The Beautiful Anthology (13 page)

I always have a hard-on for you, the Intelligent Man adds (see, I told you he was Intelligent), and the Intelligent Woman, still playing dumb but enjoying it suddenly, says, Oooh. And they are both happy, though they do not have sex at that very moment because they are watching a documentary about Mao on A&E.

Remember those assumptions about Academics and sex? OK, so some of them are true.

In Rhodes, four Travelers lie on straw mats on rocky sand. Three are dark-skinned and blend in fairly well; the fourth, a man, is very light. One of the women sits up abruptly and looks around, then flicks off her bikini top and chucks it in the sand. She says to the darker-skinned man, Pass me some sunscreen, and he looks, registers no shock at seeing her tiny, baby-pink breasts staring back at him, and does as she commands. The pale man continues to lie on his back, sweaty T-shirt on to keep his Presbyterian skin from burning, eyes closed against the sun’s glare.

Two mats away, on the other side of the darker man, the other woman sits up. Indeed, she might easily pass for Greek. She, too, pulls off her bikini top (hers must go over her head; it’s a tank and somewhat awkward) and folds it neatly to lay it over her purse. She reclines again before requesting he lotion be passed to her, too. The Intelligent Woman glances at the Beautiful Woman’s breasts, which she has actually seen many times before. Yep, they are Something.

Within half an hour, the Macho Man wants to rent mopeds and tour the island, and the Intelligent Man, responding to his cue to follow as the Macho Man does when they are playing chess, says, Cool.

The women put their tops back on and off they go to sit on the backs of mopeds, arms around the solid trunks of their Husbands, hair flying in the wind. Envisioning the image each Couple will create riding, the Beautiful Woman, whose Husband is an avid Motorcyclist, is glad for the first time on the cruise to have the Husband she has.

Or maybe the Intelligent Woman only believes this.

JUDY PRINCE

SUMMATE

my heart topples

in the warm caliper

of your hand,

my body a raised map —

new lines like moving silk

dance for you

long legs enfold the sea

UCHE OGBUJI

21
ST
CENTURY BEAUTY IN POETRY

The photograph is married to the eye,

Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth;

The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith

That shrouded men might marrow as they fly.[
1
]

Visiting Musée du Louvre a few years ago, I made the well-trodden way down the great hall to the nook of
La Joconde
, the
Mona Lisa
. Indication of just how well trodden came instantly. The corner was stuffed with tourists, almost all of them holding up digital cameras and pressing their way as far forward as they could. Luckily, I am tall and managed to see the painting at a distance of ten feet or so. I didn’t try to get any closer, reasoning that I would never be able to properly appreciate the painting, anyway, in all that welter. Despite its fame, the
Mona Lisa
has never been a painting of any devotion for me. I was far more excited to see the Piero Della Francescas and Titians in that same hall, to which close access was no problem at all.

I went seeking
La Joconde
because, regardless of my lukewarm impression, derived from reproductions, I understood it to be a benchmark of well-rounded representation of beauty in art since the Renaissance. I love paintings, especially from that era, but I am no expert in those arts. I am interested in seeing the benchmarks I have received, in order to claim, at least, that these inform my aesthetic judgments and desires. What I got in Paris, as well as the hundred or so other people in the room, was a glimpse at the work much less informative than any reproduction. Some got yet more reproductions, in the form of their digital photographs. Perhaps the folks in the front got a good look, but surely this was not the bracing environment in which humans seem to best appreciate beauty. The benchmark, juxtaposed, is held abstract from us, never really fulfilling the framing role it has enjoyed throughout most of its history. This is entirely right for our age.

In our age, a prodigious number of people live in what would have been considered opulence throughout history. There is still much poverty in the world, but a staggering number of people have access to the canons in literature, music, and visual art, traveling to exotic locations, meeting a huge variety of other people throughout their lives. For many of us, however, our concepts of fineness are still derived from narrower perspective, particularly in Europe, where beauty was established in terms of Plato’s forms, and the perfection of each genre established by analysis and comparison between variations in regression from forms. There is an ideal of painting, and
La Joconde
is considered closer to that ideal than most other paintings.

The entirety of Western civilization is apportioned into schools where experts conduct the process of determining closeness to the ideal. The many privileged of the world tend toward such schooling, and so when
La Joconde
hangs in the gallery, it attracts a swarm of well-drilled people eager to approach the ideal, even though the reality of the situation means that their closest approach barely improves on the abstraction of their lessons. The schools are self-limiting in their way, and it seems to me that there is a fundamental tension between beauty as defined in schools and the increasing number and diversity of people with the leisure and resources to properly contemplate these received ideals.

Self-contained, oh Form, in the sumptuous

Wall of violet foam you pose against

The shaded appetite of cold mist

And the shining touch that erects you.

