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

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