beauty will be convulsive - Page 3

What's more, we have to question whether or not there is such a thing as truly objective Beauty, or whether all beauty is subjective - and I can tell you right now, I'm not going to attempt to answer this question because philosophers have long studied this and nobody has really satisfactorily come up with anything that works for all people, though that said, we can be certain that Beauty has certain "qualities", read, not attributes - so we can't say what beauty looks like, we can say that the ideal of Beauty makes all people feel a similar set of sensations and behave in similar ways. The first way, I noted above is the desire to replicate and somehow capture that beauty, either for our own sake or because we feel beauty should be caught on film or caught in a painting etc, it replicates, just like our lilies replicate themselves or the mourning dove sings her coo every day. It is her nature to sing a beautiful and mournful song - so in this way, she replicates, but what really replicates it is the fact of our listening for that song every day - we listen for that song and in that way, we replay it again and again, as Scarry notes.

Before I get into other qualities of Beauty - or things that Beauty can help us with, let's for a minute think about things that we once found beautiful, but no longer find beautiful. We have all had the experience of say, loving a person and finding that person beautiful and then one day, that person ceases to be the great beauty. Now, it's possible that they changed somewhere along the line or we did, but what if we both remain static and yet still, we no longer see the beauty of this person whom we once loved? Most often this happens when beauty is displaced by another object on our horizon that we perceive as more beautiful. As Scarry points out, it is not that there is a finite amount of space in our brain for what is beautiful or a limit to the number of things or people that we can find beautiful, but it's all within context or category for some reason. Let's say I think Maple trees are the most beautiful trees, and one day, I am walking through the Public Garden and I see a pale green weeping willow tree and it is stunning, the maple tree suddenly seems boring by contrast. In my mind, I then dub the willow tree as the "truly" beautiful tree, but not the maple any longer. It is as if we must select one for each category.

Article Author: Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti is a published writer in both the United States and Europe. She is widely known for her music commentary, particularly her writings about Bob Dylan about whom she runs a highly-trafficked site. …

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