Oh...swoon

The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living. 

-Jules Henri Poincare

Found this gem at the end of a wonderful book called The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science by Robert P. Crease. 

I love, I love, I love this depiction of a scientist's passion: life proved valuable by the beauty of truth and the possibility of its discovery.

image credit: Universite Nancy 2 

A Most Beautiful Song

beauty beauty everywhere! let's all have a drink.

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."

When I read these words of Emerson I think of how there is beauty everywhere for everyone and that all we need to do is be aware of it presence.

Some questions are: How can we be more aware? Is it the same for everyone? What would be some differences? And precisely what do we gain and experience with this awareness?

citation for arctic image
citation for sunset image

Gregory

I am falling in love, and it is beautiful. 

I have connected to an exquisite soul in a darling man, and it is so so gloriously beautiful to see that the legends of love are true.

The sour fog of crushing and pining and wishing and doubting has cleared, and the words of love songs like these are so astonishingly real I feel they were written for us to sing to each other.

This clarifying quality is typical of certain beautiful, transcendent experiences. Different from those that overwhelm the mind enveloping us in vast, warm oceans of incomprehensible pleasures, these beauties are the sterling deluge of cold water from above that remind us - with physical irrefutability - of every nerve and every cell and every pulse of our being and leave us wondering how we could ever have walked and breathed and loved and learned without remembering at each instant the stuff we and everything are made of.

Without desire the world is beautiful

At the end of August 2002, This American Life did an episode about the effects of testosterone on the human body. In the first act, a man discusses how a medical condition that made his body stop producing testosterone made him see beauty in every single thing in the world.*

Everything that I identify as being me--my ambition, my interest in things, my sense of humor, the inflection in my voice--the quality of my speech even changed in the time that I was without a lot of the hormone. So, yes, the introduction of testosterone returned everything.

There were things that I find offensive about my own personality that were disconnected then, and it was nice to be without them: envy; the desire to judge itself. I approached people with a humility that I had never displayed before.

I grew up in a culture, like all of us, that divides the soul from the body and [says] that that is your singleness; that is your uniqueness; and nothing can touch that. And then I go through this experience where I have small amounts of a bodily chemical removed and then reintroduced, and it changes everything I know as my self; and it violates the sanctity of that understanding--that understanding that who you are exists independent of any other forces in the universe. And that's humbling. And it's terrifying.

When you have no testosterone, you have no desire, and when you have no desire, you don't have any content in your mind. You don't think about anything. ... I was, when I was awake, literally sitting in bed and staring at the wall with neither interest nor disinterest for three, four hours at a time. If you'd had a camera in the room, you would have thought I was comatose. I would go out, I would buy some groceries early in the morning and that would be it. My day had no content. I had no interest in even watching tv much less reading the newspaper or a book. Um, food: I didn't want my food to taste good or interesting, and when you're blessed with that lack of desire, you can eat a loaf of Wonder Bread with mayonnaise, and that will be your day. I only saw my girlfriend on weekends since she was living in New York, and I was living in Philly, so I could get away with it five days at a time. Needless to say, there was absolutely no desire.

People who are deprived of testosterone don't become Spock-like and incredibly rational. They become nonsensical because they're unable to distinguish between what is and isn't interesting and what's worth noting and what isn't.

It's very quiet at 530, 6 in the morning, and I would see a brick in a wall and I would think, "Brick in a wall," and I would see a pigeon, and I would think, "Pigeon." It's the most literal possible understanding of the world.

... Everything I saw I thought, "That is beautiful," which is odd-sounding, I know, because that sounds like the judgment of a person with passion, but it was the exact opposite. It was said--it was thought--and sometimes even said with complete dispassion--with objectivity. And you see, I was looking at absolutely everything--the most mundane sight in the world: a weed the sidewalk, and thinking, "Oh, that's beautiful." The surgery scars on peoples' knees? The bolts in the hubcaps of cars? all of it. It just seemed to have purpose, and I was like "Ah, that's beautiful."

When I think about that...the issue of God comes into the equation for me. In a way, being without testosterone brought me closer to God but not in the afternoon-talk-show sense of being, I don't know, more humane but actually thinking like God. Of course, I don't mean, thinking as God, but I mean thinking like God in an aping, superficial kind of way. He sees things as they really are. He sees you as you really are. I had this omniscient sense, when I was without testosterone, that I was seeing through the skin of things; that I was seeing things as they really were and that the objective conclusion--not the judgmental one but the objective conclusion--was, they are beautiful.

Everything is beautiful, from the bugs, to the cracks in the sidewalk, to the faces of other people, and it was automatic. Perhaps to see things objectively is to see them, all of them, as beautiful, [laughs] but in the most--you have to understand that the thought was expressed in the most flatline, boring way possible, "Oh yeah, that's beautiful, 's beautiful."

You would think that this would be a terrible thing, a terrible state to be in and for most people it is, but it was weirdly pleasant. There is a certain appeal, an impossible appeal, to that Rip Van Winkle existence of being without testosterone. You just have to remember that it doesn't matter if you have nothing if you want nothing. Very tricky to get inside that mindset, in some ways it's difficult for me to even remember it now, but it had its allure.

...all that wanting.

I love that the absence of desire yielded a zen-like understanding that the world is beautiful for this man. With judgment, things just were, and when they just were, they were beautiful.

That bit about seeing like God must is wonderful too. In God's eyes, as we imagine them, he is perfect and creates everything, so it is perfect too. He doesn't doubt his perfection like we do and so, must see the beauty in everything.

Hmmm, but perfection is problematic here. It's not perfection or imperfection that makes something beautiful in this context. It's the fact of its existence without judgment that does. There is so much in this.


*Because this particular program ran on NPR stations as a rerun this past weekend it is available to be heard for free from This American Life's website this week.

For maximum coherence I've edited out the words of Producer Alex Blumberg who conceived the idea for the episode, discovered this man's story in GQ magazine, and conducted the interview from which this passage originated. For the same reason, I've also removed a few of the subject's words as he responds to Alex's questions, as well as a transition spoken by Ira Glass between the prologue and first act of the episode.

I cannot thank Ira and the producers and funders of this program enough for its existence. It has shaped and supported my view of the world and the work I'd like to do here so thoroughly.


img credit: modified version of testosterone image file on wikipedia commons

Dave Strome

I'm cleaning house today, going through old papers at the moment. I just found a little scrap of paper from the night in November 2007 when I was at Freddy's talking to Dave Strome about beauty.

He said, "My experience of beauty in the world is theological as well as physical," then added, "Bach's music is the language of God." I wrote it all down and had some more wine.

This is for America

I'm watching the Oscars, and when Javier Bardem said "This is for Spain!" in his inevitable acceptance speech, I was struck by the beauty of his patriotism.

Being American in these dispiriting and alienating times fairly requires the dual armor of cynicism and scorn. And while world-weary disassociation promises absolution from the violence, mediocrity and arrogance carried out in your name, it never fully delivers. It's just another permutation of self-hatred that belies your lack of faith and interest in the power and presence of your homeland.

Patriotism, sweet I-am-We patriotism, is so beautiful.

The National

I'm at BAM listening to this wonderful wall of sound indie rock band loving them and most of all lovin

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From The Economist December 19th, 2007

The ugly are one of the few groups against whom it is still legal to discriminate. Unfortunately for them, there are good reasons why beauty and success go hand in hand

IMAGINE you have two candidates for a job. They are both of the same sex—and that sex is the one your own proclivities incline you to find attractive. Their CVs are equally good, and they both give good interview. You cannot help noticing, though, that one is pug-ugly and the other is handsome. Are you swayed by their appearance?
Perhaps not. But lesser, less-moral mortals might be. If appearance did not count, why would people dress up for such interviews—even if the job they are hoping to get is dressed down? And job interviews are turning points in life. If beauty sways interviewers, the beautiful will, by and large, have more successful careers than the ugly—even in careers for which beauty is not a necessary qualification.

If you were swayed by someone's looks, however, would that be wrong? In a society that eschews prejudice, favouring the beautiful seems about as shallow as you can get. But it was not always thus. In the past, people often equated beauty with virtue and ugliness with vice.

Even now, the expression “as ugly as sin” has not quite passed from the language. There is, of course, the equally famous expression “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, to counter it. But the subtext of that old saw, that beauty is arbitrary, is wrong. Most beholders agree what is beautiful—and modern biology suggests there is a good reason for that agreement. Biology also suggests that beauty may, indeed, be a good rule of thumb for assessing someone of either sex. Not an infallible one, and certainly no substitute for an in-depth investigation. But, nevertheless, an instinctive one, and one that is bound to redound to the advantage of the physically well endowed.

Fearful symmetry
The godfather of scientific study of beauty is Randy Thornhill, of the University of New Mexico. It was Dr Thornhill who, a little over a decade ago, took an observation he originally made about insects and dared to apply it to people.

The insects in question were scorpion flies, and the observation was that those flies whose wings were most symmetrical were the ones that did best in the mating stakes. Dr Thornhill thought this preference for symmetry might turn out to be universal in the animal kingdom (and it does indeed seem to be). In particular, he showed it is true of people. He started with faces, manipulating pictures to make them more and less symmetrical, and having volunteers of the opposite sex rank them for attractiveness. But he has gone on to show that all aspects of bodily symmetry contribute, down to the lengths of corresponding fingers, and that the assessment applies to those of the same sex, as well.

The reason seems to be that perfect symmetry is hard for a developing embryo to maintain. The embryo that can maintain it obviously has good genes (and also a certain amount of luck). It is, therefore, more than just coincidence that the words “health and beauty” trip so easily off the tongue as a single phrase.

Other aspects of beauty, too, are indicators of health. Skin and hair condition, in particular, are sensitive to illness, malnutrition and so on (or, perhaps it would be better to say that people's perceptions are exquisitely tuned to detect perfection and flaws in such things). And more recent work has demonstrated another association. Contrary to the old jokes about dumb blondes, beautiful people seem to be cleverer, too.

One of the most detailed studies on the link between beauty and intelligence was done by Mark Prokosch, Ronald Yeo and Geoffrey Miller, who also work at the University of New Mexico. These three researchers correlated people's bodily symmetry with their performance on intelligence tests. Such tests come in many varieties, of course, and have a controversial background. But most workers in the field agree that there is a quality, normally referred to as “general intelligence”, or “g”, that such tests can measure objectively along with specific abilities in such areas as spatial awareness and language. Dr Miller and his colleagues found that the more a test was designed to measure g, the more the results were correlated with bodily symmetry—particularly in the bottom half of the beauty-ugliness spectrum.

Faces, too, seem to carry information on intelligence. A few years ago, two of the world's face experts, Leslie Zebrowitz, of Brandeis University in Massachusetts, and Gillian Rhodes, of the University of Western Australia, got together to review the literature and conduct some fresh experiments. They found nine past studies (seven of them conducted before the second world war, an indication of how old interest in this subject is), and subjected them to what is known as a meta-analysis.

The studies in question had all used more or less the same methodology, namely photograph people and ask them to do IQ tests, then show the photographs to other people and ask the second lot to rank the intelligence of the first lot. The results suggested that people get such judgments right—by no means all the time, but often enough to be significant. The two researchers and their colleagues then carried out their own experiment, with the added twist of dividing their subjects up by age.

Bright blondes
The results of that were rather surprising. They found that the faces of children and adults of middling years did seem to give away intelligence, while those of teenagers and the elderly did not. That is surprising because face-reading of this sort must surely be important in mate selection, and the teenage years are the time when such selection is likely to be at its most intense—though, conversely, they are also the time when evolution will be working hardest to cover up any deficiencies, and the hormone-driven changes taking place during puberty might provide the material needed to do that.

