Last week I learned that a friend of mine had died at a young age (only a few years older than myself). I became an ocean, shored by waves of gratitude and grief. I was grateful for the memories I had made with this extraordinary man, and for the memories I had made with my husband on honeymoon in the week before. Grief overwhelmed everything else.
I was reading Susan Sontag at the time, a series of essays published by Penguin titled At The Same Time. The collection, posthumously collated by her editors and only son, begins with an essay on "the inextricability of ethic and aesthetic values" (Sontag, viii).
This morning I sat at my writing desk, curbed by questions. Why did this piece move me more than other reflections in the collection? Why now?
In the essay Sontag ravels aesthetic and ethic values. I believe I understand her. Beauty feels intrinsically woven into what is divine.
For me, the idea of beauty and the existence of God are indivisible. Like the moon which cannot be seen unless reflected by the sun, my experience of beauty does not exist without a recognition of the divine. I am convinced that objective beauty lies beyond the human and the made.
Objectively beautiful things emphasise our knowledge of what is good; and in doing so, affirms the disparity between what is good and what it not. In this operose way, objectively beautiful things resonate with our unconscious mind by drawing us into a conscious recognition that the world we experience is not as it was intended to be. Beauty achieves this by being the window which opens us to behold the world as it was intended to be. It gives us a glimpse into the world as it was made by God; a world scholars might call Eden, or the ancient Greeks, Arcadia.
Beauty, then, is how we define our experience with something that transcends our broken and unnatural world. This is why we understand when a German soldier standing guard in the Russian winter of late December 1924 writes:
The most beautiful Christmas I have ever seen, made entirely of disinterested emotion and stripped of all tawdry trimmings, I was all alone beneath an enormous, starred sky, and I can remember a tear running down my frozen cheek, a tear neither of pain nor of joy but of emotion created by intense experience.*
Here, we meet a man confined to an experience, or moment, inseparable from the battlefield where bullets line the ground like shells on a peeled-back ocean. There is nothing to indicate beauty here, and yet, this soldier experiences beauty nonetheless. In her essay, Sontag writes that "our capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions." Even war, or the prospect of death, "cannot expunge it" (Sontag, 12-13).
Death is not beautiful.
But beauty reminds us that death is unnatural. It arrests us with a vision of the world as it was intended to be, not as it is. Beauty gives us the hope to long for a world where "there is no more death, sorrow, weeping or pain" (Revelation 21:4).
Choosing to recognise beauty in the face of death requires and increases our courage. Or simply, to recognise beauty is to acknowledge our grief. Both beauty and grief demonstrate an inherent desire for God to restore our world to its original nature. To acknowledge beauty is to look at something divine and cry, "This, this is what my eyes were made to see, what my ears were made to hear, what my heart was made to know."
Objectively beautiful experiences give us the strength to work toward 'materialising God's world' as best we are able.
The phrase 'materialising God's world'' is worthy of note because it reflects the human compulsion to not only admire beauty but to harvest it. Poet Edna St Vincent Millay's affirms this sentiment in her poem:
Still will I harvest beauty where it grows: / In coloured fungus and the spotted fog / Surprised on foods forgotten; in ditch and bog / Filmed brilliant with irregular rainbows
Here, Edna infers that we must know where to look if we want to harvest beauty; and beauty, we learn, is found "where it grows."
In the poem, Millay wills herself and the reader into a natural world of "coloured fungus and the spotted fog." Though we would not generally consider them beautiful, both the fungus and the fog belong – and contribute – to the image of a natural world. By comparing beauty with "forgotten foods," Millay argues that beauty is indispensable. Although it grows in broken, ugly and decomposing places, we still need it to live.
How does an artist harvest beauty? I ponder this question for a month. I ask God for the answer. He is quiet. I ask my husband, my friends. I ask my glug jug, which looks back at me stoically, unamused. I ask the window. I ask the giving tree with its willowy branches. I ask the window. I ask the giving tree with its willowy branches. I ask the internet, hoping that some other writer has discovered the answer to this question and articulated it thoughtfully – nothing. I hope for an epiphany so that I might finish this essay and send it off.
On no particular morning of note I was watering our mint plant in the window when I realised that I had missed a truth from Millay's poem. I imagined her arched brow, the soft curve of her lip upturned as if to say, Beauty is seen on the outside but grown on the inside. If we want to harvest beauty, we must look to "where it grows."
We must learn how to harvest our experiences, allowing them to move us toward what is divine and away from what is not. God, the divine, does not belittle our humanness. Rather, He – and his work – serve to validate it. We were made to be human in a world created by the divine.
We must choose, like God's mother who, as recorded in the book of Luke, harvested the experience of being with the divine and treasured it in her heart.
The act of harvesting beautiful experiences helps us cope with the grief of losing someone we love. When we treasure our loved ones, we remember that not even death can "expunge" beauty.
This too is how we 'work to materialise' God's divine world where there is no death or brokenness; nothing ugly or wrong.
What comes to mind now is the beginning of a poem written by nurse and writer Vera Brittain following the death of her fiancé who was killed on the western front, Christmas 1915:
Perhaps some day the sun will shine again / And I shall see that still the skies are blue / And feel one more I do not live in vain / Although bereft of you.
Last night I dreamt of my friend and woke wishing that I were walking the lonely stretch of beach beside the ocean where my parents raised me. I heard the water and then, suddenly, it was before me, beating like a heart, wave after wave.
My feet found themselves in the sand. My ankles, also. Becoming strong, I left the shore for the sea. God's light glimmered on the ocean like mica on a rock. His face, the moon, made the water look less like an ocean and more like the sky. I floated above the waves, and in floating realised that I was dreaming. I woke again, less afraid.
. . .
Sontag, Susan. At The Same Time (Penguin, 2008).
St Vincent Millay, Edna. "Still will I harvest beauty where it grows" (Poetry Foundation).
Quoted in Stephen G. Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 130.
Brittain, Vera. "Perhaps" (warpoets.org).
*Cover: "Susan Sontag alone on a bed. N.Y.C. 1965." Photograph by Diane Arbus.
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