But Beautiful

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The other night my husband and I were discussing reasons to make art. Someone who was writing about his sculpture had asked Rick to describe his intentions. We talked a bit about his work, especially his wood pieces, which to me speak of engagement with the natural world, and also of the desire to rescue damaged material by transforming it into art. Every piece is carved from one large chunk of wood, and every chunk of wood contains surprises—rot or cracks hidden from view until he cuts into it—and mysteries—how an object, a nail or even a bullet, came to be embedded in a living tree.

Elm table by Rick Yoshimoto

Then Rick asked if I thought creating beauty was a good and true answer. I most emphatically did. I told him I’d written quite a lot about the beautiful, the sublime, their healing and awakening power. I put the keyword “beauty” into the search box on my blog, and sent him a bunch of examples. I wrote “The Question of Beauty” more than 15 years ago, on a plane trip home from a speaking engagement. It talks first about a painting and then about the origin story of Leonard Cohen’s song “Alexandra Leaving,” which borrows from Constantine Cavafy’s “The God Abandons Antony,” transforming the tragedy of abandoning a beloved city into the end of a love story.

I also shared “Spiritual Biography,” written 20 years ago, focusing mostly on the beautiful musical play Passing Strange, written by Stew, which contains the line “[L]ife is a mistake…that only art can correct.” And “Beauty,” also from 2006, exploring why beauty can hold my heart in its hands and squeeze until I can barely breathe.

That led to clicking around my blogs. I didn’t meet Rick till 2013, and I’d begun writing them nearly a decade before. So he didn’t know that from 2010 to 2012 I wrote a series of food blogs, most with the headline “Something Delicious,” that explored food as a path to beauty and meaning and offered recipes for the dishes I described. Here’s one entitled “The Sublime.” Nor had he seen the series called “The Annals of Online Dating” from the same period, in which I described my experience of looking for love after the end of a long marriage.

Rick thinks I should publish an anthology selected from the nearly 900 of these short essays I’ve written since 2005, and who knows? Maybe I’ll have the energy and ambition to do that sometime. But rereading these old writings made me ask myself a question: what happened to me to change the sometimes swooning delight I took in encountering a poem, a painting, a certain cast of light on flowing water, the way a flowering tree silhouetted against a clear blue sky caught my breath and stopped me in my tracks into what I have mostly been writing here for the last few years, stories and alerts and interpretations of the many traumas, insults, and offenses committed in our names?

There may be some practical truths that partly explain it. The older I get, the less often I encounter something that strikes me as unprecedented in its beauty. My memory is stuffed with so many images and experiences that almost everything can be seen as a reminder rather than something unique and saturated with a newness that has the power to awaken and focus attention.

I admit to being preoccupied. I’ve written recently about the incredulity and confusion that tap me on the shoulder each morning as I peruse the headlines. The punditverse is overflowing with explanations, many of which seem plausible if not sufficient to slake my incredulity. How can these evil and stupid people, the avatars of incompetence, be allowed to destroy with impunity so much that has taken lifetimes to build? How is it that so many people did not see or believe the clearly stated intentions of the MAGA regime. (This brilliant piece from Timothy Snyder is meant to be satire, but it seems more like cinema verite. I’d like more people to read it.)

But here’s the thing. I don’t want to be stuck here. I don’t want to waste the rest of my life allowing what is wicked, corrupt, and repugnant to obscure my capacity to see and be nourished by what is beautiful, good, and true. So I’m launching a personal rehabilitation campaign to reconnect with whatever can lift me out of this stuck place. I’m going to revive the “Something Delicious” series, to listen to more music than podcasts, and to let myself notice when beauty tugs at my sleeve, demanding attention. I’m not burying my head in the sand; what good would that do? But I may have a new watchword, borrowed from Oscar Wilde: “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Billie Holiday, “But Beautiful.”