#2 On Beauty
The whole attempt to write is to create an aesthetic pleasure. An aesthetic pleasure of shock, of hyperbole, of mundanity, of conversation, of lost moments, of time and memory or of experiencing our own annihilation as a spectacle. The limits of experiencing life and its aesthetic implications are endless, which is also to say, that the experience or the want to experience beauty is latently inherent in all aspects of life.
On a day, you’re sitting near the door and you’re staring at the distance that separates the outer world from the year of confinement you’ve been stuck in. This realisation, it later dawns on you, is one that is universal in its specificity, is a scene that you wish to capture in words. You’re sitting in two moments in time, in front of your placid language, and in front of a door. Both offer escape with the functional teleology of confinement. Since your experience of time is contiguous, of stacking one moment with the next, there is a chain of causality. Yet, in our attempt to generate a pleasure for the aesthete, we break time out of its linearity. Now, you’re sitting in front of the door and thinking of constraining it in language, and you’re sitting in front of language, waiting to run out the door. A simple scene is made evocative, wrapped in language to warp around time. The aesthetics in mundanity strikes you when you’re opening a box of cereal, and understanding the importance of ritual. In this realisation, you’re extending the mundane into a realm beyond itself.
Beyond the aesthetics in mundanity, there is also the beauty of sorrow. The aesthetic experience is one where the very experience of terror elevates to a level of profundity that isn’t an antidote to the terror but a compatriot. The theory of aesthetics when it enters the macabre, or the terrorising, or the sorrowful, is not to negate either, or to elevate it to a point where one is terrorised by beauty itself, but to minimise, to allow oneself the humanity to find beauty in a place where you least expect it.
In his diaries, Kafka writes, “Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate . . . but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime.”
To negate Kafka’s experience as an overt romanticisation of language, or to accept it as a cynical truth of life, is the annihilation of beauty in the face of certainty. Rather, not to take it as a theory, but as an attempt to experience both beauty and terror of life in the same moment, is what the aesthetic outcome of language is.
In an interview with Charlie Rose, George Saunders, succinctly says,
G.S: There are two great truths to life. One is the knowledge of one’s own mortality that sooner or later, everyone we know is going to die.
C.R: And the other?
G.S: That we all need to have compassion, and love in our lives.
Death becomes such an integral mystery to life, that to reconcile with it, we shroud it in metaphors. The plurality of language turns into rituals and symbols we enact to express a profound truth known to all. It is a truth that we wish to forget, and hence the most authentic form of expression becomes silence. As Walter Benjamin says, “…the immortal word remains silent,” and we circle around the immortal truth in our mortality, with our own litany of metaphors that both contain and elude the mystery.
At a funeral, you remember the words of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor: “So we have before us a mystery which we cannot comprehend. And precisely because it is a mystery we have had the right to preach it, to teach the people that what matters is neither freedom nor love, but the riddle, the secret, the mystery to which they have to bow—without reflection and even against their conscience.” At a funeral, you’re thinking on the aesthetics of death, of the pyre attaining a much higher symbolic and visual significance in the ritual than the material. At a funeral, you’re realising your own mortality, and you’re thinking if this is also compassion, if this qualifies as allowing love in your life.
The realisation is that larger truths are either confounded or conveyed only through a diversity of idioms. There is a beauty that we’re trying to talk about, coming to the same idea through different words; hence the paucity of ideas and abundance of words. In your very vicinity is the realisation: the serpentine roads straighten out in cities and develop a maze, and that fallen leaves convey a sense of time and belonging, and that the perception of skies is literally the liminal layer between our being and a vast nothingness. The absence of beauty translated through an absence of cognizance, of taking note of life, of pausing for a moment.
All of it, becomes an attempt to create an aesthetic understanding.
All of it existing in transience. All of it, an aesthetic experience.
All of it, forming a part of life, and all of it culminating into death.