Nevertheless, the accumulating evidence suggests that physical characteristics do give clues about intelligence, that such clues are picked up by other people, and that these clues are also associated with beauty. And other work also suggests that this really does matter.
One of the leading students of beauty and success is Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas. Dr Hamermesh is an economist rather than a biologist, and thus brings a somewhat different perspective to the field. He has collected evidence from more than one continent that beauty really is associated with success—at least, with financial success. He has also shown that, if all else is equal, it might be a perfectly legitimate business strategy to hire the more beautiful candidate.

Just over a decade ago Dr Hamermesh presided over a series of surveys in the United States and Canada which showed that when all other things are taken into account, ugly people earn less than average incomes, while beautiful people earn more than the average. The ugliness “penalty” for men was -9% while the beauty premium was +5%. For women, perhaps surprisingly considering popular prejudices about the sexes, the effect was less: the ugliness penalty was -6% while the beauty premium was +4%.
Since then, he has gone on to measure these effects in other places. In China, ugliness is penalised more in women, but beauty is more rewarded. The figures for men in Shanghai are –25% and +3%; for women they are –31% and +10%. In Britain, ugly men do worse than ugly women (-18% as against -11%) but the beauty premium is the same for both (and only +1%).
The difference also applies within professions. Dr Hamermesh looked at the careers of members of a particular (though discreetly anonymous) American law school. He found that those rated attractive on the basis of their graduation photographs went on to earn higher salaries than their less well-favoured colleagues. Moreover, lawyers in private practice tended to be better looking than those working in government departments.

Even more unfairly, Dr Hamermesh found evidence that beautiful people may bring more revenue to their employers than the less-favoured do. His study of Dutch advertising firms showed that those with the most beautiful executives had the largest size-adjusted revenues—a difference that exceeded the salary differentials of the firms in question. Finally, to add insult to injury, he found that even in his own cerebral and, one might have thought, beauty-blind profession, attractive candidates were more successful in elections for office in the American Economic Association.

That last distinction also applies to elections to public office, as was neatly demonstrated by Niclas Berggren, of the Ratio Institute in Stockholm, and his colleagues. Dr Berggren's team looked at almost 2,000 candidates in Finnish elections. They asked foreigners (mainly Americans and Swedes) to examine the candidates' campaign photographs and rank them for beauty. They then compared those rankings with the actual election results. They were able to eliminate the effects of party preference because Finland has a system of proportional representation that pits candidates of the same party against one another. Lo and behold, the more beautiful candidates, as ranked by people who knew nothing of Finland's internal politics, tended to have been the more successful—though in this case, unlike Dr Hamermesh's economic results, the effect was larger for women than for men.

If looks could kill
What these results suggest is a two-fold process, sadly reminiscent of the biblical quotation to which the title of this article refers. There is a feedback loop between biology and the social environment that gives to those who have, and takes from those who have not.
That happens because beauty is a real marker for other, underlying characteristics such as health, good genes and intelligence. It is what biologists call an unfakeable signal, like the deep roar of a big, rutting stag that smaller adolescents are physically incapable of producing. It therefore makes biological sense for people to prefer beautiful friends and lovers, since the first will make good allies, and the second, good mates.

That brings the beautiful opportunities denied to the ugly, which allows them to learn things and make connections that increase their value still further. If they are judged on that experience as well as their biological fitness, it makes them even more attractive. Even a small initial difference can thus be amplified into something that just ain't—viewed from the bottom—fair.
Given all this, it is hardly surprising that the cosmetics industry has global sales of $280 billion. But can you really fake the unfakeable signal?

Dr Hamermesh's research suggests that you can but, sadly, that it is not cost-effective—at least, not if your purpose is career advancement. Working in Shanghai, where the difference between the ugliness penalty and the beauty bonus was greatest, he looked at how women's spending on their cosmetics and clothes affected their income.

The answer was that it did, but not enough to pay for itself in a strictly financial sense. He estimates that the beauty premium generated by such primping is worth only 15% of the money expended. Of course, beauty pays off in spheres of life other than the workplace. But that, best beloved, would be the subject of a rather different article.

Article author TBD [Economist staff]

Illustration by Brett Ryder

Picabia from Zach

Do other animals experience beauty?

"...we want to be swept away. It's particular to our species."
-Michael Cunningham on Radio Lab's "Space Capsules" episode

Beauty isn't the Hand of God. It's much more exciting than that.

Just heard someone on a Studio 360 podcast describe jellyfish as thin layers of cells illuminated from within, and thought, "The world is too beautiful to have no Creator."

I'd just finished mining three recent issues of National Geographic for collage-worthy images, and was still reeling from the page-upon-page assault of obscenely and absurdly beautiful images of our world this magazine unfailingly provides.

Found I had to force myself to finish that glory-of-the-Creator's-hand sentence even though it was only a thought. Felt the drama of each word as if, though mental and private--not carved in stone and borne upon my back as I walked the streets, say--once complete, the sentence would doom me to a small and religious existence.

Happily, as I set these words in the the somewhat more forgiving stone of cyberspace and your eyes and your opinions, I've begun to unpack the idea a bit and have hit upon a far more palatable rational consequence of the overwhelming beauty in the world:

If it is not the hand of a benevolent creator that makes my eyes and brain sing out "Jackpot!" like the hymn of some drunken angel when I see antlers, deltas, jellyfish, sunsets, runners' legs and the like, then that can only mean that from the random fact of the Big Bang (That's still all we're working with origin-wise: God or Boom, right?) we lucked the fuck out and were born onto a stage so too our liking.

Ramifications of this line of thinking and other things to consider as I walk blissfully down the avenue of this hypothesis:

• Perhaps (generous, I know) not every human experiences the beauty of the world as viscerally as I do despite our common Big Bang ancestry.

• What is the neuroscience behind beauty and perception?

• If, like every other thing that's happened since the Big Bang, perceivable beauty exists due to the will of nothing and has continued because it works to keep this Earth party going, then there is a purpose for the world being so appealing, an evolutionary purpose for joy and bliss. Awesome!

image source: http://blogs.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/worldcup/2007/03/extreme_swimming.html

Posting from my phone?

Totally!

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Oh Em Gee! ohemgeeohemgeeohemgeeohemgee

Monu #06: Beautiful Urbanism is a collection of contributions addressing beauty and the urban environment.

Editors Bernd Upmeyer and Thomas Soehl write, "And even though the concept beauty remains elusive we think our issue is successful in shining some spotlights on the issue. One of the themes from the articles is that beauty in urbanism is what one could call an emergent quality. It rarely is in the object itself. It exists in the way we perceive spaces and objects, our vantage point. It is while wandering though the city, resolving contradictions, when we see things that jolt our imaginations that we experience beauty."

Paulina handed the issue to me during a buying meeting at the SoHo offices of Phillip Galgiani, a distributer of European art, photo, and design books. I held it for a minute or two before I realized what I had: special little thing called Monu: magazine on urbanism that's black and white all over with a stern layout aesthetic that very nearly blinded me to its possibly luscious content.

http://www.monu.org/

Cultivating a beautiful, cat-like, nonchalance

"I remember that I would wake up in morning and hear her saying things like, 'You are so beautiful! You are a princess! Look at you!' and as I'd open my eyes I'd realize that she's talking not to me but to the cat."

"You felt like the third wheel."

"Mmm hmm. You know, I know if there'd been another woman, I would have compared myself to her physically. Sort of what does she look like? What kinds of things is my girlfriend attracted to that that I could aspire to? You know, what personality traits? Is she funny? Ah, you know.... But there was just...I didn't know what it was about Sid. I mean I could see that she was a-attractive as a cat. I could see that...she had this nonchalance that was beautiful. She didn't seem to care, really, that she was loved. So those, those were things that I did think about, really--cultivating even."

"You thought about cultivating a nonchalance."

Laughing, "That I was this concerned about it shows you that it would've been a fake, but, yeah, I thought about cultivating -- that."

Since a pet can engage our affection, it also engages all the other feelings that can go with affection: jealousy, and dependence and anger, and all the others. And as soon as any one feeling kicks in, all of the complicated dynamics that happen between any people, any household, any family, inevitably kick in. As with Heather and Sid the cat.

"I felt sort of the same way I felt um you know how when you have a crush on someone and you're friends with their significant other? and all the awkardness as you pretend that, you know, you sort of don't have the feelings you do for this other person? I sort of felt that Sid was the significant other of the person for whom I had feelings. So I felt awkward around Sid. ... I felt like they were together before I was around, and I was an interloper. Y'know all the awkwardness surrounding that."

"And, so, what's it like to be in a love triangle with with, a-another woman and, and a -- cat?"

"Well it was pretty ah diminishing. I mean, it was a beautiful cat."

Excerpt from This American Life Episode #154.
Image from http://luminouslens.baltiblogs.com/whitelight/about.html

The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil

With The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, George Saunders gives us an hilarious, harrowing, and charming fable for these times. Within this small package are biomechanical creatures you will adore in a setting that raises your IQ to envision, facing the major personal and civic trials of our times. Saunders winks at us throughout, boiling the terrifying complexities of character and politics and ethics down to a cartoonish essence and when through winking, delivers an ending that may make you weep the sweetest tears.

Justin Torres writes beautifully

I met Justin Torres earlier this year in New York working at McNally Robinson Booksellers. He is funny and real and quick and well-read and a dear, dear friend.

Though we have been friends for many months now (during which he'd been published, gotten an agent, gone to Bread Loaf, and received public praise from Dorothy Allison), I hadn't had a chance to read any of his work aside from his staff picks. These book reviews stood out in a I'm-reading-staff-picks-right?-Why-do-I-feel-breathless? kind of way, but I still hadn't experienced his talent left to its own devices.

He moved to Austin, Texas recently but was back in town reading two of his stories at Dixon's Place last week, and I got to hear him then. His simple, lush writing flows so easily and, unencumbered by language, we can be fully present to the stories of pain and intimacy and the complexity of redemption.

It is an exalting pleasure indeed to see skill presented so effortlessly. Witnessing such talent evokes the nonchalant magnificence of nature where eagles and leaves, lions and rivers, whales and orchids exist just as they were designed to and inspire you to do the same.

Most Beautiful Thing of the Day

Last night, looking for a midtown theater, I left a cold, wet, Gothamy street for the warmer, but puzzling interior of 314 West 54th Street. I was off to see Dancer for Money: An Evening of 10-Minute Plays one of which was written by a friend of mine. The address on my ticket lead me to a building bearing two banners: "The Midtown Community Court" and "The American Theater of Actors". What?

I ran into a friend outside and left him to go in and get seats for our group. "It's cool in there," I think he said. "You should check it out." Knowing I was going to a play but reading that I was entering a court, maybe I expected the baroque, wooden interior of an ancient courthouse lending itself easily to a home for the arts. I found nothing of the sort. What I found was much better.

The front door opens onto an oppressively civic hallway of cinder block walls painted white, illuminated by too much cold white fluorescent light with an elevator likely leading to administrative offices you hope you'll never know, bearing subway and neighborhood maps from the Metropolitan Transit Authority. At its end, there is an elevator with an awkward hallway to the right and a small area of many doors and another elevator to the left. The signposts at this crucial intersection? Computer paper framed by Scotch tape intending permanence affixed to various surfaces saying little about theater.

What to do what to do? Having just passed through that blinding cinder block tunnel, the awkward hallway was unappealing, so I headed to the left wondering when this place would start to make sense.

