The Truth About Beauty

Beauty, according to an old Spanish saying is worse than wine. It intoxicates both the holder and the beholder. In our culture, it is often feminine beauty that is held up for admiration and becomes an actual value to be striven for; matrimonial ads are full of demands for young, fair, beautiful girls, beautiful but ‘homely’ which would mean with all the domestic virtues. There is something inflammable about beauty in isolation!

Beauty contests have become a way of life where young girls vie with each other for fame and wealth and the titles, Miss India, and later, Miss World, and Miss Universe, as if a price can be placed on this ambiguous quality which no one can even begin to define. Yet in 500 A.D. a poet in ancient India was wise enough to remark, “The glowing blush that mantles the cheek, the dazzling fire that sparkles from the eyes, the soft, shining sheen of the wavy hair Are all mere expressions of good health.” Look at the definitions of beauty in Kalidasa’s time: ‘moon-faced, elephant-hipped, serpent-necked, antelope-footed, swan-waisted, lotus-eyed.’ A very far cry from the young Amazons we see in today’s fashion magazines, who have dieted and exercised to achieve almost boyishly muscular figures!

It is not just women who compete for the prizes; young men too celebrate the human form on stage, in front of audiences, clad and unclad, curving their bodies this way and that for the viewers to get the benefit of male beauty in all its splendour. Everyone cashes in on these events--- cosmetics manufacturers, dieticians, designers of clothes, fitness professionals, advertisers, sponsors, event managers, trainers, dentists, therapists, beauty doctors, psychologists who instil the right competitive spirit in the competitors, magazines who feature the models in endless sequences.

Everyone benefits, and perhaps the one thing that is lost which no one even begins to consider, is the loss of innocence.

When such a huge premium is placed on human beauty, male and female, one can expect the distortion of everything one is brought up to regard as valuable; privacy, personal relationships and friendships, time to grow without everything being weighed on the scale of materialism, time to dream, to learn about oneself without being plunged in the cult of self, the cultivation of the mind, the spirit, the senses, not sensations. At eighteen, one nurses fledgling hopes and plans for the future, one suffers disappointments appropriate to the age, one is still at the stage of book learning.

Instead, if one structures one’s entire life on the premise that one is beautiful and must therefore get the maximum advantage from it, then the course of one’s life takes a precipitous turn. One becomes a pawn in the hands of forces too powerful to control. Everything that has held one together, till then, has to be sacrificed, and one enters a world through doors that clang shut behind you, and become an object, a thing, to be manipulated and reduced or magnified by other people whose motivations one cannot even guess at.

There is no path back to where you were before, there is no return to the time of freedom or innocence.

And yet, the need for beauty is deeply ingrained in the human spirit. We surround ourselves with objects we may consider beautiful, though they may appear tawdry or trivial to someone else’s eye. We gasp at the colours of the sky at sunset, we flock to the mountains or lakesides, painters paint pictures that other people buy because they see beauty in them. The night sky is full of beauty and mystery to the human eye, imagine what primitive (wo)man must have felt when the world was still young and fresh and untouched by the march of civilisation. What is the meaning of the cave paintings one finds all over the world? Were they not attempts to portray the inarticulate, inchoate yearnings of the human spirit? When archaeologists excavate layers of earth that have buried early civilizations, are we not struck by the harmony of form and design in the simple tools, weapons, kitchen utensils, women’s jewellery, a child’s toy? Indications of a craftsman’s keen eye, the artist’s love of line and colour.

Can anyone define beauty? Do the blind feel beauty or the deaf? Is it something that comes to us only through our senses or is it something within the mind? Do animals ‘feel’ beauty? Is it not something deeply subjective, deeply personal? It is such an abstract thing…. A mother’s face, a lover’s smile, Mount Everest or the snows of Kilimanjaro, listening to the music of Mozart or Ravi Shankar, unpolluted rivers, the beauty of a tree (I think that I shall never see/ a poem lovely as a tree.), the grace of a gazelle, a cheetah chasing its prey, the beauty of language in expressing the subtlest of thoughts, an idea, an ideal, the flowers, the incense, the rapt faces around a religious ritual, a baby’s first smile or the toothless smile of an old person.

