Editor's Introduction
As the Editor of Crossroads, I first became interested in a forum on beauty when I overheard a poet say, in a casual yet incriminating aside, "Of course, beauty is
suspect." I was provoked. Has beauty always been poetry's usual suspect, or has it only recently (in the aftermath of Modernism) become the object of literary skepticism. How have we, as poets, traversed the gamut between Keats'
tautological proclamation that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" and the confident postmodern aside, "Beauty is
suspect"? And how has a general distrust of beauty impacted both the writing and the reception of contemporary poetry?
As I began to prepare for this issue, it occurred to me that, to a certain extent, every poetic movement (and every individual poet) has had to come to grips with beauty: be it the Decadents for whom beauty was a decorative end in itself
or the Romantics whose decision to integrate railroads and factories into their poems was none other than a radical
decision about beauty. Beauty may be suspect, but perhaps
to be suspect is by definition to be the object of awareness and scrutiny. Isn't the suspect the one on whom we keep
our eye? This Spring, Crossroads presents Poets on Beauty, a forum in which five poets and critics consider the complex
relationship between beauty and truth, power, justice, excess, memory and desire.
Notes Toward Beauty
Reginald Shepherd
"I don't trust beauty anymore," I once wrote, "when will I stop believing it?" And elsewhere, "because beauty (fixed,
triumphant) isn't my friend, is it?" That is part of the truth. The other part of the truth is that without a notion of beauty, an embodiment of the possible beyond the abjections of the mundane, I would not have become a poet, would not,
perhaps, have left behind the housing projects and tenements of the Bronx in which I grew up. It is very fashionable, indeed almost de rigueur, to condemn beauty as oppressive: at worst an ideological mystification, at best a distraction from the real work. (Lenin, whom I persist in thinking a great man, couldn't listen to music for this reason: he distrusted the power it had over him, fearing it would enervate him and make him too soft to do what had to be done). And simplified, distorted notions of beauty have too often been deployed for vicious ends: the Nazi cult of Aryan beauty is the most egregious example. But for me, having grown up in a poverty I have contingently left behind—materially, though never psychically—it was not only possible to believe in the otherwhere that beauty proposed,
it was necessary.
It is common to confuse the beautiful with the merely pretty, an ornamental irrelevance, to oppose the pleasing to some more exigent or severe realm above and beyond the simply beautiful. This perspective situates beauty at the mid-point of a continuum from the pretty to the beautiful to the sublime: beauty is thus a form of mediocrity or compromise. It was Edmund Burke who first distinguished between the beautiful and the sublime as that which submits to us versus that which overwhelms us, that which could destroy us but does not. Immanuel Kant and (more recently) Jean-Franois Lyotard have elaborated on this distinction. In this view, beauty reassures and comforts: it supplies us with the already known, while the sublime crashes over us like the waves of an out-of-season hurricane. But beauty is insistent; it makes demands. It demands that we see it and acknowledge it, that we acknowledge our seeing, that we be changed by the
experience. As Rilke wrote, beauty is the beginning of
a terror that we are barely able to endure. And as Francis Bacon wrote, there is no beauty that hath not some
proportion of strangeness in it. To quote Thomas Nashe's
"A Litany in Time of Plague," a poem that embodies the beauty of annihilation, a poem whose speaker is, in part, dying of beauty:
Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen's eye.
I am sick, I must die.
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The terror that Kant equated with the sublime is synonymous with Rilke's beauty: the sublime is beauty's true face, like Zeus revealing himself to Semele in all his glory, like Yahweh whose back alone can be glimpsed by the mortal eye. Beauty burns and devours: we die to our old selves and rise reborn.
