Beauty and Perception’s Limits
Posted: December 14th, 2009 | Filed under: Modern / Not Modern |
When we experience beauty, we react to the feeling that things are just right somehow - unexpectedly right, sometimes inexplicably right. We ask another person - “Did you see the way that happened?” -or- “Did you hear how beautiful that was?” When we take note of beauty, we notice things that aren’t merely “correct,” or even “true.” We notice things happening as they should always be, though they rarely are.
[I was invited to talk to my church today about Beauty. Here is an excerpt, adapted a little for this forum.]
The difference between the experience of things as beautiful and the experience of things as merely correct is that the experience of beauty happens in relation to other experiences - usually ugly ones. The expression 2+2=4 is not more correct than the expression 2+2=5. The former is simply true, the other not. But the experience of the morning’s first light on the horizon is beautiful because it is the right change from the long dark we felt before. The experience of beauty is the experience of things that feel right in comparison to our experience of things gone wrong.
Of course, there’s a lot to go wrong in this world - starting with us. We go wrong at every turn, we wrong others, and the world wrongs us. The world also wrongs others - we want a more beautiful world for them, a world that is not only right, but that feels right.
It’s this understanding of beauty, beauty as experiences that feel right in relation to those that feel wrong, that led me to art. There are other reasons to work for what is right than the pursuit of beauty, but my experience of beauty includes the possibility of moving through the bad to a change for good, especially the unexpected good, the relief of the good.
I didn’t grow up around much Fine Art. We had an art museum in town, and I had contact with it through visits and classes. I was fascinated by it, but more as an exotic cultural space than as a reserve of beauty. Like the jazz section of the LP’s at the library, I had no idea what it was connected to but I knew there was good stuff in there. All art was other to me, really.
If I search my past for formative instances of the beautiful, I don’t go to my experiences of art or even of the picturesque in nature. I go to moments where the universe seemed bigger than the ugly one I thought I ruled. The fact that there was more to the universe than I could see has always been a great comfort to me. (For some people this fact must be constantly and painfully obvious - I hope none of you are ever as prideful as I can be. Please forgive this dolt of a man.) The ways in which I fall short, and the ways in which the rest of the world fails, are just a little less the rule of things when I see how much else is out there that I can never know.
The primary place where this happened for me as a kid was in the backyard of our country home, at night, where I would spend hours with the stars and planets, aided by telescope and binoculars. That these little spots of light numbered more than I could count, that it took such work to focus on just one, though they were in most cases even bigger than our sun, just seemed impossible - though I knew it to be true. A turn of the head to behold another swath of uncountable brightness was a reminder of how little I can ever really see, of my life or of any other. I paged through photos of Mars’ surface taken from spacecraft, compared them to the orange dot before me, imagining whole landscapes and sunsets I would never see - which were as real as mine.
Looking back, I think I did this to remind myself of the limits of what I could know. Whether things were going really right or really wrong, I had a hard time seeing how else the world could be besides the way I saw it. To be reminded of my limits by looking at the infinite sky put me in my place. More importantly, it felt RIGHT to be put in my place. It felt beautiful.
Why should it feel right to be humbled in this way? Why should it feel beautiful to voluntarily experience the limits of one’s own senses ? I can only answer this - because we are meant to be limited, we are not meant to be infinite, it is wrong to see oneself as over the whole world. (We are also meant to be able to choose when to be reminded of our limits, and not have this done for us through violence.)
Many would probably agree with me on this - and thankfully they would agree with me for a variety of reasons. For what it’s worth, I believe that it is good to discover the limits of one’s senses because it orients us appropriately to other creatures, and to a Creator. It does no good to see oneself as above any other living being - or, to my mind, as above God. (I understand that I may lose some of you on that last part. That’s OK. I should explain more about where I’m at on that one, and will soon.)
Beautiful.
Kevin, I am so glad you are writing these thoughts. I get stuck on phrases such as, “we are not meant to be…” How can we know what “is meant”? And rather than limits, which I find limiting, why not a recognition of our own experiences that may or may not be limiting? As for beauty, I think of Stan Brakhage’s film of autopsies and how the beautiful and the horrific keep trading places.
Thanks to you both! Sharon, is it that it’s too easy to talk about limits as positive from a position of privilege? Maybe there’s some other way.
I like using the word limits to describe what I can’t see or know, partly because I’m keen to get away from framing so much of life in terms of autonomous freedom. Perhaps our ideas of freedom are too tied to the transcendence of limits through autonomy; we could think about freedom as granted and lived within the space I make with others - not just any space, not an abstract, infinite space. Freedom to act within, not without or despite, the universe I co-inhabit. This is where the “meant to” language comes from too, out of a desire to acknowledge appropriate limits. To say that no person is meant to live in slavery is to acknowledge something of the right limits of what it is to be human. I’m also not meant to know the true thoughts of others, because that would go against our being as separate beings. I’m looking for a way to talk about inhabitation, as in some meditation practices. Admittedly, for me there is some implication here of a Divine purpose or narrative as well, but I don’t think that has to be here for it to work…?