The Beautiful Anthology (22 page)

And there is nothing in space that can’t be matched on our own planet. Picture the desolate deserts, the plunging oceans, home to strange and fantastical creatures. Imagine the twisting, snaking rivers of the Amazon, the Colorado, the Nile, and the Ganges and even the little babbling brook, the Itchen river that trickles serenely past my sixth favorite pub in Winchester. (Ah, Winchester, surrounded by rolling green hills that lack the power and impact of Ayers Rock or the Grand Canyon but have a small and quaint beauty of their own.) Then there are Norwegian fjords and gargantuan mountain ranges from Nepal to the Alps to the Rockies. There are the Giant Redwoods in California, sun-soaked beaches in the south of France or even Bondi beach. Also consider the fairy-tale snowfall and apocalyptic blizzards of Russia, or the unblemished snow of the North and South Poles.

There’s so much beauty to admire and appreciate, and all we do as a species is argue about who put it here, and destroy large chunks of it because the people who live there have a different opinion on the matter – as though being right or wrong about the unanswerable question of existence is more important than existence itself.

The most ridiculous thing is that every major religion teaches peace, love, and understanding. There isn’t an awful lot in those religious texts referring to smart bombs and terrorist sleeper cells. It’s mostly love and kindness, two of the most beautiful acts a human being is capable of carrying out, forsaken for the most violent and selfish acts of which a man is capable.

Religion, like time, money, and pyramid selling, is a man-made concept. I’m no expert on theology, but I doubt that if there is a God he’d want us to argue like nuclear-armed school children over whether God is black, white, Arab, largely composed of spaghetti, or if he even exists at all.

It’s like getting the greatest Christmas present you could ever think of – no, better than you could ever possibly imagine – and then spending the whole holiday arguing with your parents over who got it for you before getting bored of it and throwing it in a cupboard to slowly rot or rust or disintegrate.

Man is capable of creating beauty: Consider Beethoven’s Ninth, the Sistine Chapel, Shane Warne’s first delivery in international test cricket, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Golden Gate Bridge,
Led Zeppelin III
, intricate computer systems that are ever more powerful and ever smaller, clockwork, Hamlet’s speech in Act 11, Scene 1, and so much more.

And man is capable of appreciating physical, cosmetic, subjective beauty, from Helen of Troy to Grace Kelly, from Brigitte Bardot to Halle Berry, from Marilyn Monroe to Scarlett Johansson, from
The Venus de Milo
to Rubenesque portraits to good old twentiethcentury porno mags.

And we
are
capable of appreciating beauty, and enjoying it in its purest forms free of social and territorial context, and free from religious divisions. Or maybe we will be someday. Maybe we’ll step away from our Twitter feeds and smart bombs and appreciate our planet together, as one, before we annihilate it truly and completely.

Wouldn’t that – all humanity together appreciating our existence as one, together – wouldn’t
that
be beautiful?

TYLER STODDARD SMITH

TRUTH AND BOOTY

People are always going on about beauty. But what, precisely, defines it? Ugliness is much easier and more satisfying to talk about. Hell, with the whole world gone pear-shaped, what is there to discuss but revulsion? Root canals, colonoscopies, my ex-wife. Is there any room for beauty anymore? Is the discussion relevant, even?

Well, when it comes to matters of beauty, as with judgments about Guinea worm disease or cyclic vomiting syndrome (although curiously not my ex-wife), the consensus has historically been that we should defer to the experts. Why not start, then, with the man who wrote of the “transcendental aesthetic?”

No wonder people have been flummoxed by the subject of beauty for the last 200+ years. In 1790, Immanuel Kant claimed that standards of beauty are like empirical judgments: They are valid across time and space. The old mandarin also said that an
inner
response provides the foundation for standards of beauty.

