I have another blog, one I don’t talk about much, and one that has very little traffic. It is called Shattered Light, and it is about photography. Mostly landscapes, sometimes human. And since this week is about aesthetics, I’m going to start with some examples. With photography you spend most of your time working with the light you have, and that ephemeral: what is beautiful at one moment is not beautiful in another.
Now beauty may relate to forms, and when it comes to people that is only in part: the person who was painted or photographed has moved on, is not the same, and the very beauty of our human form is seen in very few, when they are young.
Beauty is associated with truth and truth with beauty. For as the natural order was laid down by its creator. His mind fashioned a natural order and spectacular beauty which man gazed upon when he went out from the caves as hunter gatherers.
So in imitation of such marvelous works of beauty. Of complex fractal patterns and of various colours of beautiful wildernesses and mountains although such works are mere shadows of a substationally even more beautiful and higher order. Man sought in imitation of the divine sought to replicate or capture that beauty in his buildings. And successfully did so in the traditional society that he erected in europe, asia and the americas each with their own styles yet uniquely beautiful.
Yet now beauty has been treated with contempt and architects and painters no longer knew how to create beauty. Even luxury homes suffer from the deficit of beauty. The Right currently has the sword but the ancient samurai culture of old combined both crythathenum and sword. Let us do so as we imitate the divine genius and reflect the heavenly realm in our buildings and all the things we create.
Another form of beauty is that shown in the old, where their righteous lives are shown on their faces. But that is less about aesthetics, and more about narrative: it is the difference between the young lion and the old one who rules the pack.
We used to know this. We used to see the promise in the young, and the differentiation between those who had lived well and the dissolute was graven on their faces. Both were portrayed: both had a message: this is the result of living well, and this is the result of not doing so.
As I said, beauty comes from where form and function meet and point to a higher truth. Yet we as a society reject truth, so mere attractiveness, form and function without transcendent value, is the most we can hope to aspire to. If the reality of the age is truth is subjective, there can be no truth and no beauty.
Yet we can we can not even chase attractiveness, for we reject that there is an objective reality against which objects can be measured. If there is no objective essence to the objects we arrange our society around, there can be no objective form nor function by which to judge the attractiveness of an object.
Beyond this, our collective desire for equality destroys beauty. Beauty is better than ugliness, I’ve heard none who dispute this, but this means the beautiful is better than the ugly, which would be inequality. So, to create equality our society glorifies the ugly and denigrates the beautiful. By calling the ugly beautiful (or vice versa) we can have equality while not being able to deny the undeniable.
Well, yeah, right. The ugly is not beautiful. We do not respond to the ugly as we do to the beautiful. This is not to say that there cannot be beauty found in many things, indeed many things that are quite ugly in parts can have a sense of beauty about them.
Both the hobbies I pursue, music and photography, are as much about failure as any sense of success. I play an instrument (viola) that requires that one attend to intonation, and one change in your position or technique can and will throw everything out. Where most of the photos I take — particularly when I am learning new cameras, particularly when I am using film — fail. When things work, (and I am not showing you the failures) there is a beauty. When you see a better image, made by an artist, there is more that beauty, there is transcendence. (Which you will not find here or at Shattered Light: I am not that good). But in this work, in this effort, the mind and eye and hand and ear are trained. The false becomes apparent. One tries to reflect truth.
And in doing so, we develop technique, learn the craft of our vocation or hobby, and craft becomes elevated to something that approaches beauty. And that we call art. To deny this is to be less than human. Do not allow that to be taken from you.
Perhaps you can begin practicing this ethos by correcting the spelling and grammar errors in your posts?
Your allusion to the words of Keats, as if they are automatically true, is interesting. Multiple critics have considered these lines only weaken the poem. It has also been considered an “uneducated” conclusion, according to Arthur Quiller-Crouch.
As you mention viola playing, I can see AQC’s point: When you write of intonation (and, I presume, bow articulations, timbre, tone, projection and clarity), you are speaking of the basics. The fundamentals.
Yet as a violist you know that going beyond the rudimentary means developing phrasing, musicality and interpretation. All this requires a much more extensive palette than just “beauty.”
For example, have you played the Penderecki Concerto, or, in ork, the Threnody? (The latter was used in the film score Kubrick’s horror film “The Shining” to terrifying effect.) They are intense, transcendent works of art. They contain truth. Yet few would describe them as things of “beauty.”
I suppose I find it ironic that someone who plays the viola, an instrument whose solo repertoire is among the most experimental and least conventionally “beautiful,” would espouse such an opinion.
That blogger you quote is a philistine. ‘Beauty’ is not and has never been the sole ideal in art and architecture. Look at memento mori art, particularly of the 15th century. The representations of death and decay are not meant to beautify and exalt death, but to remind the viewer that death is final and terrifying.
I am writing this not far from the Franz Kafka museum. Kafka’s art was not ‘beautiful’ but extremely disturbing. Yet his work is truthful and honest.
One comment: it is morning and I have a job that is calling. Most people in Europe walk through cities that work: have been restored (after being destroyed 70 years ago) as they were. They see buildings from three hundred to fifteen hundred years ago every day: those buildings are used.
Where I live, the oldest buildings date from the 1860s: they are the remaining buildings from a Gold Rush. And that is considered historical.
It is when you do not walk through history that you notice it.
And… arguments about grammar and calling people names does get used. As fuel. For extensive comments in other posts.