I have quoted and cited, referred and alluded, but I am still no prophet. What do I believe—and which I, and at what time? Perhaps this near-chrestomathy is evidence, however circumstantial, that beauty is not merely personal or
idiosyncratic. I have felt haunted by the beauty of men that
I did not possess and could not make mine (beauty calls to beauty, after all, though beauty also demands an audience, an audience that is presumably not beautiful: otherwise it would contemplate itself), and felt crushed by the distance between myself and what I wished to have, wished to become. I have felt both enraptured by and utterly alienated from the beauty of nature, which was other to me so fundamentally that there was no feeling of exclusion, but simply pure alterity. There was no wish, no possibility, that I could be a waterfall
plunging into a gorge, though I have felt that vertiginous urge to plummet into white water and shale. But there was, there is, a wish to preserve that moment of apprehension. This is one of the things poetry means to me: the possibility of
mediating between being and desire, of bridging alterity by articulating it. "To articulate" also means "to connect."
One way a poem begins for me is with the question, "How do these things relate to one another?" Language itself is articulation in two senses: it speaks and it connects. Liminal, nothing in itself but everything in relation, a bridge between the material and the immaterial, between image and idea,
signifier and signified, all language is conjunction, copula, commingling. The real waits in a corner, never to be spoken, but only spoken ofÉ Only connect, as E.M. Forster wrote.
I wrote once that many of my poems constitute an argument between beauty and justice, and it has long been the fashion to oppose the two, as if the falsehoods of beauty were unmasked by the unsparing eye of justice. But I believe, with Elaine Scarry and many others in what is somewhat jestingly called the Western tradition, that beauty and justice are
ultimately one, that beauty presents us with the possibility of things as they should be. In that sense beauty does embody virtue, as Plato believed, and demands of us that we embody that virtue: for who doesn't want to be beautiful, who wouldn't be beautiful if he could? The presence of beauty reminds us of its all too frequent absence, and demands that we remedy that absence to the best of our ability, if only to salve the pain of lack. In Rilke's words again, there is no part that does not see you: you must change your life. The
rightness of beauty is a form of justice: just proportion, just harmony (even in seeming cacophony and discord), the just relation of parts to the whole and the whole to the parts. In this sense beauty offers an imago of the just society.
Beauty isn't particularly good for anything, except perhaps helping one get laid, and I like the idea of its uselessness. In
a society so over-ruled by instrumental reason, to be good for nothing is perhaps simply to be good: in its inutility, beauty manifests what Kant called the kingdom of ends, a world in which people and things exist for their own sakes and not simply as the means to other ends (profit, power). In Jean-Paul Sartre's terms, beauty is the domain of the for-itself and the in-itself. Beauty is gauche and inconvenient and often embarrassing (or at least our responses to beauty are,
making us lose composure, lose our cool) and altogether
in excess of what is required, what is asked for, what is
appropriate. I dwell among these visions of excess, altogether inadequate to their demands.
Overhearing
Fanny Howe
—There is a poem by Rae Armantrout that is called "Overhearing" and the first part of it goes:
The way "The Tennessee Waltz"
is about having heard
"The Tennessee Waltz"
before:
an almost floral
nostalgia,
totally self
contained,
is what we call
beautiful.
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—Is this true?
—Is what true—the poem or its statement about beauty?
—Well, I guess the two are inseparable.
—Really? How?
—The words in the poem make the poem true insofar as anything is true.
—Hmm. I don't like that word "true."
—Neither do I. But I am having a problem finding another word for something whose
values are self-contained.
—I wonder if you realize that "The Tennessee Waltz" is both the name of a song
and of that song's subject, and that the subject only exists as a dance with
the same name. There is something illuminating about that.
—Why?
—Well, think. . . Why else does she say that self-containment is beautiful?
The truth is, it is beautiful in this case because it spirals back and back
again. It is double what it was. "The Tennessee Waltz" was beautiful to the
person who had a memory of it being beautiful when it was first played for
him and his darling. This is the way the beautiful works, through a snare of
earlier perceptions. There is no perceived beauty that isn't in a sense a
second experience of something. Like a waltz, it is learned for a whirl.
—Is this why the poem is called "Overhearing"? Because someone has to be
outside the self contained, in order for it to be self-contained?
