Sunday, May 30, 2010

All This Useless Beauty

I decided that this week I needed to lighten up.  Here's Yrsa, doing hilarious posts about the exhilarating awfulness of Eurovision, and I'm droning on about the Bangkok riots, wringing my hands over the thousands of oppressed Luigis whose dreary lives paid for the Sistine Chapel, and ranting about the haplessness of American media. I thought it was time for some pretty pictures, something that would give everyone a nice, easy lift.

But assembling all the natural beauty inescapably made me think of God.  Whatever God is.

My parents were generic Protestants, who went to whatever church was closest so they could pray without using so much gas.  When I was twelve, I cut a deal with my father: I was allowed to skip Sunday school if I would mow the lawn.  I leaped at it.

By the age of thirteen or so, I'd considered -- and renounced with all the vehement half-comprehension a thirteen-year-old can muster -- every argument I'd heard for the existence of God.  Every one, that is, except for a minor-league subset of the Argument From Design, which is implied in the Book of Romans, and which says, in effect, that the complexity of the world is an undeniable argument for the existence of God.

Complexity doesn't particularly convince me -- in a universe where an infinite number of permutations can take place, I can't think of any good reason why things shouldn't be complex rather than simple.  What I can't figure out, if there's no creative power of any kind at work, is why nature almost invariably defaults to beauty.  There's a wonderful Elvis Costello song with the refrain, "What shall we do, what shall we do/ With all this useless beauty?"

Because beauty, as far as I can see, is scientifically useless.  There's no apparent survival benefit in being beautiful.  I can understand that it might be good to blend in, color-wise, or to be bright and conspicuous to advertise that you taste awful or are poisonous.  But what use are the markings on that moth up there?  And what about the color sense?  I don't know about you, but I continually ask my wife, "Does this go with this?"  Hard to imagine that question from the -- um -- process that decorated that moth.



Note the dead flower.  Why is it still beautiful?  Of what possible value could it be, evolutionarily speaking, that it remains ravishing, like an old ball gown that hasn't been brought into the light for decades?  After all, its function (as a sex organ) is long gone.

I do not believe in any God that I've ever heard described, but Something has really, really good taste, although I think it's rubbish to personify it.  In fact, if there were a God actually picking fabrics and peering at swatches, I'd accuse Him/Her of going over the top occasionally.  I mean, irises, to pick just one example, are a bit much.

But the thing I really think needs to be reconsidered from a taste standpoint is the water cycle.  We all know that water is indispensable to life, and that means it has to be gotten around from place to place.  But is it necessary for every single stage of that transport system to be so unsurpassably beautiful?  From streams and rivers and lakes to dew and clouds and rain and rainbows (really gilding the lily) to fogs, to the oceans, to the icy geometry of  individual snowflakes?

There's a Polish guy in his eighties who gets up at 3 AM and takes his camera into the forest to get photos of the world of dew.  He's responsible for the revelation above.  The water cycle is beautiful even when we can't see it.  Hell, for all I know, it's always most beautiful when we can't see it.

So, as a critique, I think in this post-cool, minimalist age, the water cycle could be toned down a little.

Other arguments for God: music, Shakespeare, humor, the occasional pure human act.  In one of my two or three favorite films in the world, Hirokazu Kore-ida's "Afterlife," once people die they're turned over to counselors whose job is to help the newly deceased choose the moment in their lives in which they would like to spend eternity.  The poetry of the film -- and it's poetry through and through -- comes from the choices and the way they're arrived at.  One teenage girl, killed in an automobile accident, first chooses the night she and her friends went to Tokyo Disneyland, but by the time she makes a final choice, it's a moment when she was four and she put her head in her mother's lap and smelled the freshly laundered apron.  Another, a man, chooses the moment when he told the woman he was to marry, and who was the love of his life, that he was releasing her to marry the man she had fallen in love with.  He was miserable, but he chose the moment when he made her happy.

As a writer, I have no idea what to do with God, especially since I don't know what God is.  But I can try, from time to time, to see that kind of spark in the characters who populate my books, sometimes even the ones the reader isn't supposed to like.  I suppose that's a religious act.  Sort of.  Not in the same league as the dew on the butterfly, but there you are.  We do what we can.

Here, as a parting gesture, a uselessly beautiful moment in our world.


Tim -- Sunday

8 comments:

  1. Hi Tim,

    This is begging the deep question, but don't you think that our perception of beauty may be evolved from a view of things being right and in the right context? For example, if the tiger's face was not symmetrical it would no longer be beautiful. It would also no longer be a healthy tiger.
    Michael.

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  2. I believe in God absolutely. It is faith and faith cannot be explained so I won't try. But I have found the Deity in so many places.

    God is always present when a baby comes into the world. How is that for perfection? How is that for miraculous? I always think that for nine months this human being has lived and breathed under water but once it breathes air it can never breathe in water again. Such a change so quickly. What was once the source of life can never be that again.

    Every female over the age of three knows that the moth in the picture is a ballerina. Every female between the ages of three and seven believes she is a ballerina; she and the moth are the same. The colors and markings on the moth could not be more perfect - beauty and delicacy and perfection in a moth, a creature rarely noticed in the larger world but the Creator deems even the smallest of things worthy of beauty.

