On Beauty

Ugly Persists, but Beauty is Everywhere By Jason Gileno

"Die while you're young and still beautiful."
-Martha Graham

      Recently, I was sipping red wine at a kitchen table across from an acutely beautiful young woman, who asked me whom I considered to be "the most beautiful woman ever." I suggested "Angela", the object of anomalous desire played by actress Mena Suvari in the film American Beauty. It was a feeble attempt at humor. I admit it. From that point, our conversation waned and soon after, I found myself in a cab, mumpishly giving the driver directions to my neighborhood. Enclosed in my own sullenness and rankled by rejection, I considered the puerility of the last few minutes of our discourse.

Who is the most beautiful women ever... what an inane question! Broad and subjective to be sure, with nothing but indefinite answers. Immaterial... Unoccupied... Cryptic... Conjecture!

The cab cut through the darkness, meter climbing with my irascibility not far behind. I stared up at the moon. Full. It hung on the night the way a silver locket might hang on a black satin gown. A memory. A vestige. A picture worthy of an ornate frame. Beauty.

"[Beauty is] everywhere. You just have to be open to it."
-Alan Ball, author of American Beauty

American Beauty, a film whose plot wires are ignited by whirling infatuation, quickly became one of the most popular and controversial films of its time, stupefying critics and moviegoers alike. The film in its entirety being worthy of such acclaim is easily debatable, but the intrigue of the work lies in the through-line of the plot, which from several different perspectives, depicts the desperate want and need to seek and revive moribund beauty, in hope of countervailing the ugliness that man has created for himself in generic western suburbia.

And it is true. These are hard-featured times. Ugly are the front pages of our newspapers and oftentimes the hallways of our schools. Ugly are our streets, littered with looks of futility on the faces of the desolate homeless. Ugly are our highways and transit systems with the expressions of frustrated commuters, jockeying their way through the drooling menagerie of the peak-period corps d'armee.

"At the very core of fashionable society exists a monstrous vulgarity; the habit of judging human beings by standards having no necessary relation to their character. To be found dwelling on this vulgarity, absorbed in it, is like being found watching a suck 'n' fuck movie." -Tom Wolfe

Although ugly persists, beauty is everywhere. However, the general populace seems to be clueless in ways of recognizing it. We are unlettered in that which is true beauty, hampered by hypnotic multi-media imagery, and blinded by sight - our most obtrusive sense. With passivity and unexplored ambivalence we accept ersatz interpretations of beauty, that have been spooned to us by various unnamable sponsors and organizations, each of whom elude blame, because such an attempt to pinpoint one unidentifiable group, (such as the government or the media) would simply be an illustrious example of "scapegoating." We've encased ourselves inside an invisible bubble of ambivalence, robbing ourselves of the beauty that is everywhere, and yet we wonder why, and how we can possibly perceive a looming sadness beneath a beautiful August sun. Or why we are literally outraged while stuck in traffic, although we are in no grave hurry. We have forgotten how to recognize things beautiful.

"The origin of art is the simplicity of youth. The origin of beauty is innocence."
-Jonas Legoni

It is difficult to find an unobjectionable "positive" in the recent Kitchener, Ontario tragedy, where a young father killed his wife and four children before taking his own life. But while local parents were attempting to find their way around the ugliness of the circumjacent terror, fear, and confusion, neighborhood children came forward with an expressive symbol; a reminder that the origin of beauty is innocence:
"We made drawings and flowers with real flowers that we taped on," one boy said. "If we put real flowers, it proved that we liked them as our real friends... our best friends."

"We fly to beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The idea of beauty as waggish or whimsical is a delusion because it has far too great an impact to exist without meaning. Beauty has a softening effect, mood altering as any drug and erroneously classified as a "quality" or a "feature". But beauty has far surpassed that. Beauty is as practical as it is abstract, as agitating as it is quiescent and as salacious as it is wholesome. Beauty is the god of its own realm, and beauty is its own emotion.

The idea that it exists in the skin, on the surface, or outside of a particular body (human or otherwise), is inaccurate. The expression "beauty is only skin-deep" is bunk. Beauty is dead in the air, and it only begins to exist in the mind. It is our ability to perceive - to discern one image or instance from the next - that allows beauty the digestible element for its sustenance. Beauty is interpretation chiseled down to a fine point, and removing its significance is to kill art in all of its forms.

