Only if there is beauty in us can we recognize beauty elsewhere: beauty knows beauty. In this way, beauty can be a mirror that manifests our own beauty. This has little to do with narcissism or self-absorption. To achieve a glimpse of inner beauty strengthens our sense of dignity and grace. The glimpse ennobles us; it helps awaken and refine our reverence for the intimate eternal that dwells in us. Yet the recognition of another person’s beauty can sometimes induce envy and a sense of inferiority. When we succumb to envy, we have become blind to ourselves. In the end, the truth is surprisingly ordinary – that there is beauty in every life regardless of how inauspicious, dull or hardened its surface might seem.
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HERE
F
EELING
AND
F
ORM
F
IND
B
ALANCE
THERE IS A SUBLIME COHERENCE AT THE HEART OF BEAUTY, AN order which has a lyrical simplicity. Since beauty issues from depth, this order has emerged from intense engagement with chaos, confusion and contradiction. It is a beauty that the soul has won from the heart of darkness. Such beauty cannot simply be siphoned off from chaos. Neither can it be fabricated or slipped over chaos as a benign, concealing mask. Such beauty engages in the labour and grace of the imagination. Beauty is ultimately a gift.
Sometimes the perfection of beauty can seem aloof and cold. There is the clichéd image of the man or woman who is immensely good looking. Their attraction draws others towards them. But the magnetism turns hollow if their hearts are shown to be cold or empty. Sometimes a work of art has the same style of perfection – technically accomplished, formally adept yet disappointingly void of presence. This is especially clear in a musical performance. Each note is hit immaculately, yet the fibre and tenor of the sequence remains strangely hollow. For true beauty is not merely a formal, technical order or quality in a thing. When passion of feeling and technical brilliance come together, the beauty can be devastating and transfiguring. Feeling in itself can tend towards sentimentality and often masquerade as concern when in truth it is concealed resentment or smothered anger. There is a profound balancing within beauty. Perhaps the magnetic tension of beauty issues precisely from the threshold where passionate extremes come into balance. Beauty invites refinement of feeling and thought. It calls us ever towards a greater fullness of presence.
E
LEVATED
BY THE
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RANDEUR OF A
G
REATER
H
ARMONY
KEATS SAID: ‘BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY – THAT IS ALL YE know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Keats’s famous lines concur with the medieval understanding of the Transcendentals. In both instances beauty and truth are internally linked. The search for truth is allied with the visitation of beauty. In contemporary thought, truth has become an arid and weary concept. From the practice of people’s lives, one gains a similar impression. There is a relentless search for the factual and this quest often lacks warmth or reverence. At a certain stage in our life we may wake up to the urgency of life, how short it is. Then the quest for truth becomes the ultimate project. We can often forage for years in the empty fields of self-analysis and self-improvement and sacrifice much of our real substance for specks of cold, lonesome factual truth. The wisdom of the tradition reminds us that if we choose to journey on the path of truth, it then becomes a sacred duty to walk hand in hand with beauty.
The twelfth-century Persian mystic Ibn Arabi writes of such beauty in his classic about the spiritual journey, Journey to the Lord of Power: ‘And if you do not stop . . . He reveals to you the world of formation and adornment and beauty, what is proper for the intellect to dwell upon from among the holy forms, vital breathings from beauty of form and harmony, and the overflow of languor and tenderness and mercy in all things characterized by them . . .’
There is a kindness in beauty which can inform and bless a lesser force adjacent to it. It has been shown, for instance, that when there are two harps tuned to the same frequency in a room, one a large harp and the other smaller, if a chord is struck in the bigger harp it fills and infuses the little harp with the grandeur and beauty of its resonance and brings it into tuneful harmony. Then, the little harp sounds out its own tune in its own voice. This is one of the unnoticed ways in which a child learns to become herself. Perhaps the most powerful way parents rear children is through the quality of their presence and the atmosphere that pertains in the in-between times of each day. Unconsciously, the child absorbs this and hopefully parents send out enough tuneful spirit for the child to come into harmony with her own voice. In its graciousness, beauty often touches our hearts with the grandeur and nobility of its larger resonance. In our daily lives such resonance usually eludes us. We can only awaken to it when beauty visits us. Like intimacy, beauty is reserved. It turns us towards that primal music from which all silence and language grow.
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HE
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USIC OF
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EAUTY
Because difference constitutes music . . .
Sound is . . . the rubbing of notes between two drops of water,
the breath between the note and the silence, the sound of thought.
. . . To write is to note down the music of the world.
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS
T
HE
M
USIC OF THE
E
ARTH
IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE SILENCE. BEFORE ANYTHING WAS, there was silence everywhere. As the universe was born the silence was broken in the fiery violence of becoming. As planets settled in the cold, endless night of the cosmos, silence was restored; and it was a deep and dark silence. We can imagine the cry of the first wind as it billowed against the strange curvature of new mountains and warmed over the restless, boiling oceans. In time, the earth settled and entered the adventure of its own journey. The rippling of waters and the wail of the wind were the only sounds until the arrival of the animals. Gradually the earth developed its own music. Streams gave voice to the silence of valleys. Between the mountains and the ocean, rivers ferried the long songs of landscape. In fresh spring wells the dreaming of stone mountains sounded forth. And from infinite distance the moon choreographed each sequence of tides. As the memory of the earth deepened, the wind built into a Caoineadh – a huge keening. It was as if the music of the mourning wind voiced the distilled loneliness of the earth. Who knows what presences depended on the wind in order to come to voice or how long they have waited for voice. The wind is the spirit-sound of the ancient earth.
Over hundreds of millions of years, the earth deepened its elemental music. Each note arises out of the infinite silence of the earth and falls away again into the vast stillness. The elemental conversation of the silence and the music of nature gives the earth a spirit of intimacy. There is an interesting symmetry between the silence of the earth and the silence of the human body. Just as the music of the wind and water breaks the deep silence of the earth, so the sound of the word breaks the private silence of the body. This threshold between silence and word sets the imagination free to create beauty. A world without this threshold would be a world of nightmare. An earth where noise never stopped or where clear dead silence was endless could never be a home for the mind. It is somehow consoling that at a primal level the heart of silence ripples in music and word. In terms of our theme, it is as though the deepest dream of silence is the beauty of music and word.