Perversity of Beauty

Note: Please understand that the blog entries do not intend to and cannot describe everyone in general. They are only indicative of certain trends and the entries are usually clear about what they seek to comment on. And in my opinion, I'd call this article juvenile, but something I still wanted to put out.

Beauty can hardly be construed as something that inheres completely in the object beheld, but it could completely be confined to the realm of perception itself. Beauty isn't just a simple perception or an amalgamation of thoughts, beauty is better described as an emotion. And that makes it all the more harder to give it a form and definition. But even if you can't see the wind blow, you can see the leaves rustle in it. And beauty is better judged by the mark it leaves on a man than on absolute terms.

And the perversity of beauty I speak of is less a perversity of the object but the perception attached to it and it's present incapacity for subtlety. and for depth. A story would illustrate the point well, though I don't remember the source.

In an art gallery a man was looking intently at a painting of a beautiful, young and incidentally naked woman. An old woman who passed it by remarked that it was a very vulgar thing to display to which the man coolly said, "The vulgarity of the painting, madam, is in your eyes".

This is not to justify nudity or all acts of artists as simply innocent expressions, but only to illustrate the point that most times, especially if one turns their eyes to ancient sculpture or paintings which a modern eye may term as erotic or crass, is simply a fallout of present perversity rather than something that is born of it on its own.

Modern beauty appears to have lost itself to a mind-numbing bombardment of the senses in a great many ways. I do not wholly deride this, but the incapacity to appreciate more subtle expressions is what is more worrisome. Everything seems to be pushed to the brink to even begin to appreciate it, and there is no dearth of examples to show this.

Consider our palate. Maybe not to one who is rooted in a more cultural cuisine, but the modern palate seems to appreciate taste only when it has been overwhelmingly expressed. A great deal of spiciness, or saltiness. Or how much they fawn over meat and oil. Or even the salad eaters who seem to shun all other flavors for a "healthy" diet and abhor fat, cholesterol and  carbs as the devil's own. And as if it did not suffice to drown oneself in this deluge, there is the tyranny of the excess. Extra large steaks and burgers, lattes and the like. 

One doesn't need to be a gourmand or a connoisseur to appreciate food. All one needs to be is a little more mindful and perceptive. There is a joy in the small and faint as in the large, a somewhat greater pleasure. Of hide and seek, to sense a faint aroma of jasmine in your tea or orange rind in a bar of chocolate. Also, to refrain from gorging perpetually, but patiently savouring and abstaining, just to make each experience all the more valuable.

So with the music, it just seeks to drench the senses, just by being loud. As before, it is not that this doesn't exhibit complexity and subtlety, but that perceptions have become much too crass to appreciate this. And to most people, music is simply an onomatopoeia. Music is one of the finest discovery known to mankind. But an appreciation of music would also mean an appreciation of silence too. To really appreciate music would be to lose efface one's own identity as one embraces the flow. But that is a long ways off and requires effort.

And another aspect of the crassness that has entered the modern mind would be in their ideas of love and sex. This is obvious in the mainstream addiction to focusing only on certain particular aspects of the human physiology, and an utter disregard for the abstraction that a human actually is. And also a disregard for the finer arts of courtship and romance. And this is vividly expressed in modern day popular art and literature.

There does exist a difference between an expression and grotesque deformation. And beauty is to help one capture and embrace emotions and experiences that normal expression cannot provide. And also to provide a greater deal of abstraction and wings to the mind, that it may scour the vestiges of understanding in the human mind. A greater degree of subtlety is something which in my opinion art should nurture. But I also imagine that art cannot simply be flights into fantasy, it must have its feet on the ground even if its head is in the clouds, or that which was simply to be an enabler of emotion will let it run havoc over the mind. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder and the beholder who decides to give form to beauty shapes himself to project onto the world. To peer into himself and to give form to that which hides in the darkness would be real beauty, a picture of man in his entirety.

P.S.: Thank you for your patience with this post, it's been pretty confusing writing this and putting things into words. I hope some ideas may be clearer in later posts.