BEAUTY IN A TIME OF DARKNESS (A Note on Craft) by Bonnie Nadzam
By beauty, I mean something I recognized as well when I was a child as I do now. And experiencing it hurt as much as – perhaps even more often than – it was a source of pleasure. By beauty, I don’t mean God, but I do mean a kind of death. I don’t mean the object of reproductive desire, but I do sometimes mean erotic longing. First and foremost, I mean something that elicits a sharp cry in me – sometimes of joy, sometimes of grief or shock, of injustice or of horror. And by sharp cry, I mean a flash of awareness. I mean something that I will not experience – something that I will miss entirely – if I am not paying attention.
For example, sometimes the sun set spectacularly behind the yard where I grew up, and I sort of hated it. I had to stop everything, be still, and give it all of my attention, when there were a hundred other things that wanted my attention: my sisters whooping and laughing from the swings behind me; my parents’ young voices through the open kitchen window; their radio music – Pink Floyd, say – competing with the neighbor playing Chopin on his piano; even hunger; even anxiety because the next day was Monday . . . but no. The sunset had me by the throat, and I had to stand there beneath those clouds, transfixed, not yet having the language to say that what I wanted – what everything other than girl in me desperately, desperately wanted – was to disperse into my atomic parts and merge and mingle with that smear of purple, that bruise across the sky. As if in looking at the changing light, everything other than girl in me was trying to re-member something. What was it in me that wasn’t girl? I don’t know. Whatever it was, it was nothing personal, and had little to do with that child, who would have rather been playing.
If experiences such as this are experiences of the beautiful – and I believe they are – then I can say with some confidence that they have not, as I’ve grown older, been “improved by practice,” “perfected by comparison,” or “cleared of prejudice,” to use Hume’s language regarding how an individual might cultivate and establish a reliable standard of taste. It is not the case that I have had more of them, or more intense instances of them, because I have cultivated by means of education what Kant calls the “disinterestedness” required to recognize what is beautiful.1 While certainly my ability to read has improved since I was a child, I would argue that the intuitive sense to which I surrendered in that old Ohio backyard is the same, if now a little dulled, as that which finally unlocks poetry (if and when it does) for this adult.
It does seem right that if we know what’s beautiful, it is not because what we’re witnessing or studying speaks to our ego, or to our personal history or particular preferences. According to Kant, for example, if we mean to defend our assessment of a mountain range or poem as beautiful, we cannot say: because I grew up among those hills and I love them, or: because it was the first poem I ever memorized, so I remember it fondly. We must instead refer to the quality of the light on the mountainside, its slope, the wildness or self-willed formation, the geological age that it has taken for the mountain to form – qualities any rational person would be able to appreciate and explain.
But – and this seems quite important to me – I vividly recall how as a child watching that sun set, what was so responsive in me was intuitive and visceral – not rational. When I stood there as a child mesmerized beneath the sky, it was as if – indeed, it was the case that – something impersonal out there was calling to something impersonal in me, calling me away even from my own thoughts. This was in large part what I disliked about such experiences. All of my brilliant ideas, interesting thoughts, personal preferences, needs and wants had to be set aside while I gave the sky my attention. It – whatever it was – called to me all the time when I was a child. From the redness of a stop sign. From my grandfather’s wrinkled brown shoe in certain light. From the disorderedness of acorns on the sidewalk beneath an oak tree. Even from the apparent hideousness of dissolving snow stained by vehicle exhaust along the curb of a downtown Cleveland street. There, too, it was so beautiful. What was it? What is it?
It almost always catches me by surprise, as was the case a few months ago when a teacher shared with me a remarkable image – a photograph she’d taken quickly with her phone and sent to me over email. It was a tiny, pale green, origami paper crane in a very small corked glass bottle.2 In the image, she’d held the bottle between her forefinger and thumb, for scale. The little green crane was only slightly larger than her thumbnail. I was as blown away as I was surprised by being blown away. The little crane was a work of art that my teacher had bought from a museum in Seattle, for her partner. When the image of it came to me I was, as I so often am, in the kitchen multitasking. I turned off the stove. I turned off the sink. I sat down for a minute.
