On Beauty
Let’s talk about beauty for a moment. In a world that surrounds us with disruption, anger and grief, let’s consider the nature of beauty for a while.
To get to the point straight away, the kind of beauty I’d like to consider here is a radiance. Not a form or line, neither a color or shade. Our beauty here is a state of resonance between two beings. As such, our beauty is evanescent, transient, and contingent. At the same time, it is also grounded, embedded and imperishable.
Can you see the snake there in the shadow of the stone, struggling to shed its old skin? It is brimming with beauty for all who ever shed a skin. Can you see the wolf, there in the field of the night, pressing her muzzle deep into the guts of the rabbit? She is full of beauty for all who ever felt hunger. Can you see the man there, leaning against the wall of the house, face in the sun, a deep scar running through his left eye? He is a beauty for all who lost a part of themselves.
I’d fail the nature of beauty if I proclaimed that beauty was simply a matter of kinship. That it tied together what is alike in an erotic bond of affection and compassion. Such notion would insinuate that beauty was predisposed between certain individuals only; that it followed through the furrows uniting a tribe. That is not so. Kinship favours the experience of beauty, but is by no means essential. The opposite can also be the case: By sensing an unfamiliar kind of beauty in something alien or foreign, the circle of kinship expands. And the Other is no longer entirely foreign.
In the kabbalistic Tree of Life the central Sephira of Tiphareth is called the Mediating Intelligence. And of course, Tiphareth is translated as beauty. This is something we might want to meditate upon.
The one seeing the skin-shedding snake, the feeding wolf, the scarred man, if they can perceive them in beauty, they enter a state of mediated balance, of momentary harmony with what they witness. This is a profound secret about the nature of beauty: It cannot exist in imbalance. The scales are always turned and adjusted if beauty enters the room. It awakens, and there is balance.
Consider the relationship between beauty and the natural phenomenon of resonance. The scientific definition is that resonance occurs when something is subjected to a vibration that matches its natural frequency. As living human organisms, we are constantly adjusting and re-calibrating our natural frequency. We vibrate differently in sleep, with a slow heart and steady breath, than we do after our third cup of coffee or while running to catch the tube. In the course of a single day we move through a whole spectrum of vibrations, most of them familiar and recurring, yet deeply unconscious. All of them are defined by years of habitual behaviour and patterns. Beauty, then, as we have said, is ephemeral, transient, and contingent. Its radiant presence all around us can only reach us if our momentary vibration is in resonance with it. In our natural state, therefore, we constantly filter out, suppress and neglect beauty because of our own confined frequency of vibration.
At the same moment I behold the beauty of the feeding wolf, I struggle to see the beauty of the wound. At the same moment, I want my lover’s embrace to last forever, I struggle to see the beauty in the skin-shedding snake. Beauty is resonance; and wherever it occurs it yields perfect balance for as brief as it might last.
Can you see the sunlight on its mighty flight through space, all colourless and weightless. Then it finally hits the membrane of a cell and explodes, hurled back into the eye of the beholder in a single, iridescent true tone. This unique colour is the exact resonance between the full spectrum of light and the single frequency in which this cell knows beauty. For many things in creation, such resonance is inborn and defined. For us as human beings, it presents a broad spectrum of possibilities – as broad as the myriad shades of colours contained in a single ray of light – from which we get to choose in what we want to encounter beauty.
How do we get to make such choices then? How do we change our natural frequency consciously, and not only according to the circadian rhythm of our cells? The answer to this question is a lifetime’s work for the adept in Tiphareth. Drawing beauty from all encounters in creation is not a process of grasping, pulling or piercing a shell it hides underneath. Drawing beauty from all objects of creation is a process of lightly adjusting our ability to resonate, to empathise, to share a new experience.
So to speak ‘you are beautiful’ is to say ‘I am in this experience with you, right now, in this very moment. The skin you are shedding, I have already shed or want to shed next. The hare you are feeding on, I have tasted its blood or am willing to taste it next. The scar you carry is alike to the wounds I carry or to my readiness to receive them.’ Beauty is radiance, all around us, all the time. Yet experiencing it, requires us to reflect, to mirror, to echo it back, to relate to its call.
Next time you use the words ‘this is beautiful’ or even ‘you are beautiful’, take a moment to pause. Allow this beauty to truly come to the fore, allow it to vibrate through your blood and body. Then see, if you can lay your finger on what it is that causes this resonance with you? Not in categorical or codified ways, but in fleeting, ephemeral and unspeakable precious ways: What is it between you both right now that sets this beauty aflame? – Then in that next moment, when all beauty is void and gone, when it is pain and grief and darkness, let’s pause again. Let all of it in, let it vibrate through your bones and blood again, and ask yourself: Who would I need to be in this experience, to resonate in beauty with it? Who is the snake now shedding its skin? Who is the hare now feeding the wolf? Who is the scar now marking this face?
If we want to travel on the Tree of Life in wisdom, we better learn to be as full as the light.
Finally, here are the lines that came to me this morning, which prompted these brief reflections on beauty.
Beauty is radiance
Not Form and line
Not color or shade
But echo and call
Beauty is resonance
Resounding from
The skin I shed to
The skin you don
Beauty is radiance
From this sun to
That cell exploding
In its own true tone
