Beauty In A Time Of Uglification
We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.
~Mary Oliver~
I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.
~Anne Frank~
Certainly in making this statement, Anne Frank was not dismissing the reality of misery but rather insisting that we balance it with beauty. Of course, balance is tricky, and neither the young author nor any of us is likely to attain perfect balance in this regard. However, in turbulent times, which are guaranteed to become even more turbulent, the capacity and willingness to create beauty may prove not only restorative but even life-saving.
Hidden in the attic of an Amsterdam office with her Jewish family, attempting to escape apprehension by the Nazis, she had access to little that one might consider beautiful. She found comfort, however, in her cat and in her writing. In any event, she tells us to seek and savor the beauty that still remains.
Anne Frank’s contemporary, Sophie Scholl, also murdered by the Nazis, wrote “Isn't it bewildering … that everything is so beautiful, despite all the horrors that exist?”
As one travels throughout certain regions of the United States such as the Rust Belt and the South, visual indications of collapse are ubiquitous. Blight, broken windows, and a distinct absence of beauty degrade the landscape. It is not difficult to imagine rampant ugliness engulfing cities and suburbs as collapse exacerbates. Thus, our need to find and create beauty is imperative for those who wish to sustain themselves emotionally and spiritually.
Poetry, story, music, visual art, and dance are some of the tools available to us for creating beauty in the midst of brokenness. Each has the capacity to knit together within the soul and the senses those many opposites that seem irreconcilable in times of great unraveling: despair and joy; fear and tranquility; austerity and generosity; solitude and community, to name a few. The willingness to create beauty gives witness to our intention to persevere---our commitment to living life soulfully in the midst of changes that will ultimately become soul-destroying for countless individuals.
Creating beauty is reparative not only for ourselves but constitutes a generous act of healing for the community. Sharing our appreciation of beauty and resolving to co-create more, we navigate misery with the eye, ear, and heart that refuses to concede that misery is all we have left. Thus, we re-dedicate ourselves to forces more meaningful and timeless than mere physical survival.
Virginia Woolf wrote that “The beauty of the world has two edges; One of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”
Tragedy, loss, and trauma, are places where we are likely to experience the two edges of the world’s beauty. A society in decline is replete with both. What leaps forth to me from Virginia Woolf’s statement is her definition of both as “beautiful.” But how can the cutting of the heart asunder be beautiful?
Perhaps we need a new definition of beauty---one that does not confine itself to things that make us feel good. Beauty is much larger than that, and to dismiss anguish as the opposite of beauty is to dismiss its depths in preference for the superficial.
What is it about a Beethoven piano concerto, reverberating with sorrow, that leaves us in awe of its beauty? Or a wrenching painting by Van Gogh that sears the eye with the abject misery in which he lived so much of his life? Yet we are compelled to confess the beauty of his work.
Anguish, ours or that of our fellow earthlings, pulls us down into the territory of vulnerability, innocence, and imperfection that we share in our common humanity. From this well of agony, compassion is molded into the clay of our physiology. The heart is shattered and opened time and time again---if we are willing to let both joy and sorrow be our teachers.
How often beauty and trauma travel together! At one moment, a passenger in a car revels in a glorious sunset, and in the next moment, she is the victim of a fatal crash. At one moment a police officer proudly saves the life a child, and in the next moment, he is shot and killed.
Amid the horror and uglification of collapse, beauty is the affirmation of life, and dare I say, of love as well? Italian psychotherapist and philosopher, Piero Ferrfuci, in Beauty and The Soul, writes that, “Beauty plays a central role in our decision to be here. The more we can perceive beauty in our surroundings, and also inside us, the more we will feel at home and glad to exist.” As collapse intensifies, we may feel less committed to being here, which is certainly our choice as sentient beings, but creating and appreciating beauty may sustain us if we decide to persevere.
We speak of “dark humor” in which sometimes in the midst of the most distressing situations, we laugh or tell a joke. “Emotions” contains the word “motion” which implies that they are not static, compartmentalized, or inert. Thus, we cannot know when the waters of emotion will flow from one extreme to its opposite. Laughter and anguish comprise the two edges of the world’s beauty---and of our own.
Over the years one of my ultimate teachers of beauty has been the late Irish poet, John O’Donohue. I have dog-eared so many pages of his extraordinary Beauty: The Invisible Embrace, that each time I open the book, I can scarcely find my way through it because so many pages invite my attention. He speaks of “the invisible world”—a world to which all beauty calls us. “The imagination,” he says, “will often be drawn to the edges of things where the visible and invisible worlds coalesce.” That invisible world is the “something greater” to which I referred in my last post, “Collapse and Spirituality.” Beauty always rivets us to life but at the same time, seduces us to life beyond life.
At the moment, we have sanctuaries of beauty in a collapsing world, and as the unraveling exacerbates, those will disappear at least partially, if not totally. As beautiful places vanish from the landscape and are replaced by ghastly destruction as well as equally ghastly construction that is an insult to the eyes and the soul; as museums and symphonies vanish; as AI supplants poetry written by humans in moments of both anguish and ecstasy, we must acquire our own treasure-troves of beauty to sustain us through sights, sounds, and loathsome degradation that tears at the soul.
O’Donohue writes that “…the subtle touches of beauty are what enable most people to surivive…Beauty is not an extra luxury, an accidental experience that we happen to have if we are lucky. Beauty dwells at the heart of life.”
What beauty will you savor today? What beauty will you create today?
Learn more about Emergence Coaching amid collective descent at www.carolynbaker.net