http://www.beautywithoutirony.com
For any who are interested! _____ _____ _____ _______________________ this is a meditation upon beauty without irony by stanley gemmell - homepage, http://scroll.to/surlsone First let us reflect on what is commonly called beauty. Oftentimes, folks say beauty is what is popular or commonly adored. Othertimes people claim that the unusual is the truly beautiful. But what do these categories really point to? To the simple fact: first beauty must be present. Something beautiful must be appreciable by the senses. That is what I believe true beauty to be. Something which contains presence. But not just something which is only simply present. True beauty must have a certain relationship with presence... which is what this meditation will concern itself with :-) Presence is what is. The environment, the three dimensions, the things we sense. These are the things which are potentially beautiful. The growing dark of evening as it gracefully merges and fills into the whole, huge night. But what makes this beauty real? The way I understand it, the tragic and fleeting all-too brief nature of the truly beautiful. The fact that the form of what is pleasing is destined to change shape. When one notices something beautiful, it seems as if time has stopped, and every single idea we ever had and every single hope or dream has taken on flesh and matter, form and function. This is an amazing, exhilarating experience. Something drastic, no? Well... this is precisely where and when one makes an either conscious or unconscious decision about what to do regarding beauty. If we become ironic, and allow for a difference between what we feel and what we mean, this beauty may seem cheap. It may seem like just another ghost or pawn in the game or mere figurehead for something deeper... perhaps bitterness, or unfulfilled longing or worse, untruth! But if one notices something beautiful and decides to cast out every preconception, and really pay attention, then beauty becomes tremendously powerful. Beauty becomes a saving grace with the ability to make us happy and enlighten us and make us more able to fulfill the promise our lives represent to the rest of the world. Beauty without irony is an ethos. A path through the life we create which organizes itself around an important principle: that beauty must never be allowed to be "merely" this or that. That beauty is a serious opportunity for growth and harmony, and that irony does beauty a disservice by placing it at odds with itself. When beauty is mixed with sarcasm, or cruelty, or laziness, or too much ego and self-praise it loses an important humility which helps giude it into the senses and lives of others. Beauty without irony would see a gorgeous person, but not feel jealous, it would instead try to discern detail, over-all pattern and form, it would realize that to see this person with yesterday's eyes would only admit to the failure of this moment's opportunity. The opportunity to notice something fresh and exciting as part of the world one dwells in. Chaos, absence, the trace and the negative also have a place among the beautiful, but must be supported by positive search and care. Beauty may be popular. The Beatles made beautiful music and even people who did not understand one word they sang liked it! When beauty is both popular and respected one enjoys communion and fellowship with like-minded others. Every single Beatles fan feels like part of a unified whole. Beauty may be unusual. The particular looks of a certain fashion model, for instance, are unlike most others' appearance. This model with unusual looks becomes prized as a rare example of pleasing grace and all who look upon the model are immediately struck by how valuable this uncommon form of beauty and the appreciation of it truly are! Irony destroys both the popular and the unusual forms of beauty by derision and mockery, hypocrisy and ungenerous intent. Instead of praising beauty, irony attempts to humiliate it by reducing it to a cruel puzzle in which the observer takes on an impossible quest to search for a so-called "true" meaning, as opposed to accepting what is before the observer's eyes as a presence of truth in and of itself... I'll explain :-) Humanity has always asked questions, this is one way we reach for higher knowledge and deeper emotion, among other things. If we are before a great painting, we may ask, what does this image mean? How can we relate with the painter's vision and inspiration? These are great questions and can spur us on to finer thought and greater appreciation of an artistic object which is worthy of such scrutiny. But let us imagine an ironic art lover who cracks jokes about the work and calls it ugly and senseless. The ironic observer spurs us to look for meaning elsewhere than in the work. The ironic observer asks us to find meaning in the jokes and sarcasm (and the worldview such attitudes represent, think about it) and not in the beautiful object itself. The ironic observer claims to carry the codes to put beauty in its place, which becomes a cage of ideas the irnoist attempts to lock us into. Beauty, for the ironist, does not reside in the object but