—It's the frame around the mirror. But incidentally, do you think she means
what she is saying in the poem?
—I'm not sure. She is ironic. She says that "a floral nostalgia" is called
beautiful, and that little word makes her whole statement ironic. When you say
something is called something you are saying that it doesn't mean it is that. Necessarily.
—So her irony is a kind of uncertainty?
—Exactly, and just the opposite of true. . . except, ironically, her uncertainty
is a form of certainty. After all, she says "we" in a way that makes a huge assumption
about all of us.
—You're right, and I too am puzzled by the mix of uncertainty and certainty that
is in her poem. On the one hand, she is bewildered; on the other hand, she is making
a strong statement about what we all agree on where beauty is concerned.
—The term "floral nostalgia" seems ironic to me.
—How can you spot irony?
—It's tonal, like irritation. And maybe it is irritation rather than irony that
she is expressing—irritation at the way the beautiful is saturated in emotion and memory.
—Wait a minute. Is that because we're not allowed to say "beautiful" any more?
—It is basically against the law, it's true. . . Yet everyone uses the word
"beautiful" and often in conjunction with the word "love."
—How?
—People say, "I love it. It's beautiful." Or: "It's beautiful. I love it."
—You're right. "Love" and "beauty" are almost interchangeable. Equal in
their meaninglessness. "True" is too.
—But then why does everyone know what each one means?
—In the context of other words, each one of those
abstractions makes emotional sense.
—Emotional sense? Huh?
—Believe me, you would know what I mean if you knew what it meant.
—You mean if there were a contained bundle of references
to put it in? Words?
—I. . . um. . . er. . . Maybe we should read the rest of
the poem.
—Where is it?
Beauty and Her Rivals
Charles Altieri
In the current condition of the academy, "beauty" appears
to have attained the currency that "power" possessed in the 1980s. Indeed, the very appeal that "beauty" now has may be directly related to the cache that "power" had then. Since political and sociological approaches to the arts seem to have outlasted their welcome, it has become important to develop alternatives more closely attuned to what artists and writers think they are doing in their work, as well as to what
audiences have traditionally expected from such work. Concepts of beauty seem to meet this demand because
they focus attention on at least three basic features of the
imaginative energies articulated by writers and artists that have proved resistant to the sociological gaze. First, they remind us that art-objects have claims upon us because of what is singular and excessive in their ways of appearing. They also remind us of beliefs that attentiveness to this
singularity and excessiveness can modify our understanding of our needs and powers as subjects. Finally, thinking about beauty helps preserve a melancholy but also potentially ecstatic distance between the states that art-objects make
possible and the rhetorics we employ to interpret those states.
However beauty's conceptual promise has proven very
difficult to realize. Beauty is burdened with too much
baggage from its metaphysical childhood. Thinkers face
what may be an inescapable gulf between the abstractness
of the concept and the concreteness that it is intended to
preserve. It ought to be no surprise then that most current uses of the concept of beauty fail aesthetic objects because they are insufficiently discriminating. It is too easy to speak of beauty without looking carefully at the distinctive modes of attention, self-reflection and expression that specific objects make available. And beauty, as a concept, fails
subjects because it tends to cast the subject either as pure
perceiver or as experiencing the sense of subjective
universality that for Kant enabled beauty to be a symbol
of the moral good. Stressing beauty makes it very difficult
to specify how works and moments call audiences to the
self-reflexive enjoyment of distinctive imaginative powers
and forms of desire basic to establishing possible senses of our own capacities and commitments. Finally, if that were not enough, proponents of the beautiful as the carrier of moral force have to come to terms with two further
sociological problems. At one pole beauty-talk has a history of providing social capital, so that rather than trying to
establish what is distinctive in a given artwork's claim on
us, we are tempted to preen over what is distinctive in us
that makes us so sensitive to beauty. At the other pole
the universalizing aspect of our theorizing about beauty has the tendency to invite philosophical accounts that replace
the authority we might attribute to aesthetic experience with the authority earned by abstract arguments. As Jacques Derrida has shown brilliantly in his writings on Kant, this tendency leads us to rely on concepts and moralizing
ambitions that ultimately occlude everything that is violent
or fantastic or disruptive or amorally ecstatic in art. Because talk about beauty tends to stress only those aspects of the subject that either revel in discriminating sensibility or find justification in their proximity to moral discourses, I suspect that efforts to make artworks and art audiences into good citizens risk losing everything that makes them interesting and challenging ones. Conversely, the richer our attention to distinctive and affectively engaging particularity characteristic of strong aesthetic experience the harder it is to subsume
aesthetic to moral concerns. For then the values that stand out involve intensities and delights and excesses and even refusals of moral reasoning grounded in how individual
performative states take on definition.
