Beauty

An exploration of aesthetics in all its forms.

Beauty, as ritual and symbol, are as necessary to human beings as air and water. The recognition of beauty marks us as human, and gives us identity. And that is why the inquiry into the makeup of beauty, and its constituents, becomes influential. Is beauty an illusion; is it a mere commodity? Is it only a credit card receipt away? Or is it something more ethereal?

Is it substantial or insubstantial? Is it purely and only physical; is it spiritual?

In other words, are the Thomists correct or should the Manicheans take precedence? What is beauty? And how does it impact us as individuals? As members of a society? How does it impact and influence our culture? Or does our culture influence our opinion of beauty?

And of course, all these interrogatives are pertinent and important; yet the most salient question is this: how, what, when and where is beauty? In other words, what is the epistemology of beauty?

Let’s see what we can see.

“Real beauty is always both tough and fragile.” — Kathleen Norris. The Cloister Walk

“Love is intensity, that second in which the doors of time and space open just a crack.” — Octavio Paz.

If love is beauty, then it must follow, according to Octavio, that beauty is as intense as love is. So perhaps love is the intensity that opens the doors of time and space, and beauty is what slips through while the door is open. Maybe love and beauty are two different sides of the same coin, and both are extreme.

“How but in custom and in ceremony / Are innocence and beauty born?” — William Butler Yeats, A Prayer For My Daughter

So then, what is ceremony? Ceremony is ascribing ritual and secular liturgy, and thus significance, to any human endeavor, action, idea, belief, or institution. It is the recognition by like-minded persons of a common experience which demands sanctification — for the encounter is sacred for some reason. And the mere act of consecration augments the encounter with the sensation of beauty, or what humans have chosen to denominate beauty. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assert that ‘beauty’ is not simply and purely composed of the physical, but is also a way of being which might or might not include appearance.

“Innocence and beauty.” The connection between sexual desire and the desire to unite with the divine may be defined as a type or semblance of beauty. Georges Bataille defined it as eroticism. Thus, to Sade, Bataille, and Breton, the deeply erotic is beautiful. But they also took it a step further: uniting the beautiful with the divine. And that introduces death into the equation.

For ‘death’ is The Ugly, The Destroyer, according to mankind. But once it is realized that ‘death’ is now passé, that it has been countermanded by its total diminution, then death becomes erotic.

For that which is erotic is ‘amatory’ by definition. And Love Itself has set aside ‘death.’ Indeed, it has superseded it, swallowed it, passed through it to never die again. For recall that in the words of Dracula, Bram Stoker’s impious and appalling creation, “Love never dies.”

Absolute, unconditional, radical Love, which thereby precludes mankind’s most strenuous attempts, cannot die. He/She/Love, which is a plenary plenum, All, cannot become a privation — for it is exactly correct. And that which is right, in every logical, physical, spiritual, mental and emotional sense, cannot cease.

Love is the definition of Resurrection. Such Love is right and thus eternally and sublimely beautiful. Love is the infinite Pop Tart — sweet, quick and just right. Efficacy. It is, then, right to love. And love is right.

And so is beauty.