radfrac_archive | On On Beauty and my day (Reply)

On Beauty and Being Just is a little book, short enough to have been delivered as a Tanner Lecture on Human Values. I'd imagined an enormous text, comprehensive, large enough to contain all of Beauty itself somehow. No. It is wee. Beauty, as Elaine Scarry says, is in the particular.

I gather there was a debate in the humanities about the Value of Beauty which I completely missed. I think I'm relieved.

What I like most in a book is when an author identifies an experience I have had, but not fully examined. The first section of the book, "On Beauty and Being Wrong", begins by delineating two kinds of errors about beauty -- realizing that something you thought was beautiful is not, and realizing that something you had believed was ugly is actually beautiful.

[T]he... object has remained within reach but with the subtraction of all attributes that would ignite the desire to lay hold of it.

Something you did not hold to be beautiful suddenly turns up in your arms arrayed in full beauty.... this second genre of error entails neither the arrival of a new beautiful object, nor an object present but previously unnoticed, but an object present and confidently repudiated as an object of beauty.

That is excellent, especially for those of us who feel like the sort of beauty that is often confidently repudiated. (Sorry, sorry, I read Hermia's lines last night and am still feeling a little residual self-pity.)

I carried the book about with me all day. It's small enough to disappear in my satchel and be pleasantly rediscovered.

This has been just the right sort of day. I got up and made three chocolate croissants by means of cutting open a frozen croissant and inserting chocolate. Then I sat down and wrote a thousand words on the purely-for-amusement project

inlandsea and I made up one day. I was only slightly hampered by the mass of bandages wrapped round my forefinger because of the gash I made in it while slicing the croissants.

Then the Moss St. Market, to eat miniature doughnuts and hang about Zoe's tea stall. I was exhorted to finally go out to the Glass-Smith and find out about their glass-bead-making kits, and I thought that would make a suitable afternoon's adventure, so I did.

The sale is next weekend, the kits were sold out, and the owners were not present, but I made some cost estimates about glass rods and admired, without having the slightest idea what to do with, the sheets of glass for sale. The room is dim. The glass stands in deep shelves, edge-on. You turn it, pane by pane: cloudy purple and white swirls, confetti patterns of orange and aqua, sheets of pure cobalt and garnet. I like that the broken pieces of glass are still useful. Nice to think of still being worth something, even fractured. It was particularly good to visit because I had been once, a long time ago, and forgotten where it was, while remembering the magic of sheet after sheet of colour, leaved together like a book of light.

The Glass-Smith is right next to the Galloping Goose, so I adventured up the trail as well, as far as the trestle bridge. What a view that is, the trees folding back and the water suddenly crystallizing before you, the sun making it bright as a river of sugar.

I walked up the boardwalk to the east, past the rowing centre with its boneyard of long white sculls hanging in rows. Back up into the world, stopping off to read some of On Beauty and Being Just over a Tim Horton's sandwich. Hm.

I surfaced in the Hillside area, and discovered that the bookstore on the corner, by the roastery, is becoming the Camas Anarchist Book Collective's site. When I heard there was going to be a new anarchist bookshop, I thought, funny how the same ideas come up in cycles with each new generation of activists, but then I ran into someone I knew from the Old Days, painting the sign, and realized that it was still the old generation. Which is sort of comforting. Makes one feel less obsolete. Anyway, it's a great space. They had a poster for the Anarchist Bookfair, so I adventured on to that.

There was a bookmaker from the Bay Area who had her own letterpress (sigh), and we chatted a bit. Aresenal was there, and Spartacus had a table.

Things seem not to have changed much since I was last among the anarchs. Well, the aesthetics haven't, anyway, except for the addition of those strappy bondage pants. The bathrooms had been thoughtfully degendered.

If you know me, you know that I feel about snarling teenaged anarchist punks the way most people feel about new babies. They're so fresh. Everything is so new to them. Their discoveries are so all-important, so consuming. It exhausts me just to look at them, but Dog I love them.

I still believe, you know, though I act not, or rarely, which makes me the worst sort of something. I still think anarchism is the best political theory I have ever encountered. It has an absoluteness, a purity, that appealed to my youthful self, and it still feels true even to my corrupt and ancient soul. It seems to derive from the logic of experience. More than anything, though, I admit -- I think it is beautiful.

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*Technically this is a Love Icon, but I love beauty, and besides, it's new.