I have to hope that one example will serve to indicate how deep and widespread
the problems are with contemporary claims for beauty. So I will turn to a
representative moment in Elaine Scarry's On Beauty and Being Just, which is
perhaps the boldest recent attempt to dignify beauty by
correlating it with truth and moral practice. I cannot but applaud Scarry's overall project, because she frames her
case by developing a devastating critique of efforts to reduce the arts to socio-political frameworks. But the confidence
generated by these successful critiques has substantial
drawbacks. Many of Scarry's positive assertions seem to me problematic. And, given the possibility now of fostering a criticism devoted to values immanent in artworks, it seems
to me crucial that we be very careful to get some distance from those aspects of her case that risk making talk about the arts even more vulnerable than it has been to attitudes skeptical of any kind of idealizations about the values they promulgate. Here I will concentrate on generating that
distance from two particular weaknesses in her arguments. First, Scarry's book is a very good example of the deleterious effects of beauty's metaphysical roots, since she gathers into one undivided category the beauty of natural phenomena, art-objects, persons, scientific explanations and debates,
without defining beauty or explicitly Platonizing it. The
second is a close corollary: Scarry is so eager to connect
her observations about beauty to assertions about truth
and moral goodness that she does not pay sufficient
attention to other more dynamic and less abstract ways
that the values realized in the works may in fact modify
how we live our lives.
The moment I want to examine is Scarry's treatment of
the scene in The Odyssey in which Odysseus emerges from the bushes to make himself manifest to Nausicaa. For
Scarry the scene illustrates how standing "in the presence
of beauty" produces for Odysseus a "sense of being without precedent" that in turn conveys "a sense of the 'newness'
or 'newbornness' of the entire world"1:
But if you are one of the mortals living here on earth,
three times blest are your father, your queenly mother,
three times over your brothers too. How often their hearts
must warm with joy to see you striding into the dances—
such a bloom of beauty [...]
I never laid eyes on anyone like you,
neither man nor woman [...]
I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me. Wait,
once I saw the like—in Delos, beside Apollo's altar—
the young slip of a palm-tree springing into the light.
Then, I'd sailed, you see with a great army in my wake
out on the long campaign that doomed my life to hardship.
That vision, just as I stood there gazing, rapt for hours [...]
no shaft like that had ever risen up from the earth—
so now I marvel at you, my lady: rapt, enthralled,
too struck with awe to grasp you by the knees
though pain has grounded me down.2
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Scarry wants us to see first how beauty astonishes, then
how the work of comparison manages to "magnify rather than diminish, his statement of regard for Nausicaa, letting the 'young slip of palm-tree springing into the light' clarify and verify her beauty" (23). Ultimately the passage
exemplifies three features of beauty: that it is sacred, that it
is "unprecedented" and that it is "lifesaving," at least
figuratively because all of this emerges just after Odysseus has escaped death, now to emerge into a profound sense of the possibility of being welcomed.
