T
HE
D
ARKER
B
EAUTY
D
AWNS
M
ORE
S
LOWLY
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light,
but by making the darkness conscious.
CARL JUNG
BECAUSE YOU ARE OPAQUE TO YOURSELF, YOU ARE NEVER FINISHED with yourself: this is the quest for meaning. You never own yourself and stand constantly at new frontiers wondering what lies beyond. There is a beauty in discovery that deeply satisfies us. When you discover something new about yourself, you become more grounded and free. It is delightful when you find out more of your hidden light, when the radiance inside you glimmers through in new, unexpected colours. Without being narcissistic or arrogant, you are quietly nourished by the discovery of the beauty – the diversity – that dwells in you. But discovery can also be difficult. When you begin to excavate the darker beauty of your complexity, you may become startled by your own strangeness.
Framed with our own thought-world, routines and expectations, only rarely do we get a glimpse of how strange we actually are. We usually ignore and avoid the ever-present and curious strangeness that dwells in each individual. Each of us is aware at some time of our own strangeness. At night our dreams throw up peculiar shapes and figures. Sometimes even the most respectable people, the veritable pillars of society, have a fascinating night-life. They are up to things in their night-time dream-world that would not even cross their minds during the day. When they lose their grip on the day and sleep takes them, they become wild other people in their dreams. The ancient Greeks believed that the figures in our dreams were real. They left the body during the night and came out into the world to act out their stories but returned before the person awoke. When you consider where we go and who we become in dream, it is often an achievement to show up for breakfast in the morning!
Strangeness attracts the imagination. It is drawn to the fissures in behaviour where strangeness becomes visible. One of the intriguing areas here is where the failure of another person becomes the occasion for revelation of oneself. Failure becomes a ruthless mirror where the false façade of morality and values is questioned and exposed. Joseph Conrad evoked this dilemma in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and in Lord Jim. The failure of an admired character or mentor subverts the belief system of the key character. Dostoevsky also explored this theme in epic fashion in The Idiot, where a saintly figure and a criminally destructive one are locked in mutual fascination. Sometimes the tame and the strange become very attracted to each other.
Part of the beauty of the act of discovery is the integrity of its desire for wholeness. Your soul will not want to avoid or neglect the regions of your heart that do not fit the expected. When you trust yourself enough to discover and integrate your strangeness, you bestow a gift on yourself. Rather than annulling a complex part of your heart which would continue to haunt you, you have thrown your arms around yourself to embrace who you are. This is at the heart of holiness. Holiness is not complacent refuge in the glasshouse of pale pieties. To be holy is to enter the dense beauty of passionate complexity. In his classic book On the Idea of the Holy, Rudolph Otto said the experience of the holy is at once ‘tremens et fascinans’, trembling and fascination. And Edgar Allan Poe said: ‘There is no exquisite beauty without some sense of strangeness in its proportions.’
T
HE
B
EAUTY OF AN
I
DEAL
:
A C
ALL TO
Y
OUR
D
EEPEST
C
REATIVITY
For with a wound I must be cur’d.
SHAKESPEARE
WHEN YOU BECOME VULNERABLE, ANY IDEAL OR PERFECT IMAGE you may have had of yourself falls away. Many people are addicted to perfection and in their pursuit of the ideal they have no patience with vulnerability. They close off anything that might leave them open to the risk of hurt. An ideal is certainly a beautiful thing and part of the crisis in Western culture is due to the erosion of ideals. With the revelation of corruption in so many political and religious domains, our perception of ideals has become tinged with cynicism. Yet no society can endure without the sense of honour, dignity and transcendence enshrined in its set of ideals. Also in one’s individual life the sense of excellence in the ideal encourages you to realize what is best in you, to reach beyond your limitations to a level where something new and surprising emerges. Every poet would love to write the ideal poem. Though they never achieve this, sometimes it glimmers through their best work. Ironically, the very beyondness of the idea is often the touch of presence that renders the work luminous. The beauty of the ideal awakens a passion and urgency that brings out the best in the person and calls forth the dream of excellence.
The beauty of the true ideal is its hospitality towards woundedness, weakness, failure and fall-back. Yet so many people are infected with the virus of perfection. They cannot rest; they allow themselves no ease until they come close to the cleansed domain of perfection. This false notion of perfection does damage and puts their lives under a great strain. It is a wonderful day in a life when one is finally able to stand before the long, deep mirror of one’s own reflection and view oneself with appreciation, acceptance and forgiveness. On that day one breaks through the falsity of images and expectation which have blinded one to one’s spirit. One can only learn to see who one is when one learns to view oneself with the most intimate and forgiving compassion. Such a glimpse of one’s essence can utterly rejuvenate a life and enable one to find the hidden wisdom in the beauty of the flaw.
Death is the great wound in the universe; it is the ultimate vulnerability that overshadows every footstep.
9
T
HE
W
HITE
S
HADOW
:
B
EAUTY AND
D
EATH
But: for me, death is past. It has already taken place. My own. It
was at the beginning . . . Of course death also has a future for me.
But I am not expecting death. I am expecting to cross it, to spend it.
HÉLÈNE CIXOUS
T
HE
P
ATHOS OF
B
EAUTY
BEAUTY SHINES WITH A LIGHT FROM BEYOND ITSELF. LOVE IS the name of that light. At the heart of beauty must be a huge care and affection for creation, for nowhere is beauty an accidental presence. Nor is beauty simply its own end. It is not self-absorbed but points beyond itself to an embrace of belonging that holds everything together. Yet not everything is beautiful and in a broken world occasions of beauty point to possibilities of providence that lie beneath the surface fragmentation. When we endeavour to view something through the lens of beauty, it is often surprising how much more we can see.
Beauty is such an attractive and gracious force precisely because it is so close to the fractured side of experience. Beauty is the sister of all that is broken, damaged, stunted and soiled. She will not be confined in some untouchable realm where she can enjoy a one-sided perfection with no exposure to risk, doubt and pain. Beauty dwells in the palace of broken tenderness. This is where the pathos of beauty shines forth. Pathos is the poignancy that comes alive in our hearts in the presence of loss.