Moments later, the sour aesthetic of modern, public-sector architecture parted, and through a boring doorframe, this exquisite staircase beckoned me to it with silent ballads of public neglect and hymns of private love. My steps and breath slowed. My heart and mind raced. Where did this come from? Who built it? Where are they? Wish I could meet them. Who knows about this? I love this secretive city! Woah, it goes all the way up! Look at that part. And what's down there? Thank you. Thank you Thank you.

I floated in this underwater reverie of confusion, discovery and quiet for many minutes until others came my way, also looking for theater. I called them to me, and once they got there shared this vision with them. Coming up for air, and back in the ordinary world of men, I realized I'd forgotten long ago about finding the theater and made a note to tell you about all this.

Live Action Role Playing

Listening to this week's podcast of On the Media just now, I heard a segment about a LARP documentary called Darkon in which beauty was noted twice. Daniel McArthur, one of the game's participants mentioned, "I've actually got a relationship trying to go on in character with a certain nomad, and I've been following and helping this person more than anybody else, and it's cost me several things -- like my life on several occasions -- but it's beautiful." A few minutes later, Andrew Neel, the documentary's co-director with Luke Meyer said, "I think television, and online role-playing games, and video games, they're kind of the opposite of Darkon because they feed you the fantasy. They remove you from the process of creation and destruction, and that's one of the things that I think makes Darkon so warty and idiosyncratic and in that way beautiful. And so, while Darkon seems so weird, it's actually very human and makes perfect sense to me." It was such a pleasure to come across these words because, while I'm doing this work in part to open more people to the experiences of beauty possible in life, it is unnerving at this point to encounter and consider those that are closed off, and while they both used the word "beauty" to refer to different embodiments of it, these two men had an encouraging ease and familiarity with the concept.

Heart-warmed, and faith in humanity stable, I am left only with the intriguing work of sorting out what each man meant precisely. Neel's comment is easiest to tag as the beauty of imperfection and challenge and agency while McArthur's might be the beauty of giving oneself over to something greater.

Honor your interests, read the news and live beautifully. This is important work.

"What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing? Beauty?? Am I kidding?!"

Horrified and violently ashamed, these thoughts raced through my heart, and mind, and gut as I watched The Kite Runner at a preview screening in Maryland Monday night. Khaled Hosseini's novel of loyalty, shame, and hard-won redemption has been made into a powerfully emotional film by director Marc Forster. Immaturity and weakness of character have life-and-death-consequences in this story, and the protagonist confronts internal and external demons at its climax set in the Taliban's fear-and-violence-ridden Afghanistan.

Stunned and weeping, I sat in the theater wondering how I could possibly have chosen to devote my life to beauty when the world is so ugly and violent. "Beauty?" I thought. "Really, Adjua? Beauty? What an irrelevant luxury. Grow up, and do your part. Fix this!" I shouted at the cacophonous volume of thoughts held in the mind.

As I write this, I am riding the train home from Baltimore and am calmer now – assured anew by a few thoughts:

One: Not everyone has to fight on the front lines. The most courageous generals need solace and peace and art and beauty to come home to after the most important battles. The reality of war need not mean the irrelevance of beauty.

Two: There is no sense in dishonoring your strengths straining to fill positions for which you are unfit but which you hold in higher esteem.

Three: With each of us in the role we are best suited to play our team is stronger as a whole.

Four: I have been born in a time and place that do not demand I struggle and fight for every aspect of my existence. This good fortune has allowed me to enjoy a good life including the intellectual awareness and emotional energy to address the problems I encounter and learn of in the world. Guilt at my good fortune is a form of ungratefulness. My day-to-day life is not hard. It is delightful. My responsibility is to enjoy this gift, remain aware of is rarity – its fragility – and fight for a better world for all of us through the work I love and am fortunate to do.

Five: The Indigo Girls sang "Shine my life like a light" and hearing those words at sixteen, I was inspired to live as I wished others did. This deeply challenging directive requires so much to take on but seems the most likely way to change the world.

While I am somewhat soothed by all this, I am not wholly convinced. Afghanistan's recent troubles were made real for me tonight in Forster's film, and I had to reevaluate how I'm choosing to live. Only a fraction of the world's problems will be given such a presentation. As I continue my research on beauty, I must remain aware of battles that need fighting at home and abroad. I don't want to be caught painting pictures of war when it is finally time to get in there and fight.

Darjeeling Limited

Off to see this movie with a bunch of friends from college and work tonight. I read recently that the problem with Wes Anderson's films is that "...they're all good, even when they're not."

Visually, they're so satisfying and emotionally so rich, yet understated, that I always feel I am hypnotized into loving them. Rushmore though, never resonated for me. Maybe because the kid's angst is so familiar in its tragedy - too close to home somehow. Or maybe cause that movie isn't gorgeous in the lush way that The Royal Tennenbaums or The Life Aquatic are.

I'm still wrestling with Life Aquatic. I own it now and watch it sometimes wondering, "Is it because this is good? or just visually (deeply) pleasing? or now familiar?"

I'm going to see Darjeeling Limited for wholly aesthetic reasons. Anderson's cinematographic palette and Adrian Brody's amazing face.

Neuroscience, Bio Class, Day Dreams, Imagination

At times, it is hard to know where to begin.

Should I tell you first that there is, in this exceptional city, a place called The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination? How long should I wait before adding that I recently attended an event there called "Daydreaming, Night-Dreaming, and Stimulus-Independent Thought." And how about that is was a roundtable discussion among five men and women whose work in neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry brought them there? Also, it was free. And open to the public. And simulcast on the web. Christ.

I have a crush on this place. If you are not already with me on this, take a look at their events calendar and events archive, and see if you don't fall in love.

Exactly.

Sasha told me about this place and attended the roundtable with me. About fifty of us made up the audience. We surrounded the participants, listening for the first hour and asking questions for the second. Many in attendence were psychologists, and psychiatrists or students on their way to becoming such. Others were like Sasha and I -- credential-free and curious -- there to absorb this heavenly city-as-school experience.

As I sat there listening to scientists talk about the mind, and behavior and day-dreaming, I was taken back to the lecture halls of my early college career as a biology student. I'd attend lectures dutifully, and for a while took notes with the best of them. Some aspect of this did not agree with me though, and my notebooks became festooned with more and more elaborate drawings and less and less information about the biological sciences.

At the time, I thought, "I absorb this information better when I am not distracted by the task of note-taking." This may have been true, but to secure the grades I'd need to continue in the sciences, this plan needed a level of support on the bent-over-a-textbook-in-your-dorm-room end of things that I was unwilling to provide. I like listening to scientists, but do not care to do what it takes to be one. No matter. This frees me up to be a fan of the sciences, a role I happily found myself in last Saturday at the Philoctetes Center.

Oy - another surprisingly confessional post.

All I meant to say was that, hearing neuroscientists talk about what they do, and do not, know about the mind is exciting and humbling and beautiful because they don't know much. Just like the universe is right out there, and we know so little about it, the mind is right in here and just as alien.

During the Q&A, John Antrobus mentioned that there are 100,000,000,000 neurons in a human brain and 100,000,000,000,000 synapses amongst them. Here is a video showing how they work together -- a video which says, but does not show, that this neural collaboration is what creates new ideas.

Stalin was gorgeous. Discuss.

There's a new book out called Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore. The first photo you see here, of Stalin at 24 years old, graces the cover and caused an uproar of blushing and deep ambivalence among my fellow booksellers when we saw it last week. Even now, as fountain-haired young Joseph stares back at me, I search the nobly un-smitten crevices of my mind for words to tell you what I am feeling. Words don't come, but this image does.

The 20th century has morphed into a lush, primeval jungle swamp, and I stare, enchanted, at this face which is now the massive siren bloom of some bewitchingly decorative, flesh-fueled monster plant. My life-and-death encounter is scored by the chirping, whirring creature sounds of fellow swamp-dwellers. Their disinterested emissions become a horror film's tension-inflating string section and within me, the signal "Threat! Threat! Threat!" struggles to overpower my urge to gaze on with abandon. Beneath me, my froggy legs shudder and twitch as I summon the survival-loving restraint of my raw amphibian brain to keep from springing forth into the smug and gaping mouth of this gorgeous carnivore.

Back here, in the 21st century, I crave information about this man for the first time ever. Well-done Montefiore.

Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

Eight hundred years ago, on September 30, 1207 CE, in what is now Afghanistan, the Persian philosopher Rumi was born. Upon his death in 1273, his followers founded the Mevlevi Order within Islam's mystical Sufi tradition. Its members are commonly known as the Whirling Dervishes. Deep reverence and affection for this man and his work can be found in religious and secular contexts all over the world.

Two lines from one of his many poems inspired the name of this blog. My dear, dear high school friend Elizabeth once sent me a card including the words "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground. -Rumi" - a brief, yet potent introduction.

Here they are again in their original context:

SPRING GIDDINESS

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let's buy it.

Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

All day and night, music,
a quiet, bright
reedsong. If it
fades, we fade.

The lines "Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground." are the perfect touchstone for the work I am doing here. They remind me to occupy myself with the pursuit of beauty through my intellect and my actions, and that the efforts and successes that come with this work are celebrations of the glory of existence.

http://www.rumi.net/

Rumi's Wikipedia article

UK Rumi website - with biography

Crime and Ornament

Found this gem of a book at The New York Art Book Fair Friday afternoon. I can't dive in just yet cause I've got to finish Crispin Sartwell's book Six Names of Beauty for my art and beauty book club, but I'm so ready for this one when the time comes. [link to Sartwell's website]

Walking around the city passing the old, stone structures that remain from an older New York I often sigh and lament the obvious temporal and financial constraints that keep us from living with such earthy grandeur.

What rarely finds a way into that lament is any notion that people might not build The Ansonia, The Dakota or The Metropolitan Museum of Art today - even if they could.

The book is an anthology of essays responding to a hundred-year old essay by Adolf Loos about the deep, societal problems ornament exposes.

Email conversation October 2005

ADJUA
Do you know the word in Japanese for the feeling you get watching geese take off for flight or how I can look that up?

DUSTIN
Well, which feeling do you mean? Like the small but enveloping sadness that comes from an ennobled moment of beauty? And do you want the noun form of it (like "beauty), or the adjective form (like"beautiful")?

ADJUA
Yes exactly. I don't know that I would have said sadness, but well said. I want to know how it's different and differently used if you have that information too.

DUSTIN
Okay, so the words you're looking for are probably "wabi" and "sabi". They come as a coherent set, adjectives for the much vaunted Japanese aesthetic. Wabi means, essentially, simplicity. It is more loaded than that, but that's the best, and probably most accurate translation. Sabi is loneliness, and the character used here is actually the root for the basic word for "lonely" in Japanese: sabishii. Sabi can be translated as an elegant loneliness if need be, but loneliness is better. The same character can, according to my dictionary, indicate the death of a priest in the buddhist canon. Also, it is a homophone for rust, which I thought fitting. The real reason these words are difficult to describe is really just usage history.

The words, in the way I've described them to you, together, came to be used for the Japanese aesthetic about three hundred and fifty years ago, at the same time as the devolpment of what we now see as traditional Japanese art forms. That is, the art and the lexical means to describe them were developed together. These concepts are not as ancient as might be expected. Part of that has to do with our perception, as westerners, of the whole kanji system as unchanging and primitive and beautiful. Another part might have to do with the Japanese use of these terms. These words, indicating as they do an idea inevitably wrapped into Japaneseness, are political. This was more true during the end of the nineteenth century, and had more to do with the struggle between the old Japanese empire and its new nationhood, but is still true to a lesser extent now.

