Beauty by virtue of being
People have differing opinions about what is beautiful.
There are some beautiful things that almost everyone agrees on. A sunset, for example.
Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of beauty.
There are different theories about what is beautiful.
My argument is this:
Something is beautiful if it is.
Everything is.
Therefore, everything is beautiful.
I sent a collection of poetry to an editor a few years ago.
She commented on one of my poems:
“A moment in time is beautiful because what it can tell us, not just because it happens to happen.”
I replied:
“I think, to some extent, I believe that things are beautiful just because they happen.”
She wrote back:
“My brother is that way, as far as things being beautiful because they happen. It's part of his faith as a rabbi- to see and take note of the small things in life is a mitzvah, a religious moment owed to his God … If it's beautiful because it Is, show us what it Is, give us the grains of dirt and sunstreaks that make it itself.”
Dear editor: I left out your name for anonymity. If you’d like to be credited for these quotes, just let me know. Happy to!
I went through a phase of writing about what I was sensing, as opposed to what I was thinking.
I described what I was seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, tasting. Sometimes they were poems.
There are moments when sheer reality is awesome.
In this video, a hiker on the Appalachian Trail describes seeing a butterfly on a pile of shit.
I wrote about an experience that seemed awesome to me when I scooped protein powder for a smoothie.
I think everyone has had an experience like this.
You’re just like, “Wow, this is awesome.”
It could be anything.
Not just things that are typically beautiful.
Whether or not something is perceived as being beautiful is at least partly determined by the viewer’s perspective, their frame of mind.
Maybe everything is always beautiful.
Just because it is.
The sheer fact of existence is incredible.
But we’re not always in the state of mind to appreciate that fact, so we don’t always see the beauty.
Our inability to see it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
This reminds me of what my editor wrote:
“If it's beautiful because it Is, show us what it Is, give us the grains of dirt and sunstreaks that make it itself.”
An artist’s job is to help us see the beauty that’s always there.
Not all art does this.
One way that an artist can create art that conveys beauty to the viewer:
The artist experiences one of those “moments when sheer reality is awesome.”
They capture it clearly enough in their art form that the viewer gets the sense of awe.
My editor made the comment because I wasn’t doing #2 well enough in the poem.