Photo, my own.
Fear and beauty make odd bedfellows.
So I wrote in March of 2020 as Covid-19 spread across the globe and everything turned upside down and inside out. I remember the incongruity of a lone magnolia bush on a cobalt blue day: though I admired the magenta petals and budding shoots, they felt dissonant in the face of so much death and unknowing.
Now, two long years later, the world’s eye is on Ukraine. There isn’t a sentient soul who can look upon war without grief, anger, and fear.
I cannot write about the human atrocities. I don’t know how.
I can write, a little, about beauty and fear.
The universe holds unlimited manifestations and interpretations of beauty. For Plato, it meant ‘goodness’ and justice in Form, the object of admiration; not quite the same as virtue, but a close cousin.
We are conditioned to western ideas of beauty, to Hellenistic bodies and pre-Raphaelite complexions and tresses. What of Inuit faces and tattoos, tunniit, or mehdni, Indian body art? Or wabi sabi, the Japanese art of finding beauty in transience and imperfection? What of African ideals that hallow social and communal harmony over individualism? All evoke admiration. All are, indeed, beautiful.
Beauty is abundant in the religious and familial. It lives in the arches of cathedrals and in the arabesques of mosques. It’s a bowl of homemade soup and the touch of elderly hands. It’s the syncopation in a symphony and in ribbons of rap.
Beauty is emotive. It sneaks up on us in belly laughter over a bad joke. It’s found in gratitude for good advice given, and in the waning moments of really good cry. Compassion is abundantly beautiful. So are the doleful, dinnertime cries of my overweight cat.
There is something about visual beauty, in particular, that unsettles and solaces us. The privilege of sight provides a window to the ineffable in nature and art—drivers behind western aesthetics and eastern philosophy. Both branches seek to understand the currents in beauty. It’s about lines. No, it’s about love. No, it’s about loss. I’ll go for any one of these, or all three together: perhaps at some deeper level, happening upon visual beauty in a suffering world is somehow a reminder of my own fears, timidity, and mortality.
For a more poignant take on beauty, look no further than the dialogue between Shug and Celie in Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple. Throughout the story, the two women ponder the essence of God, moving beyond traditional, western representations of an old, white man who reigns supreme toward a more abstract, diffuse conception—not a ‘he’ but an ‘it’ that runs through everything.
Listen, God love everything you love—and a mess of things you don’t. More than anything, God love admiration. (Shug)
You saying God vain? (Celie)
Naw, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off when if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back. … Everything just wants to be loved. (Shug)
Everything wants to be loved, even color, pattern, and form.
And a lone magnolia bush on a cobalt blue day.
So much unfolds under Nature’s broad umbrella. I do not have her long view. But I can behold beauty and fear together, not in opposition, but as magnetic counterparts in a larger design.
[You can view the movie version of Shug’s and Celie’s dialogue here].