Thusly, Lady of dynamic repose,

You step evenly towards your perfected sum

Ah, like a sun, without spending in so walking

So much as the echo of your tardy tread.[
2
]

Which echo brings me to poetry. Most literate people are aware of the power of poetry to express beauty, but most people are also stymied by the schools that have held sway in poetry for so long. Most people only ever approach poetry through the same layers of abstraction through which I see
La Joconde
. It starts in childhood, where teachers no sooner put across an enjoyable poem than they trundle out the diagrams and strategies and rubrics and other destructive devices that interfere with the child’s tendency to connect the original wit to their own instinctual reactions. This includes the reaction to what we consider beauty. To be fair, we’ve been served well by what schools have advanced for centuries in terms of how poetry connects us immediately to beauty. But in the numbers and diversity of our age, the inevitable tensions have done much to abstract away what power poetry has to allow us to express or capture the experience of beauty. Living in the middle of the phenomenon, it’s not easy to find perspective to relieve such tensions and restore poetry to its native place in our pantheon, but it never hurts to look, and the arrow of time has given us a singular direction. What can the history of beauty in poetry tell us about its future?

I tend to think, as Kierkegaard and others did, that in
The Republic
Plato had his tongue partly in cheek while writing into the mouth of Socrates such stern limitations on poets. Not everyone read it that way; schools from ancient times seized upon Plato’s rather zealous (taken literally) ideas in
The Republic
:

Our artists should be those with the gift of discerning the true nature of the beautiful, the graceful. Then our youth will live in a land of health, amid fair sights and sounds, and receive the good inherent in all things; and beauty, which flows from all good things, shall flow into the eye and ear, like a salutary breeze from a pure land, and compel the soul from its earliest age into sympathy with the beauty of reason.

The sanctimony of schools is written pretty heavily into this passage. There is the prejudice of a thin veil between health and physical beauty and moral luster (resurrected in its most startlingly literal sense in the bigotry of the popular film
300
).[
3
] There is the concept of truest nature, the ideal of beauty (meeting healthy opposition in the West as long ago as Boccaccio and Rabelais with their grotesque-aesthetic response to idealized poetry, and onward to the “coxcomb impudence” of how Whistler kicked open the door for abstract art in the West). There is the notion of the blessed land (debunked by experience of desperate conflicts between heritage and calling among immigrants who have shaped the past couple of centuries). And ultimately, there is the notion of the beauty of reason, a divine, mathematically continuous order over all things, radiating in all directions, attenuating so that any person and thing that does not press toward the ideal is left cold and dark.

That wondrous pattern, wheresoe’er it be,

Whether in earth laid up in secret store,

Or else in heaven, that no man may it see

With sinful eyes, for fear it to deflore,

Is perfect Beauty, which all men adore;

Whose face and feature doth so much excel

All mortal sense, that none the same may tell.

Thereof as every earthly thing partakes

Or more or less, by influence divine,

So it more fair accordingly it makes,

And the gross matter of this earthly mine,

Which clotheth it, thereafter doth refine,

Doing away the dross which dims the light

Of that fair beam which therein is empight.[
4
]

No one silly enough to drink too literally of Platonism ever produced any poetry worth preserving (despite my quoting of Spenser, he knew better in most of his work), but its effects meant that even those with the lyrical craft and style to write great poetry, the dead white males who have become the bogeymen of their own schools in the past fifty years, lost their relevancy through one-dimensional aesthetics. If we no longer recognize their own pious absolutes of beauty, we lose any compulsion to seek out the power of their words. This leaves a vacuum into which it’s easy for charlatans to enter, and the twentieth century had quite the run of poetic charlatans. This species can always find a rich vein in some fad or another, but ultimately they lose the public.

Beauty is by no means the only thing that compels people to write poetry, or which people seek in reading poetry, but in many ways it seems the quality that has been most clearly lost from popular interaction with poetry as the tensions of modernism have played out. I believe that an important step in restoring poetry to relevance is to tap into the great crafts of classical poetry worldwide, because these are what lead people to seek out language that they themselves might not be able to express, that helps them savor and preserve their sensual experiences. The trick will be to look backward for craft while remaining true to the complexity of modern aesthetics.

If the marbled highway from
The Republic
eventually gave way to fallow wilderness in the twentieth century, and we accept that the idea of a straight-and-narrow causeway is obsolete, how do we find what we love best, as we make our new way, dispersed in all directions? For my part, the poetry with which I’m most familiar outside the radiating paths from New York, London, and Paris is African poetry, but I hope that in contemplating these thoughts, the reader can substitute the emerging traditions that most suit his or her own identity.

For better or for worse, identity has always been bound viscerally to appearance, and idealized beauty has always been feted by Western poets, notably in
la dompna soiseubuda
of the troubadours, the “borrowed lady” assembled from parts of individual women seen in their ideal form, looking back to Rufinus.