What were we
thinking
, taking beauty lessons from a seventy-three-year-old Teutonic virgin? Although a seminal advice column co-authored by Hegel and Kant in German
Vogue
(one has to make ends meet, even as a tenured philosopher) has been a veritable Rosetta Stone of beauty tips: “Entice your guy with a tropical-smelling unguent! Crack open a fresh coconut, and pour the milk into a
kleine Schüssel
. Add a scoop of gruel, and whisk it into a sexy froth. Spread it between your palms, and massage it over your body for an erotic treat – he will enjoy watching you do this, we think.”

In the art department, Botticelli’s ginger-haired
Venus
serves as a paragon of beauty, not only because the painting is old but also because
Venus
is mostly nude. Some philistines insist that
Venus
is “a little thick, needs a tan, and looks like a crazy Irish bitch I used to mess with. It’s fine, though, how she can cover her pubes with her head hair.” That’s my roommate, Clint, who lacks a certain
je ne sais quoi
, but I do think the core of the problem lies in our misguided efforts to define beauty.

What follows are some thought-provoking (though often farfetched) quotations by famous people on beauty, because what do
I
know about the subject?

Khalil Gibran:
“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”

You can always count on inspirational claptrap of this sort from an undersexed Ottoman. From what I gather, the alleged “light in the heart” is a reference to the sinoatrial node, which produces small electrical impulses that our celibate prophet confuses with light. Did Gibran have possession of the hexaxial reference system? No, because he’s dead, and even if he weren’t, you can’t just go to the 5 & 10 store and find a quality ecg that will administer accurate lead placement. However, the first part of his statement has the ring of truth. Indeed, beauty is not in the face; it is
on
the face, like a cute little pug nose, a nice smile, straight teeth, maybe some long eyelashes. You’ll know it when you see it.

Maybe Gibran meant for his statement on beauty to be an allegory? I hope not. We, in today’s world, take our symbols literally, so more than just confusing us, Gibran could be encouraging beauty seekers to carve each other open in search of ethereal “light,” which is really just 70 MHz of current pulsing through a sea of brackish, cardiac soup. If you want light, hook up some nodes to a potato. If you’re looking for beauty, stay away from Gibran’s misinformed postulate(s) and check out those
cheekbones
. But beware! There’s nothing like a tug on the heart strings, or fibrins (important proteins involved in platelet activation), to hoodwink the eye of the beholder.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”

An ironic statement from a man who spent most of his life cooped up in his study, groaning about the “infinitude of the private man.” To be fair, Emerson paid regular visits to Henry David Thoreau’s yurt-cum-wattle house in Concord, and he once traveled to England where he confused Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s opium for cinnamon (in the ensuing vision quest, he suggested Coleridge publish “Kublai Khan” as a “pop-up book,” throwing Coleridge into a frenzy, who then asked the blitzkrieged Brahmin, “Why am I not getting any fucking buzz from this? This is exactly what you get when you deal with the Moroccans, Ralphie!”)

So, Emerson’s aphorism, in addition to having the linguistic typology of a nineteenth-century Yoda, becomes even more preposterous when you imagine folks traveling the world in search of a beauty they’re already carrying. This is exactly the kind of un-Jedi assumption that would drive Yoda bonkers. To me, it reeks of greed. You just
said
you already had beauty somewhere on your person.

We do, however, travel the world in search of the beautiful, so why didn’t the author just stop there? I’ll tell you why: His life was devoid of beauty. Behind Emerson’s back, and indeed, in front of his front, people often referred to him and his wife, Lydia, as “Dingo Fingers and The Manatee.” And while verbosity on any subject may eventually carry the day, in the end, it’s really just existential deception. You want beauty? There’s a flight from LaGuardia to Miami Beach, $199 on Orbitz. If you find some beauty, it’ll most likely be at The Bottoms Up Lounge on 8th Street, but my advice is not to carry it with you. If you do, I recommend a topical solution of Dynamiclear, two to four drops on the affected area.

Pablo Picasso:
“Beauty? To me, it is a word without sense because I do not know where its meaning comes from nor where it leads to.”

