beauty is a verb

7/28/2019 Beauty is a Verb

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Beauty is a VerbBy Eric Booth

Art and spirit meet in many places. Perhaps the most delicious, perhaps the mostimportant, is in the experience of beauty. Shinto, an ancient spiritual tradition,

worships at sites of beauty like waterfalls and rock formations. I believe that all

people worship in the experience of beauty. However, in our secularized and

hyperkinetic times, we usually overlook the significance of the occasion, and we

rarely celebrate it with rituals and respect. Let me share my sense of beauty with

you.

Over many years in practicing, teaching, and writing about the arts, I have

become more dedicated to the verbs of art than to the nouns. Of course, those

nounsthe paintings, music, dance, and theater performances, and later in

human history the novels and poemsare as powerful and wonderful as they

have been for the last ten thousand years or so. However, in our times we have

come to overemphasize the "thing" aspect of art, to the point that our very

definition of art now lies in those things.

The nounness of art explains why an overwhelming majority of Americans feel

they have no place in the arts; the arts are about those fancy "things" that require

experts and education to appreciate. So many feel art is irrelevant except for an

annual pilgrimage to The Nutcrackeror a haul through the Metropolitan Museumto view multi-million-dollar paintings on a trip to New York. We have noun-ified art

just as we have commodified so many aspects of modern life.

I am fascinated by the verbs of art. It is what artists do as they create their nouns;

it is what perceivers do when they respond by making connections to those

nouns. We all participate in these verbs of creating and perceiving in bits and

pieces throughout our lives. Indeed, pursuing this truth is the way to revive the

arts in America, as I have argued in my book The Everyday Work of Art. I see

beauty as a verb. Yes, there are beautiful thingsthey abound; but spirit and art

really meet on the playground, in the action of beauty.

Beauty can't be a noun, except as an abstract idea like goodness, because it

doesn't exist unless you participate in the present tense. Beauty is neither only in

the eye of the beholder nor only in a beautiful "thing" itself, no matter how good-

looking that thing may be. It resides in both beholder and beheld at the moment

of their interaction. Beauty is a skill of experiencing, a kind of dialogue. Like any


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live-performance work of art, it exists only in the moments when it is happening.

Beauty is a seeing or discovery of a satisfying whole that is completed by our

participation.

For example, you might scrape together ten or twenty million dollars to buy

yourself a nice van Gogh painting of sunflowers. (Don't forget the extra million for

a proper security system and insurance.) You hang it on the living room wall, and

sit down to visit with it. You might get a transporting sense of its beauty. On the

other hand, you might also miss the experience, worrying about the humidity in

the room. There will be other times when you sit with it, vaguely enjoying its

presence, without really attending to it. Your thoughts are drifting; you are tired;

something is bothering younothing beautiful is there.

Conversely, the neighbors six-year-old may have sold you a drawing she made

at school: price, a nickel. Mechanically, you stick it on the wall by the phone. Andthen you notice it; you start to see what the child has done, you see some clever

ideas and accomplishmentsbeauty is there.

Although there are relatively few ultimate human masterworks (thank heavens for

museums and performance halls), there is no shortage of beautiful objects, well-

made things that require no ticket and will reward your attending with

experiences of beauty. There is no dearth of natural beauty if you can see a

single tree. Nouns are abundant. What isin short supply is the attending side of

the beauty equationthe skills, the habits, the priority of engaging with

worthwhile objects to discover beauty.

Beauty is more than nice, more than pretty, more than the opposite of ugly. You

are making beauty every time you engage in a process that makes something

more satisfying, more efficient, more effective, more elegant, more

communicative, more complex, more compellingmore of whatever you see the

project might become. In whatever work you invest yourself inbe it writing torts

or touting warts, Total Quality Management or massagebeautifying pleases the

senses and brings new order to the world.

It just plain feels great to make something beautiful; this is the main reason

artists become and remain artists in spite of horrendous career difficultiesit

feels good to make beautiful things. This reward alone provides enough joy to

sustain many artists lives. And when artists clog their direct pipeline to beauty

with career concerns or emotional sludge, their joy diminishes, their spiritual

connection dries out. The philosopher John Dewey made the point elegantly


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when he said that he couldnt quite define the word aesthetic, but he knew its

opposite was anesthetic. Art is about being awake, alive, able to feel, and beauty

is its quintessential moment.

You also make beauty every time you attend and connect to the beauty in

something well made. Notice the word "connect." This too is a verb of creation. It

is not that there are artists and audiences; there are only participators in the

creation of beauty, and different people actively participate in different ways.

The power of beauty derives from four inherent truths.

! 1.! Etymologically, "beauty" evolves from a word meaning "the good," "theideal," "the whole." Beauty is yearnings superhighway, the most direct way

to drive toward an individuals ultimate truthswhich Paul Tillich described

as spirit. We become part of a whole in beauty, which is why the heartopens and we feel connected to others. In beauty, we enter the whole,

loving, cohesive world we dream about.