The terms are also highly commodified. The aesthetic they describe sells for a lot of money when well executed, and no one is willing to pay more than those Japanese desperate to buy into the myth of their own poignant, existential appreciation. That said, they do indicate an emotion that I think everybody feels, and I wish more people were aware of the simplicity and loneliness around them.

In use, by the way, things are said to have more or less wabi or sabi. For example, grey geese that fly with the moon on their wings (thank you Julie Andrews) have a whole hell of a lot of Sabi. While I was in Japan, I spent some time learning tea ceremony where these ideas are paramount.

Why do you ask anyways? Also, sorry to write all that shit. I had a minute to think about it today. By the way, if your feeling is less loneliness and more ecstatic upwelling, try something from the Sufi tradition. Read some Rumi, maybe.

http://content.ornith.cornell.edu/UEWebApp/images/fig2_1083.jpg

Sean Kingston-Beautiful Girls

Music Videos - Beautiful Girls

Christina Aguilera-Beautiful-Alternate version

Worrying about Emerson

At a lecture on Jack Kerouac earlier this month, I remembered how important the Transcendentalists were to me when we learned about them in high school and how this work I'm doing now emerged around that time.

So, I've been looking forward to reading their work again and said as much to a friend's roommate the other night at their Williamsburg apartment. She surprised me by asking why I liked them so much. When I told her because they tapped into the sublime, transcendent, life-affirming moments available to us, she pursed her lips and shook her head and held forth for a while on the limited relevance of their work due to their privilege of time, leisure, solitude and intellect.

Her question was: What good is this work? What good is wonder? What good beauty, awe, transcendence and all the rest if it can only be pondered by the privileged?

My question is: Is it even true these concepts are only pondered by the financially and socially privileged, or is it that they are the only ones whose intellectual work is documented and disseminated?

The biggest question is: Why let class guilt deter us from contemplating the human condition - ever? We ought to accept privilege, use privilege, do the work and be sure to take on the challenge of communicating and applying what we discover as broadly as we can. If the Transcendentalists were conceptually incestuous and insularly self-reflective in their privileged, intellectual pursuits, then it is the work of the rest of us - privileged and not - to get at what they discovered and unlock its worth.

Emerson's essay, The Transcendentalist

image credit http://www.writespirit.net/authors/emerson

At the Fishtank

A few hours ago, Dustin and I stood before this fishtank in a beloved Brooklyn dive bar at 4 something in the morning regarding the crudely-rudely moldy-grouted in-tank plexiglass divider whose purpose he will have to explain to me again at some point.

Encountering this shameful hack job of aquarium alteration with my aesthetic ally, I confessed somewhat conspiratorily, something like, "Uggchhh! You see this? This is what I originally thought my aesthetic revoultion was going to be: ridding the world of shit like this."

Bless his heart, he scoffed even as I hurriedly began alluding to how my work is happily about so much more than "good design" already, and offered up this gem of insight and recognition, "No. No. No. Somewhere, this is beautiful precisely because it looks like this. Your revolution is about the fact that this is beautiful in a way you're not seeing. Your revolution is about awakening people to all forms of awe and beauty."

Indeed.

Discussing the subtleties of beauty with Fabio.

I met a man named Fabio the other night, and in this case he was a neatly dressed, friendly Italian graphic designer living in New York City. When he asked what I did, and I told him that I write about beauty, he nodded politely, paused and confessed his difficulties with that word.

Fabio's boss often says his work is beautiful, and that makes Fabio cringe. Not because the man abuses the word making it mean less each time, but because for this designer, the word smacks of inconsequential, meritless surface fluff--nothing he wants his work to embody.

I countered that there is more to beauty than its surface and that in terms of design, beauty can refer to the excellence of form and function working together as in nature where everything looks the way it does because it must.

He hadn't considered that aspect of beauty before, and appreciated my perspective.

Terrific.

Relating can be beautiful

Chat that transcended past betrayals with friend I thought I'd have to hate.

Noticing the huge grey eyes of my customer crush for the first time today. Traveling with him past custy/worker border into the sweet dance of flirtatious special attention before and after those eyes.

image credit screenshot from http://www.java2s.com/Code/Java/Language-Basics/Log.htm

Sincerity: Finally talking with my manager about being frustrated and unhappy at work. Months of tension and anxiety transformed by openness and honesty and valuing my perspective into calm realism in the face of an imperfect world.

Universe: Big bright moon tonight. At some point in highschool, the terrific Dermot O'Reilly gave us an astronomy test with the True/False question "The moon is a hole in the sky through which sunlight appears." That beautifully absurd notion often surfaces when I'm confronted with a full, and shining moon--the magic-eye moment when it looks true is awesome. All my best, Mr. O'Reilly.

Deception: Remembering that despite the powerfully sexy look and feel of Monocle magazine, I have yet to be wowed by its content after four issues--and not snatching one up immediately, like I usually do.

Courage: Reading a preview copy of Pierre Bayard's new book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. This brave and serene Frenchman, no less than a professor of literature, has written a book-length essay on the virtues of skimming and not being ashamed all in the service of experiencing literature as a whole rather than in fractured parts. The emperor doesn't read. Long, live the emperor.


image credit Jason Ku and Brian Chan [link]

Beautiful like a Movie

Watching Miranda July's film, Me, You and Everyone We Know tonight, I wept several times, panicked and forgetful wondering where all the beautiful moments were in my life. Then I remembered a fully transcendent hour I spent diving for plastic stick-on gems that had fallen off swimmers one summer.


I was a camp counselor, she was a little camper kid. She found the first one, then lost it in the hectic pool. I dove under to help her find this tiny sparkling speck in the huge and sparkling pool. After the miracle of finding it and the accident of finding others as we searched, we continued on like that for what thankfully felt like forever.


We glorified a fad and made treasure of debris. We made time wait and were nameless. We were young and old pirates and mermaids together.

Thanks, Sunshine. It's been six years since then, and it can be harder at 13, but I hope you're still having beautiful afternoons like that one.

image credit Tim Laman

What if campaign posters were gorgeous? What if we didn't have to look at shoddy art as a matter of course? What if everyone loved what we loved?

Beautiful propaganda is more effective.

image credit http://www.gotellmama.org/

Miru Kim: Naked City Spleen

photo credit Miru Kim

New York Times article on urban explorers

META + WEE HOURS + THE UNIVERSE = SOUL SOCK

A zygote is a gamete’s way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the universe. Robert Heinlein

One year in

Happy Anniversary, Hundreds of Ways. A toast of love and thanks to you for reminding me who I am and what I can do. You are surprising and challenging and easy. You are wonderful, and we can do anything we envision. Be brave, be good, have fun, love tons.

photo credit Jeff Ragovin

My favorite story is a beautiful one

An invaluable tale for leaders and dreamers, hopeful outsiders, stifled insiders, budding pilots and budding mystics. It is the story of a seagull who believes there is more to life than scavenging, sets out to follow his dream and creates so much more than he ever could have imagined. Fear, failure, shame, dedication, passion, wonder and glory are all present in this gorgeous story. It is desert-island, time-capsule worthy.

To purchase the book from Simon and Schuster click here. To read it now, click here for the virtual book (cool!) or here for plain text.

Art and Beauty Bookclub at McNally Robinson Booksellers NYC

I started a bookclub at McNally Robinson Booksellers in New York City earlier this year. Our first three books were on fundamental aspects of the visual arts. The first was a catalog of the perceived artistic temperament; the second was an investigation of the experience of viewing images--paintings in particular; and the third was on the existence and signifcance of photographs.

On September 12th, at 7pm we will be discussing Survival of the Prettiest, Nancy Etcoff's study of the psychological and biological characteristics in humans that respond to physical beauty. I'm particularly excited about this book because Etcoff's premise is that while beauty can be analyzed into abstraction, it remains fundamentally powerful to human beings on a physiological level.

The bookclub is open to all and free of charge. Come through, it's a great time.

"That's what we're here for."

Physical beauty is what many people first think of when I tell them about this project. In the beginning, I was resistant to that aspect of beauty being a part of this work--muddling my lofty endeavors, but in my meanderings, I've found that's where my mind is at too. There's power and privilege and oppression and standards to think of when you talk of physical beauty. It's worthy. Plus, we're human beings.

Still there's more so much more. Beyond sex, there's the ethereal beauty of the universe. There's the beauty of peace and tranquility. There's the beauty of elegant design. And of course, there's the beauty of integrity, which, I'd like to think, runs through it all.

I'm working on a longer post now though, which is alas--no not alas, damn it--which is about the beauty of intimacy and dedication as experienced through the physical qualities of our bedfellows.

It's righteous and all to push ourselves beyond sex, but as a co-worker explained some months ago, "That's what we're here for."

photo credit unknown as per source

On Hotness, Part Two

I found myself in bed with a beautiful friend a few weeks ago touched by the beauty of his body, his discipline, and his sacrifices--knowing it was a gift.

Despite the years I logged charting and listing and inspirational collaging, it wasn't the pages of Shape, Self, Runner's World, Vogue or Elle that made the difference.

Seeing a beautiful man lain out before me, bathed in natural light and looking like a woodland-nymph Adonis, or towering above me ripped like David, made me want to make the best of my flesh in a way no magazine ever could.

Vive la sexualite.

That Vein of Beauty

A few years ago, I wasn’t feeling well and told a dear friend as much. She wrote back a beautiful, beautiful letter, and in it, among other, spectacularly loving things, she reminded me, “You have direct access to that vein of beauty that is fading ever faster from the sights of daily life.” Two years later, I wrote another dear friend a poem for his birthday and passed along the gift of that phrase calling him an “organic, electric, secret rock star, casually mythical, riding that vein of beauty that fuels enviable existence.”

In the complex expanse of human existence, there is running through the joys, irritations and boredom we all may experience, a beauty which takes many forms and which can be accessed “hundreds of ways.” That vein of beauty stirs my soul, and the project of finding people who know it, and figuring out how to connect others to it, is the deep joy of my life.

When beautiful moments resonate for me, I get chills down my arms and legs. It is happening more and more, and it’s a sign that I am closer to that vein than I ever have been before. This physical reaction is especially convincing when it happens in the middle of the afternoon at work because it’s easy to transcend ordinary existence in the wee hours of the day blogging about aesthetic experience listening, as I often do, to a mix of beautiful, contemporary music made for me by the first boy I ever loved, and who I still have the pleasure to know, even in this anonymous city.

When I’m writing here, each post is a chill of sorts that I’ve identified, worked out, verbalized and sometimes illustrated. From the outset, at 15 years old, my goal in this beauty project was to stay connected to those moments when I saw the beauty in the world clearly. I could not be happier that it is happening already, even through these first several months of blogging experiential aesthetics—merely the first stage of this work.

Transcendence, Part 1

I'm reading a fascinating, scholarly account of the eccentric artistic temperment in Margot and Rudolf Wittkower's Born Under Saturn. The book is 300 pages enumerating the oddities of artists from Greek and Roman antiquity through the French Revolution.

I'm especially interested in the idea that in order to tap into the artistic element available in man's existence, perhaps these artists had to, or found they were only able to, access it by consciously or unconsciously altering their existence as compared to that default of ordinary men.

Beauty's so meta

I once wrote myself a note that said, “I want to marry a scientist and live in New York forever.”

