Hello there. And welcome to Jawbone. So today I'm going to do something a little different. I am going to talk about the trouble with beauty. And I will be primarily reading. So you will see my eyes moving about a bit and then breaking off and improvising. Such is my inclination. So let's crack on.
I think that the trouble with beauty is twofold, at least. Here's the first trouble. That beauty would be seen as ornamental, dull, and a bit vacuous. And most of us don't feel beautiful at all. That it is a long resolved set of ideals that create a kind of hierarchy that doesn't have any nuance or depth to it. And at some point when we were kids, we were exposed to these values and we found ourselves significantly lacking.
But it's something that creates a rather generic world around us. And it is beauty not as an inner realization, but a rather vacuous rule of thumb. So this is the kind of thing that, over time, is going to have us folding our wingspan to hide our appearance because our appearance doesn't make the grade. So it is beauty or beauty is tyranny, and that kind of thing is going to create a long dragonish tail that drags behind it.
And for that kind of thing to thrive, it has to diminish anything that is not it. It is always hungry because it is always starving.
Do you remember the story of the Lindworm? That old fairy tale in which we find out that we have an exiled twin who was lobbed into the forest the night that we were born and abandoned and marginalized. They grow up in the treeline as we kind of prance about with all the advantages that modernity gives us. But they're not in the castle, are they? They're out in the forest and they watch us, and they don't watch passively. They brood and they glower and they grow scales and they plan their revenge.
Now, the interesting thing is, I think many of us have both characters rolling around inside us. And so there is part of us playing the game of vying for affirmation and popularity. But there's another part of us that doesn't buy it for a minute, not any of it. And we live in the forcefield of these very different outlooks. That alone is tiring.
So I think as we get older, we do recognize that the beauty of a pageant queen. Do we even have pageant queens anymore? Or a chiseled movie star? That is no kind of definition of beauty for anyone with even half an imagination. But if those ideals enter the psyche while still in its formation, and they will, then we will most likely feel kind of lacking. And what do we do? We get uncomfortable feeling like we're lacking. We either shrink away or we develop what in myth is called a Puritan complex, or a poor Perella complex where we develop some sort of flighty persona where we fly over the encounter of loss.
And one way or another, you know, all of this is going to make beauty really hard to trust. It is going to start to feel like an untruth. So this would be a kind of beauty that it just makes sense to wake up from, to be absolutely un-spelled by. And I'm not going to be referring to this kind of beauty for most of what we're doing today.
I think in the end, this kind of thing, if you get hooked into it, is inhibiting. It is depressive, it is constricting, it is grubby, and it is not to be encouraged. I say that as a parent, but there is another kind of beauty tucked away.
So another story. Tristan and Isolde. Do you remember that one? Now Isolde is described as having a beauty that makes other people more beautiful when they behold her. Now isn't that marvelous? Her beauty is actually infectious. And in Irish stories of Finn MacCool, Finn MacCool has a buddy and he's called Dermot, and Dermot is known as having a love spot on his face that when you glimpse it, you cannot help but love him.
Now it's not really to do with him being cute. It's to do with the love spot. And I think in our lives, when we glimpse somebody’s love spot, it's that moment when we see them doing what they really love doing. And it is transformational. It is a kind of cracking open. And what makes them beautiful, as diverse as a weather pattern or the movement of a bird across a Norfolk field. This is beauty as eruption from the interior, not an outer set of visual conditions. I'll come back to this. This is beauty in all its unexpected, diverse and quixotic manifestations.
And I mean, who knows? Maybe it's Isolde’s harp playing that makes her so beguiling. Maybe it is the gurgling brook of her laughter. Maybe it's Dermot's skill with a story that makes him so damn attractive. We leave their company blessed. We leave their company changed in a way.
So, you know, the problem with that, of course, is we're going to go away and think that we're in love with them, rather than what is actually being transmitted through them at that moment. I wonder if it would be more accurate to say of somebody like that beauty has them, then they are beautiful. That would be an Irish way of thinking about it.
So now we come to the second kind of trouble, the more productive trouble. This is trouble with consequence because when you've met an Isolde or a Dermot, they open a door to both delight and to longing. And we witness for a moment—I really think this—what stands behind them, what they somehow stand for. And that's going to encourage us to figure out, well, what do we care about? How do we earn our name? What will be our art and our skill in this life?
This is an old bardic question. What will be our art and our skill in this life? So to be infected in such a wonderful way may bring the poet's realization to our door that we have to change our life.
. But at the same time I do some gardening especially when the weather is fine and I am reorganising my supplies, stocking up a bit more and clearing out old stuff. Time away from my computer keeps me sane, especially because it is so painful to follow the news and witness the destruction and suffering. I have never been more grateful for the romance novels as I very much need to recharge every day, so I can continue to bear witness. Somehow it feels very important to be a witness to all of this.
