make your life beautiful
One of the best things I’ve ever done is to start buying flowers. I’m paraphrasing here, but years ago I read a passage of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s in which he was talking about the natural world, and how it is always beautiful (I’ll leave aside that nature is red in tooth and claw; he was talking about something else just as important) but that the human world isn’t beautiful unless we make it that way. I’m 46 now, and it is clear to me he was correct. It’s also clear that as long as I have flowers in my apartment my days are better in a way that is not particularly easy to articulate without just saying: They’re better.
Which is one of the difficult things about beauty, or at least trying to talk about it. Reality is that the relationship between a subjectivity and the objective / material world is pretty difficult to parse;1 nonetheless the question of what beauty is must be approached, I think, over and over, even if the final answer is to say we cannot articulate a final answer. Just because you can’t quite say why you love the person you love doesn’t mean you don’t love them; it just means love exceeds, is larger than, is beyond language. Or, to bring us back to beauty, sometimes, maybe more than sometimes, it is enough to point at a bouquet of flowers and say, Look at those flowers, they’re beautiful.
And if you can’t see that then you might be so lost you’ll never be found. Because there is the reality that the more we talk about what beauty is the more likely we are to end up far, far from it. Lost in our thoughts, lost in trains of them—lost in ourselves. Or: if you can see Michelangelo’s David in person and not be stunned into silence, if you are not put into a state of aesthetic arrest, if all that interior motion does not come to rest, if only for a moment, well…that’s just the worst possible outcome, isn’t it.2
It was one of the reasons I knew I had to get out of English courses, anyway, near the end of my time at the University of Montana in the early aughts—my major was English with an emphasis in creative writing. I had been there for almost a decade, dropping out a few times because I didn’t know why I should get a degree, or what it might be good for (the 90s, when I came of age, were such a different time from the 2020s that it seems not just an earlier period of American history but a parallel, in some ways better in some ways worse, universe), going back finally to finish at the urging of my mother. I realized that the part of me that writing came from was categorically distinct from the part of me that analysis came from. And that no English lit class was ever going to make me a better writer except by mistake, except by exposing me to a good book I had not read before.
To be clear I’m not against reading about or thinking about beauty; but I am against doing both of those so much and getting so lost in that that you can’t have an experience of beauty that occurs outside of or behind or beneath the words in your head. (In my experience most art and lit critic types fall into this category; and if they don’t start that way, like most people who become English majors because they love to read, they end up that way.) That is, if you can’t see why buying or acquiring flowers in some way might make your days ineffably better, then baby, it’s time to head back to the proverbial drawing board. Or maybe just eat some more maps, hoping you’ll finally find the territory. There are a lot of options.
Beauty demands—maybe even generates in us, is probably one of the original experiences that laid the foundation for—a sense of hierarchy, and the refusal to allow the question of what is better and what is best, regardless of how difficult and ultimately impossible it is to find a final answer to that question, is a refusal to meet the challenge beauty presents to us. And the result, I think, is nothing less than losing out on the chance for beauty to make our mornings, our days, whatever years we are fortunate enough to have here, more meaningful. Because there is something meaningful about beauty, isn’t there. And despite our attempts to language it to death, the direct experience itself remains, waiting out there for us to access it, or stumble across it, or create it.
I have three vases in my apartment; one for the kitchen, one for my writing desk, and one for my bedroom, on the shelf by the side of the bed where my girlfriend sleeps when she stays with me. Since embarking on what I’m going to *very tentatively and not unhumorously because of how it sounds* call The Path of Flowers,3 my days are better, and more mysterious and more beautiful. It seems that’s not necessarily all I can ask for, that life should be those things—we are human beings, we can and pretty much do always find ways to ask for more—but maybe it is all I should ask for, or should want to. My old Zen teacher said once that we can have understanding or we can have the world.4 He obviously didn’t mean there’s no value in understanding; he did mean, though, that understanding will never give us the thing we’re looking for. And neither will any amount of thinking or talking or reading about art.5 But the direct experience of beauty—I mean face-to-face here, eyes wide open, let the distance between subject and object fall away—can give us a taste of what we want. And the more we visit that well, the more we get to drink. I can’t imagine a more fortunate life.
