Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry

Notes toward Beauty

Notes toward Beauty “I don’t trust beauty anymore,” I once wrote, “when will I stop believing it?” And elsewhere, “because beauty (fixed, tri umphant) isn’t my friend, is it?” That is par t of the tr uth. The other part of the truth is that without a notion of beauty, an embodiment of the possible beyond the abjections of the mundane , I would not have become a poet, would not, per haps, have left behind the Bronx housing projects and tenements at all. It is ver y fashionable, indeed almost de rigueur , to condemn beauty as oppressive: at worst an ideological mystification, a best a distraction from the real work. (Lenin couldn’ t listen to music for this reason: he distr usted the power it had over him, fearing it would ener vate him and make him too soft to do the hard things that had to be done). As poet Jay Hopler writes, “It is hard to believe beauty is the new ugliness. / But it must be, why else would so many of my contemporaries mock it so?” And simplified, disto ted notions of beauty have too often been deployed for vicious ends: the Nazi cult of Ar yan beauty is the most egregious example. (Though I am also reminded that the sculptures of Arno Breker, Hitler’s court artist, are actually ugly. But Leni Riefenstahl’ s straining, triumphant Olympians are not.) Adorno’s point remains: “Beauty of any kind has to face the question of whether it is in fact beautiful or whether it is just a fake claim resting on static affi mation.” It is common to confuse the beautiful with the pretty , an ornamental irrelevance, to oppose the pleasing to some more exigent or severe realm above and beyond the merely beautiful . This perspective situates beauty at the midpoint of a continuum from the pretty to the beautiful to the sublime: beauty is thus a for m of mediocrity or compromise. It was Edmund Burke who first distinguished between the beautiful and th 65 sublime as that which submits to us versus that which overwhelms us, that which could destroy us but does not. Immanuel Kant and (more recently) Jean-François L yotard have elaborated on this distinction. In this view , beauty reassures and comforts : it supplies us with the already known, while the sublime crashes over us like the stor m surge of an out-of-season hur ricane . As Susan Sontag has obser ved, “Beauty is part of the history of idealizing, which is itself par t of the histor y of consolation . But beauty may not always console. The beauty of face and figure to ments, subjugates; that beauty is imperious. The beauty that is human, and the beauty that is made (ar t)—both raise the fantasy of possession. Our model of the disinterested comes from the beauty of nature—a nature that is distant, overarching , unpossessable.” Beauty is insistent; it makes demands. It demands that we see it and acknowledge it, that we acknowledge our seeing, that we be changed by the experience. As Rilke wrote, beauty is the beginning of a ter ror that we are barely able to endure. And as Francis Bacon wrote, there is no beauty that hath not some proportion of strangeness in it. To quote Thomas Nashe’s “A Litany in Time of Plague,” a poem that celebrates and embodies the beauty of annihilation, a poem whose speaker is, in par t, dying of beauty, Brightness falls from the air, Queens have died young and fair, Dust hath closèd Helen’s eye. I am sick, I must die. The terror that Kant equated with the sublime is synonymous with Rilke’s beauty: the sublime is beauty’ s true face, like Zeus revealing himself to Semele in all his glor y, like Yahweh whose back alone can be glimpsed by the mor tal eye. Beauty is not kind or benign; it is a natural force, amoral, beyond good and evil. Like the pleasure/pain of or gasm, like Roland Bar thes’s jouissance, it is shattering, ecstatic: we are beside ourselves, outside ourselves. Beauty bur ns and devours: we die to our old selves and rise reborn. I have quoted and cited, refer red and alluded, but I am still 66 no prophet. What do I believe—and which I, and at what time? Perhaps this near -chrestomathy is evidence...