Mandala of Loss 5

The Threat of Beauty

In Olga Grushin’s outstanding novel “The Dream Life of Sukanov”, a well-indoctrinated soviet youth says, “Beauty is for the bourgeois.” Art that didn’t support the soviet philosophy was rejected, not just because beauty was considered frivolous or subversive but because it had power. Authoritarian systems want to harness that power only to further the aims of the state or ruler. Dave Hickey in his book “The Invisible Dragon” was the first to bring to my attention how beauty is a threat to authority because it needs no authority but its own. Beauty has the power to command attention without anyone pointing to it. Beauty engages feelings. The intensity of the feeling is a gauge of how much it matters. As G.I. Gurdjieff wrote “Feeling is the foundation of common sense.” Art develops the range and depth of feeling leaving it to the conscious mind to find words for it. Nature offers endless opportunities to see a perfect collaboration of light, wind and clouds in the sky. The healing power of sunrise at the beach for the variety of people who gather to watch has a quality of ancient spiritual homage. When authority wants to decide what has value and what doesn’t, whatever stands out in itself is a problem. Theories and analysis that try to break down a formula for beauty can never work because the response to beauty is individual and dependent on the moment. “We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought”. Alan Watts Labels and categories have multiplied in the modern world, each one making a boundary. Every label separates. Categories and definitions cannot pin down the experience of beauty. Try as they might with theories about symmetry or preference, they can’t capture the magic that happens for the brief moment that light hits the damp leaves with a sparkle that makes the heart glad. As Elaine Scarry wrote, beauty is always in the particular. Experiencing beauty is a sensation that connects us to the beautiful, drawing us out of ourselves and into creation. We love the beautiful because in that experience we love. Attention is drawn away from ourselves and into the world. The only thing that can heal the pathologies that ravage today’s collective soul is the power of love. Rarely do the artificial sensations and flash of media exhilarate like perfect moments of amazement. But technology does gives us access to a wide range of art to meet each person’s particular sense of beauty. Art unifies. Even when exposing flaws, attracting attention still pulls attention into the world of feeling, it depends on the existing connection between us as human beings that resonates and communicates. Artists that strive for beauty are stimulating the viewers best qualities, unselfish appreciation and gratitude for those moments of connection.