Which is not to say we should just toss our hands up when faced with the task and resort to the now standard “all art is subjective,” which is just a truly fucking dull thing to say, at least as dull as saying there’s a canon of beauty out there whose objectivity lies entirely beyond human making.
Imagine seeing that statue in the wild, so to speak, at some future date when humanity is almost gone from the earth. You stumble upon it somewhere, it’s in the same building in Florence that it’s in now, or it’s been moved, it is in a glade somewhere. Imagine stumbling across that thing having never heard or it or seen an image of it and not being stunned into that internal silence we know as the primary marker of high aesthetic experience. If that’s you, well, let’s just say…you know…there might be something wrong with you. In my more wishful or perhaps serious thinking I imagine that someone two thousand years from now, someone with no cultural or linguistic connection to Michelangelo’s Italy, would feel the same as I did when I first turned that corner in the Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze and looked down the long hallway past those four unfinished pieces—which are so powerful in their own right one could argue they deserve a space of their own, one not utterly engulfed by the aura of their more beautiful cousin—and saw what is certainly one of the greatest works of art any human will ever create.
I’m not sure what else to call it; if it is anything it is certainly more than getting some pretty things for my apartment; because while it very much undeniably is that, I have been around long enough to know when I’m facing a question that will open up into the rest of my life, should I choose to really pursue it.
The sort of statement that is almost certainly upsetting to people who think you cannot understand anything without first reading a lot of books about it.
I’m looking at you, creative writing PhDs.
Despite my middle-age, I live with my parents, because I am ill and I will never be well again. It might be a stretch to say that I am dying, but I am on a road that leads only one way. The friends I made who were diagnosed around the same time that I was are all dead. I am the last remnant of that social circle.
The house has a large garden. When my parents are away, I look after it. The different flowers each have their time of year to bloom. It may only be a week or a few weeks. It is always a much shorter time than you think.
A month ago, there were Autumn crocuses around the trunk of the fig tree. I had not seen them in that part of the garden before. Their pale pink petals splayed quickly and they were gone, leaving behind grassy foliage. A week later, the giant puzzle piece leaves fell from the fig tree.
The Autumn is no less regimented than the Spring and Summer. Decay is as orderly as growth. The fig tree is first to clear its boughs, followed by the spindly branches of the pear tree that are now almost bare. I must go out tomorrow and gather the leaves for the compost heap. In a week or two, the apple tree will lose its leaves. A month from now – maybe a little longer – the first snowdrops will appear. The winter aconites (not, as the name might imply, a Biblical tribe) will spread like a yellow rash around the trunk of the fig tree. The rhubarb that originated ten miles to the west in the garden of my great grandmother's bungalow, in Thundersley, and that has been transplanted from garden to garden ever since, will show a few tiny crinkled green leaves that, when they are larger, will attract continental patches of blackfly. In the summer I turn the fruit into cordial. I might attempt a rhubarb sorbet next year – something sweet and slightly tart.
There is beauty to be found within these overlapping circles of growth and decay. I observe it, but I am not removed from it. I am part of a cycle too, on the downslope, I suspect, kneeling on a damp, tear-shaped slab of crazy paving, reaching out across bare earth and leaving a hand print on the grave site of a chameleon, who has been gone for almost a year and a half, but who I still miss.
You've nailed it here: "To be clear I’m not against reading about or thinking about beauty; but I am against doing both of those so much and getting so lost in that that you can’t have an experience of beauty that occurs outside of or behind or beneath the words in your head."
Too many of my English teachers focused on analysis at the expense of inherent enjoyment. They had no sense for the balance of the two, or conception that the latter is primary and should always come first.