The Beautiful Life

What is beauty? Not an easy question to answer and believe me there are lots and lots of answers. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the mark of genius is the ability to hold two contradictory thoughts simultaneously. His example was recognising things were hopeless and yet still having hope. However, the very definition of logic is the art of non-contradictory reasoning. Something cannot be hot and cold at the same time.

When is comes to defining beauty there is actually one definition and a variety of imposed meanings and interpretations. Examinations of beauty over the centuries also opened up all the subtle nuances of meaning, such as the differences between the beautiful, the sublime, the grotesque, and the sexy.

Beauty is something that invokes in the viewer a feeling of delight. To the Classicists, this beauty was inherent in the object itself. People find proportion to be beautiful, also known as the Golden Mean. Beauty then becomes a simple question of maths.

The Romantics found beauty in chaos. Theirs was a more Dionysian than Apollonian approach. For them, the focus was on the individual's emotional response and not the object itself. Therefore Romantic art is characterised by strong emotion. The feelings the creators sought to inspire were awe, wonder, and fear. This came to be seen as the sublime, as opposed to the beautiful.

During the Romantic Movement we see the emergence of the grotesque. The emotion evoked by the grotesque is intrigued disgust and in the face of such a powerful feeling the response is often to laugh, so there is a humorous element to it as well. The archetypal grotesque character is the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Brian Warner's stage persona Marilyn Manson is another example.

The Victorians invented photography and soon after they invented porn. They also invented advertising. I do not know who coined the phrase, "sex sells" but it may have been some Edwardian. Since the early days of advertising, pictures or paintings of beautiful women were used to sell products from absinthe to toothpaste. If the Classical world gave us beauty and the Romantics gave us the sublime and the grotesque, then it might be fair to say that the Twentieth Century contribution to aesthetics was sexy.

What is sexy? How can a car be described as sexy? And yet it is. The emotional responses invoked by something sexy are arousal and desire. This is ideal for advertisers. They want you to associate the emotions invoked by the image with their product therefore making you desire the product. As a result we as a society are bombarded with sexy images constantly. Sexy has nothing to do with fucking. It's all about titillation and arousal. This aesthetic is not limited to selling goods. Sexy also sells music and even the public images of people. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are sexy, so I will pay to see their films and buy magazine with their pictures on them.

Language is how the human mind defines its perception of reality. If a word does not exist for a concept, the mind cannot conceptualise it beyond a vague sense. Since we both feel and act according to our concept of reality, then faulty language can at best limit our range of feelings and actions, and at worst it can bring about the end of civilization. Like the Tower of Babel crashing down because no one could understand each other.

These subtle nuances of meaning may seem a bit OCD in this age of casual and corrupted language. The question I pose to you, my dear reader, is whether you can tell the difference between the beautiful, the sublime, the grotesque, and the sexy? More importantly, can you distinguish between the emotions of delight, awe, disgust, and arousal? Then there are other emotions not thus far discussed, the feelings of attraction and lust.

I know of many girls who describe Marilyn Manson as beautiful and sexy and are complete with feelings of attraction and lust towards him. The last thing they would say is that he is disgusting. From what I've read and seen, Manson is a smart guy. He knows what he is doing and possibly knows what I am about to write here.

The grotesque invokes intrigued disgust. It's like looking at some thing so ugly that you cannot take your eyes of off it. Like the beautiful, the sublime, and the sexy, it stands out from the crowd and evokes a strong emotional response. Your sense of intrigue draws you closer even though you want to recoil. Some people are uncomfortable with those emotions. Others are drawn to it.

These people take delight in the feelings of intrigued disgust and after lengthy exposures to the grotesque develop an attraction to it and with that attraction come desire and lust. The initial feelings of intrigued disgust are supplanted by those of delight and arousal.

At this point, they can no longer make either the conceptual or emotional distinctions. So they say its sexy, cool, or whatever positive phrase comes to mind, but really all they are saying is "Me like. Good" in some primal fashion because they can no longer conceive of the nuances. This seems to apply across the board in our post-modern age. For a people supposedly obsessed with beauty and sex, we certainly lack any critical understanding of it. Now back to the grotesque.

