The Likeness of a Beautiful Thing - 11

The FINAL week --
     with summary conclusions for "What is a beautiful thing?" and "Why pursue beauty?" and the meaning of true fulfillment for our leisure time.

   F.   The Definition – What is a Beautiful Thing?

        Just as a thing is interesting when it engages the participation of the intellect, so is beauty its ability to engage us through the senses which, in our present line of interest, is the sense of sight.

        If we have reached agreement on my live demonstrations, two things will have been made clear.

1. First, we all perceive the music and the screeching the same way once the locations that require action are identified and mended, or you could not have conceded that I had improved anything at all.
2. Second, to ascertain the sites where correction will be needed is a skill which grows more powerful with practice and experience. It was therefore easier for me to do than it could possibly have been for a layman without training.
   

           The true action of this skill is to observe our own responses as we behold a visual
            display. It is the ability to look at ourselves while looking at a thing.


   G.   The Purpose – Why Do We Pursue It?

        If we ask what makes a beautiful thing desirable to have, we get invariably the reply: “It pleases.” So it often does, but decidedly not always: 

1. Matthias Grűnewald’s Isenheim Aaltar Crucifixion is a very embodiment of suffering.
2. And Pucchini’s opera Madama Butterfly ends in tragedy and terrible despair.
3. Against the backdrop of Germany’s declining fortunes of battle and her shattered cities near the end of World War II, the narrator in Thomas Mann’s great novel Doctor Faustus looks upon the parallel devastation of the broken sanity and approaching death of his lifelong friend, the composer Adrian Leverkühn.

• He relates to us how he felt like one of the condemned souls in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment whom a pair of daemons wrenches downward into the abyss. The figure covers but a single eye while glaring insanely through the other, as though he could not endure and bear to look upon this hell he was nonetheless compelled to see.
• The narrator ends these broodings with a prayer of a single sentence:  “May God have mercy upon both your souls – my friend, my fatherland!”

  
             Literature, of all the arts, uses the comprehending intellect as if it were one of our
            senses. For, the reading eye alone would see page by weary page a single basic
            pattern endlessly repeated. But form and composition speak at first to the brain
             itself as if it were purely an organ of reception – a retina and eardrum of the mind.
 

        What unfolds in all my three examples are terrifying tragedies. To be gratified or well-pleased with them would be indeed satanic pleasure – a diabolical amusement. But, even while the heart is saddened, these works can so utterly engage all our mind and feeling that no foreign desires are able to intrude, and no distractions tarnish, the experience. Thus we learn through them a perfection of fulfillment.

1. We can otherwise have a perfection of experience without necessarily beholding a perfect work of art.

• We are capable of giving this fulfilling beneficence to ourselves from something merely good enough to stimulate us to the mental labor of perfecting inwardly what may inherently be flawed. To do this is to make one’s reception better.
• Pictorial composition may deliberately use incompleteness to achieve perfection. We can mentally complete my sphere and cube in the following illustration, though I have rendered them in fragments only.   
• Experiencing perfection without a perfect work of art also can be base and, at its worst, extremely ugly. Cheap entertainment or cheap reading and, most of all, the deadly plague of psychoactive drugs, furnish a perfection of downward self-fulfillment. While these pleasures last, they constitute perfection for the user, because he is incapable of any wider purposes or wishes.

The Purpose – Why Pursue Beauty?   (cont’d)  
 
        2.  But to love and learn about the Arts we have to measure up to them. We have
              the right to assess any work against the artist’s claim – his promise, if you will –
              that he is showing it to us because it will be a first rate thing to see. Yet, as viewers
              we must have good will, seek to un-learn our prejudices, and shed the common
              failing of ill-tempered and pedantic carping. For these will surely shut the doors
              on art.

        Besides good will, and by the instrument and reason of good will, we have to learn to open our eyes and to develop a clear mind, to be –  to the best of our ability –  a Noble Viewer for the artist’s work.

1. The Noble Viewer of measureless good will, keen intellect, and clarity of vision, plays his role as an artist’s ideal in the Platonic sense. He may grow to be more real than any living person, because he represents the granting of an ardent wish, as the human being with whom most of all an artist wants to share the best of all his work.
2. And no actual person may quite equal the hope and the reliable assurance the Noble Viewer can thus carry into the domain of art, who may be quite severely critical, but never uncharitably so. The Noble Viewer is in that sense a reality that we assemble him from real people – not from a single person, but from the best qualities of several.
3. To attain – even imperfectly—the attributes of our Noble Viewer demands self-control and study, that is, self-expenditure. And gaining so much ground is truly an enrichment. The pursuit of art is always upward self-fulfillment, because it is invariably accompanied by self-enrichment.

The Sciences – and here we must include Philosophy among them – are also fulfilling and enriching. But the Fine Arts and the Sciences cannot take one another’s place.

1. For science when it does not treat reality becomes a kind of science fiction, and Philosophy in this case, an unavailing speculation and subjective brooding.
2. All the Sciences – to do their proper work – must face man’s needs and problems squarely, as must also the designer of any object of utility, however beautifully made, if his product shall be useful as well as good to see.

The Arts, however, can transport us to another world where our daily troubles matter little, and where we are refreshed as if we went on a vacation.

1. My painting was able to surpass the actual coffee pot, which cannot surpass itself, and so could not accomplish what the picture did.
2. Other pictures articulated images of fantasy and rendered my personal responses to literature and life, while my table easel, for example, must interpretively remain mute and forever a mere tool.
3. My action of setting down the paper snippets showed that a beautiful thing in art is a work capable of engaging fully our sensibilities.

            We consider it worth creating and worth having – not so much because it pleases –
             but because it simultaneously enriches and fulfills and restores our weary spirit,
             in a compact – one almost wants to say “efficient” – form that nothing else can
             quite achieve.
      4.   Finally, works of art can give to us this true refreshment and unburdening from
             our common cares in ways no artifact can altogether equal.


   H.   A Change of Pace Rather than Escape 

1. A journey into the world of art is not an escape from reality in the sense of flight, any more than an outing to the Susquehanna means an escape from Lancaster. We want what art can give. And without art – its enriching and restoring powers – the world would be a hellish place.

            We have seen that ugly objects – however functional – can distract the user and
            weaken him in the execution of his tasks. We assume therefore that ugly
            surroundings damage man’s ability to perform his proper work in life. Yet the
            unimaginable hell of a world entirely devoid of art – despite our inner city
            slums – still remains, I hope, mostly outside of human ken. But we are not prevented
            by our dependency on art from also wanting the truth of science and the reality in
            which it operates. We are not put to flight by reality.

      2.  The escapes of mindless thrills and pleasures cannot provide this change of pace
            we need for our restoration. For, largely disengaged intellects and sensibilities
            mean a relaxation of no pace at all.The mind-deadening effects of numerous
            television offerings – that is, the resulting sluggishness toward mental action –
            show that downward self-fulfillments as a class, far from giving us refreshment,
            put us beyond the reach of any restoration.

      3.  But the Arts demand of us a diligence and an attention that will bring us true
            enrichment instead of a mere land of dreams. For they alter solely the use we make
            of our faculties, and thus sharpen them into alertness, instead of rendering them
            numb.
            Leisure time is time which truly belongs to ourselves, and we should get from it
            all the benefits we may. The Arts are more suitable than almost any other instrument
            for gaining such a purpose. 
 
                                                                                                               Johannes H. von Gumppenberg
                                                                                                                Lancaster, PA October 24, 1995