in the labels, classifications and opinions the ironist gives importance to. Therefore the object becomes servile and subordinated to the thoughts of the ironist, who places a far greater value on him or herself rather than on the external world. If we follow in those dangerous, unkind footsteps we will never be able to realize the beauty of the object outside of our relation to it. We are therefore always to defer importance and significant, available truth: it is not to be found in what is present, but in what is absent. In everything the painter failed to paint, and in everything the art lover failed to notice or think of. This is a very bad situation. Harsh criticism has tortured the sensibilities of art appreciators for ever! Many artists and beauty lovers have gotten extremely sad from the thick headed stupidity of people who do not try to think beyond the confines of their prejudices and inherited opinions. Beauty demands that one lay aside prior conventions (except as helpful markers to understand the over-all context of the beautiful) and attempt to view the current thing with as much clarity and opened-mindedness as possible. Both the authentic and the ironic observer of beauty participates in the construction of a relationship with what is beautiful. The authentic observer creates a deep and meaningful rapport with beauty, one in which the search for meaning does not exclude the simple and generous presence of the beautiful form and its intrinsic importance. The authentic observer initiates a quest to find more and more ideas and truth within the beautiful object and in the beautiful object's place and placement in the world. The ironic observer creates a confusing and saddening denial of the beautiful object's importance and value. The ironic observer uses the beautiful object as a point of departure not for growth, but for vainglorious seeking after the cheap thrill of domination and mental enslavement. For the ironic observer, the beautiful thing cannot in and of itself simply BE! It must always serve the ironist's tools: the sarcasm which finds lack of truth, the never present answer to the question of what is worth investigating... Beauty becomes a black hole which never yields results or lasting understanding, for the ironist. It actually, instead, infuriates by suggesting such answers might be possible but, ironically enough, never to be found! There are positive and authentic ways to search for meaning. The true beauty lover will first accept what is actually before him or her, with no preconceptions, and then draw forth from the well of personal experience and collective wisdom to identify various strands and threads in the weave of grace available to the senses. He or she does not need to exclusively defer the gratification and satisfaction of beauty appreciation by denying what is present in favor of what is always absent and lost. He or she admits there is more to find in the beautiful object, but does so with generosity, and by validating what is already available to them in the work. The ironic observer always denies the available wisdom and grace of the work. Therefore, the best way to observe and appreciate beauty is, of course, with an open mind and the relation to presence which celebrates both what IS and what will come after careful searching. The lover of beauty without irony will always stare into the face of their brother or sister and see both a patently clear and available message of present life force... and a mystery to be pondered with respect and care. _____FEBRUARY 2003, USA --- http://scroll.to/surlsone http://topica.com/lists/temple2/read [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Thu, 30 Jan 2003 09:31:00 Ninette Murk wrote: > > > >dear friends >today or tomorrow the txt below will be put on the Beauty without Irony >website and I'd like to start it with some personal statements on beauty >from you. can you please send me one asap? please add the name you want me >to put underneath it, your profession and where you live. >thanx! >kindest regards >ninette > > >The BWI Forum is the place where visitors from all over the world can >virtually meet each other and share their views on beauty. We9d like you to >submit your personal statement on what true beauty means to you and this >will be put right here on the website. From all your contributions, the five >most relevant will be chosen to also feature on the first exposition in >Paris and in the BWI book. >Prefer to do it the visual way? In that case, please select your favorite >picture, together with a short explanation. Our photography curator will >choose the 3 most heartwrenchingly beautiful ones for the first expo and the >book. >E-mail your statement or photo with explanation (in 72 dpi or slightly >higher) to : [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Together we can make the world a more beautiful place ! > > --- http://scroll.to/surlsone http://topica.com/lists/temple2/read [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] ____________________________________________________________ Get 25MB of email storage with Lycos Mail Plus! 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