What takes place in the mind of the poet who finds a poem, a poet who knows just where to place her frame, and is this framing different from submitting a urinal to an important exhibit and, by virtue of its submission, calling it art? I imagine that the words, when first encountered, must seem to shimmer a little in the midst of their duller surroundings or maybe it is more gradual than that. Maybe the poet finds himself singing the words in his mind the way a child will chant something he has heard and likes the sound of. (I once knew a four-year-old who spent several afternoons skipping around the playground to the beat of "Sex-sex-sexy/Sex-sex-sexy," apparently with no idea of what the words meant but enamored with their sibilance).
This brings to mind Tolkien's famous declaration in his lecture "English and Welsh" that "most English-speaking people…will admit that [the phrase] cellar door is beautiful especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling.)" This remark is usually paraphrased as the unverifiable claim that the syllables that make up "cellar door" form the most beautiful succession of sounds in the English language and I have yet to see a reference to it that includes the latter half of the statement—"especially if dissociated from its sense (and its spelling)." (When dissociated from its "sense," there is, I have to admit, something pleasing even about the curved porcelain lines of a urinal). Tolkien goes on to say that, though the sound of cellar door is "more beautiful than sky and certainly more beautiful than beautiful," there is a "higher dimension" of words in which "the contemplation of the association of form and sense" is naturally encouraged. (I have taken liberty with Tolkien's phrasing because his primary purpose was, not to describe his experience of the English language, but to express how this higher dimension was particularly accessible to him in Welsh).
By his own account, Tolkien's experience of writing the works that make up The Lord of the Rings and its accompanying mythology was one of writing down what was already there. If we accept this receptivity as typical of the author or poet then perhaps there is no real difference between finding poetry and "composing" it. The beauty of art is of a different order than the beauty of nature but art, like the human consciousness that delivers it to the world, is itself of nature. As Caillois put it, "…art constitutes a particular instance of nature: that which occurs when the aesthetic act undergoes the additional process of design and execution." The poet, the painter or the photographer possesses the burden and the gift of guiding our sometimes mulish minds to the shift in consciousness that allows us to see the beauty that was always available but might have otherwise remained unregarded. The remarkable thing is that, sometimes, this beauty is not a primary expression of the necessary and harmonious relationships of the qualities of nature but comes to us as the result of the irrepressibility of such necessity and harmony, even in the face of human efforts to distort natural relationships in the service of human ends.
I suggested in another post that there is a particularly human brand of ugliness that I call "the meretricious" that occurs when certain features of what is portrayed are exaggerated in an effort to stimulate the baser instincts of the user. The depictions we see in advertising are a case in point. Another related kind of manufactured ugliness comes into the world when an attempt is made to imitate the living tendencies of nature by reducing those tendencies to a formula then producing objects based on the formula, leaving the life behind. Objects produced in this way are ugly because they are empty, brought to us via the reduction of quality to quantity followed by a naïve attempt to bring the quality back to life. Ratio is substituted for relationship. For such ugliness to exist, there is no need to distort the ratio of the qualities, though doing so adds a dimension of repulsiveness to the coldness of the object. (The arrogant, heartless architecture of Le Corbusier strikes me as an example of a product that is lifeless but not otherwise particularly vulgar). There is nothing, however, that cannot be rescued from ugliness. Nature, as it expresses itself in the materials of manufacture, in the mind of the manufacturer, in the way the elements play with even our most self-important monuments, and in the mind of the observer, will have its way.
Beauty is the experience of a vital order and, because order is not what we see but how we see, a certain amount of order is necessary for human consciousness to perceive even the meretricious. Without it, there would be no substance to perceive but, in the way the world reveals itself to us, there are degrees of necessity among the relationships of the qualities. We can think of ugly artifacts as speaking the language of nature but speaking it so clumsily that they are almost grunting where others might sing. (In making use of this metaphor, we should as always be careful not to forget that nature is language and language is nature). Sometimes, by some miracle, however, we manage to grunt something that, with only a little application of aesthetic consciousness, can be understood as beautiful.
Have you ever seen a power plant lit up at night and thought that it looked, not like a dark, Satanic mill, but like a castle with signal fires lit along its parapets—or, better yet, have you ever driven above a Wal-Mart store on an elevated freeway at night? For some reason that is unknown to me, the roof of every Wal-Mart that I have seen from this perspective has been a neatly rowed farm of plastic skylights. When the interior lights of the store shine into the darkness through the plastic, I get the sense that I am looking down through clear, dark waters at large, luminescent mushrooms on the deepest ocean floor. Beauty—voilà! Beauty, where all the odds and all our efforts stood against it.
The work of a friend recently helped me to see that, in articulating an aesthetic, we are articulating a cosmology. If as Tolkien contends, "we make…in the law in which we're made," then understanding what makes something ugly, beautiful or merely pretty, can take us all the way to understanding what makes a thing a thing. In Tolkien's creation myth, a legion of gods, the Valar, sing the world into being (though not into full-fledged life) at the command of the One God, Ilúvatar. When one of the number of Valar rebels and attempts to introduce his own refrain into the symphony, Ilúvatar shows him that this has, in no way, subverted the theme. "You will see..." he tells his wayward child "that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite"
No less than the consciousness of the gods, our consciousness, and the world in which it participates, is alive and, as a living thing, it has a certain temperament, a disposition to behave in a certain way that is as much a part of it as my eye color is a part of my body. As living consciousness in a living world, we can choose to rebel but, in the spirit of Kierkegaard, we must concede that we cannot choose not to be. As beings made of and naturally making order, we can never wholly rob ourselves of at least some measure of access to truth and beauty. That is one freedom that even the Divine has no power to bestow.
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