Transience and Beauty
A recent post described my encounter with Sam on my flight home from Kansas City. Sam has found this site and posted a brief response and question to my earlier post. Due to the transience of blogging, the substance of our conversation will disappear off of the main page with this post. Hence this revival…
Sam’s comment on the earlier post:
Hey, I’m the infamous Sam. My website is suffering from some mod_rewrite weirdness so the front page doesn’t work so well, however http://www.samuelcole.name/HomePage should work fine.In other news I think we ended that conversation with me accepting that art can have intrinsic “Joy” (or as Pirsig said: “quality”). The question is how can you appreciate that beauty without experiencing ugliness?
Hey Sam! I saw a hit from Rochester and thought it might be you! I hope you’re on your old computer and didn’t end up being right about your suspicion of it being stolen while you were gone.
Can beauty be appreciated without experiencing ugliness? Great question! I think the answer is yes, but that the practical reality of the matter points to no. People tend to be suspicious of things that seem perfect. Case in point: I had the opportunity to lead worship at a homeless shelter downtown last Friday. Musically, I tend towards perfectionism and am generally very polished in every aspect from the singing and playing to my very stage mannerisms and movement; and yet, it wasn’t until I made a mistake and commented on it laughingly with them that everyone lightened up and really started belting out the songs with smiles on their faces. The imperfection had brought a touch of humanity. And that is the locus of my answer. Humanity is not intrinsically beautiful anymore, which speaks to their very need for a God, for a Savior. In this earth beauty and ugliness walk hand in hand, and most of the time things that disclaim all ugliness are revealed as kitsch; and yet I don’t believe that ugliness is really necessary–I stick to my claim, ugliness is possible but not necessary. And part of the hope in Christ is that death and sin will all pass away, that ugliness will pass away, the resurrection will occur.
And death shall be no more, death thou shalt die.
-John Donne, Holy Sonnet VI (X), last line.
Jan 18th 2006
At the fear that I may have misunderstood you to some degree I post this addendum:
Specifically that the intrinsic beauty may be experienced wiithout the ugliness in the purest experience of God. To what extent this is possible on earth is not something I am sure of; and yet stories of martys brings a fascinating glimse into the possibilities.
Jan 20th 2006
One thought to add. Joy may be a reflexion of quality, it seems to me that joy is also related to relationship. if happiness finds its roots in circumstances, joy roots in relationship.
Is ugliness correlated to lack of relationship? Kind of like Beauty and the Beast.
Jan 21st 2006
Excellent insight, and I do think your question strikes to the heart of the matter.
While there is a definite level of relationship/commmunity (and hence joy) on earth, it does seem that every relationship here is flawed in some way. The first betrayal, the first lie, broke the purity of relationship from our end of the spectrum, I think.
So does that mean that the pursuit of beauty, the pursuit of quality are really at their most fundamental a search for relationship?
Jan 22nd 2006
I really like your blog. Check out mine sometime. I’ve also linked to yours. Hope u don’t mind.