Land of Beauty
“Why are rainbow people beautiful?”, Nilüfer asked.
There is a common experience when someone puts something into words that you were clearly aware of but never consciously considered. Why would a bunch of barefoot hippies making music inthe forest with sooty faces, smelling of smoke be beautiful? And yet they obviously are.
”Why?”, I asked Nilüfer.
”Because of their shiny eyes.”, she said.
Source: Егор Камелев, Unsplash
Beauty has been the subject of considerable reflection by people in love, philosophers and those pursuing a PhD in aesthetics. Later it became quite an industry. There are interesting words like the beau arts and belles-lettres — as if there were also laid arts or lettres-affreuxes. (English, for some reason, insists that all words connected with aesthetics must be of French origin.) And yes, there are ugly works of art and hideous pieces of literature, but those that are ugly by design are probably meant to call attention to a higher form of beauty, or the lack of beauty in some aspect of society. Whether they succeed is another issue. But how can one grasp this very phenomenon? What is beauty, after all?
I once had a conversation about this topic with my musician friend, Penguin. I recounted her an interview with Lagzi Lajcsi, a Gypsy entertainer producing notoriously popularist, simplistic party beat. Many would be surprised upon learning that he has a diploma from the prestigious Budapest music academy. Lajcsi (Little Lou) did not beat around the bush in the interview. He said he knows exactly what he’s doing but he makes loads of dough and all the starving beauty freaks can go to hell. I thought this was way more elevated than the attitude of Ákos, a pseudo-rebel lickspittle of the Orbán regime who is convinced of his greatness and the high artistic value of the slag he produces. Why is the aesthetic sense of some people so skewed?
Source: Szabó Bálint, Unsplash
Penguin shook her head. “I’m sure I could have a more meaningful conversation with Little Lou who appears to have some self-awareness than with a narcissist. Yet the only thing I can say is whether I like something or not. People in my social circles would tend to agree with me because we have similar models of the world. But there are more people who like things that are “oh my God” for me. I don’t know any objective criteria that could be used to determine beauty.
Beautiful. So there’s no actual ugly and nice? It’s all about individual or cultural taste? I’m sure bees find their larvae gorgeous, just as birds find the little naked dinosaurs in their nest pretty. And male hippos find the smell of females irresistibly nice. For beauty surely can be perceived by all senses.
Source: Andreas Vonlanthen, Unsplash
Enormous Imp, another artist, stopped on the street in the village and looked at a house, transfixed. “Look”, he said. “How beautiful.”
My eyes scanned the crumbling plasterwork, the mailbox barely hanging on by one screw, the yard full of junk and weeds, looking for some pretty living thing or object in the mess.
”What’s beautiful?”, I asked.
”The house.”
”This monstrosity?”
”Look at the color of the walls. They have exactly the same hue as the mail box. Both have the light saturation of the sky. The paint crumbles in patterns that look like the roots of a giant tree. The slant of the mail box is replicated by those plastic pieces on the other side.”
I stared in wonder at the painting produced in coproduction of nature and human negligence. I would never have looked for proportions and color harmony in a ramshackle courtyard full of objects of the industrial age. I would have thought the very material of the rusty metal slates, plastic pieces unfit for aesthetics. Yet my friend was right; a kind of otherworldly beauty revealed itself to me on that overcast day.
The Mandelbrot-set. Source: Simpson, Wikipedia
“Do you know of any criteria that can be used to judge beauty?”, I asked Enormous Imp. To my surprise he nodded. “If it reflects the patterns of nature”, he said. “Nature is always beautiful and if a manmade object emanates natural symmetries we will find it beautiful.”
“Some of us will”, I admitted. “And this view might have been more prevalent in the population in a foregone age. I haven’t encountered any genuine traditional art that would have been unaesthetic. But a lot of people like kitsch which is everything but natural.”
I don’t remember what my friend replied. What stuck in my mind was that perhaps he was right: there might be some criteria for beauty independent of personal taste, after all. Would this only reflect the aesthetics of our earthly world, the music of organic life, or some kind of more cosmic harmony? People in Oman often commented on the grim, scary lava mountains: “Look how beautiful this desert is!” Although the coziness of life was completely absent from the land, this exclamation also had some truth to it.
In an Eastern Transylvanian village I used to visit there was a general agreement that Mrs. Virág was the prettiest old woman in the village. Since the American cult of youth has been confining human beauty into a more and more restricted area, we tend to raise our eyebrows at such statements. How can an old hag be beautiful? If your face isn’t smooth and tender, go hide behind a haystack. Or get some botox quickly.
It might be reasonable to distinguish surface beauty from profound beauty. Or honest beauty from deceitful beauty. Shining eyes belong to the former, the beauty industry to the latter. Although all you need is a drop of belladonna and your eyes have become attractive… Beauty industry has a solution for everything.
Source: https://www.gq.com/story/valeria-lukyanova-human-barbie-doll
The most beautiful old people I’ve seen were the parents of an Iranian friend. We communicated without words. The mirth coming from their being almost had an odor. It seemed they had had a full life with everything in place. They didn’t want to prove anything, they were in no hurry, they saw the essence of things, they were present in every moment as it unfolded.
Mass production transformed the world of objects around us. Instead of things that reflect the soul we live in the desert of pragmatism. Or in the proud taste convulsion of local chieftains and their court.
The recently erected Monument of German Occupation in Hungary. Source: Elekes Andor, Wikipedia
Although beauty might be subjective, hideousness might reach a level where this question is not applicable. At home many people create their oasis of aesthetics. I’d be curious how we could extend that to public places. No, I don’t mean cozy coffee houses where you can get a slice of pastry for ten dollars plus service charge. It was money, profits that removed beauty from modern society. We can’t reintroduce it with the help of more money. If we want to recreate shared beautiful places we have to find different methods.
The BMW with the tinted windows stopped. A plaza woman with fake white-blonde hair let the window down. We can take you to Kanizsa, said the driver, a hulk full of tattoos. Sindbad took a seat. The talkative, good-hearted couple held each others’ hands during the whole trip. The guy kept bursting out in hearty laughs. Sindbad was happy when his prejudgements proved wrong. How would it be, he thought, to see through walls of frustration, through armors built of muscles, and immediately perceive the inner beauty in everyone?