On Beauty

What is beauty? Why are we so obsessed with it? I mean is it really something that can even be defined?

Sure, Merriam-Webster defines it as something that “gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit.” Fair enough. But does that definition really allow us to grab ahold of beauty, get behind the veil, get us into the neurological schema that affords us the experience of this familiar yet elusive phenomenon. 

Is it even important? It would seem to be. Our society tends to value, even aggrandize beauty. An appreciation of beauty in the world around us can bring great joy and fulfilment. But obsession with the physical appearance of faces, bodies, the scenery from the front windows of our big houses, can lead to all sorts of problematic behaviors. For instance, studies have shown that symmetrical and youthful faces are more attractive to us than asymmetrical mugs. This is good to know, I guess, but what options does it leave us if we happen to not have hit the jackpot in the cosmic lottery? Surgery, social media filters, a lifetime of disdain for those who have more pleasing features than us, or disdain for ourselves as we scrape and claw and lift and apply to put our “best face (and abs)” forward? Seems pretty stupid.

And what if you are beautiful by objective psychological standards and by subjective contemporary societal standards? What then? You’re a daylily. You never stood a chance. In some ways, in many ways, the beauty of sunsets, flowers in bloom, youthful smiles are enhanced by their ephemerality.

But so is everything else.

Or at least it should be. Can our appreciation of, or definition of beauty not be expanded? Our fixation with symmetry is observed in suburban landscaping and on Cosmo covers, but our potential to rise to another, all together loftier and less ephemeral experience of beauty is available to us through Art and Nature. Emerson knew this. Nietzsche apotheosized this. Nietzsche said, “The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.” 

How are we not more thankful for life? Or how are we not grateful for a larger percentage of life than most of us generally are on a day-to-day basis? The experience of my fingertips tapping (finding and pecking) on this keyboard is an outright miracle. The fresh fallen snow, the puffing chimneys, the cavernous winter sky. Of course. But also, the dirty week old slush, the deformed, demented, leaning, dying snowman still alive with the splendor of a day off from school, of children’s earnest hands sculpting circumstance into beauty, the leaden overcast afternoon we all complain about, the well-earned lines on an old man’s face, the shining sliver of an old woman’s hair as if audibly pronouncing the wisdom of her years. Should she cry for an inevitably lost youth and “beauty,” or exult in her current, equally miraculous form? 

The beauty of rainy days, of imperfect smiles, gnarled crooked pines is of course just as fleeting as that of the beauty queen and the ocean sunset. But the more we are able to find beauty and wonder in our surroundings, the less time is spent bemoaning “ugliness,” old age and decay. In a sense, everything, not just the “great outdoors,” is part of nature. And nature is beautiful. We do not have to create beauty. It already surrounds us. We only need to pay better attention.

To Nietzsche, perhaps the most misunderstood thinker of the last two hundred years, beauty stemmed from one’s full, genuine, fearless embrace of their own unique style of life, a courageous expression of one’s full unmitigated, unapologetic potential. F the haters, just be, just do, Nietzsche might have said from behind the mic in a punk band had he lived a century later. 

Beauty is either, an expression of God’s unparalleled consciousness made manifest, an absurdly fortunate and improbable arrangement of molecules that interact to give rise not only to individual consciousness but “pleasurably exalts” it, some sort of chemical reaction in the brain that we are biologically programed to seek or maybe more than one of these at once. It matters little to the artist. All of these options leave me astonished. And none of them preclude (in fact they may promote) an expansion of what one might call our “aesthetic lens.”

What is gained by expanding our experience of beauty? Is it even possible? I don’t know. But keep in mind, one does not need to deny their natural impulses in order to experience an aesthetic evolution. One can continue to appreciate the wonderful symmetry of architecture and follow their corporeal attractions were they take them. I am simply arguing, and I think the Buddhists, as well as Nietzsche would at least partially endorse this notion, that all human experiences of and interactions with the stimuli around us can be categorized as beautiful if the subjective filter of what Huxley called “the reducing valve of our perception” can be adjusted. Or scientifically (although I am no expert here), new neural pathways can be developed. Or from a religious perspective for God’s sake stopping cherry picking pieces of the eternal, lest you miss the majesty of the whole. 

All I am saying is, wherever you are, whatever you can turn around from these words and look at, is a goddamned (or blessed) improbable state of affairs. 

I used to get extremely irritated with all the pee spots my boxer left all over my lawn. I tried a multitude of futile plans to try to limit what I then identified as his “destruction” of the beauty of our backyard. 

Our yard looks different now. But not because Boss has passed into doggy heaven or because any of those vitamins or supplements purported to lower his nitrogen level or whatever actually work. 

In fact, there are still huge bare spots where Boss has left his mark. But when I look at those spots now, I think about him sprinting across the yard like a rabid ghazel, dozing in the sun like a furry bodhisattva, fetching the toy and standing guard over the kids. I look at the beautiful arrangement of urine art and think – life happened here. 

And life is beautiful.