No one is ever going to say, “I find the Internet beautiful,” or market fluctuations or a steel girder. But there are people who see beauty in a mathematical theorem, the structure of DNA, or the endless convolutions of the human brain, or a philosophical or economic theory. Any theory really…. Men’s minds can catch fire from concepts and ideas and make it their own thereon. The French revolution was born from just such a spark, theories of equality , brotherhood spread like wildfire in a wasteland of aristocratic privilege, and the suppression of human rights.

There is beauty in Revolution, clearly seen by how many people are prepared to die for these ideas. America, Russia, China, the bloody revolts against class and caste and poverty have all been born from the purity of the ideal. And the intolerance that comes with the clash of ideas is how dictators are born. “I am the standard-bearer of the idea, and its truest proponent; I have the truest vision and all who oppose me must die…” Surely even monsters like Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot must have once been carried away by the beauty and simplicity of the revolutionary ideal.

All religions have also begun with the excitement of a great idea that burst like a bright vision in the mind and imagination of one man. The teachings of Christ, the Buddha, Mohommed are so beautiful because they are so true and simple and obvious, and you wonder why no one had thought of it before. And they attract masses of people and take hold of the minds and hearts and spirits of people who become dominated by these ideas of love, and service before self, and love thy neighbour as you love yourself and live simple, chaste, honest lives, and give until it hurts and do not lie, do not cheat, do not commit an injustice and you will inherit the kingdom of god, or the gardens of Allah, or the bliss of Nirvana. And these ideas in their turn are the core of all the great and beautiful Art in the world. Representations of the Madonna with the Christ child, Christ dying on the cross, the Pieta, the cherubim in the Sistine chapel, the art of Leonardo and Michaelangelo, and the great cathedrals and churches, Ajanta and Ellora and Sanchi and the great and beautiful mosques and tombs of the Islamic world, their splendid calligraphy, all born from the beauty of the idea. And the truth.

And as the poet said, “Beauty is Truth and Truth beauty, That is all we need to know.” But is it really all we need to know? What about death? Like Keats, are we all ‘half in love with easeful death?’ Like the great poet Donne who kept his coffin always in the bedchamber so that he would never forget the fact of his mortality, are we not all beset by the idea of the briefness, the transitory nature of our lives and our ignorance of what comes after? Is our never-ending quest for the Beautiful, great Art, great music, travel to lonely lakesides and mountains, not just a way of warding off the ultimate knowledge? But we joust with death all the same; fast cars, motorbikes, aeroplanes that have conquered the speed of sound, the liquor we drink, the marijuana, the cocaine, the heroin we play with as if we were immortal, the promiscuous use of our bodies as if we were challenging death and the afterlife….are they all nothing but a vain attempt to find the ultimate vision of beauty that we could pin down for all time. Time and then no-Time.

Great truths are found in poetry too, and perhaps Milton’s famous line, “The mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,” carries the profoundest truth of all. The infinite enigma of beauty can turn out to be the falsest mirage, the mystery of love can turn into a cruel trap, religious and philosophical truths so beautiful when they are first encountered can become unbreakable chains around one’s neck and soul.

Is human equality truly possible? Does not all political truth starting from Plato’s ‘aristos’ ( Greek for ‘the best’), evolve into a system of control by one group of people over another? Can everyone as in Mao’s and Pol Pot’s experiments, go back to tilling the soil, ploughing the earth, working with one’s hands, with no class and wealth as barriers between people? Can the great advances of science and technology, of human knowledge, of civilisation be held at bay? Will there not be a natural surge upwards of the more intelligent, the more naturally creative? And then will not the need to control, the need to keep the rest on the straight and narrow path become a stranglehold on the majority?

Is, as Aldous Huxley once said, celibacy which the great saints in India and the Mahatma celebrated, merely another perversion? But then so would be the opposing pole of sexual excess. And so we come back to the Buddha’s beautiful Middle Path, the life of moderation, a life closely allied to nature, fulfilling relationships, righteous thought and action. And acceptance.

But acceptance comes slowly for most, if ever. The still centre is a dream that most glimpse from the far side, and human nature remains embattled to the end. Our ideas and dreams about beauty are in a constant state of metamorphosis; and indeed our acceptance of change and decay may be the first sign of adulthood. Yeats’ words “Who dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?” are like a summing up of all those bright images that hold us in their spell and are so transitory in their reality.