I had never before taken the slightest interest in origami. But this one – this little bird! So tiny! Such precision and care – for what? Smaller than a thumb and fashioned out of paper – flimsiest of materials – and so finely wrought, so time-consuming, such a small and delicate piece that no doubt took its creator years of practice and countless failures in order to make right. See for yourself – look up “tiny origami.” Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Whatever could come of such a labor? In these finite bodies, in a life of limited duration, taking the time to create something so little, so apparently insignificant and with such painstaking, exquisite care – it’s illogical, audacious, defiant. And at odds with so much of what we seem conditioned to seek and attain. Aspiring artists – emerging writers – so many of us spend our time this way, taking the time to create something small, of perhaps little or no moment, but that we hope will be beautiful. And in seasons or on days of doubt, we may wonder if it’s not indeed a waste of time.
In some of her last work, in response to praise for success in a letter from a friend, the philosopher Simone Weil said, “I haven’t the slightest idea if what I am doing is likely to be effective. That depends upon far too many unknown factors.”3 How interesting that she was not – as I can divulge some artists defensively do – self-righteously claiming she didn’t care whether or not she was successful. She was only rightly stating that it was impossible to predict. This is so for all of us, all of the time, though perhaps no one feels it as poignantly as an emerging artist, who as yet has no audience. It can be easy to despair, or at least to doubt one’s enterprise. Why bother? We might ask ourselves, alone, hard at work, whether our projects will ever turn out, or be “good.” Whether they will ever even have an audience. Whether they will ever effect any change in the world. Or whatever other criterion we can think of to measure or enjoy “success” or effective work. It is simply the case that when commencing a work of art, whether it will be effective in terms of securing some level of wealth, or reputation, or status, or change in the world, none of us can ever say – too many unknown factors. And in fact, to achieve some level of reputation or renumeration or cultural change by way of our art by no means entails, guarantees or means that we will have succeeded or been effective.
These are dark times indeed, and we protest, demonstrate, vote, dialogue, rage, reason – yes to all of that. But whether the poems you are drafting and redrafting ever make it to print, win an award, earn you some kind of distinction, or money, or change anyone’s minds about kidnapping migrant children, is not why the practice of writing poems or stories matters – not first and foremost. Fundamentally, at least in my own life, the enterprise has ever been about beauty – and it is hardly reductive to say so. Far from it. Says Toni Morrison: “I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for.”
Beauty, truth, goodness . . . I can hardly take on thousands of years of philosophy that attempt to account for the relationship across and amongst these virtues. My focus is narrower. It is about authorship, and perhaps primarily authorship of what we rightly or wrongly call “creative writing.” It is about writing in tremendously dark times when there may be much need of sharing your message, your poem, your story, but when there is perhaps very little likelihood these poems or stories will make it out into the world, to an audience of thousands or even a hundred or, let’s face it, a dozen readers. And it is about why I believe it is important to write them anyway.
You are not likely to hear it said very loudly or broadly in our culture that you should work hard at something that is very demanding, that won’t feel good, that isn’t really about you, that will take a lot of time, make little or no money, and when there is no way to know whether or not it will be effective. But we do precisely this, don’t we? It’s remarkable. Illogical, absurd, and defiant, indeed. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say that when it comes to the matter of making art – writing a story, an essay, painting a watercolor in the morning at the dining room table – especially in a consumer, celebrity culture such as ours, where definitions of beauty can easily be confused by the marketplace and by what makes it to the level of mainstream consumption – when it comes to the matter of such creative work, it is not only helpful and important but critical to work away without any interest or knowledge in the art’s outcome or reception. (Easier said than done, perhaps – but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying for!)
I’m not making a claim, here, about art for art’s sake, or any other claim about whether or not a completed work of art is or should be useful politically, financially, or otherwise. Rather, I’m making an observation about the process and the practice by which a work of art is made. The process and practice of creating – of folding a tiny paper crane, for instance – necessarily comes first. But it is so easy – is it not? – to expect or at least secretly hope for something like easy, more or less immediate, even viral “success.” We work in conditions in which we may want not beauty – or to be attentively stopped in our tracks by beauty, pulled out of our own cherished thoughts and hobbies – but the more palpable direct shot of success. And it is so often the case – is it not? – that some unskilled artists and performers do attain it, and much visibility thereby, when very experienced, practiced artists’ work remains largely unseen, unknown, unheard. Who can blame us? As artists and aspiring artists in a contemporary Western culture, we are at least sometimes likely to confuse the value of our own artwork with the notoriety or number of “likes” and public reception that we –not even the work itself! – can get. Does it matter? What if we write a poem, or a novel, or commence a painting or installation from that ground? I propose that it might be impossible either to create or fully bear witness to anything beautiful from such ground.
