“Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything that is beautiful, for beauty is God's handwriting--a wayside sacrament. Welcome it in every fair face, in every fair sky, in every fair flower, and thank God for it as a cup of blessing.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Ugly. Is irrelevant. It is an immeasurable insult to a woman, and then supposedly the worst crime you can commit as a woman. But ugly, as beautiful, is an illusion.”
- Margaret Cho
For a long time i tried to believe that beauty was indeed an illusion. It was probably an attempt by my psyche to reconcile itself with all the beautiful women it chanced to gaze upon. But is not youth, in any form, beautiful? But there are a lot of pithy sayings that remind you that the beauty of youth is just that, something that belongs to the transitory phase of being young. Taking it one step ahead, the next thing you will hear is that we are all dying from the moment we are born.
This is indeed a very pessimistic view of life. We have only one and it is too precious to spend it rejecting all that it has to offer. Does something that is impermanent not worthy of being called beautiful? If so, nothing in the world is beautiful. Both you and I know that is not true. I do not talk only of the human form here, but everything that you have ever experienced that made you feel more alive - an orange sunset, trying to get a hold of a 100 pound dog that thinks it is still a pup, your favorite bit of music - these are not illusions.
Philosophy goes so far as to say that the world is 'maya', an illusion; because it is impermanent. I do not know why there is a fixation on permanence. Nothing is. Why should something last forever? Every flower withers and dies. Every building ever built will return to dust. So will we. Everything that we feel will be lost in time. Aren't we all part of an on going process? Isn't life a string of such moments woven together?
Zen doesn't think so. It believes in centering yourself, to a more permanent part of your conciousness. Having no experience with this, i won't be too hasty in rejecting it.
Do we reject beauty because we reject change? It is a common human condition. We don't like to grow out of the comfortable niches we have carved for ourselves ( i am the poster child for seeking comfortable corners). If we accept beauty we must then accept change and flow too. Maybe that is too scary? Probably this is why 50 year old women get botox shots and use half a pound of foundation on their face?
The male archetype is supposed to prefer permanance while the female archetype flows and changes. I say archetype because all of us supposedly have both, in different or the same proportion. Much of human philosophy is male oriented. I am not familiar with feminist literature but feminism in general tried to supress the female archetype so that the woman may compete / supersede the man in man's world. There is a focus today on changing the world and not the woman. Maybe philosophy that arises from a female archetypal thought would throw more light on the issue?
1 comment:
A thought that should be carried concurrently with the thought of beauty is how do you interpret permanence. Generally, on average, if people are asked to define permanance, than people would say anything that stays the same above a week or month is possibly permanent. Of course as the context changes, this time interval will go up and down.
By asking this question, I am not trying to undermine your question of beauty. Rather I am trying to understand your question through the paradigm that " Yes everything is an illusion because everything is impermanent. But at that moment in time- that second, that microsecond, that fraction on a second when I see a sunset, a beautiful girl, my 2b wife, I find that beautiful. I certainly may not find the girl beautiful 10 years from now, though I will find my wife to be just the same. But that only means that illusion of beauty doesnt have to last every moment. It can change and most certainly change. It is also why something you find beautiful may seem mundane to me".
Moving on to why then we reject something that was previously beautiful or that someone else finds beautiful, its partly because
1. the human society has built around itself an invisible measuring yardstick (that everyone knowingly or unknowingly adheres to and again man being competitive wants the better portion rather than negative portion. And let me include myself also in this. I am not an exception to this rule.)
2. and partly because we cling on to what was beautiful. By this I dont mean we reject change. But we keep maintaining old records (baselining against them) when something new could possibly be beautiful in its own sense. But since its being compared to the baseline, its chickens out. Isnt this why a 60 year men & women get botox shots.
To bring in your view of male and female views on change, I would think that warrants another topic.
Also would love to have a female viewpoint on this (but who could that be).
Post a Comment