Generosity and the Black Swan (exerpt), Bill Beckley
Introduction
I saw a swan that had broken out of its cage,
webbed feet clumsy on the cobblestones,
white feathers dragging in the uneven ruts,
and obstinately pecking at the drains,
drenching its enormous wings in filth as if in its own lovely lake, crying
'Where is the thunder, when will it rain?'
Elsewhere in Les Fleurs du Mal, Baudelaire foreshadows Freud's criteria for civilization through beauty, order, and cleanliness.
All is order there, and elegance, pleasure, peace, and opulence.
Freud concluded Civilization and Its Discontents with a note of optimism, even as Fascism took hold in Europe and the
future held little hope for Jews, "What the world needs is a little more Eros."
Datta "To give" is one of three ways Eliot offers out of a dry, avaricious, and sexless landscape in the concluding section of The Wasteland.
Beauty is generosity and reveals itself freely for it must be seen in order to exist.
But we vacillate between self and giving,
both as individuals and as a society.
Beauty joins grown-ups, like children, in play.
"La Beauté," said Louise Bourgeois, "est la raison d'être."
A few years ago, I was reading John Ruskin and Walter Pater in my semiotics class.
Both taught aesthetics at Oxford in the 1870s.
They disagreed on many points, particularly on the use of beauty and its relationship to morality, though neither had any problem employing
the word.
I complained that the word was seldom used today.
Then Roberto Portillo, a graduate student from Mexico City, waved a little white book by Dave Hickey called
The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty.
Walking home that evening, book in hand, I saw two lovers in a park near a church on Seventeenth Street: one pressed against the other,
the other pressed against a tree, the tree traversed a purple sky.
In an earlier book, The Sense of Beauty (1896) Santayana wrote that if beauty is linked so strongly to the sexual drive,
we do not need philosophy to defend it.
If one wanted to produce a being with a great susceptibility to beauty, one could not invent
an instrument better designed for that object than sex.
If people didn't have to unite for the birth and rearing of each generation, they might retain their "savage independence."
But sex endows the individual with a silent and powerful instinct, which carries each of us continually towards another.
I recommended Hickey's little book to my friend David Shapiro, with whom I share a similar aesthetic.
Soon after, perusing an antiquarian bookstore on the fringe of Boston, I found an old anthology called
Philosophies of Beauty: From Socrates to Robert Bridges, compiled by E.F. Carritt and published by Oxford University Press in 1931.
It included writings by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hume, Baumgarten, Kant, Wordsworth, Ruskin, Pater, Nietzsche, Shelly, Santayana, Bergson,
Croce, and several others.
With inspiration from Philosophies of Beauty, I felt it might be time for a new anthology on beauty.
But if beauty had indeed been dropped from contemporary discourse, would there be enough to fill a book?
I asked David to help in the search and we were surprized at how much we found.
Soon after, Peter Schjeldahl's piece derived from his "Notes on Beauty," published herein, appeared as the cover story for
The New York Times Magazine.
Disparaged for so long in intellectual circles, if not in the popular culture, seathing beauty had suddenly resurfaced.
In organizing the book, David and I categorized the writings into three sections: theory, ownership, and practice.
The theory section includes philosophies of beauty from some of today's most important art critics, poets, and philosophers.
The oldest essay in this section dated 1966 is by Meyer Schapiro on the concepts of perfection and unity of form and content.
Arthur Danto's piece, on the relationship of beauty and morality, redefines for our time a question so close to eminent aestheticians
of the nineteenth and early twentieth century like John Ruskin and Henri Bergson.
Hubert Damisch contrasts the idea of beauty in Freud and Kant in the context of his book The Judgment of Paris.
The most recent works are by Robert C. Morgan, Marjorie Welish, and Carter Ratcliff, written specifically for this anthology.
Zumbah!