Beauty and the Beast

From Menletter May 2006

By Tim Baehr

The ache in the heart. The sudden gasp. The free-fall feeling in the pit of the stomach. How long do we go between our encounters with beauty that makes our heads spin and our stomachs do flips?

We live in an ugly world; it seems to be getting uglier and in more ways than ever. Cities cluttered with refuse. Roadsides the same. McMansions, with excessive size and bizarre architectural details, dominating old neighborhoods or rising like alien spacecraft out of pristine forests. Tract housing stripped of hills and trees. Strip malls. Big-box stores. Acres of blacktop. Noise, noise, noise everywhere. Even deep in the country, the incessant hiss of tires on nearby Interstates. Except in the remotest areas, skies so washed out by light pollution that we can see Orion, the Big and Little Dippers, and not much else. Bland, tasteless food from agribusiness farming or fast-food emporiums.

It's as if some beast has taken over and is taking delight in torturing us.

In many ways, we are the beast, or at least collaborating with it. It's easy to allow ourselves to become numb, to close off, to cocoon ourselves at home or not look or listen too hard when we're out and about. Many of us have fallen asleep because it seems the only reasonable thing to do.

Waking Up

What happens if we wake up? Should we start campaigns to clean up our cities and roadsides? Bomb the strip malls and McMansions? Outlaw city and suburban streetlights? Ban Interstate traffic on alternate days? Move to the deepest exurbs and wait for "civilization" to spread out to us so we can move again?

I think there's another kind of waking up. Although we may feel a duty to do something in the social and political spheres about ugliness, we also owe it to ourselves to wake up to beauty - to find it wherever it is - to seek it out.

Where is beauty? Philosophers, psychologists, and aesthetes have had much to say about beauty. What it boils down to for those of us who aren't writing books or PhD theses is that beauty is what stops us in our tracks. The reaction may have become unfamiliar, but we recognize it instantly. Even when the reaction isn't that dramatic, we get a sense of connection - our essence (or soul) responding to the essence of the beautiful person or object.

It's worthwhile, in making our lives as happy as possible, to seek out beauty:

· A flower, bush, or tree

· A baby or young child

· A pet

· Any graceful curve: on a building, on a plant, on the breast or buttocks of a lover (or complete stranger), in the dome of the sky

· The face, voice, aroma, or touch of someone we love

· Food from a farmer's market, lovingly prepared at home

· An opera, symphony, popular song - anything that emerges from the background noise to capture our undivided attention

· A birdsong, wind chime, distant church bell

· Any beautifully or elegantly made object

· The aroma of home-made food cooking, of freshly washed skin, of crisp country air

This list could become so long that it would never end. There's plenty of beauty to be found if we go looking for it. Some things may not even be conventionally beautiful - sometimes it's how we experience things and not the things themselves.

Paying Attention

And sometimes it's not a matter of seeking out beauty. When we pay attention to things, beauty seems to find us.

William Blake said this:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

And Walt Whitman said:

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

A dictionary definition of "gaze" is "To look steadily, intently, and with fixed attention" (American Heritage Dictionary). Blake must have gazed at a grain of sand: How long did it take him to see an entire world? Whitman must have gazed at a single blade of grass: How long did it take him to see the entire cosmos?

There must be analogs to gazing for all the senses. If single words existed for these phenomena, their definitions would be something like "To listen/taste/feel/smell steadily, intently, and with fixed attention."

Have we become so used to averting our gaze from the ugly and the banal that we avert our gaze from everything? In the face of ugliness, have we stopped looking at things? Have we become so used to blocking out the constant din of civilization that we block out all sound or mask it with sounds from our iPods? Do natural odors offend us, so that we wear deodorant to block our natural smell?

Slowing Down

Our patience for paying more than passing attention to anything is severely compromised by the pace of our existence. We simply have too much to process, too many things to do in our multi-tasked world. It can take a supreme act of will to slow things down, to take even five minutes to see just one thing, to listen to just one thing, to taste just one thing, to feel just one thing.

Let's try to find just five minutes every day to just experience one thing with no distractions or interruptions. Examine a grain of sand in the palm of our hand. Observe a bird in the birdfeeder. Pet the cat. Watch a baby sleep. Taste breakfast without reading the paper and watching the morning news. Sit and listen to the birds. Stand naked in the breeze coming in the bedroom window. Watch a caterpillar. Smell the flowers in the garden or the perfume of our lover's neck. We could think of it as a re-tuning of our senses.

With a little practice, we may start taming the beast and making love to the beauty.