Consider the following, by the poet Sarah Vap (emphasis her own):
The High Priestess Enheduanna (2285 BC, Ur, Mesopotamia) is the first human (that we yet know of) to have ever had their name linked to a piece of writing. With Enheduanna’s name next to her devotions and hymns for the goddess Inanna, that is, humans gained the category author (versus singer or storyteller or musician or dancer-singer of words that originated from who-knows-what-sacred-origin). With named authorship and the increasingly close association of author-work, we lose the communal, some of the ritual, some of the channeled aspects, some of the sacred original intention of uttering heightened or special words aloud to have some kind of an effect. We lose some of the powerful magic when we reduce origin of the words to simply ourselves.
Compare this to an observation made by the late Stanley Plumly, distilled here by Robert Hass:
. . . [Stanley Plumly] argues that, in contemporary verse, tone has become important in the way that it is important in the dramatic monologues of Browning. Only the poems aren’t dramatic monologues, they are spoken by the poets out of their own lives. That is, instead of being an instrument to establish person, tone has become an instrument to establish personality. And the establishment of distinctions of personality by peripheral means is just what consumer society is about. Instead of real differences emanating from the life of the spirit, we are offered specious symbols of it, fantasies of our separateness by way of brands of cigarettes, jogging shoes, exotic food.4
I confess I do know the experience of planting little branding tidbits in my own fiction and non-fiction in order to effect some interest in or approval of me, as an author/person. And I know well the feeling when reading of sudden confusion, even inadequacy compared with and/or desire to praise personally the author whose work I’m perusing and who apparently likewise knows how to surreptitiously brand themselves. Neither feeling is remotely like that experience I’ve had since a child, of the impersonal “out there” calling to the impersonal “in here.” There was nothing in the closet light or in my grandfather’s old shoe that wanted personal distinction of any kind. Indeed, if that shoe could have talked, it might have been saying something like: “Remember when we were something else other than these particular forms? And aren’t we still, sort of? That is – aren’t we not really – or not only – what we think ourselves to be in this moment? ‘Shoe’ and ‘girl’?”
When I forwarded on the image of the tiny paper crane to a friend, it elicited in him a little cry. “The crane is trapped in there,” he said, “and it shouldn’t be!” I find it curious that the paper crane need not have spoken to each of us in precisely the same way to have elicited such a cry. For myself, I hardly noticed the glass bottle – but my response was also a visceral one. The attention and practice that making this crane must have taken – its very smallness seeming to emphasize the futility and meaninglessness of such an act – struck me right in the chest when I first saw it. There it was. And every time I look back at the image, I feel that same little jolt, as if of pain. This jolt, this cry, this little pain – seem to me essential to the experience of the beautiful.
Of course, there have been plenty of philosophers on beauty who have asserted the opposite: that experiencing the beautiful brings about, or promises to bring about, or only should bring about, pleasure. I’m not going to make any claims against such assertions – no room for that here – but instead consult my own experience. You too? Go ahead – put yourself in front of something you consider and that perhaps others, too, would consider beautiful. I really do find the experience to be both pleasurable and painful – an ache and a longing that is briefly satisfied, and then not. A swift meeting and falling away. Met, made, gratified . . . and undone. And over and over again in quick succession as I stand there before the sunset, or the old shoe, or yes, the Caravaggio, or with tears in my eyes as the French horn comes in alone, from somewhere lost in the middle rows of ninety-five musicians suddenly motionless and silent. It is the experience of standing in my backyard, a girl alive to the summer night suddenly, briefly, gone – merged with the light in the sky. Then shot back into the finite body of the girl in the grass. Then gone again. Then back to the yard . . .
Here’s a metaphor. Think of a kiss. A good kiss. Go ahead, pause for a moment and think of it. First, imagine the beloved. Hold her in your mind’s eye. You are not imagining kissing just anyone – just any person – but this particular person. Scan his eyes, chin, jawline, hairline. Picture the shape of her mouth – you know it well. Picture her eyes half closed. Lips half parted. You can feel his breath – you are that close. And your hands – where do you want to set your hands? Your fingertips on the back of his head, or the sides of his face? Or maybe you draw her in closer, with one hand at the small of the back. Or with both hands on her hips. Then the first instance of lips touching – perhaps tentatively, perhaps not so tentatively. And then, and then, and then. And in this meeting, during this kiss, where do “you” go?
