On Beauty and Being Just

book by Elaine Scarry

I was completely unfamiliar with the phrase ‘the narcissism of small differences,’ so seeing it in writing the day after hearing it aloud drew my attention. It would be a narcissism of a different sort to claim small differences between myself and Elaine Scarry, she whose casual anecdotes extend into a world so rarified as to be breathtaking:

One day I ran into a friend, and when he asked me what I was doing, I said I was trying to explain how beauty leads us to justice. (It happens that this friend is a philosopher and an economist who as spent many years inquiring into the relation between famine and forms of procedural justice such as freedom of the press.)

As I flipped to the endnote, the friend was, excuse my language, freakin’ Amartya Sen! So, yes, we are not the same. Yet I cannot shake the feeling that there is as little light between the author and myself as between the leaves of a palm tree:

The signature of a palm is its striped light. Palm leaves stripe the light. The dyadic alternations of leaf and air make the frond shimmer and move, even when it stays still, and if there is an actual breeze, then the stripings whip around without ever losing their perfect alignment across the full sequence.

Rarely have I read something that I found so unengaging with such focused attention. Palm trees? Matisse? Mid-tropical komorebi? Every time I am surrounded by Japanese Maple trees and their tiny leaves cutting the light into a thousand-thousand fragments, the concept seems natural, but to extend it toward Gallic coastal vibes? Quelle horreur. Further, beyond the opacity of pages riddled with Matisse descriptions, the book forced my examination of a handful of preformed assumptions about, well, existing, with elegant arguments that I found underintuitive (they don’t go quite as far as unintuitive). It’s occasionally a challenge (for me, and my ego) to love writing that I sort of disagree with.

Those who recall making an error in beauty inevitably describe one of two genres of mistake. The first, in the lines by Dickinson, Shakespeare, and Hopkins [all of whom I bet she would be friends with, had they still been alive], is the recognition that something formerly held to be beautiful no longer deserves to be so regarded. The second is the sudden recognition that something from which the attribution of beauty had been withheld deserves all along to be so denominated.

The acknowledgement of sudden coruscating beauty from a reorientation to the mundane, or the fickleness of a desire dimmed by seemingly nothing, are clear. These arguments grounded me, ‘Yes, I am on board, where are we going?’ The underappreciated palm tree suddenly lifting into arboreal primacy through art is a strong example of the former for the author—she didn’t like them, now she does. I do not know why I found the detailing so tedious while also recognizing this was a necessary frolic to set her argument. This detour functionally is the book.

Once we veer off into the garden, the actual green-and-gold flowers-and-plants garden, which honestly seems to function more as foil for human-beauty-appreciating, I bog my own self down with petty invasive thoughts:

We must still leave to the side the highly puzzling site of persons, because the question is this: even if it is the case that we can be persuaded to stop looking at persons, ought the negative account of harmful looking be extended to other sites such as gods, poems, and–the site now before us–gardens? Because flowers are alive, they are (unlike omnipotent or nonsentient things) susceptible to damage; but a moment’s reflection shows the impossibility of concluding that this damage is brought about by our perception of them, and the deep oddity of banishing them from our regard. Gardens exist for the sake of being beautiful and for the sake of having that beauty looked at, walked through, lingered in. In this one respect the sentient site of gardens and the nonsentient (or only sentient-like) site of poems are alike; for poems too–as well as other art objects such as glass vases and paintings–are brought into being in order to place their beauty in the field of human regard. Prohibiting attention to the beauty of gardens or poems therefore seems even more peculiar than prohibiting attention to the beauty of gods and persons.

Flowers as beauty, even imperfect and alive in a garden, feel disingenuous as a argument for the treatment and display of the beautiful: the modus operandi for human-floral relations is in the preservation of cut flowers, a tiny petaled realm of death, a constant display of slow suffocation, a disruption to core purposes of propagation, pollination. Mummified and estranged into jars, antiquaries, vases of reciprocal beauty. Flower Confidential poisoned me against the practice; flowers are a by-volume business that leaves no small trace of poison on each representation of beauty as it is handled and displayed. On Beauty and Being Suffocated.