Scarry is no fool. She knows that Odysseus is also being "relentlessly strategic" in his effort to have Nausicaa "lead him to safety." But she is perhaps too much like an eager Nausicaa in not being sufficiently suspicious of Odysseus, and hence also in not being sufficiently attuned to what is truly distinctive and aesthetically compelling in Odysseus himself. For Scarry there is a simple choice: "Just as his hymn to beauty can be seen as an element subordinate to the larger frame of his calculation for reentering the human community, so the narrative of calculation can be seen as subordinate to the hymn of beauty" (27). And then she goes on to several pages of hymning about the importance of treating beauty not as "life-threatening" but as "life-affirming, life-giving." Yet all of this praise seems to me to miss Homer's basic
concern. Beauty is a topic invoked, but all the energy resides in the "larger frame" of Odysseus' "calculation" where we see how he puts the various topoi to work. Homer wants us to participate imaginatively in this rhetorical effulgence (not to believe it) and he wants us to appreciate how such skills are part of one possible type of heroism. Critical talk about beauty simply will not be able to characterize what seems most at stake for the author or to clarify what an audience might realize in yielding itself to those authorial labors.
I find Scarry farthest from Homer's spirit when she ignores the fact that the shipwrecked Odysseus not only refers to palms but uses the fronds to cover his private parts. The material palms do more than beauty can to help the exile
at least enter the possibility of human community. And her
decision prevents her from exploring how the double use of palms provides a framework for reading the entire passage.
If Odysseus is to get what he needs, he cannot be simply a detached appreciator of beautiful young things. He must use the rhetoric of praise to position Nausicaa so that she will be induced to lead him to her palace. Scarry understands this need, but she ignores the degree to which the need imposes demands on Odysseus that make it impossible for him to be simply an awestruck responder to beauty. Certainly Odysseus' rhetoric about the palm-tree invokes beauty's
relation to precedents. But his primary reason for introducing the precedent is not to contextualize the beauty that he sees. Rather, it is to position the person with whom he is dealing. For Odysseus the important precedent is not one involving her beauty but one characterizing his suffering. He turns back to the past because he has to get his own situation into the foreground. He has to make it clear both that his has been a life of suffering and that beneath his apparent
ignobility there rests a truly illustrious man.
I suspect that not even Nausicaa thinks that this rhetoric is more about her than it is about Odysseus' own situation, more about need than it is about beauty, and more focused on performance than on description. Scarry's academic
moralizing response to this young woman may well deny
her her own Odyssean intricacy. At the least it ignores the
difficult position in which both Nausicaa and the reader find themselves. Is she just taken in by Odysseus' discourse—one more person seduced by the desire to believe in protestations about beauty? Or does she use the openings that his brilliant rhetoric affords to pursue what seems increasingly in her
self-interest? Whichever alternative we choose, Scarry's case is in trouble. If Odysseus simply seduces Nausicaa by his rhetoric, then his assertions about beauty are in fact
manipulative. Moreover, Homer clearly does not judge him for that abuse. The text is much less interested in moralizing through Odysseus that it is in admiring him for his ability not to be bound by the finery of morality and of truth.
He has a wife to return to, a kingdom to run, and perhaps above all a character to exercise in all its amoral fullness.
If, on the other hand, Nausicaa is not seduced by Odysseus' praise but by his abilities as a rhetor (as well as by his
manhood in other respects), then we have a substantial adult exchange of values. But beauty plays a very small part in that exchange, unless one claims that it is the rhetoric that is
really beautiful. And in that case why use so abstract a term of praise when one can get much closer to the values that
the rhetoric embodies for the characters by talking about inventiveness and pointedness and responsiveness to context and an amazing ability to delight in himself even under such
trying circumstances?
There seems so much suppressed by Scarry's analysis that
I am tempted to counter her "three features about beauty" with three assertions about how the aesthetic experience of this passage requires dispositions of energies that no theory of beauty can either generate or direct. I address my case specifically to the appreciation of artworks but I think it also applies to some extent in relation to the non-artifactual
presences that Kant called "natural beauty." The first two assertions are closely linked. First, it is crucial not to be seduced by beauty's promise of self-evident satisfactions.