! 2.! Beauty lives only in active collaboration between the thing and theperceiver. It requires that we come out and engage. (We may get that

pleasant "nice feeling" of something that is beautiful as we let a symphony

wash over us, for example, but we are not tapping what it holds, what it

was made to give.) We often mistake the recollection of beauty for beauty

but dont ever forget the difference between a kiss and the remembrance

of a kiss.

! 3.! At the heart of that live encounter that we call beauty lies wonder. Toexperience beauty, we tap into and revive our capacity for wonder; and

experiencing wonder reorders the world for a while. In wonder we are not

alone; the world has a new pattern; joy and love are the law of the land.

! 4.! In experiencing beauty, we create beauty and we become beautiful. If weexperience the beauty of a dancer, we construct the experience by tapping

into things we already knew about dance, about body movement, about

life; we bring these understandings together in the serious play of

perceiving, and make some beauty of our own. In engaging those artistic

understandings that we hold inside ourselves in overlooked abundance,

we become beautiful and add to the worlds storehouse.


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My terse grandmother used to warn her misbehaving, adolescent grandchildren

with a stern look and the peculiar admonition: "Pretty is as pretty does." Elliptical

as her approach was (especially to roughhousing boys), it stopped us in our

tracks. We didnt care that much about being "bad," but being ugly . . . . She

implicitly suggested that the actions of beauty formed the basics of a character;

she gave me my first sense of behavior as a metaphor. It took me decades to

appreciate her points, which she made beautifully.

The importance of beauty rises with our awareness of it. To a large degree

beauty begets beauty. That doesnt mean we must buy new designer duds; it

means that beauty assumes a more central, active place in daily life. With

practice, beauty-making becomes a habit of mind. This mindset becomes an

ordinary way to experience life, a celebration of the aesthetics of everyday

things, which include the way light falls across a sidewalk, the ironic graffiti on an

advertisement, and the pattern of wrinkles in a weathered face. The habit ofbeauty is expressed in a thousand tiny adjustments and thoughts within each

day, all aiming toward the highest quality.

Look at the key moment of beauty, the instant when beauty grabs you, all of you,

takes your breath away. Everything else stops, and there is only the experience

of beauty. The mind ceases whirring. The reactive mechanisms shut off. The ego

takes a hike. You are simply there, aware and alive. This is an important event, a

mini-nirvana. In this occasion, you are meeting your naturally enlightened self,

you are spiritually infused, you are . . . add your own preferred spiritual

metaphors.

The moment of beauty is not a passive moment, even though it feels like the

beauty reached out and grabbed you. You are doing important things. You are

actively attending, you are responding with your heart and mind, with everything

you have got. You are applying awareness of a high order. And perhaps most

importantly, you are reminding yourself of what you are capable of the rest of the

time.

In that moment of beauty, you expand what you know. As you allow yourself toexperience the world of a beautiful thing, you change your understandings in

response. That is, incidentally, how I distinguish between art and entertainment.

Though these can only be determined by the individual involved, entertainment

happens within what you already know, while art requires you to expand in order

to experience a new world. And beauty woos you into expansion.


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Beauty develops the mind and heart; but its power extends even further.

Studying the writings of modern physicists, particularly those of Richard

Feynmann, I have come to view beauty as one of the great forces in the

universe. Feynmann first glimpsed the possibility of beauty as an elemental force

when he was in high school. The story goes that he looked bored in science

class one day as his classmates typically took three times longer than he did to

solve a problem. His perceptive teacher, Mr. Bader, saw the impatient look on his

brilliant students face and came over and whispered a provocative thought to

young Feynmann. In scientific terms, he challenged his student with the notion

that light, like all things, follows the path of the beautiful. That thought shaped the

scientific yearning of one of the creative geniuses of our time.

Feynmann spent a lifetime discovering the truths of beauty in science, as the

actual ways the universe works. It might be said beauty is the organizing

principle of nature, the structure of the universe. So many of the greatest humanminds throughout history have all reported the same experience at the peak

moment of finest accomplishmentseeing beauty.

When we intensely experience a clear awarenesswhether through spiritual

practice, meditation, alternative-consciousness disciplines, love-making, or the

athletes "zone"in that state everything looks beautiful. The perception of

beauty is inherent in enlightenment; and I think the reverse is also true. That is

why those small occasions when beauty takes you are so terribly important. We

are not offered sips of divine nectar very often, so we must taste whenever we

can.

Seek out beauty. Seek it in the museum. Find it in the hardware store and in your

mates turn of phrase. Find it in the work you are doing today and in a dream

image tonight. So simple, yet so profound. How can anything so delicious be so

good for you?

Be prepared to find beauty, because if you are prepared, you will find it

everywhere, even including the garbage dump. Ah, and how do you prepare to

be awake to beauty? The answer to that is the spiritual practice you create. Manytraditions and approaches provide excellent tools, but you prepare for beauty as

an artist, working with the raw materials of spirit you have inside.

beauty is a verb

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