Beauty is all
There was a baffled look on her face, justifiably so. The assertion was illogical, how could something appear different in a photograph from its actual reality? Didn’t everyone have such experiences, didn’t people look in a mirror and see one person and then look at a photograph and see someone who appeared differently from the person they had perceived in the looking glass? The argument did not seem convincing, the bafflement seemed to have been augmented by a degree of perplexity. Introducing an additional angle did not convince the listener. Suggesting a room had an appearance in reality that differed from its digital image brought a realisation that the line of thought should not be pursued.
Perhaps it is something idiosyncratic, the idea that photographing an object might reveal qualities not perceived in an initial view. The use of Instagram has brought a capacity to find beauty in common and unlikely moments. Of course, there are filters, and there is scope to change light and colour and texture, but the essential nature of the subject is unchanged; a house is still a house, a stone is still a stone; a tree, or a river, or a landscape remain what they were.
Finding beauty in simplicity can imbue the stuff of everyday life with an interest, or even an excitement, that it might otherwise lack. It can prompt the stopping of the car in unlikely places to photograph images passed countless times. It can prompt a curiosity among passers-by as to why a grey haired man in a clerical collar might want to stop and take pictures at such points. The suspicion he is more eccentric than previously imagined might be magnified, or perhaps a thought that he might know something of which they are not aware.
Richard Jefferies, the Nineteenth Century English naturalist, who died at the age of 38, possessed an extraordinary sense of the beauty of the commonplace, he wrote
“The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable time.”
Jefferies’ words offer an affirmation of the propensity to stop and record Instagram images, it is in contemplating beauty that real life is found. The more time spent stopped at the roadside, the more is gained from time.
I’ve wondered about this very issue. People would have little problem hearing Ode to Joy on a harmonica and be transcended by it. Except those who attend the LSO or the RTESO regularly. They might be offended.
Seamus Heaney was within himself having real trouble. His belief in poetry as a real endeavour hadn’t become part of his soul until his kids were being enrolled into primary school when the master asking the kids what occupation their father did, heard Poet, but then as we do here, translated it into Irish is File (Fill-ahh). And that changed it in Seamus.
There is an aspect of Allowed to be something. The ‘shur why would he be anything, didn’t he/she come from a bog/mountain/slum/dole’. You see it here and in the UK, and probably elsewhere too.
To my mind this destroys society. In simple things like the design of a knife, or fork. If you asked German or Italian kids, no longer French for some reason, to design a knife they would come up with something. Here and the UK our kids wouldn’t know what you were on about. You’d get the ‘haven’t we loads of knives at home, why make new ones’.
And out of this to my mind flows the anti-intellectualism.
I think the Nineteenth Century utilitarianism that pervaded much of our culture caused a turning away from beauty for the sake of it, though even the Victorians, for all their faults, had a vision of construction as being about more than the function of a building.
The Jefferies quote comes from a foreword to a 2000 edition of Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring,’ a classic piece of protest writing against the notion that the world is there simply for exploitation.
Politics on both sides of the Irish Sea is almost entirely devoid of anything visionary, debate is reduced to ad hominem attacks. Much as I dislike Jeremy Corbyn, he has reintroduced to political discourse the idea that one can aspire to a society one would regard as beautiful