Full aesthetic experience of most situations requires
interpretive efforts to contextualize those satisfactions, as Homer does in his focus on Odyssean performance (and as Joyce does when he renders a responsiveness to the beauty
of Nausicaa that escapes Scarry's idealizing nets). Second, once we do stress contextualized performance, by artist
and by characters, we have a locus for the multiplicity and the many forms of excess in relation to reason that I think
art keeps possible in the face of society's constant efforts to impose standards based on versions of prudential or
normative judgment. Aesthetic experience is the provisional enactment of states of intensity made possible by how
particulars are composed.
My third assertion generalizes about the values embodied
in such performances when they are appreciated for their
particularity. Art matters because it guides us in engaging particulars under the rubric of slow time and careful
attention—to the object and to what happens to us as
audiences in the time and the imaginative space that the object composes. Such engagement does not require any
feelings of duty or desires that our actions will somehow
provide us with an improved position in some actual
marketplace. We respond most fully to Homer's Nausicaa passage when we allow ourselves to explore as possible
idealizations of human possibilities the ways that the agents perform and display their own powers in relation to the
discourse of beauty. For the time of our reading, moral
judgment seems a disturbingly dull instrument when
compared with Odysseus' brilliantly condensed exercise of
intelligence and energy.
There is then an obvious final moral to my tale. The very energies that emerge as we feel the idealizing force within
artworks have to be accepted as in constant tension with
our desires for morally satisfying reflective attitudes and the forms of motivation that they encourage. One crucial social role of aesthetic experience may be its capacity to remind us of just how ordinary we are on most of the occasions when we have to decide what judgments can be defended in the public sphere. Moral thinking must always go in fear of
virtuoso performance if it is to have force as something other than a statement of interests: too accomplished an appeal
to universals will make the particular investment seem
inordinate and hence suspicious. So there is something deeply wrongheaded about presenting the aesthetic as if it were
supplemented by the discourses linking it to the ethical and the moral. Our richest experiences of the aesthetic in fact invite us to dwell in moments where we are more interested in appreciating human powers as manifest energies than we are in judging how they might be applied in practical
circumstances. Rather than subordinate such moments to the workings of moral reflection, critics and theorists in the arts should trust the example of Odysseus. One finds one's way into the minds and bodies of a public most powerfully if one can stand before them only minimally embarrassed by having just a palm frond with which to cover one's always already rhetoricized nakedness.
The Case for Beauty
Carl Phillips
Beauty—at least when it is referred to by that name—suffers the same
treatment by too many contemporary poets (and students of poetry) as does authority
in poetry. That is, it gets dismissed as naïve, or irrelevant, or somehow on the wrong
side of the field on whose other side we are all assumed to have happily set up camp
together. But to hold that assumption is to exercise the very sort of authority that
the mysterious "they" hold suspect. It also suggests that beauty is monolithic,
one-dimensional, and finally inorganic—hence, without the capacity for evolution,
without susceptibility to time.
It is easy enough, of course, to trace this attitude in terms of history, but in the end as uninteresting as is anything that's easy. Curious only; unseductive.
About beauty, as about all other versions of abstraction (which includes the
abstraction of history), there is a general nervousness that I see as symptomatic of
an ever-increasing unwillingness to think athletically—that is, without
(as opposed to in concert with) the safer (easier) toeholds of the concrete. And that unwillingness looks sometimes sore in danger of becoming an inability, even as the merely vestigial must eventually disappear.
Equally on the rise: an unwillingness to be held accountable—to take responsibility, which is what authority requires; it forces the artist to take a stand and to reckon with such issues as intention, meaning, self, and their relationship to what Marianne Moore calls "the genuine." And since abstraction is generally conflated with authority—as,
erroneously, the concrete is not—what hope for beauty?
The authority of a plum is different from that of, say, beauty, but no less complex.
