[Image: “Yam awely,” by Emily Kame Kngwarreye. (1995; synthetic polymer paint on canvas; approximately 16 feet wide by 5 feet high. For more information, see the site of the National Gallery of Australia, where the original resides.) From the essay where I encountered it this week: “It is not our cultural differences that strike me when I look at this painting. I know that a complex set of ideas, stories, and experiences have informed its maker. But what captures me is beyond reason. It cannot be put into words. My felt response to this work does not answer questions of particular cultures or histories. It is more universal than that. I am aware of a beautiful object offered up by its maker, who surely felt the beauty of her creation just as I do.”]
From whiskey river (although there it omitted a crucial sentence on the next-to-last paragraph):
One day Dostoevsky threw out the enigmatic remark: “Beauty will save the world.” What sort of a statement is that? For a long time I considered it mere words. How could that be possible? When in bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, uplifted, yes — but whom has it saved?
There is, however, a certain peculiarity in the essence of beauty, a peculiarity in the status of art: namely, the convincingness of a true work of art is completely irrefutable and it forces even an opposing heart to surrender. It is possible to compose an outwardly smooth and elegant political speech, a headstrong article, a social program, or a philosophical system on the basis of both a mistake and a lie. What is hidden, what distorted, will not immediately become obvious.
Then a contradictory speech, article, program, a differently constructed philosophy rallies in opposition — and all just as elegant and smooth, and once again it works. Which is why such things are both trusted and mistrusted.
In vain to reiterate what does not reach the heart.
But a work of art bears within itself its own verification: conceptions which are devised or stretched do not stand being portrayed in images, they all come crashing down, appear sickly and pale, convince no one. But those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force — they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them.
So perhaps that ancient trinity of Truth, Goodness and Beauty is not simply an empty, faded formula as we thought in the days of our self-confident, materialistic youth? If the tops of these three trees converge, as the scholars maintained, but the too blatant, too direct stems of Truth and Goodness are crushed, cut down, not allowed through — then perhaps the fantastic, unpredictable, unexpected stems of Beauty will push through and soar TO THAT VERY SAME PLACE, and in so doing will fulfill the work of all three?
In that case Dostoevsky’s remark, “Beauty will save the world”, was not a careless phrase but a prophecy? After all he was granted to see much, a man of fantastic illumination.
(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Another One of the World’s Liars
I am just another one of the world’s liars
believe me
I have a few charms
worn-out peddler’s trinkets
with grand names like beauty
friendship, truth, passion
—and this one’s a real item, sometimes
I even buy it myself: love
Check my record; odds
are not in your favor
that I won’t sell out
my goods, bolt by night
deny you three times
before the cock has crowed
Consider this fair warning:
never fall for my spiel
If you do
and end up with a huge bill
for damage done
never forgive me
(Mohja Kahf [source])
…and:
Philosophy
Nihilism, but not in a negative
sense—such was his thought,
what else to call it? Like snow
inside a novelty snow globe,
vague possibility descended
from probability, descended
from likelihood and certainty.
Now not even air. Those great
words discussed in college—
truth, beauty, justice, which
had come to embarrass him,
like teasing bare-breasted
girls in postcards sent from
Polynesian islands that each
year he had found less likely;
absolutes faded like old shirts,
as still he tried to create from
stray thoughts as if out of wood-
chips and mud, the old certainties
he once loved, the believable lie.
(Stephen Dobyns [source])
…and:
[W]henever I appeal to something to explain why I like something, I know that the same feature may hurt a different work: the obsessive observation of social detail which gives such power to Remembrance of Things Past is just boring in the diaries of the Goncourt brothers; the long-lasting sexual tension between Niles and Daphne in Frasier is the subject of some of the series’ best scenes over a number of seasons, while the sexual tension between Billy and Ally was deadly after two episodes of Ally McBeal. But if social detail or sexual tension explains why I like Proust or Frasier, how can it also explain why I hate the Goncourts and Ally McBeal? There is not in all the world’s criticism a single descriptive statement concerning which I am willing to say in advance, “If it is true, I shall like that work so much the better.” If I know that something is yellow, ductile, malleable, and soluble in aqua regia, then I know that it is gold. But though I know that it is gold, as Socrates proved to Hippias in Plato’s dialogue, I still have no idea whether or not it is beautiful…If you really feel you have exhausted a work, you are bound to be disappointed. A piece that has no more surprises left—a piece you really feel you know “inside and out”—has no more claim on you. You may still call it beautiful because it once gave you the pleasure of its promise or because you think that it may have something to give to someone else. But it will have lost its hold on you. Beauty beckons.
What you come to see as a result of such beckoning you come to see for yourself. Odysseus had to listen to the sirens’ song on his own, not through the ears of one of his sailors.
(Alexander Nehamas [source])
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