To be as fair to the text as I can be, the focus on flowers is a focus on living gardens and is bundled into a larger argument about the potentiality of harm wrought by observing beauty, and how, at least in the late 1990s, acknowledging human beauty has become an issue of both rhetorical and political danger. Yet the Matisse tedium (which I appreciated after it was over) and the floral dismemberment (which, given my backtracking, is mirror to Odysseus’ palinode:  “If you are immortal, I recognize you. You are Artemis. If instead you are mortal, I am puzzled and cannot recognize you, since I can find no precedent. No, wait. I do recognize you. I remember watching a tree coming up out of the ground at Delos.” If you are a flower in a garden, I recognize you as smothered in a vase. No, wait, you can blossom and thrive in a landscape of curated beauty) were the only spaces between myself and the text into which I could wiggle any outré opinion, could find anything to say that wasn’t simply “This is a good thing to read.”

Until.

Perhaps I am a simpleton, but it is exactly the situation that as ephemeral artifacts flow into my life–impermanent flowers replaced, new objects for display and appreciation acquired–sites of prior obsession or abject object worship lose a bit of their urgency:

If I was about to place a vase on a wide safe ledge and then, finding one more beautiful, I consigned the first vase to a careless spot, we might have a case. But it seems more likely that the concern demanded by the perfect vase or god or poem introduced me to a standard of care that I then began to extend to more ordinary objects (perhaps I began to notice and worry, for the first time, about my neglect of the ordinary object and, inspecting it more closely, may now even discover that it is not ordinary).

I just find this summation wrong in form. I do not toss my favorite painting on the pyre when I get a new one, but the churn of beloved objects makes each prior obsession less anxiety-inducing to hang, enjoy, be inspired by. If my painting were to break or be lost, well, there is in fact more beauty in the world. Caring less is not, by necessity, carelessness; not crossing a grassy field for fear of scuffing your favorite sneakers (at least you took them out of your closet!) is delimiting in a that way I find absurd. Is this the argument, then, that our care and love should extend down the tiers, blossoming out from the favorite shirt that sits unworn in the drawer-cum-mausoleum to the less adorable, more adornable clothing? Perhaps the balance of our wardrobe, that which we wear neutrally, unconsidered, is where the truest love lives?

No. I can’t imagine this is so. But even in this core disagreement, reading On Beauty and Being Just was delightful. Even, or perhaps even because of, the section on Matisse and the palm trees, because of the distance between myself and the gardens. What I read without friction felt too easy:

The first flash of the bird incites the desire to duplicate not by translating the glimpsed image into a drawing or a poem or a photograph by simply by continuing to see her five seconds, twenty-five seconds, forty-five seconds later—as long as the bird is there to be beheld.

I could swim in this language all day, let it wash over me until I drowned in it. What a way to go.

Further, it astonished me that a book more than twenty-five-years old could approach what I, in my naïveté, had assumed was a structural issue inherent to social media. An uplifting, or even benign, post about something joyful is freighted with a thousand comments attempting to drag it back down to earth: “Why are you thinking about [X thing of beauty] when there is [Y social problem]?” That this precedes attenuated communication mediated through instant-transmission machines should not be so shocking to my millennial brain, and yet…

The political critique of beauty is composed of two distinct arguments. The first urges that beauty, by preoccupying our attention, distracts attention from wrong social arrangements. It makes us inattentive, and therefore eventually indifferent, to the project of bringing about arrangement that are just. The second argument holds that when we stare at something beautiful, make it an object of sustained regard, our act is destructive to the object. This argument is most often prompted when the gaze is directed toward a human face or form, but the case presumably applies equally when the beautiful thing is a mourning dove, or a trellis spilling over with sweet pea, or a book whose pages are being folded back for the first time.

Live your life. Look for and appreciate beauty. Everything else is small differences.