There is also the general conviction about beauty that all has been said about it; in that respect, it apparently resembles light and shadow, the body (which is becoming more and more categorized as an abstraction itself, has anyone noticed?), water and—in sudden flight—the dead: low, across itÉ The point about beauty is to see it. The point of the poem is not to say anything about beauty, but to enact the vision of it. As for statements, in a poem, about beauty: that's precisely where, if it has been successfully enacted on the page, the vision's work begins.
As the philosopher once said, "Oh well — all's either lost or
it is not," and returned to that from which he'd been distracted:
A star
A sky
A snowfield
..
The fish,
the vine — twisted,
bloomless —
whose ugliness gets
outvoted by its having
alone of its kind
survived
..
The victory that
knows to blush,
and the one that can't
..
Not as if fine distinctions mattered,
but because they do
Back home,
they baled the hay, they
roll it, here
..
Magdalene
Magdalene —
in equal parts,
"The Craven"
"She-Who-Kisses-the-Bloody-Wounds"
..
One of those perhaps
silos through which by
day the smaller carrion-birds
pass,
wanting and unimpeded
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This is my case for Beauty.
Beauty Queen
Terese Svoboda
Beauty is beholding to fashion. Classic beauty is culturally bound. The eye is all.
Every society brings forth its beauties for the Met of Time, bearing its aesthetic revolutions, its 7th chords, its tyranny
of abstractions (I know something you don't know) with a
modicum of cacophony, considering. Then collectors with their own collections and publishers with bottom-lines open their goods for the next generation to peer into, with their own agendas. Qua beauty, like ducks we are, shot or sitting.
Like the secret ingredient in Worcestershire sauce, beauty's
a great asset to art. However, the mellifluous can be
beautiful—or trite. The metrical delights with anticipation—or dulls. And beauty is sneaky. The most disturbing outpost of sound or writing can be infiltrated, even lack suggests
possibility, even chaos theory oozes beauty. Let the jailers
of beauty, those word-mincers, look out—beauty is loose among us no matter how denied. Although truth is not always beauty, the reverse is true. Truth, even relativized,
we still stop and listen to, like a melody in the twelve tone
of our everyday.
I have a dog that is beautiful and two children of absolute beauty. I know the fascination,
their Absolut intoxication. It is absolute beauty that we object to, the presence
of a scale to scale, an arbiter other than what occurs between the poem and reader, the
Beauty Queen. I myself am a sucker for meaning. This is not to say I haven't read
meaningless (on the syntactical level) poems that are beautiful, but, for me, they must
not not mean too long. For me, meaning is like water—after three days I die without it.
The longing for beauty is human. Does it comes down to simple attraction, ionic perhaps, the hushed syntax of
another human, the regularity of the heartbeat, the absence—or presence—of Jungian archetype, the bare tracks on the
page? But beauty in general is under info-duress. With so much going on, the lack of beauty around us perhaps
indicates we're not so human anymore. "The chatter of the codes," as art historian Rosiland Krauss calls this modern onslaught of more, more, more.
In the creation of beauty, the artist is often out of it, the artist is gone; a big Something Else beyond the artist makes the beauty. After weeks or years of work, beauty arrives on its own, in a huff, as if it had been kept waiting. Or it's a
conjure game, hiding where no one thinks to bet on it.
New beauty is always rejected, as in the reception of The Rites of Spring, abstract art, l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poetry. We have no ear (or eye) for this new beauty or else it has no beauty but for the mind, and the mind, craving beauty, requiring it, finds it, will find it. New beauty is discovered
as if it were a country hidden by impassable mountains, shrouded in mist that no plane dares penetrate. And when the poet arrives to announce this Shangri-La, no one speaks Shangri-Laian. (Travelers right behind him). Beauty is
blinkered (and brokered) by culture, place and time.
Old beauty, like the new, is also rejected. The ear ages, hears cliché, Frost lines so worn they're rutted. At least poetry in other languages can be retranslated. Sappho waxes eternal. Beauty waxes ephemeral.
Ugly can be good, but not beautiful. Yet beauty must have argument to survive. Unless, in this blighted postmodern world, sameness is the only opposite, a Warholian
conundrum.
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