In my experience, what is beautiful is an almost unbearable yet exquisite combination of pleasure and pain – a sensation for which the relatively impoverished English language seems only to have a single word: bittersweet.
Says the philosopher Roger Scruton, “to kiss that mouth is not to place one body part against another, but to touch the other person in [their] very self. Hence the kiss is compromising – it is a move from one self toward another, a summoning of the other . . . ” 5
It seems to me it is as if as separate individuals, you and your beloved drop away – and meet in a third space that both contains you and is you. And yet, even the best kiss in the world will never allow you to fully possess or fully merge with your lover, as I felt I needed to merge with the sunset. However long we may embrace, we must each come back to ourselves, and go about the business of being a single human being/lonely lover/girl in the grass.
In his 2004 work Six Names of Beauty, Crispin Sartwell doesn’t attribute beauty to subject nor object, but to the relationship between them – and further, to the room, or field, or woods, or museum, in which they are situated. Beauty emerges, he says, in situations in which subject and object are juxtaposed and connected.6 I propose taking this a step further: beauty emerges when in such a situation, with receptivity, with attention, we surrender our very notion of self. When we allow ourselves – for the briefest of moments – to drop away. We put ourselves at odds with truth, and at odds with beauty, when we put the premium on what Vap calls author-work – either as artists or as art appreciators. Indeed, truth and beauty are not only impersonal, Weil says, they are anonymous.
How can we begin to practice anonymity in such times? Surveillance and the apparent impossibility of privacy aside, conspicuous consumption is driven by nothing if not by envy and preoccupation with wealth and status – a constant game of comparing one body to the next, of firmly affixing all of the positive adjectives and inventory to our stable self as we possibly can – and as visibly as we can. I know that artists are not exempt from seeking this kind of currency – or, let me speak for myself, I know that I am not exempt from it. I have felt the pressure of wanting recognition. I know what that feeling is – and what it isn’t. We cannot simultaneously experience beauty – as either artist or art appreciator – and keep the lowercase “s” self alive. We must die to it, and in so doing, wake, however briefly, to something else.
How? How during the process of creating, sharing, and witnessing art can we abandon not only our personalities, our expectations of or resentments about worldly success or reception, but even the notion of ourselves as artists? As authors? As painters? How to surrender every role, every instance of that lowercase “s” self we must otherwise be so occupied with becoming? Indeed, spending time in such a way nearly guarantees we will never have either the wealth nor the reputation we are supposed to be seeking. And really, in such garish times, this is the most likely outcome: that there will be no attention at all paid to our art. So why do we do it? Not when we’re fantasizing about whatever we think success or “having an effect” would look like, but when we’re deep in the midst of the process of creating? Because so many of us do, don’t we? Isn’t it curious, if not wonderful? I suggest that one way to work toward and from anonymity is to surrender enough of ourselves – our resistance, our defensiveness, our personal preferences and brilliant ideas – to regularly bear witness to the beautiful. To let it hurt, if it hurts. To feel that jolt, that reminder, that internal cry.
* * *
The tiny paper crane was folded by the artist Sakiko Lavigne. And I didn’t know this when I first saw the image of it and sat down, but a paper crane is meant to be precisely and simultaneously a cry and a prayer. According to a Japanese legend from the 18th century, folding one thousand paper cranes is supposed to grant a wish. The legend gained notoriety in the 1950s. Let me briefly recount the fairly well known story about how this came to be.
