Making Commitment to Beauty

This is not my phrase. I, in fact borrowed it from one of my favourite authors. When I first read it, I was stuck. I thought there was something more than what I could readily comprehend. I then wanted to uncode that mysterious note that made this phrase enigmatically special to me.

Commonly understood, beauty is that quality which specially pleases one’s senses. But this make our understanding more ambiguous. What kind of quality is this? Is it the quality of the mind or that of the objects strewn around us as ‘things of beauty’? I am least interested in reviving this old controversy. Still for some strange reason I want to inform myself of its meaning. At times it becomes an obsession, conjuring but elusive. More you try to get close, more it evades.

Commonly perceived, beauty masquerades before our eyes in many forms – often in awkward caricatures though. It is spoken of as weights and measures. (No one would have missed a beauty contest at least on the TV screen!). What I intend saying is that market has a magic wand that aesthetises everything – form and flesh, sound and noise, taste and distaste and touch and pain. Beauty thus becomes a commodity. Thanks to long years of capitalism. It has taught us one thing: standard bargains. Trivialized and enslaved in the first place, beauty then starts enslaving the consuming mind. Once consumed, beauty is no more there. So we loath and feel constantly dissatisfied. Beauty becomes rapacity.

What then is real beauty? It is freedom from all kinds of banalities that senses would dictate. This includes all forms of nascent sensualities and sexualities. The silent dawn, the sweetest of bird songs, the melting silver of the sun, the vanity of the noon and after-noon, the sorrows of twilight, the horrors of dusk and darkness, the twinkling of the midnight and the waxing moon, the all-enduring life – its joys and hurts, its forgetfulness and forgiving moments, its grace, peace and harmony, its unceasing desire to reach out to the mysteries of unknown – all express beauty. Could they ever be perfectly described or in the least, measured? The beauty of beauty is it unfathomable quality.

Paradoxically, no form, no sound, no smell, no taste and no sense of touch and feel that could define beauty. It eludes the most delicate of hands that could sculpt. It is sweeter than songs yet to be born. It is more fragrant than the flowers of yonder. It is softer that the virgin embrace of youth. It is a higher knowledge and a higher gnosis. ‘Committing to Beauty’ then should perhaps mean committing oneself to a new form of spirituality – a spirituality that believes in the wonderment and mysteries of human good, that is born out of every man and every woman and their communion with their fellow beings and nature, their bondage and freedom. It is a spirituality that moves away from aggression and possession but nurtures on a desire to create, enjoy and enrich. It is important I think that one takes efforts to understand his or her aesthetics.

                                                                                                                                            SCORPIUS