So, about beauty, what is it to you?
I remember back then, learning that beauty was a noun. It is a word that belongs in the same class as these other solid, definite things that are either persons, places or things.
But beauty has a unique qualifier, it is an abstract noun.
That is fitting isn’t it?
Beauty isn’t something that we can see, or touch, or hear. It is something we experience. Even more, it is part of our experience in living in this world. Something integral.
A more universal definition is this
A combination of qualities, such as shape, colour or form that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight.
Of course [as usual ha-ha], I only partly agree with this.
Many things we consider as beautiful are not things we can actually, see.
So what do we do about beauty? What part of it, what about it can we hold on to?
Well, in considering beauty in this post, I want to talk about this amazing album that I listened to, and that I have kept listening to since the first time I heard it almost five years ago.
Maybe through it I can answer that question of what beauty is, or what to do about it at least.
BEAUTY, AS IT IS…
Correspondence {a fiction] is a spoken word album by Levi the Poet. An artist I found very incidentally years ago on Youtube.
Spoken word poetry.
And prior to finding it, I did not even know you could do something called a spoken word album.
But there it was, existing.
It has twelve tracks. And they all weave into one another telling a story about a boy and a girl.
It is in many ways a simple love story, a tragic one like Romeo and Juliet.
It is interesting however that, while it is a story about a boy and a girl who are in love, and are separated because the girl had to go on a voyage with her father, it incorporates many things into the story’s narrative. The thoughts and the emotions of the boy and the girl are what form the substance of the storytelling.
And especially the boy, where he tries to make sense of their separation, and all the hurt and longing it causes him.
It is in this pining that we begin to see where the story is woven with the bright colour of beauty, or the colours that come out uniquely when we consider beauty.
And the first time I heard [and really thought about] this album, I was forced to reconsider the plain, generic way I have related with beautiful things.
We are very lucky that we can see beautiful things, with the stark, undeniable pleasure they bring. But if you think about it, beauty has no real material function in our lives. It has no measurable value, its substance is not something that we need to survive. It is not food, or shelter or health. Yet without it, these ‘definite’ things would lose their colour, and we would be stuck only trying to survive. Not reaching for newer things, for more, for meaning in our lives.
A thing being beautiful will never not take us by surprise, never not draw us in.
This album, the boy in the story, goes further than I would have and asks; what is the point in beauty?
WHERE, DEAR READER, DOES BEAUTY RESIDE?
One thing about beauty is that at a casual glance, it is something that rests on beautiful things.
A flower, a painting, a note of music are beautiful in the sense that they wear beauty on themselves, like a cloak, or a splash of paint.
But perhaps the really difficult moments of life make us reconsider this. Those points where the things we loved, or found joy in seem so banal, so common and uninspiring. Less than what they were.
I think the boy experienced a moment like this in the story. When he was patiently waiting for the girl’s return, for her letters that would comfort him and tell him that she would be back, all would be well, soon enough.
In the story, he waits on the shore for her letters to arrive, and in that waiting, he is prodded to ask a question about the way we experience the world, one that a lot of people might not have had the right words to ask in such a moment.
He asks this question
It seems so random, asking that question.
But I think it is like taking a magnifying glass on something we take for granted. Looking at all of its parts, wondering about it.
If you really consider it, trees and everything that is constituted of matter; birds, air, me or you, the things we love, are made of tiny molecules. Made of atoms that are colourless, arranged in a specific pattern, that form things. But they are all tiny balls of matter fundamentally.
Your eye that perceives these things that are beautiful, in a real sense only detects vibrations when light strikes those objects and is reflected into your sight.
Your eye sends those vibrations up your nervous system, and then to your brain [which also happens to be made up of colourless atoms].
So at what point does beauty reside in these things. In the vibrations? The specific atoms that make up our capacity to experience these things? It is not our minds that randomly create a standard called beauty, it is something we experience, that we want to be touched by too. It is like these beautiful things reflect their colours from a source that we want to enter into, belong to.
The boy said, it has to mean something. It has to.
Beauty doesn’t just show itself to us, it makes us feel invited into that secret world where it comes from. It draws us in. We want to dance in it, be imbued into it. Yet whenever we try to grab hold of beautiful things, force them into our possession, the tender grace in them sort of, filters away. So, beauty isn’t really a thing we can just grab through objects.
THERE HAS TO BE A BETTER MEANING FOR BEAUTY
The album asks that question. And it answers it too, unambiguously.
I have always considered beauty to be the most compelling evidence of God, of an invisible God.
There are many reasons to believe God exists (and some to believe there is no god) but I have always thought that the entire concept of seeing beauty, without it pointing to a Creator, or at least something grander than what we can hold, just didn’t make sense.
There has to be an explanation for why when the experience of a beautiful thing ends; the end of a song, or a good day, or a friendship, we feel as though something we did not fully get to understand was pulled out of our grasp, right before we got to its climax.
We feel like we have been brought down to earth, down to this ordinary place the beauty in those things helped us escape for fleeting moments.
Like it were only a thing to tease us of something even better, a shadow of the real thing.
Maybe that is what the beauty in this album, in this world, is meant to do; to be a shadow of a real thing we can actually hold, something we can finally dance in, and be a part of in a different realm.
The boy echoes it in the heart-rending last track of this album. He finds out that the girl dies.
He is torn, quite obviously. But his reaction is something so bold, so hopeful. A hope that hopes beyond even death.
To the girl’s death, he admits his loneliness, and he also admits something; that he cannot reconcile the loneliness he feels with meaninglessness.
Isn’t that succinct?
The loneliness he feels can be likened with that which we feel when we are snapped back into reality, to our drab surroundings, after beholding beauty. After beholding God through those beautiful things.
And we stand in that emptiness, that drabness that echoes a meaninglessness that we try to avoid.
That maybe this silence, the banality of daily life, or of suffering and ugliness, is the real thing.
The end of the last letter the boy writes to the girl, in hopes that it will reach the girl, far on the other side of this reality we know and perceive, is something that captures the hope beauty allows us.
I don’t think beauty can ever fail us in pointing out this truth to us. Showing us that this invisible Other is here with us on this side, through all the ugliness, the plainness and confusion. And still with us onto the other side too.
Maybe that is why we were given beauty. To be reminded of this when we see it.