New York is infinite, and I want its changing continuity to be the backdrop of my whole life. I want to give myself over to it on the faith of my 27 years here and commit—all the while knowing that long, slow stays in forests and oceans are part of that commitment. I want to make a life with someone who’s voraciously curious about how things work and whose passion can overtake them keeping them up at night running on fumes like mine does. I want to make children who are the products of an artist’s and a scientist’s lusts for life.

It’s so poetic too, the marriage of art and science, but I don’t know any young scientists really well yet so it’s hard to say if my poetry can withstand the reality of it all.

I found very encouraging support for this plan a few weeks ago while listening to NPR’s art and culture radio program Studio 360. Astrophysicist Michael Salamon was talking about the beauty he experiences in his work and his frustration with Walt Whitman for being blind to the beauty so present in that field. He defends his profession valiantly here and scoffs easily at Whitman's disinterest knowing deeply that he is blessed with an understanding Whitman lacked. He also believes that given the chance, he could turn Whitman on to the analytical side of astrophysics.

Salamon was a freshman at MIT when he first experienced beauty in physics. Janis Joplin played in the background as he sank into a deep meditation struggling to understand Maxwell's four elegant equations explaining electrodynamics. After many hours of this, the concept opened up to him in an explosive moment of beautiful clarity. He works at NASA now--in the Universe Division.

Here’s the Whitman:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Salamon loves this poem, but it also bothers him to hear Whitman, of all people, dismissing the beauty of physics because for him, knowing the workings of the universe makes its beauty that much more beautiful.

I understand Whitman's dismissal though because I'm fully guilty of it myself. Aesthetic theory frustrates me to no end, and I continually find myself walking away from books telling myself that focusing on the way we experience beauty is more essential to this work than reading the work of these criminally detached scholars. Ultimately though, it’s just dense complex material I haven’t mastered yet, and I have to be honest with myself and acknowledge that what I am seeking with my study of experience are the very nuts and bolts these theories provide.

Eventually, by studying both experience and theory, I may come to an explosive understanding of my own when the warm, murky mystery of beauty becomes crisp and clear and solid. I used to worry that knowing too much about beauty would ruin it, but if I get to experience what Salamon has, it'll only be that much more beautiful.

Bring on the Kant.

Michael Salamon, http://www.physics.utah.edu/people/faculty/salamon.html
Eagle Nebula http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_314.html
Walt Whitman http://www.usc.edu/schools/annenberg/asc/projects/comm544/library/images/477bg.jpg

Sweet Fat Yes

Earlier tonight, sitting here in the dark, before this glowing screen, I raised my head and saw, outside—tan, and warm, and somehow plump—a gorgeous, gorgeous moon. Instantly crushing on the Universe, I sat here bewitched remembering where we are.

We are living on Earth. Every wonderful, irritating, ordinary thing that happens to any of us during a day is happening on a pretty blue sphere spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning through a dark and mysterious sea of nothing.

There is something about seeing the Moon—knowing it more intimately, more quietly, than the Sun—that reminds me that this ground below me—knowable and sure—is actually the surface of ball I am stuck to somehow, and above me, over my head, higher than my roof, past the tallest building around, above the clouds, and past the air, there is a sweet, fat moon, then other things, and then nothing.

Outside, without anything built or growing above me, I reach up and touch the Universe.

Jerome, mid-30s, MTA transit worker, NYC 09MAY07

Varsity Aesthete: What is beautiful to you?
Jerome: Something new and different.
VA: How do you react to beauty?
J: Stare, fantasize, imagine.
VA: How often do you experience beauty?
J: I don't know.

Beauty is Different

Sometimes, when people list what is beautiful to them, that list gets corrupted by what they merely like. When something is “beautiful”, the key difference is the transcendent quality of the reaction to it.

Yesterday, I was reading one of my own lists from 1997, and this corruption is evident. Beauty has a slowing, contemplative power that listing won’t often support. It’s so easy to be distracted by good feelings, get lax with my criteria and realize I’m so totally in love with the world. I might start with “the ocean” recalling times spent floating in it and the sense I had of being part of something enormous, powerful, sparkling and delightful, and a few lines later find myself writing, “Strawberry Mentos” because they’re, you know, really, really good.

“Strawberry Mentos” is the clearest anomaly on my 1997 list, but there are many entries that don’t truly fit. In my defense, my whole sense of this project and of myself was so different then. I was spending a lot of time alone and outdoors, and was just often in a woozy, dreamy state in general. Those Mentos weren’t actually beautiful, but I discovered them at a time when everything was lofty and elevated and special, so they easily made the cut.

Comedian Eddie Izzard does a great bit on the word “awesome” that is useful here. “Awesome” used to be a word with deep theological connotations. The idea or presence of God was awesome. It struck fear—all-encompassing, fully glorious, thoroughly humbling fear—into the hearts of men. Izzard complains specifically about the use of “awesome” in marketing copy (“Awesome!”), but whenever we say someone’s party was awesome, or their haircut is awesome, it’s a very different usage than the original. With beauty, word usage is important because if you aren’t clear you can end up moony-eyed and overly sentimental in a hurry. The difference between liking something and thinking it’s beautiful is that the beautiful thing will alter your state, even if only momentarily, sending you beyond yourself and into it.

Living in New York City, getting to see the sky in full is rare, so when, on the waterfront, or an outdoor subway line, I find myself with a clear view of the sky and am really open to its presence, my heart beat changes, and small thoughts fall away. I find myself thinking about the unique expansiveness of the sky, and how I want to lay under it for hours and hours and lose myself contemplating its endlessness. Alternatively, when it’s, say, really nice and sunny out, I can, you know, note that and go about my business. I’m not mesmerized by it or internally transported anywhere. It’s simply nice out. I’m really happy, sure, but there’s not the heavy take-me-from-myself-and-into-what-you-are that true beauty elicits.

This is an exciting distinction. I’m not so interested in what people like. I’m interested in what sends them and in their ability to be sent. I’m interested in their vulnerability to beauty.

On Hotness, Part One

I’m a leg man myself, and Regina Spektor is wrong.

A few weeks ago, we had the first glorious days of new, good weather here. Downtown Manhattan, the aesthetic capital of this great nation, parades beauty like pigeons and litter year-round: it has nothing to do with you, it's not a big deal, and it's fucking everywhere. Everything changes though when the weather becomes kind and we can wear what we like. That’s when the 10s come out, and, in this city, the 10s go up to 11.

As I strolled along that week, Spektor's Summer in the City was on repeat in my mind, and it's not cleavage, cleavage, cleavage. Summer in the city is hamstrings, hamstrings, hamstrings.

As a woman, I feel such one of the cool kids when I see men struck dumb with delight as the bold and beautiful strut past, and, in those days, I saw much pedestrian traffic stall in the presence of the hot-pantsed and shiny-legged. The best was two men walking down the street, one ancient and struggling with a serious cane, his companion bopping slow alongside him, young and able-bodied.

Here comes a 10 in shades, a chic black top, killer killer khaki hot pants (tailored cuff!) and the legs and gait to match. At first, Able Bodied is just basking in the passing eyeful with Struggling Cane at his side wrapped up in his all-too-familiar physical drama letting the 10s of the world pass him by, as usual. It's too good a show though, so Able Bodied stops him and gently turns him around saying, “Come on man. You can’t miss this.” A noble companion. She passes and they stand there, off track and male gazing with abandon.

I felt so good seeing Struggling smile through his difficulties, that moment so improved by a glimpse of a woman he will never be with. I loved, too, that Able knew it was worth disrupting Struggling’s flow to share the hotness.

This kind of scene romanticizes the objectification of the female body for me and brings up all kinds of inconvenient questions. I will not bore you with those questions.



*Jessica Alba, by Terry Richardson for GQ cover June 2007

Who Broke My Window?

"I told the truuuuuuuuuth!" Give me chills everytime. Beautiful.

Standing Ovation

Standing ovations are heavy. The performance is over, applause has begun, and I often find myself assessing my cojones for the boldness to be first out of my seat. Some tight-fisted little thing in me says I am weighing the critical merits of the performance when what I actually am is chicken and facing a tragic glitch in my constitution.

I recently saw Stephen Petronio's work onstage at the Joyce Theater and absurdly faced this dilemma. At turns sexy and powerful, accessible yet deliciously opaque, Petronio's dancers and choreography answered the nagging "Why dance?" with more grace, pathos and sex appeal than I've ever seen before.

So why wasn't I first out of my seat when the applause began?

Because I find it difficult sometimes to be open and generous with my love. It's a small and rotten thing this feeling and requires an almost physical redirection of self to make the shift. The times I feel most beautiful are when that wrenching shift isn't necessary to let out the words "I love you", or "Thank you" or "Bravo!" and I am free enough inside to pour love out.

UPDATE Since writing this post, I've found myself markedly more open with my love. Lots of good things are coming together, and that's part of the change, but writing through this helped a great deal

A Thing of Beauty

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its lovliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkn'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.
-John Keats, 1818

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit dities of no tone.
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal---yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unweari-ed,
Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty"---that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

-John Keats, 1820

What can blue, green and brown do for you?

image credit united parcel service of america, incorporated

Beautiful People by Melanie Safka

Beautiful people
You live in the same world as I do
But somehow I never noticed you before today
I'm ashamed to say

Beautiful people
We share the same back door and it isn't right
We never met before but then
We may never meet again

If I weren't afraid you'd laugh at me
I would run and take all your hands and

I'd gather everyone together for a day
And when we gather'd
I'll pass buttons out that say: Beautiful People

Then you'd never be alone
'Cause there'll always be someone
With the same button on as you
Include him in everything you do.

Beautiful people
You ride the same subway as I do ev'ry morning
That's got to tell you something

We got so much in common
I go the same direction that you do
So if you take care of me
Maybe I'll take care of you

Beautiful people
You look like friends of mine
And it's about time
That someone said it here and now
I make a vow that some time, somehow
I'll have a meeting
Invite ev'ryone you know
I'll pass out buttons for
The ones who come to show

Beautiful people
You never have to be alone
'Cause there'll always be someone
With the same button on as you
Include him in ev'rything you do

He may be sitting right next to you
He may be beautiful people too

And if you take care of him
Well maybe he'll take care of you


'Cause all of the beautiful people do
And I'm a beautiful people too....

Beautiful People, words and music copyright Melanie Safka

Brave enough to accompany the beautiful

J. Ruth Gendler's astute and loving observations of our human condition are packed tight into The Book of Qualities. She brings forth a world where Beauty, Blame, Sensuality, Complacency, Guilt, Power and many, many others are neighbors, relatives, friends and enemies. Each of the 74 qualities she describes has its own personality traits--some of which you may expect, many you may not, yet few you will dispute. She is a wise woman with a weird and essential vision of who and how we are.

Beauty is startling. She wears a gold shawl in the summer and sells seven kinds of honey at the flea market. She is young and old at once, my daughter and my grandmother. In school she excelled in mathematics and poetry. Beauty doesn't anger easily, but she was annoyed with the journalist who kept asking her about her favorites--as if she could have one favorite color or one favorite flower. She does not usually mind questions though, and she is especially fond of riddles. Beauty will dance with anyone who is brave enough to ask her.*

The play of "young and old at once," "mathematics and poetry" and irriation over chosing favorities sent a flash of recognition through me. Still, I wasn't convinced of Gendler's vision here until "Beauty will dance with anyone who is brave enough to ask her." This is true, and I know it from both sides: the stunned and the stunning.

So often, we feel we won't measure up to our visions of greatness, of beauty, of integrity. When we shy away from them, safe, small, lame and ashamed we leave the greatness unattended and lonely.

