Saturday, September 29, 2007

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.

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.

Friday, September 28, 2007

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.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Sunday, September 23, 2007

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.

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.

Friday, September 21, 2007

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.