Sadako Sasaki was a two-year-old when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, right near her home, about a mile away from ground zero. She was blown out of the window and was found alive by her mother, with no apparent injuries. While they were fleeing, Sadako and her mother were caught in black rain. Eleven years later, Sadako was diagnosed with leukemia, hospitalized, and given a year to live. She began folding paper cranes, ultimately folding some 1300 of them before dying in 1955. In 1958, a statue of Sadako holding a golden crane was unveiled in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. At the foot of the statue is a plaque that reads: “This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace in the world.”7
“Every time that there arises from the depths of a human heart the childish cry . . . ‘Why am I being hurt?’ then there is certainly injustice.”8 According to Weil, the people who inflict the blows that provoke this cry have different motives – some people derive pleasure from the cry; but most simply don’t hear it. “For it is a silent cry,” she says, “which sounds only in the secret heart.” Those who can’t or don’t hear it are often intentionally deaf to it, because such ignorance is more agreeable and satisfying than feeling the hurt. It’s easier to distract one’s self, and to maintain, thereby, one’s sense of self. But we must be receptive to hearing it, and to sounding it. It is a practice of call and response. We have to practice being vulnerable and receptive enough both to hear and to sound these cries. Says Weil:
. . . Those who most often have occasion to feel that evil is being done to them are those who are least trained in the art of speech. Nothing, for example, is more frightful than to see some poor wretch in the police court stammering before a magistrate who keeps up an elegant flow of witticisms. Apart from . . . intelligence, the only human faculty which has an interest in public freedom of expression is that point in the heart which cries out against evil. But as it cannot express itself, freedom is of little use to it. What is first needed is a system of public education capable of providing it, so far as possible, with a means of expression; and next, a regime in which the public freedom of expression is characterized not so much by freedom as by an attentive silence in which this faint and inept cry can make itself heard . . . 9
Weil was writing before the atomic bomb – long before technology was so ubiquitous that we took it to bed with us, carried it around in our pockets, and started giving it our attention over and above, at worst, our children, our lovers, our friends, the trees, the mountains, the world itself, the beautiful in any form. Experiencing the beautiful requires silence, space, and fully engaged and reflective attention.
For every person there should be enough room, enough freedom to plan the use of one’s time, the opportunity to reach ever higher levels of attention, some solitude, some silence . . . If this is the good, then modern societies . . . seem to go about as far as it is possible to go in the direction of evil . . . .everybody . . . is constantly harassed and kept on edge by the interference of extraneous wills while the soul is left in cold and desolate misery. What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium.10
Weil was writing here about factory work. Factory work! But does it not sound eerily familiar and resonant with walking down the street in a 21st century developed market, with a phone in your hand? How can we be spared – how can we spare – the attention for beauty?
For centuries philosophers have debated whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or a quality inherent in the object we call beautiful. Sartwell says that when we attribute beauty to the night sky, we’re not merely making a report about our own feelings; we are turned outward toward this sky, he says; we are witnessing (even celebrating) the real world. And so often, we want to point out the beauty to others – we want to share the experience. We rush to tell a lover to look at the moon, before it changes. We ask our friends to listen to a new favorite song. And this sharing is particularly the case, even intended, if the object of beauty is a work of art in a community setting. Or in a classroom of students considering a story, a poem, a painting, a composition, a native flower. Witnessing and creating the beautiful connects. It establishes and re-establishes community. It re-members a fragmented body. And what “counts” as beauty is more ubiquitous – the redness of the stop sign! – than we might imagine. But after all, “[ours is] the will to deny, to wipe out mystery of beauty. Because beauty is a mystery. [. . .] Our sense of beauty is so bruised and clumsy, we don’t see it, and don’t know when we do see it. We can only see the blatantly obvious.”11 We need the silence, the solitude, the attentiveness and the guts to be receptive to it. We have to practice.
ENDNOTES
1 Sartwell, Crispin, “Beauty”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/beauty/>.
2 Thanks to Wendy Egyoku Nakao for sending me the image – to see it, visit www.bonnienadzam.com
3 Simone Weil: An Anthology. Grove Press, New York, NY: 1986.
4 Hass, Robert. Twentieth Century Pleasure: Prose on Poetry. Harper Collins, New York NY, 1984.
5 Scruton, Roger. Beauty. Oxford University Press. New York, 2009. While I find myself inspired by Scruton’s observation, I must make the point of saying that it is one he makes in service to a later argument against pornography as a source of the beautiful – a conclusion with which I disagree, as I hope might be at least implicitly clear in this note.
6 Sartwell, Crispin. Six Names of Beauty. Routledge, 2006.
7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadako_Sasaki
8 Simone Weil: An Anthology. Grove Press, New York, NY: 1986.
9 Ibid
10 Ibid
11 Boulton, James T., ed. The Cambridge Edition of Late Works and Articles of D.H. Lawrence. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Bonnie Nadzam is the author of the novels Lamb (Other Press, 2011) and Lions (Grove Press, 2016). Her fiction and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Orion Magazine, Granta, The Iowa Review, and The Kenyon Review. Nadzam is an AQR contributing editor.