Consider this in the most literal sense: there are babes aplenty too hot to talk to and few among us who can get beyond that and engage them. Everyone needs love and attention. Even the very, very, very attractive. People're always asking how Regular Joes end up with the knockouts they do. It may be money, it may be power, but those attributes are hollow without confidence and courage at their source.

Consider too, that sometimes it isn't just that we are now too little and lame, but that we don't even believe we should build ourselves into the greatness we can imagine.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. **

Liberate yourself. Liberate the others. Talk to all the 10s you can. Get right up close to the Sun, Apollo. Your blaze of glory is waiting.



*J. Ruth GendlerThe Book of Qualities. Turquoise Mountain Publications, 1984 (pg. 27). Thanks Mark!
**Marianne Williamson. A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles. Harper Collins, 1992. From Chapter 7, Section 3 (Pg. 190-191).

Eleven years ago...

...I bought this issue of Interview and knew I wasn't alone.

Inside, is a page of arty celebrities describing in a sentence or two what beauty is for them. There is such passion and intimacy in those lines. It was so good to know that people were thinking this way--cataloging what stirs their souls.

Elate: magazine cover

I love when ugly girls get pretty! It is my favorite cinematic cliche of all time. When the librairian's bun comes down! When the makeunder is revealed! When Oprah gets hotter every month! Terriffic.

Remember the Simpons episode when Moe gets to be a soap opera star like he always wanted but then Lindsay Negel says they want TV ugly, not ugly ugly? America Ferrera was clearly never ugly ugly, but this cover is so lush it doesn't matter what her show's about at all. Fantastic. Really.

I love these colors too. Any shade of blue-green with some smoky grey-brown cast is pretty much a perfect photograph for me. Plus gold? Totally.

Enrage: magazine cover

Oh man, I'm not sure why, but this cover is really getting to people. I keep overhearing conversations where the phrase "so obviously photoshopped" is hissed as the issue gets flung back on the rack. Why the rage? It's so photoshopped it's not tricking anyone right? Photoshop's complex digital processes don't leave behind toxins our children and our children's children will inherit, do they?

Maybe celebrities really shouldn't promote anything but their own movies. People always sound like such haters when they say this, but maybe it's true. Like, for instance, what's he scowling about? Is he scowling at me because I am polluting the earth? So is he! Movies are made of plastic, Leo. What movie's he coming out with anyway? He's not just on there for that damn Prius is he? Sigh. And to think how deeply I loved him on Growing Pains.

UPDATE DiCaprio's made a documentary about personal environmental responsibility called The 11th Hour, and is showing it at the Cannes Film Festival in France. 20MAY07

What is this thing called now?

Something's up: everything's hot off some presse, lovingly designed with art-deco-throw-back flair. The band names are from dreams of owl machines and everyone's drawing again. Perhaps the common thread is digital zeitgeist backlash: the power for hyperrealism has ceased to thrill the artistic and productive among us, and they've looked to the other end of the spectrum for inspiration.

Though Chris Ware's untouchable in this regard, I'm seeing a lot from the McSweeny's franchise as well. The covers of Wholphin, The Believer and their periodical anthologies are straight graphic nostalgia. They publish so much that I assume any new book I see with that look is theirs. (The cover of Dead Beat was designed by Milan Bozic, a contemporary designer who has nothing at all to do with McSweeny's. Astonishing.) What is this graphic trait called? McSweeny's-y is losing its appeal.

Labeled or labeless, I like what the trend implies:

With computers these days, we can do whatever we want whenever we want and for cheap. Remember when design was slow and expensive and our accomplishments felt momentous and important? Let's make it look like that again. That felt really good. Also there was more stuff everywhere, and stuff's not so bad. Clean design's had its fun—bring on the clutter!

Graphically, we can make anything look like anything we want, so, instead, we daydream about the aesthetic of yesteryear and create it with today's cool tools.

On Repeat: The Lamentable Power of the Gluttonous Loner

My name is Varsity Aesthete, and I repeat music. Repeatedly.

Years ago, when it finally became possible for me, I often enjoyed my music this way. Soundly out of the cassette ghetto, I was awash in the luxury of "repeat all" and "repeat one" - loving the songs more and more each time they played - and as ungrateful and dismissive of this power as the most blissfully spoiled child.

It wasn't until college that I began to push "repeat" with any twinge of anything, and even then it really wasn't much at all. After years of free time alone, I was suddenly 24-hour slumber-partying with all the other freshmen. We'd pile into eachothers' rooms soaking up the social, and it was terrific.

One night, I got to my room and found a bunch of my friends inside chatting - in silence. When I asked what'd happened to the music I'd left on, a pitying glance or two flickered amongst their faces. Finally, very calmly and with a bit of some pointed emotion, I was told that they'd turned it off because I "left it on repeat".

That "left it on repeat" was so loaded for me. The public/private protection was gone and I was out there exposed: naked and gluttonous.

It's only in the past few days as I've been trying to defend this quirk that I've gotten so far in understanding what may be wrong with it. Maybe what's wrong is that it's gross. Gross like eating the large all by yourself in your room alone is gross. You don't want company, it's all for you and no one else needs to know about it. Gross. It's also so bratty. So only child. Christ. What could be more the-world-is-my-oyster-and-always-has-been, oh-when-did-you-get-here? Yikes.

The troubling momentum of self-recrimination has sent me off the deep end here. This post has taken on a guilt-ridden, confessional life of its own. I am beat, I am sad, and I haven't even covered the aesthetic concerns at all.

In Six Names of Beauty, Crispin Sartwell investigates, among many other qualities, the aspect of beauty that comes from rareness, scarcity and innocence.

"My son Sam, now eleven, once crawled across a field at my mother's house toward a huge full moon on the horizon, trying to put it in his mouth. I myself saw the moon differently that night, and am now capable in a pinch of seeing it that way again. But it is a sad and necessary truth about people that the things we experience often become commonplace, that the green on the tree behind the house can no longer be for us a cause of rejoicing unless we receive with it a refreshment of experience in general. We cannot always achieve such a refreshment, and the dullness of the world emerges from our own dullness, from the bluntness of our desires and the and the surfeit of sensation in the course of a life."

Without meaning to, I am perhaps stripping my favorites of their appeal by indulging my desire to enjoy them over and over and over again. There is so much more to say about this, but I am exhausted and more than a little bummed out by this revelation.

Some other time, okay?

The French, Part One

Is it just me, or do the French have the grandeur and glory aesthetic on lock? Honestly, this rendering of their new concert hall, Philharmonie de Paris is alarming in its beauty. What must it be like to live in Paris (eww...I can't believe I just said that. I thought only a certain kind of person breathlessly dreamed of a Parisian life...and frankly I did not think I was one. Ah well. C'est la vie!) surrouned by large stone palaces, grand avenues and women whose blood is couture?

Joan Collins

"The problem with beauty is that it's like being born rich and getting poorer."

Courage to be nice

Summoned some easy like sunday morning earlier and said hi to the guys selling "Newports. Newports. Packs and loosies."

My good morning beamed back to me tenfold from the warmed heart of the homeboy with a glistening apple cheeked smile and an appreciative nod to my W4th look.

So glad I had to courage to be nice.

Beauty Shmooty. Grandeur Blandeur

Beauty schmooty!! scoffs Hal Duncan. It's not about the universal grandeur of this or the ennobling glory of that. Your aesthetics are your business. They are the set of your own visceral responses to the stimuli of the world around you.

Those that elate you are just as much a part of your aesthetic as those that enrage you. Elate or enrage, "fight or fuck", you are a taste-making factory all your own.

So what? you say? Well, I'm not sure what other than I like having the conversation open to what we hate and not just what glorifies this priceless existence.

There is, as usual, so much more to this post (including the purpose of sentience and science experiements with angry monkeys), but I will not be tackling it now.

Accountability

I was recently asked how my blog was going.

Just as my cyber spirits lifted, "The Written Nerd's been reading me!", the hard facts burst through the shimmer, so gross and so familiar.

I punked out and joked that I was writing it in my head. This lame response was rightly and clearly noted as such. Off she and the conversation went like so many rolled eyes and fallen crests before.

Accountability is a beautiful thing really. Strong and simple, "Did you do what you said you would?" is always there to face squarely or slink away from. Always.

I must must must remember that the plain truth of what I've actually gotten done is the most accurate indication of who I am, far surpassing any to-do list, no matter how brilliant in scope or range or penmanship.

Integrity, honesty, and truth. The simple, the plain, and the uncluttered all beckon with the beauty of their strength.

"You will like it here. We are noble and unworried. No one at all can fuck with us."

Natural Affinity?

I have this visceral response when some greens and blues come together. I wonder sometimes if the appeal is universal. Are we wired as humans to enjoy the colors in nature?

I heart yes-no

Passed this gem on my bike. Hopped off with an ear-to-ear grin. Wanted to take a big bite! The red, the blue, the old, the new. My, my, my. Looks like candy, right? Mmmm....

Aesthete Guilt at the Movies

Two-thirds of the way through Open Water, I noticed the gorgeous Caribbean seascapes where the couple is dealing with their life and death decisions and desperation. As the skies became saturated in pinks and reds and the striking silhouettes of the clouds sharpened, beauty was again put in its place. Not once mentioned - aesthetically powerful yet irrelevant in light of the present human drama.

Spider release

Technorati Profile

Glossary

aesthete: one having or affecting sensitivity to the beautiful especially in art

aesthetic: a particular theory or conception of beauty or art --
a particular taste for or approach to what is pleasing to the senses and especially sight

aesthetics: a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste and with the creation and appreciation of beauty--a pleasing appearance or effect

beauty: the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit--a particularly graceful, ornamental, or excellent quality


photo by Cody Pomeroy via flickr

definitions from www.m-w.com

Yapha

It was one of those sparkly days. I'd just been fired and was so delighted to be free and undetermined. This shot was irresistable: the glowing debris so pefectly decorative in the gray-brown field--the yes-no so textbook. Who can gamble on laser eye surgery when vision is so delicious?

photo by Varsity Aesthete MAR06

Betty Borges

organic electric secret rockstar

casually mythical

riding that vein of beauty that fuels enviable existence

capiliaries tributaries dignitaries

disseminating magic

to those who don't know it's free

pirate buddies

stealing grandeur and glory

from where it is going to waste

twenty-six laps around the sun

don't stop now

my plundering sac's only half full

April 2005

photo by tearapen via flickr

Orhan Pamuk on Beauty and Decay

Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday, and today The New York Times published this excerpt from his memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely. Quickly reading through the paper on my way to work this morning the passage shook me pointing to a segregation I hadn't seen before and an arrogance I hadn't fully acknowledged.

To savor Istanbul’s back streets, to appreciate the vines and trees that endow its ruins with accidental grace, you must, first and foremost, be a stranger to them. A crumbling wall, a wooden tekke — condemned, abandoned, and now fallen into neglect — a fountain from whose faucets no water pours, a workshop in which nothing has been produced for eighty years, a collapsing building, a row of homes abandoned by Greeks, Armenians, and Jews as a nationalist state bore down on minorities, a house leaning to one side in a way that defies perspective, two houses leaning against each other in the way that cartoonists so love to depict, a cascade of domes and rooftops, a row of houses with crooked window casings — these things don’t look beautiful to the people who live among them; they speak instead of squalor, helpless hopeless neglect. Those who take pleasure in the accidental beauty of poverty and historical decay, those of us who see the picturesque in ruins — invariably, we’re people who come from the outside.

