Posts tagged Grotesque and Honesty

A fantasy for reality:

In discussing beauty in fairy tales and myths, Trebbe Johnson outlines how the beautiful is inevitably revealed beneath the ugly.  It’s not only for princesses and frogs:

show compassion;
acknowledge the sovereignty of the other;
confront the unbeautiful;
love actively;
turn suffering itself to beauty.

Trebbe Johnson, Beauty Redeemed, Parabola Magazine, Winter 2010-2011

Andy Goldsworthy, a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist once said: I find some of my new works disturbing, just as I find nature as a whole disturbing. The landscape is often perceived as pastoral, pretty, beautiful – something to be enjoyed as a backdrop to your weekend before going back to the nitty-gritty of urban life. But anybody who works the land knows it’s not like that. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn’t walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying. Quoted from Luke Storms of Parabola magazine.  The Winter 2010/2011 issue of Parabola is on newsstands now.  It’s a beautiful magazine. [Painting: Georgia O’Keefe, New York with Moon, 1925]

Andy Goldsworthy, a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist once said:

I find some of my new works disturbing, just as I find nature as a whole disturbing. The landscape is often perceived as pastoral, pretty, beautiful – something to be enjoyed as a backdrop to your weekend before going back to the nitty-gritty of urban life. But anybody who works the land knows it’s not like that. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn’t walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying.

Quoted from Luke Storms of Parabola magazine.  The Winter 2010/2011 issue of Parabola is on newsstands now.  It’s a beautiful magazine.

[Painting: Georgia O’Keefe, New York with Moon, 1925]

parabola-magazine

Believe me, no need for remorse. Destroying is better than creating when we’re not creating those few, truly necessary things. But then is there anything so clear and right that it deserves to live in this world? In the end what we need is some hygiene, some cleanliness, disinfection. We’re smothered by images, words and sounds that have no right to exist, coming from, and bound for, nothingness. Of any artist truly worth the name we should ask nothing except this act of faith: to learn silence. Do you remember Mallarme’s homage to the white page? And Rimbaud… a poet, my friend, not a movie director. What was his finest poetry? His refusal to continue writing and his departure for Africa. If we can’t have everything, true perfection is nothingness. Forgive men for quoting all the time.
Federico Fellini
The eye in a way that is invisible to the naked eye.  Not glassy, almost fungal. ~ü [Image: The Ciliary Body & Part of the Iris on the Human Eye]

The eye in a way that is invisible to the naked eye.  Not glassy, almost fungal.

~ü

[Image: The Ciliary Body & Part of the Iris on the Human Eye]

ospernil

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.
Baudelaire
In a previous post I wrote about King Louis XVI, the pious king who unwittingly ushered in the first Republic of France.  He purportedly offered that his blood may be able to cement the happiness of the French as he stood at the gallows.  After his head rolled, the French citizens dipped handkerchiefs in the pool of blood as a memento of the last king.Those gruesome handkerchiefs are now long gone but his blood may still be contained within this gourd.  Scientists are one genetic test away from confirming the gourd’s authenticity.  They already know that the blood is from a unique genetic pool.  The king had an uncommon perspective on his death.  He was raised and repeatedly told of his significance.  As a king, he was surrounded by constituents the believed him to be the most important man in the world.  Yet through his faith he was able to ascertain that his place in the universe was much different - almost insignificant.  Understanding that in some small way his execution was a sacrifice for a greater good took a man of remarkable insight that far exceeded those who served him.  As written previously, his reputation was not that of a great ruler but a coward.  I content that the blood within this gourd symbolizes a gateway away from tyranny and a step towards democracy.  In that way he certainly did cement the happiness of a great many Frenchmen and other free people around the world. ~ü

In a previous post I wrote about King Louis XVI, the pious king who unwittingly ushered in the first Republic of France.  He purportedly offered that his blood may be able to cement the happiness of the French as he stood at the gallows.  After his head rolled, the French citizens dipped handkerchiefs in the pool of blood as a memento of the last king.

Those gruesome handkerchiefs are now long gone but his blood may still be contained within this gourd.  Scientists are one genetic test away from confirming the gourd’s authenticity.  They already know that the blood is from a unique genetic pool. 

The king had an uncommon perspective on his death.  He was raised and repeatedly told of his significance.  As a king, he was surrounded by constituents the believed him to be the most important man in the world.  Yet through his faith he was able to ascertain that his place in the universe was much different - almost insignificant.  Understanding that in some small way his execution was a sacrifice for a greater good took a man of remarkable insight that far exceeded those who served him. 

As written previously, his reputation was not that of a great ruler but a coward.  I content that the blood within this gourd symbolizes a gateway away from tyranny and a step towards democracy.  In that way he certainly did cement the happiness of a great many Frenchmen and other free people around the world.

~ü

Beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else.  Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view.  Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace. Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi (1994)

Beauty is a dynamic event that occurs between you and something else.  Beauty can spontaneously occur at any moment given the proper circumstances, context, or point of view.  Beauty is thus an altered state of consciousness, an extraordinary moment of poetry and grace.

Leonard Koren, Wabi-Sabi (1994)

apoplecticskeptic

Know yourself and you will know the universe.
Inscription at the entrance of the Temple of Delphi

lilysang

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging… He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter… For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand - like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery - in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding. Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle,” in Reflections, 26via Svetlana Boym [Image: Remedios Varo, “The Encounter” (1962)]

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging… He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter… For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand - like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery - in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.

Walter Benjamin, “Berlin Chronicle,” in Reflections, 26
via Svetlana Boym

[Image: Remedios Varo, “The Encounter” (1962)]

sealmaiden