One assumes a painter would appreciate the nature of beauty. Of course, Picasso uttered this cryptic line later in life, after gravity had taken its toll on his breasts, his head had become extraordinarily bald, and he had resorted to the last refuge of artists: the beret. Since the word “beauty” is, by his own admission, lost on him, we’re forced to make sense of it ourselves, in the same way we make sense out of much of Picasso’s art, especially his Athlete’s Foot Period.

“Beauty … is a word without sense,” he says. Sounds like somebody’s got rocks in his
cabeza
. The ability to sense anything is, in and of itself, a thing of beauty. Take Christmas Eve. When you’re seven, you can
sense
that Santa Claus is coming and you’re going to get all the great stuff you asked for in the catalog, and it’s almost better than the Tonka truck you don’t get because Dad “sensed” that Tonka trucks were only for “Presbyterians.” None of it makes sense, actually: On my seventh birthday, he sent me to a steeplejack camp for Satanists, and
last year
I got a Tonka truck.

Oh, I almost forgot! Where does beauty lead? To
getting your own apartment
– you’re fucking thirty-two, Tyler. Shit.

Gabriela Mistral:
“Beauty … is the shadow of God on the universe.”

You can always count on a Latina to come up with something esoteric and groovy when a simple explanation will do. Mistral, a Nobel Laureate, poet, autodidact, and amateur astronomer, became convinced that she had discovered beauty, that it was “the shadow of God on the universe.” Well, a Nobel Prize in Lit does not a Galileo make, no disrespect. What theodicies were pin-balling around in that Chilean brain of hers? It’s a nice little image, I grant you. But it’s such an easy way out.

See if you can guess what went wrong with Gabriela Mistral’s premature declaration about the nature of beauty:

With the plastic lens cap still on the telescope, a shadow effect does admittedly occur. However, it is not the shadow of God; it is the shadow of the plastic lens cap,
espáz
.

OR

Somewhere in those Dickinsonian ellipses after “beauty” lies a phrase like “… which is when something bad happens to someone I hate, like my ex-wife Timber, etc. etc.” The fact that, as far as we know, Mistral was neither a lesbian nor married to my ex-wife is irrelevant. Everybody hates somebody, and there’s nothing more beautiful than
laughing at your enemy’s misfortune
.

The correct answer? Both. And though I can’t prove the second part (Borges writes eloquently of the first in a Valentine letter to another Borges, living precisely three seconds behind the normal Borges), we can be certain I’m on the right track. And Timber, don’t think you’re above suspicion. You are a shameless social climber, and I wouldn’t be surprised if, in addition to tramping around the bar at the St. Regis with your paid
claquers
, you didn’t try to make a pass at Mistral even though you were just an itch on your Dad’s crotch when she died.

Helen Keller:
“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart.”

Please. I don’t know where to start, so I’ll just finish: The most beautiful things
can
be touched. You just have to pay to do it. (See above: The Bottoms Up Lounge).

Albert Einstein:
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.”

Einstein gets credibility in all aesthetic domains because of his beautiful mind and – usually – spot-on observations about the theoretical and natural world. That’s giving this horse a lot of head, despite the need to put the huge hair part of the eminent physicist’s head in whatever that expression means.

The mysterious is lots of things, but it’s usually not beautiful – it’s usually a flaming bag of ordure on my doorstep, the way a woman blows a rape whistle when I’m just trying to get directions to nyu for a lecture on Kant; or how my roommate Clint’s rent check manages to take a tenor of eternal death, yet his hydroponically grown marijuana crop in our closet remains fecund as can be. No, the most beautiful thing we can experience is not “the mysterious.” If Einstein could go back in time – which he may actually be doing – and utter one more profound glottal stop and suck his tongue in contemplation, I think he’d have to agree that the most beautiful thing we can experience is the obvious:
Regularly occurring and marginally deviant sex atop piles of money
(tax-free). Maybe in the Caribbean or somewhere – a little drunk, but not too.