Often I feel pleased and proud blissing out on broken this, or fraying that as I go about my life. Thank goodness for me, you know, rootin' for the underdog. However, even I am occasionally put off by my unexamined pleasure at some of life's difficulties. Usually though, it's all private and in my head and I mostly ignore the complication and chalk up another point for myself on the aesthete scoreboard. There was one time though, that my indiscriminate bliss hurt my Mom's feelings and exposed a callousness that made me embarrassed.

Back in high school, when I was still going to church with Mom every week and considered polish and sheen a kind of disingenuous showing off, preferring instead the authenticity of wear and tear, I considered making a series of photographs showing the decaying beauty of the city. Mentioning this to Mom one Sunday, I recall she supported the idea at first, but that as I pointed in illustration to the paint falling cracked and rotten off the walls high above the congregation, she winced admonishing me, "Oh no. Don't photograph that." She felt the building's dignity eroding with its physical changes and saw my photographing that as an exploitative exposure of these sad circumstances. As photographers we shared a vision, but our sympathies and allegiances were very different.

While the deterioration endeared the old building to me, in the years since, I've found that the polished and grand and perfect are indeed beautiful to me now as well. At that time though, perhaps due to my youth and perceived smallness, the imperfections of grand things cut them down to size. It's hard to say for sure, of course, because that sort of reflective introspection is so imprecise, but recalling that exchange even now, a part of me winces at the arrogance of not even considering another perspective.

For Mom it was a sign of the poor condition of our parish at the time, but I, removed from concern by youth, asked only for the church to please me. Mom felt instead the more adult pangs of responsibility and obligation.

What makes the passage from Istanbul especially valuable though is Pamuk's concession in the end. With "us" and "we're", this author, so often preoccupied by the complications of identity and allegiance, lowers his pointed finger and joins us in the detached romance of good fortune.

Photo Credit Nicole Bengiveno NYT

Phosphorescent Bees of the Future

Daily I enjoy your particular blend of jolly smart-ass and the physicality of your aesthetic. One day, we may look back on how we got so amazing, and smile at all the beautiful things we made.

photo credit Ocean Oasis © 2000 CinemaCorp of the Californias

DANGER + CALCULUS 4 EVA

Via: VideoSift.

Wild Animals Don't Get Fat

And that's beautiful. It's in the elegance of necessity--form following function. Lack of excess is so gorgeous. Where is beauty for you? I feel it in the unchecked openness of small children; in the dizzy bliss of sleep deprivation or the first few drinks where the self I often edit and supress flows so easily; drinking water and not soda; raw and steamed vegetables not roasts and sautees. Keep me close to the world as it cannot help but be, and my soul will shout YESYESYES reawakened to the ecstasy of this existence.

When I am envying eagles and bears, confused and depressed by the excesses of civilization, beauty feels so far away. Still civilization (like cyanide) is also natural and therefore necessary and faultless. What am I seeking? More good feelings and a deeper connection. I feel the universe so much more when I am closer to its simpler state.

Let me bike and use my body--wilderness commute! Drop me unsuspecting into the deafening quiet of a forest--my mind changes. I smile and sing. Show me the rainbow galaxies above me--my big life also so so small. Remind me where and what I come from, and I will remember I am so glad to be alive.

Ancient Roadmap

My heart races when I read this. An ancient call to action. Spend some time with this.


Exploring Ancient World Cultures Readings from Ancient Rome
Ennead I.6 [1], On Beauty
Plotinus / Translated by Stephen MacKenna

1. Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight; but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations of words and in all kinds of music, for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues. What loftier beauty there may be, yet, our argument will bring to light.
What, then, is it that gives comeliness to material forms and draws the ear to the sweetness perceived in sounds, and what is the secret of the beauty there is in all that derives from Soul?
Is there some One Principle from which all take their grace, or is there a beauty peculiar to the embodied and another for the bodiless? Finally, one or many, what would such a Principle be?
Consider that some things, material shapes for instance, are gracious not by anything inherent but by something communicated, while others are lovely of themselves, as, for example, Virtue.
The same bodies appear sometimes beautiful, sometimes not; so that there is a good deal between being body and being beautiful.
What, then, is this something that shows itself in certain material forms? This is the natural beginning of our enquiry.
What is it that attracts the eyes of those to whom a beautiful object is presented, and calls them, lures them, towards it, and fills them with joy at the sight? If we possess ourselves of this, we have at once a standpoint for the wider survey.
Almost everyone declares that the symmetry of parts towards each other and towards a whole, with, besides, a certain charm of colour, constitutes the beauty recognized by the eye, that in visible things, as indeed in all else, universally, the beautiful thing is essentially symmetrical, patterned.
But think what this means.
Only a compound can be beautiful, never anything devoid of parts; and only a whole; the several parts will have beauty, not in themselves, but only as working together to give a comely total. Yet beauty in an aggregate demands beauty in details; it cannot be constructed out of ugliness; its law must run throughout.
All the loveliness of colour and even the light of the sun, being devoid of parts and so not beautiful by symmetry, must be ruled out of the realm of beauty. And how comes gold to be a beautiful thing? And lightning by night, and the stars, why are these so fair?
In sounds also the simple must be proscribed, though often in a whole noble composition each several tone is delicious in itself.
Again since the one face, constant in symmetry, appears sometimes fair and sometimes not, can we doubt that beauty is something more than symmetry, that symmetry itself owes its beauty to a remoter principle?
Turn to what is attractive in methods of life or in the expression of thought; are we to call in symmetry here? What symmetry is to be found in noble conduct, or excellent laws, in any form of mental pursuit?
What symmetry can there be in points of abstract thought?
The symmetry of being accordant with each other? But there may be accordance or entire identity where there is nothing but ugliness: the proposition that honesty is merely a generous artlessness chimes in the most perfect harmony with the proposition that morality means weakness of will; the accordance is complete.
Then again, all the virtues are a beauty of the soul, a beauty authentic beyond any of these others; but how does symmetry enter here? The soul, it is true, is not a simple unity, but still its virtue cannot have the symmetry of size or of number: what standard of measurement could preside over the compromise or the coalescence of the soul's faculties or purposes?
Finally, how by this theory would there be beauty in the Intellectual-Principle, essentially the solitary?

2. Let us, then, go back to the source, and indicate at once the Principle that bestows beauty on material things.
Undoubtedly this Principle exists; it is something that is perceived at the first glance, something which the soul names as from an ancient knowledge and, recognising, welcomes it, enters into unison with it.
But let the soul fall in with the Ugly and at once it shrinks within itself, denies the thing, turns away from it, not accordant, resenting it.
Our interpretation is that the soul- by the very truth of its nature, by its affiliation to the noblest Existents in the hierarchy of Being- when it sees anything of that kin, or any trace of that kinship, thrills with an immediate delight, takes its own to itself, and thus stirs anew to the sense of its nature and of all its affinity.
But, is there any such likeness between the loveliness of this world and the splendours in the Supreme? Such a likeness in the particulars would make the two orders alike: but what is there in common between beauty here and beauty There?
We hold that all the loveliness of this world comes by communion in Ideal-Form.
All shapelessness whose kind admits of pattern and form, as long as it remains outside of Reason and Idea, is ugly by that very isolation from the Divine-Thought. And this is the Absolute Ugly: an ugly thing is something that has not been entirely mastered by pattern, that is by Reason, the Matter not yielding at all points and in all respects to Ideal-Form.
But where the Ideal-Form has entered, it has grouped and coordinated what from a diversity of parts was to become a unity: it has rallied confusion into co-operation: it has made the sum one harmonious coherence: for the Idea is a unity and what it moulds must come to unity as far as multiplicity may.
And on what has thus been compacted to unity, Beauty enthrones itself, giving itself to the parts as to the sum: when it lights on some natural unity, a thing of like parts, then it gives itself to that whole. Thus, for an illustration, there is the beauty, conferred by craftsmanship, of all a house with all its parts, and the beauty which some natural quality may give to a single stone.
This, then, is how the material thing becomes beautiful- by communicating in the thought that flows from the Divine.

3. And the soul includes a faculty peculiarly addressed to Beauty- one incomparably sure in the appreciation of its own, never in doubt whenever any lovely thing presents itself for judgement.
Or perhaps the soul itself acts immediately, affirming the Beautiful where it finds something accordant with the Ideal-Form within itself, using this Idea as a canon of accuracy in its decision.
But what accordance is there between the material and that which antedates all Matter?
On what principle does the architect, when he finds the house standing before him correspondent with his inner ideal of a house, pronounce it beautiful? Is it not that the house before him, the stones apart, is the inner idea stamped upon the mass of exterior matter, the indivisible exhibited in diversity?
So with the perceptive faculty: discerning in certain objects the Ideal-Form which has bound and controlled shapeless matter, opposed in nature to Idea, seeing further stamped upon the common shapes some shape excellent above the common, it gathers into unity what still remains fragmentary, catches it up and carries it within, no longer a thing of parts, and presents it to the Ideal-Principle as something concordant and congenial, a natural friend: the joy here is like that of a good man who discerns in a youth the early signs of a virtue consonant with the achieved perfection within his own soul.
The beauty of colour is also the outcome of a unification: it derives from shape, from the conquest of the darkness inherent in Matter by the pouring-in of light, the unembodied, which is a Rational-Principle and an Ideal-Form.
Hence it is that Fire itself is splendid beyond all material bodies, holding the rank of Ideal-Principle to the other elements, making ever upwards, the subtlest and sprightliest of all bodies, as very near to the unembodied; itself alone admitting no other, all the others penetrated by it: for they take warmth but this is never cold; it has colour primally; they receive the Form of colour from it: hence the splendour of its light, the splendour that belongs to the Idea. And all that has resisted and is but uncertainly held by its light remains outside of beauty, as not having absorbed the plenitude of the Form of colour.
And harmonies unheard in sound create the harmonies we hear, and wake the soul to the consciousness of beauty, showing it the one essence in another kind: for the measures of our sensible music are not arbitrary but are determined by the Principle whose labour is to dominate Matter and bring pattern into being.
Thus far of the beauties of the realm of sense, images and shadow-pictures, fugitives that have entered into Matter- to adorn, and to ravish, where they are seen.

4. But there are earlier and loftier beauties than these. In the sense-bound life we are no longer granted to know them, but the soul, taking no help from the organs, sees and proclaims them. To the vision of these we must mount, leaving sense to its own low place.
As it is not for those to speak of the graceful forms of the material world who have never seen them or known their grace- men born blind, let us suppose- in the same way those must be silent upon the beauty of noble conduct and of learning and all that order who have never cared for such things, nor may those tell of the splendour of virtue who have never known the face of Justice and of Moral-Wisdom beautiful beyond the beauty of Evening and of dawn.
Such vision is for those only who see with the Soul's sight- and at the vision, they will rejoice, and awe will fall upon them and a trouble deeper than all the rest could ever stir, for now they are moving in the realm of Truth.
This is the spirit that Beauty must ever induce, wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love and a trembling that is all delight. For the unseen all this may be felt as for the seen; and this the Souls feel for it, every soul in some degree, but those the more deeply that are the more truly apt to this higher love- just as all take delight in the beauty of the body but all are not stung as sharply, and those only that feel the keener wound are known as Lovers.