The 18th Century adage that suggests that beauty lies in the "eye of the beholder" is just as false, as this dictum gives us far too much credit as individuals. The human animal, it seems is flawed. The foible in our genetic make-up is that we somehow allow our perception to be steered by our eyes and controlled and/or manipulated by our compatriots. The very existence of the phenomenon known as "trends" supports this claim. Television's (curiously) popular Who Wants to be a Millionaire, recently usurped by the perverse public preoccupation towards Reality-TV-refuse, such as Survivor and Big Brother, is similar to the full-figured supermodel being forced to make way for the emaciated waif.

The individual opinion is unfortunately frail compared to the momentum of the collective. The reluctance of humans to explore their individual tastes; to exclaim, I have discovered something beautiful; to wear potato sack in place of a Gap ensemble; to quietly step through the chaos of a crowd confused by catastrophe, bearing "drawings with real flowers taped on" seldom exists. Such is the true mark of the artisan. Beauty does not lie so much in the eye of the beholder as it does in the collective eye of the society to which that beholder belongs. Indeed, we fly to (what society tells us is) beauty as an asylum from the terrors of finite nature... and we take comfort in its numbers.

"GREEN arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,
Crushed strawberries!
Come, let us feast our eyes."
-Ezra Pound, L'Art, 1910

Art, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary is "the conscious production or arrangement of sounds, colo(u)rs, forms, movements, or other elements in a manner that affects the sense of beauty, specifically the production of the beautiful..."

In North America, we do not inject enough merit into the vein of this definition nor do we give our artists the grave consideration they deserve. Certainly, once an artist has proven his or herself, (by attracting the appropriate measure of critical acclaim), we relinquish our vacuous admiration. And sometimes, if an artist achieves enough notoriety, we even aspire to be like them, both in philosophy and dress, (indeed Canadians are an outstanding group of mimics), yet, as is the case with beauty, we don't recognize our artists as artists until someone informs us that they are such.

The artist's role in the rediscovery of beauty is tremendously important. The artist is born with both a gift and a curse: the sensibility to recognize the beautiful and the restless need to explore it and display it to its potential. The artist, as portrayed in American Beauty, is a roaming videographer, seeking to discover all things beautiful. His camera filters away (most of) the outside influence, but when he attempts to explain how he has found beauty in a dead and decomposing bird, he is ridiculed and labeled a "freak." As was Beethoven, taunted and disparaged in the streets of Vienna. As was Cézanne when they allegedly attacked his canvasses with umbrellas. As was Picasso, Beckett, Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, and Canadian film maker David Cronenberg. Our society hesitates to accept any advance in the arts, and our culture is too comfortable in the existing definition of what is beautiful.

Recognizing beauty and defining it are individual tasks. "Beauty resides in proper measure and proper size of parts that fit", said Plato. (Beauty is) "a pleasure arising from outline, color, motion, and grouping", said Emerson. But throughout the years, beauty has found itself victim to a strict paradigm, that being the "concept of beauty. This concept, or what Plato calls "the beautiful itself" provides us with a standard, against which, we may measure objects for their individual quality of beauty. Plato's concept is what we now refer to as idealism.

There is an unwritten (yet often spoken) law that shelters, by means of euphemism, those things that exist with parts that don't fit into Plato's category of "proper measure" and "proper form". The paradox? Violate this law and risk being pronounced superficial, dull-witted and socially unpolished; live within it and confine yourself to constructs of beauty that are pre-conceived and ill defined.

What came first, "fashionable society" or the concept of idealism? Whatever it was, reactively, our society has developed a need to suppress our predilection towards things beautiful. We might label something as ugly: a dead tree, a unique face or even a portion of our own body. But that element is ugly only because we compare it to what we consider to be "the ideal." And in our culture, the ideal is not only preconceived (by us), but also contrived (by someone else). We don't even allow ourselves the right to define our own ideal.

"Society expunges the significance of beauty; the artists bring it back."
-Jonas Legoni

Only a few weeks have elapsed since that wine-sipping episode left me contemplating the moon and the omnipresence and significance of beauty. Plato might have summed up the encounter by simply stating that every glass of red wine is merely an imperfect imprint of a single ideal glass. Here Plato speaks idly for the masses; those who need a corporeal archetype to measure themselves against. This is not to deny the existence of the ideal, but to challenge how our culture defines and consequently perceives it. A plea to show appreciation to those who consistently seek, challenge and redefine the ideal. This is how we define our artists and such is the rediscovery of beauty.