ON BEAUTY

David Hickman

Beauty is desire in the shape of the desirable. When desire is clean and clear, beauty may become an experience of the sublime, and then it is beyond the personal desires of the one who apprehends it. At that point it becomes the object of aspiration, which is a higher kind of desire within our everyday, familiar desires.

Beauty has an inner necessity to it that enters us and pulls us toward it. In this way it turns us from ourselves to what is outside us, and turns the external into an internal experience at exactly the same time. As an internal experience beauty enters us, to the extent that we allow it to enter, not as an object, but as a figuration of the other we initially feel ourselves separate from. The experience of beauty is paradoxical then. It requires “a local habitaion and a name” yet it can never be possessed, cannot be fully captured, and as such remains elusive except for the moment when one is so immersed in one’s experience of it that one has no need of captures. In a Lacanian sense, this latter experience is the capture. Yet in a spiritual/phenomenological sense, such a capture is itself only one inside many more that are waiting to be made. . . like a set of infinitely collapsing but delicately carved ivory boxes.

There are heirarchies of beauty then. And these heirarchies haunt the same grounds the ancients once knew. The great chain of being is nothing if not a notion of successive beauties of a moral kind, (that it was quickly perverted and used by those both powerful and unscrupulopus has nothing to do with its orgins in the true) as our human experience of beauty, to borrow a phrase from the poet Robert Duncan, has “orders within orders.” As such the experience of beauty has always as subtext its relationship to an ever expanding sublime. Though it may also hold all the delicacy and poignancy of desire that has been enslaved, even frozen, inside a continuum that dissapears because we have lost the imaginative capacity and/or care to re-enliven it in the context of our own times. As such, the experience of beauty has a tragic element, and to gaze on beauty can be as shattering a human experience as any that can be imagined. This is not only due to the gap between beauty apprehended and the one who apprehends it, but also because beauty tests the limits of our powers of description to the point where we are left outside of language, struggling to ground ourselves in the ordinary world we hold onto as a defense against dissolving into the nothing between us and what we apprehend.

The relationship between beauty and nothingness is worth exploring then, as an experience of beauty necessarily carries within it the aesthetic experience of the void. . . of dissolving into the flower, the field, or the luminous face that appears suddenly in a crowd. In such an encounter the whole of what one senses is both absolutely present and poised at the brink of an eternal emptiness, as if it is about to become so present in us that we may dissapear in the experience of holding it. As such, the beautiful is experienced with an elemental surprise. This may dawn on us slowly or be felt as an immediate shock. Whatever the case, it charges us as it inhabits, and we may literally have the sense of a silence that rises to meet the object we hold in our sight. This is true even in the appreciation of sensual beauty, for even in the sensual there lies the promise of a meaning that permeates everything we admire, as well as everything we do not. It is this meaning that charges the eros of our own desire for its imagined forms. And though that particular experience is always a local and specific one, it still manages to leave us with the sense of something over and above our immediate desire, -- something hopeful, something charged, in the same way that language is charged in poetry. In this way the experience of beauty is intricately and subtly layered, and the experience of those layers can be absolutely intoxicating, as it returns us to our origins as beings who desire. And in the case of that beauty which is most sublime,in which the eros that seeks a form is least personal and most invested in the well-being of the world as being that blesses, beauty can charge our desires with the remembrance of having their source in that same sublime.

So the experience of beauty is the experience of remembering, and the moment of seeing the beautiful object becomes the advent of the entrance for Mnemosyne. . . the mother of the muses, who is memory herself—the memory of that numinous world from which all desires derive.That we sense beauty before we are able to think about it is a clue to our relationship to it. It is sensed not only through vision, but our sense for symmetry and balance and more. . . even our sense of touch as it lives in the imaginative encounter with a beautiful thing. . . . so it is our sensory experience which enlivens the field between us and what is beautiful. . . filling it, pervading it, until the boundary between the perceiver and the object percieved becomes porous, and beauty pours in, lighting the reality that lives between us as subject and the beautiful that is perceived.

In Michelangelo’s Pieta for instance, the figure of Mary is poised above the body of Christ, her head bowed in prayer and grief at the same time. Her features are so completely focused in the objective gravity of this world-shattering and world-preserving moment, that she is able to hold, not just her son in death, but all of us who hold her in our gaze. So we are able to be held by her as we look, and in being held by her, we are initiated a little way into the deep mystery of her sorrow. We feel the sadness that is captured in her face. We know the loss of the very essence of our own humanity. We sense that, in this loss, there is no hope whatsoever, save the dim unsopken hope that something beautiful may rise from this beautiful devastation, that such beauty carries inside it a terrible knowledge that is the world-as-mystery. And that mystery places us in the center of an absolute and reverent silence, in which time itself waits to be reborn from a moment in equipoise, a moment in which the desire of the world is both formed and unformed out of a silence that traces the beautiful in both the figure of loss and the figure of its mourning.

David Hickman is a graduate of the Hollins College Master's program in English /Writing and the MFA program in Creative Writing at UNC-Greensboro, where he was a Randall Jarrell Fellow. He also holds a Master's degree in Counseling from Appalachian State University. He is the author of a book of poems titled What the Silence Said , and the founding editor of Trope ,an online journal of poetry and graphic arts. He currently lives, works and writes in Greensboro NC.