The grotesque grew out of the Romantic Movement and is an indelible part of its idiom. There are those who would argue that the greatest Romantic novelist is Victor Hugo and that the greatest work in Romantic literature is his book Les Miserable. Hugo also wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the great novel on the grotesque. Romantics cannot disown their ugly little sister.

In the modern Goth scene you have the classic Gothic Romantic focusing on the sublime. He or she is striking, elegant, bold, and conveys a sense of power. Imagine Dracula or Heathcliff for boys and Vampira or Morticia Addams for girls.

There are also the grotesque Goths who disfigure themselves in the Marilyn Manson shock-style. They see this as attractive, but outsiders not conditioned to that aesthetic respond as people have always responded to the grotesque, with disgust and humour.

It is easy to see how, given the subjective nature of aesthetics, that the objective definitions and meanings can be lost or confused. The means of keeping this alignment is in understanding the concepts of attraction and lust.

Attraction is a feeling based on self-identification with a person or thing and derives from deeply held unconscious values. You may say that you really like a particular article of clothing, or painting, or object d'art. The feeling you describe as "like" is attraction. More commonly we use the word attraction to refer our attraction to certain people.

The people or things that we find attractive are not necessarily objectively beautiful. Herein lies the ability to say that someone or something can be recognised as being beautiful, sublime, grotesque, or sexy, but is not attractive to me. The image evokes feelings of delight, awe, intrigued disgust, or arousal, but I do not identify with it. There can be appreciation without identification.

I have met many women in my day. I have met the beautiful, the sublime, the sexy, and even the grotesque. Some have even been most of the above. They have filled me with delight, wonder, arousal, and intrigue. However, I did not necessarily find them attractive. I have met girls that any man, including me, would call a beautiful, sexy ten, but I did not feel lust. I have also met a few average looking girls who within seconds of meeting her I wanted to bend her over the nearest table.

Like attraction, lust is a feeling not necessarily associated with any of the aspects of aesthetics. Lust is more of a primal desire welling from deep in the unconscious mind. A homosexual male can feel the emotions that sexy is associated with concerning certain women, but he does not feel lust towards them.

In his book Paris Spleen, Charles Baudelaire writes of a glassier selling his wares on the street. The narrator calls him up the several flights of stairs to see what is on offer. Unfortunately, everything is dull and boring. No greens or blues. Nothing to inspire. So the narrator sends him packing all the way down the stairs with his hefty burden. Meanwhile, the narrator waits at the window till the glassier appears on the street and throws a flower pot at him causing him to fall and damage his goods. The narrator shouts, "Make Life beautiful."

I have a word for non-Romantics. I call them Mundanes, or Mundies. The world mundane comes from the Latin meaning worldly or of the world. Today, it carries the connotation of being routine, boring, dull, and lifeless. The Romantics believe in making life beautiful. This is not just about the material values in life. It is about feeling something about those things. It is about the passionate existence and actually living life fully, and not in a boring, routine where you simply accept everything society offers from clothes, to people, to lifestyle choices without question. If the things that you own inspire nothing and serve only practical function, then your existence is meaningless and mundane.

As emotional creatures, all human being have the capacity to appreciate beauty in all its forms. Be it beauty in the Classical sense of clean lines and proportion, or the dark ruggedness and grandeur of the Romantic sublime, the twisted fascination of the grotesque, or the sensuality and passion of the sexy. We can hold all of these apparently contradictory concepts in mind objectively and yet feel all the wonderful feelings that they inspire because they really are just superficial emotions to entertain us and make life more interesting.

The deeper emotions reside within the concepts of attraction and lust. These involve more than mere experiential appreciation, but also self-awareness. The full expression of it requires an understanding of our deeper unconscious values and desires. These we discover by examining our emotional responses. If something inspires attraction or lust, then take note of it. Don't over-analyse, just accept, be aware and find more of it. Soon understanding will come and when armed with that knowledge we truly can make life beautiful.