Let The Beauty We Love Be What We Do
Our integrity depends on it
How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weight of beautiful things. — Elaine Scarry
When was the last time you saw something or someone beautiful? If you had to describe that beauty, how would you do it? Have you ever encountered a definition of beauty expansive enough to hold the world?
I’ve been thinking on beauty of late. Partly because, in my current perimenopausal state I am viscerally aware that I am, according to the culture, past my sell-by date— the age at which I was nubile and dewy and, by some people’s accounts, beautiful, though I didn’t know it then. While the culture equates beauty with youth, however, increasingly I find this conflation of beauty and prettiness limiting at best.
Beauty is fierce, as opposed to pretty or pleasing. The truth of someone, uncensored and unashamed, pushes out through their skin, shunting away everything extraneous. It is not unlike great sculptors, who talk about seeing the figure in the material and merely stripping away everything that is not that until the true form reveals itself. There is a raw, unsettling truth in beauty, the witnessing of life revealing itself.
Part of what it means to be, is to be beautiful. Beauty is not superadded to things: it is one of the springs of their reality. It is not that which effects a luscious response in perceivers; it is the interior geometry of things, making them perceptible as forms. — Francesca Aran Murphy
It is also true that the visible, tactile beauty of things and people is deeply calming. There’s a certain sense of order to it, which doesn’t necessarily equate to symmetry. It’s not as simple as proportion either, the golden ratio notwithstanding. It’s something deeper, some sense that everything about that form in and of itself, or of that form within its wider context, is exactly as it should be. That it occupies its place in space and time perfectly regardless of its state. This is how a crumbling ruin can be beautiful, a tree twisted and scoured by age exquisite, an ancient couple walking each other home gorgeous enough to twist your heart in your chest.
Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue wrote eloquently on the essential nature of beauty and how it is tied to the integrity of things. Among the many Western philosophers he referenced in Beauty: The Invisible Embrace he included 12th-century Italian priest Thomas Aquinas, writing, “For Aquinas beauty also included the notion of integrity, integritas. He understands that each thing is alive and on a journey to become fully itself. Integrity is achieved when there is a complete realization of whatever a thing is supposed to be…There is here a sense of achieved proportion between a thing and what it is called to be.”
O’Donohue was a former priest as well, and a man deeply tied to the place and land that he came from— far in the bare, western wilds of Ireland. An avid, Celtic imagination infused him, such that he saw God in everything. Rocks, ocean, plants, animals, and people were all simply various iterations of an immanent Divine. On integrity and beauty he further wrote, “Creation is always in the heave of growth and becoming and when a thing journeys towards its own perfection or fullness of life, it is also secretly journeying towards the divine likeness. The integrity of beauty is that inner straining towards goodness and completion. There is a wonderful urgency within things to realize the dream of their individual fulfillment; nothing is neutral, everything is on its way.”
O’Donohue also insisted that everyone is an artist because everyone is constantly in the process of helping create the world. So, the question of beauty is not simply one of physical appearance, but also of creating and seeking beauty around us. Which brings me to the other reason that I’ve been ruminating on beauty these days. Because I’m in a flurry of activity in my house— painting, replacing flooring, rearranging furniture, and hanging art.
For some, this might be a simple creative process, but for me, it’s more complicated. Being raised on the Quaker testimony of simplicity and stories of historical Quakers who refused bright colors or embellishments caused me to shy away from my own natural curiosity about how to balance necessity and aesthetics in a way that created a sense of harmony. I did it privately, somewhat furtively and shamefully in my own space (my childhood bedroom, my various apartments, and eventually my own home) but shied away from any notion of it as a job or, heaven forbid, a vocation. To spend money was bad enough, but to make money “simply” making an environment beautiful felt… shallow? Wasteful? Petty. Even as I yearned to do it.
Employment-wise, that ship may have sailed, but I’ve come to believe, like O’Donohue, that the desire for beauty is not only innate to me but to all humans, so I am working to allow myself this creative process without feeling shameful about it. At the same time, I’m mindful that this innate human desire— to be beautiful and surrounded by beauty— is easily coopted by our capitalist training to consume at all costs. So, I’m thankful for my Quaker grounding to the extent that it gives me a critical eye, causing me to question the deeper implications of all the choices I’m making. If I invest in something new, will it last? Is it produced sustainably? What can be repurposed that I already have, or found used and given a new life? Can I rise to the challenge of marrying my ideals, budget, ingenuity, and exuberant aesthetic to fashion a space that is vital, that breathes and inspires and extends beauty’s embrace?
It is not, certainly, going to solve any great problems of the world, this pursuit of creating beauty. But I hope that it provides a space that engenders delight, which allows me and the people that I love to gather together and feel some sense of homecoming and renewal. Because I believe that matters.
Perhaps it is obvious in the definition of beauty that I’m laying out here, but just as beauty is easily coopted by capitalism it is also often confused with other, shallower things, like attractiveness and style and glamour. A glamour, of course, being a spell to trick the eye into seeing something that is not true. One of the best writers I know who is deconstructing capitalism’s conflation of beauty and glamour, who writes with heart, critical analysis, and humor about the so-called “beauty” industry is Jessica DeFino at The Unpublishable. If this question of what beauty actually is calls to you, Jessica will aid you in discerning the answer.
The famous lines from Rumi are these:
Let the beauty we love be what we do
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground
Is it possible to “do” beauty? Is that what creating beauty means? Or is the process we call creation simply offering ourselves as a passageway through which truth reveals itself?
Author Howard Jacobson illuminates this aspect of beauty when he writes about searching for a sculpture in London (a bronze mitten, it turns out) meant to commemorate the foundlings (orphans, for us non-British folk) kept in a Bloomsbury hospital. He writes:
Pause at this mitten, however, and we can resolve the argument about beauty or the lack of it once and for all. Those who say that art need not be beautiful betray the subtleties of the modernity they embrace. Art to be art is always beautiful, but its beauty does not necessarily reside where the untutored spectator thinks it should, that’s to say in the lineaments of the work itself; it might just as readily be found in the surprises it evokes or the meaning it finds as an act of criticism or comparison, in juxtaposition or manner of display. The beauty of Tracey Emin’s mitten is that it is neither beautiful nor displayed. Like the children it commemorates, it is hidden, forgotten, easy to miss and easy to ignore. Eloquent in its silence. Mute. A foundling. But in its very throwaway coldness, warm with life.
How do you define beauty?
Oh my goodness.. finding the midpoint somewhere between Quakerism and all the sequins and sparkly eyeshadow has been the journey of a lifetime. Yes to alll these musings.