Away from the blatant centre, it prefers the neglected margin. Beyond the traffic of voyeuristic seeing, beauty waits until the patience and depth of a gaze are refined enough to engage and discover it. In this sense, beauty is not a quality externally present in something. It emerges at that threshold where reverence of mind engages the subtle presence of the other person, place or object. The hidden heart of beauty offers itself only when it is approached in a rhythm worthy of its trust and showing.

Only if there is beauty in us can we recognize beauty elsewhere: beauty knows beauty. In this way, beauty can be a mirror that manifests our own beauty. This has little to do with narcissism or self-absorption. To achieve a glimpse of inner beauty strengthens our sense of dignity and grace. The glimpse ennobles us; it helps awaken and refine our reverence for the intimate eternal that dwells in us. Yet the recognition of another person’s beauty can sometimes induce envy and a sense of inferiority. When we succumb to envy, we have become blind to ourselves. In the end, the truth is surprisingly ordinary – that there is beauty in every life regardless of how inauspicious, dull or hardened its surface might seem.

W

HERE

F

EELING

AND

F

ORM

F

IND

B

ALANCE

THERE IS A SUBLIME COHERENCE AT THE HEART OF BEAUTY, AN order which has a lyrical simplicity. Since beauty issues from depth, this order has emerged from intense engagement with chaos, confusion and contradiction. It is a beauty that the soul has won from the heart of darkness. Such beauty cannot simply be siphoned off from chaos. Neither can it be fabricated or slipped over chaos as a benign, concealing mask. Such beauty engages in the labour and grace of the imagination. Beauty is ultimately a gift.

Sometimes the perfection of beauty can seem aloof and cold. There is the clichéd image of the man or woman who is immensely good looking. Their attraction draws others towards them. But the magnetism turns hollow if their hearts are shown to be cold or empty. Sometimes a work of art has the same style of perfection – technically accomplished, formally adept yet disappointingly void of presence. This is especially clear in a musical performance. Each note is hit immaculately, yet the fibre and tenor of the sequence remains strangely hollow. For true beauty is not merely a formal, technical order or quality in a thing. When passion of feeling and technical brilliance come together, the beauty can be devastating and transfiguring. Feeling in itself can tend towards sentimentality and often masquerade as concern when in truth it is concealed resentment or smothered anger. There is a profound balancing within beauty. Perhaps the magnetic tension of beauty issues precisely from the threshold where passionate extremes come into balance. Beauty invites refinement of feeling and thought. It calls us ever towards a greater fullness of presence.

E

LEVATED

BY THE

G

RANDEUR OF A

G

REATER

H

ARMONY

KEATS SAID: ‘BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY – THAT IS ALL YE know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Keats’s famous lines concur with the medieval understanding of the Transcendentals. In both instances beauty and truth are internally linked. The search for truth is allied with the visitation of beauty. In contemporary thought, truth has become an arid and weary concept. From the practice of people’s lives, one gains a similar impression. There is a relentless search for the factual and this quest often lacks warmth or reverence. At a certain stage in our life we may wake up to the urgency of life, how short it is. Then the quest for truth becomes the ultimate project. We can often forage for years in the empty fields of self-analysis and self-improvement and sacrifice much of our real substance for specks of cold, lonesome factual truth. The wisdom of the tradition reminds us that if we choose to journey on the path of truth, it then becomes a sacred duty to walk hand in hand with beauty.

The twelfth-century Persian mystic Ibn Arabi writes of such beauty in his classic about the spiritual journey, Journey to the Lord of Power: ‘And if you do not stop . . . He reveals to you the world of formation and adornment and beauty, what is proper for the intellect to dwell upon from among the holy forms, vital breathings from beauty of form and harmony, and the overflow of languor and tenderness and mercy in all things characterized by them . . .’

There is a kindness in beauty which can inform and bless a lesser force adjacent to it. It has been shown, for instance, that when there are two harps tuned to the same frequency in a room, one a large harp and the other smaller, if a chord is struck in the bigger harp it fills and infuses the little harp with the grandeur and beauty of its resonance and brings it into tuneful harmony. Then, the little harp sounds out its own tune in its own voice. This is one of the unnoticed ways in which a child learns to become herself. Perhaps the most powerful way parents rear children is through the quality of their presence and the atmosphere that pertains in the in-between times of each day. Unconsciously, the child absorbs this and hopefully parents send out enough tuneful spirit for the child to come into harmony with her own voice. In its graciousness, beauty often touches our hearts with the grandeur and nobility of its larger resonance. In our daily lives such resonance usually eludes us. We can only awaken to it when beauty visits us. Like intimacy, beauty is reserved. It turns us towards that primal music from which all silence and language grow.