5. These Lovers, then, lovers of the beauty outside of sense, must be made to declare themselves.
What do you feel in presence of the grace you discern in actions, in manners, in sound morality, in all the works and fruits of virtue, in the beauty of souls? When you see that you yourselves are beautiful within, what do you feel? What is this Dionysiac exultation that thrills through your being, this straining upwards of all your Soul, this longing to break away from the body and live sunken within the veritable self?
These are no other than the emotions of Souls under the spell of love.
But what is it that awakens all this passion? No shape, no colour, no grandeur of mass: all is for a Soul, something whose beauty rests upon no colour, for the moral wisdom the Soul enshrines and all the other hueless splendour of the virtues. It is that you find in yourself, or admire in another, loftiness of spirit; righteousness of life; disciplined purity; courage of the majestic face; gravity; modesty that goes fearless and tranquil and passionless; and, shining down upon all, the light of god-like Intellection.
All these noble qualities are to be reverenced and loved, no doubt, but what entitles them to be called beautiful?
They exist: they manifest themselves to us: anyone that sees them must admit that they have reality of Being; and is not Real-Being, really beautiful?
But we have not yet shown by what property in them they have wrought the Soul to loveliness: what is this grace, this splendour as of Light, resting upon all the virtues?
Let us take the contrary, the ugliness of the Soul, and set that against its beauty: to understand, at once, what this ugliness is and how it comes to appear in the Soul will certainly open our way before us.
Let us then suppose an ugly Soul, dissolute, unrighteous: teeming with all the lusts; torn by internal discord; beset by the fears of its cowardice and the envies of its pettiness; thinking, in the little thought it has, only of the perish able and the base; perverse in all its the friend of unclean pleasures; living the life of abandonment to bodily sensation and delighting in its deformity.
What must we think but that all this shame is something that has gathered about the Soul, some foreign bane outraging it, soiling it, so that, encumbered with all manner of turpitude, it has no longer a clean activity or a clean sensation, but commands only a life smouldering dully under the crust of evil; that, sunk in manifold death, it no longer sees what a Soul should see, may no longer rest in its own being, dragged ever as it is towards the outer, the lower, the dark?
An unclean thing, I dare to say; flickering hither and thither at the call of objects of sense, deeply infected with the taint of body, occupied always in Matter, and absorbing Matter into itself; in its commerce with the Ignoble it has trafficked away for an alien nature its own essential Idea.
If a man has been immersed in filth or daubed with mud his native comeliness disappears and all that is seen is the foul stuff besmearing him: his ugly condition is due to alien matter that has encrusted him, and if he is to win back his grace it must be his business to scour and purify himself and make himself what he was.
So, we may justly say, a Soul becomes ugly- by something foisted upon it, by sinking itself into the alien, by a fall, a descent into body, into Matter. The dishonour of the Soul is in its ceasing to be clean and apart. Gold is degraded when it is mixed with earthy particles; if these be worked out, the gold is left and is beautiful, isolated from all that is foreign, gold with gold alone. And so the Soul; let it be but cleared of the desires that come by its too intimate converse with the body, emancipated from all the passions, purged of all that embodiment has thrust upon it, withdrawn, a solitary, to itself again- in that moment the ugliness that came only from the alien is stripped away.

6. For, as the ancient teaching was, moral-discipline and courage and every virtue, not even excepting Wisdom itself, all is purification.
Hence the Mysteries with good reason adumbrate the immersion of the unpurified in filth, even in the Nether-World, since the unclean loves filth for its very filthiness, and swine foul of body find their joy in foulness.
What else is Sophrosyne, rightly so-called, but to take no part in the pleasures of the body, to break away from them as unclean and unworthy of the clean? So too, Courage is but being fearless of the death which is but the parting of the Soul from the body, an event which no one can dread whose delight is to be his unmingled self. And Magnanimity is but disregard for the lure of things here. And Wisdom is but the Act of the Intellectual-Principle withdrawn from the lower places and leading the Soul to the Above.
The Soul thus cleansed is all Idea and Reason, wholly free of body, intellective, entirely of that divine order from which the wellspring of Beauty rises and all the race of Beauty.
Hence the Soul heightened to the Intellectual-Principle is beautiful to all its power. For Intellection and all that proceeds from Intellection are the Soul's beauty, a graciousness native to it and not foreign, for only with these is it truly Soul. And it is just to say that in the Soul's becoming a good and beautiful thing is its becoming like to God, for from the Divine comes all the Beauty and all the Good in beings.
We may even say that Beauty is the Authentic-Existents and Ugliness is the Principle contrary to Existence: and the Ugly is also the primal evil; therefore its contrary is at once good and beautiful, or is Good and Beauty: and hence the one method will discover to us the Beauty-Good and the Ugliness-Evil.
And Beauty, this Beauty which is also The Good, must be posed as The First: directly deriving from this First is the Intellectual-Principle which is pre-eminently the manifestation of Beauty; through the Intellectual-Principle Soul is beautiful. The beauty in things of a lower order-actions and pursuits for instance- comes by operation of the shaping Soul which is also the author of the beauty found in the world of sense. For the Soul, a divine thing, a fragment as it were of the Primal Beauty, makes beautiful to the fulness of their capacity all things whatsoever that it grasps and moulds.

7. Therefore we must ascend again towards the Good, the desired of every Soul. Anyone that has seen This, knows what I intend when I say that it is beautiful. Even the desire of it is to be desired as a Good. To attain it is for those that will take the upward path, who will set all their forces towards it, who will divest themselves of all that we have put on in our descent:- so, to those that approach the Holy Celebrations of the Mysteries, there are appointed purifications and the laying aside of the garments worn before, and the entry in nakedness- until, passing, on the upward way, all that is other than the God, each in the solitude of himself shall behold that solitary-dwelling Existence, the Apart, the Unmingled, the Pure, that from Which all things depend, for Which all look and live and act and know, the Source of Life and of Intellection and of Being.
And one that shall know this vision- with what passion of love shall he not be seized, with what pang of desire, what longing to be molten into one with This, what wondering delight! If he that has never seen this Being must hunger for It as for all his welfare, he that has known must love and reverence It as the very Beauty; he will be flooded with awe and gladness, stricken by a salutary terror; he loves with a veritable love, with sharp desire; all other loves than this he must despise, and disdain all that once seemed fair.
This, indeed, is the mood even of those who, having witnessed the manifestation of Gods or Supernals, can never again feel the old delight in the comeliness of material forms: what then are we to think of one that contemplates Absolute Beauty in Its essential integrity, no accumulation of flesh and matter, no dweller on earth or in the heavens- so perfect Its purity- far above all such things in that they are non-essential, composite, not primal but descending from This?
Beholding this Being- the Choragos of all Existence, the Self-Intent that ever gives forth and never takes- resting, rapt, in the vision and possession of so lofty a loveliness, growing to Its likeness, what Beauty can the soul yet lack? For This, the Beauty supreme, the absolute, and the primal, fashions Its lovers to Beauty and makes them also worthy of love.
And for This, the sternest and the uttermost combat is set before the Souls; all our labour is for This, lest we be left without part in this noblest vision, which to attain is to be blessed in the blissful sight, which to fail of is to fail utterly.
For not he that has failed of the joy that is in colour or in visible forms, not he that has failed of power or of honours or of kingdom has failed, but only he that has failed of only This, for Whose winning he should renounce kingdoms and command over earth and ocean and sky, if only, spurning the world of sense from beneath his feet, and straining to This, he may see.

8. But what must we do? How lies the path? How come to vision of the inaccessible Beauty, dwelling as if in consecrated precincts, apart from the common ways where all may see, even the profane?
He that has the strength, let him arise and withdraw into himself, foregoing all that is known by the eyes, turning away for ever from the material beauty that once made his joy. When he perceives those shapes of grace that show in body, let him not pursue: he must know them for copies, vestiges, shadows, and hasten away towards That they tell of. For if anyone follow what is like a beautiful shape playing over water- is there not a myth telling in symbol of such a dupe, how he sank into the depths of the current and was swept away to nothingness? So too, one that is held by material beauty and will not break free shall be precipitated, not in body but in Soul, down to the dark depths loathed of the Intellective-Being, where, blind even in the Lower-World, he shall have commerce only with shadows, there as here.
"Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland": this is the soundest counsel. But what is this flight? How are we to gain the open sea? For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso- not content to linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense filling his days.
The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is The Father.
What then is our course, what the manner of our flight? This is not a journey for the feet; the feet bring us only from land to land; nor need you think of coach or ship to carry you away; all this order of things you must set aside and refuse to see: you must close the eyes and call instead upon another vision which is to be waked within you, a vision, the birth-right of all, which few turn to use.

9. And this inner vision, what is its operation?
Newly awakened it is all too feeble to bear the ultimate splendour. Therefore the Soul must be trained- to the habit of remarking, first, all noble pursuits, then the works of beauty produced not by the labour of the arts but by the virtue of men known for their goodness: lastly, you must search the souls of those that have shaped these beautiful forms.
But how are you to see into a virtuous soul and know its loveliness?
Withdraw into yourself and look. And if you do not find yourself beautiful yet, act as does the creator of a statue that is to be made beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes there, he makes this line lighter, this other purer, until a lovely face has grown upon his work. So do you also: cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue, until there shall shine out on you from it the godlike splendour of virtue, until you shall see the perfect goodness surely established in the stainless shrine.
When you know that you have become this perfect work, when you are self-gathered in the purity of your being, nothing now remaining that can shatter that inner unity, nothing from without clinging to the authentic man, when you find yourself wholly true to your essential nature, wholly that only veritable Light which is not measured by space, not narrowed to any circumscribed form nor again diffused as a thing void of term, but ever unmeasurable as something greater than all measure and more than all quantity- when you perceive that you have grown to this, you are now become very vision: now call up all your confidence, strike forward yet a step- you need a guide no longer- strain, and see.
This is the only eye that sees the mighty Beauty. If the eye that adventures the vision be dimmed by vice, impure, or weak, and unable in its cowardly blenching to see the uttermost brightness, then it sees nothing even though another point to what lies plain to sight before it. To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.
Therefore, first let each become godlike and each beautiful who cares to see God and Beauty. So, mounting, the Soul will come first to the Intellectual-Principle and survey all the beautiful Ideas in the Supreme and will avow that this is Beauty, that the Ideas are Beauty. For by their efficacy comes all Beauty else, but the offspring and essence of the Intellectual-Being. What is beyond the Intellectual-Principle we affirm to be the nature of Good radiating Beauty before it. So that, treating the Intellectual-Kosmos as one, the first is the Beautiful: if we make distinction there, the Realm of Ideas constitutes the Beauty of the Intellectual Sphere; and The Good, which lies beyond, is the Fountain at once and Principle of Beauty: the Primal Good and the Primal Beauty have the one dwelling-place and, thus, always, Beauty's seat is There.

YES

I was 15 when I first felt it - a big deep silent YES. That spring and summer, I spent hours at the ninth floor window looking out over the bay toward Manhattan watching the sky change. Had I ever been that quiet and comfortable before? It was so different. It was the sweet accidental beginning of my search for beauty.

That same summer I drew up plans for documenting beauty and surrounding myself with the quest but never followed through in the way I thought I would. Instead, I've had this project tucked away for years. It's funny too. At times I've actively pursued it, and at other times, while otherwise involved, beauty's come to me.

There's something so special there: when without searching I've found myself again aware of the big YES YES YES. I feel a fondness and comfort and deep joy at those times often followed by the impulse to hold on tighter maybe, or at least to pay attention and look out for those moments. Then after awhile, the feeling fades and the cycle starts again.

This though, is the next step. The active pursuit, the fruition of that original vision. My plans and goals for the project have aged as I have and happily so. Also, this work - this search for beauty - investigation of its nature and source, implication and power - means more to me now as other dreams once dreamt have fallen away while this one has stayed with me.