    The Creator of the moth decorates birds, particularly birds in Leighton's part of the world, in color combinations that humans don't have the imagination to conjure. The Creator tosses color around as if color exists expressly for expressing joy. Rainbows and sunsets are there to raise the spirits of anyone who takes the time to look. Useless beauty or beauty to uplift the souls who may think themselves useless?

    Another argument for God is a conversation with a three year-old. Those little people are experts on everything and they have no doubts about their opinions. They think deeply about everything - dogs, bugs, and why people say apples are round when clearly they are not. Beauty is everywhere except maybe in insects that fly in people's faces. Sometimes three year old people cry when the snowman in the yard melts and that's when parents get saved by the beauty of the water cycle. Snowmen don't really disappear, they just change how they look and feel and after they have spent some time as clouds, they come back as crystals that are made into another snowman. I've known people who actually claimed to see their snowman in a cloud, waving.

    The big cat is magnificent. What is he thinking? When the big cats run they are breath-taking but they are dangerous and destructive according to their nature. More beautiful are the horses that run in the high stakes races like the Kentucky Derby. I know nothing about horses or horse racing but I watch the Derby every year just to see those gorgeous creatures run seemingly for the joy of running. How can such a big body be propelled so fast and so gracefully on legs that belong on a ballerina? Those animals are pure beauty.

    God hides in plain sight. He challenges us to look. In the Gospels, Christ says we must become like children to enter heaven. So, follow a three year-old around because they will show you God in places you'd never think of looking.

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  3. How is this for a theory?
    We evolved as a species that sees beauty and takes joy in it because it helps our surviuval to notice and be uplifted for some reson. For instance--
    One: loving its beauty makes us want to take care of our planet. Since we depend on it for our survival, taking joy in it is part of our survival. I know. I know. We screw it up, anyway, by swarming like vermin all over the planet and acting as if we are in charge. But without our love of its beauty, there would be no passion in the fight for ecological sanity for those of us who insist on protecting nature.

    Or: the love of beauty, be it the vision of a lioness with her cubs or hearing a Mozart concerto, gives joy to our lives. That joy encourages us to stay alive and survive in the face of how painful life on this planet can sometimes be.

    I have begged the God question, but I see no conflict between believing in God and believing in evolution.

    Thank you, Tim, for raising such a profound and stimulating topic.

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  4. Hi, everyone, and thanks for responding. By the way, most of the photos are taken from the website of a woman in North Carolina who calls herself Wolfhunter 60 and who apparently spends her time tracking down the most beautiful nature photos in the world. I had three times as many pictures as I used, and I barely skimmed the surface. (You should see the flamingos!)

    Michael, I have no idea how our perception of beauty evolved, but it's clearly possible that the identification of beauty is a purely subjective experience, maybe genetically determined, and that symmetry or other characteristics play a role. But my belief (this is a tip-off that what follows is completely without any correlating data) is that beauty has an objective existence of some kind, that the our reactions to a a Persian cat and a mole rat or a butterfly and a banana slug occur because one is beautiful and the other isn't. If natural beauty were confined to living things, I'd be more likely to think it's a genetically determined reaction: after all, human beings share approximately 50 percent of their genes with a banana. Everything that's alive on the planet is essentially a cousin. But then there are galaxies and supernovae and crystal growth and that old water cycle, the rings of Saturn, and all the other exquisite variations in the inorganic world. And many of them are drop-dead beautiful. In other words, I have no explanation for anything, I'm just saying that the operatic scale and sheer profusion of natural beauty is the only thing that makes me open to the notion of some kind of divinity.

    Hi, everyone, and thanks for responding. By the way, most of the photos are taken from the website of a woman in North Carolina who calls herself Wolfhunter 60 and who apparently spends her time tracking down the most beautiful nature photos in the world. I had three times as many pictures as I used, and I barely skimmed the surface. (You should see the flamingos!)

    Michael, I have no idea how our perception of beauty evolved, but it's clearly possible that the identification of beauty is a purely subjective experience, maybe genetically determined, and that symmetry or other characteristics play a role. But my belief (this is a tip-off that what follows is completely without any correlating data) is that beauty has an objective existence of some kind, that the our reactions to a a Persian cat and a mole rat or a butterfly and a banana slug occur because one is beautiful and the other isn't. If natural beauty were confined to living things, I'd be more likely to think it's a genetically determined reaction: after all, human beings share approximately 50 percent of their genes with a banana. Everything that's alive on the planet is essentially a cousin. But then there are galaxies and supernovae and crystal growth and that old water cycle, the rings of Saturn, and all the other exquisite variations in the inorganic world. And many of them are drop-dead beautiful. In other words, I have no explanation for anything, I'm just saying that the operatic scale and sheer profusion of natural beauty is the only thing that makes me open to the notion of some kind of divinity.

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  5. Sorry about the hiccup above. There should be a way to edit comments.

    Beth, I sort of envy you your belief, as I envy anyone something that makes them happy or makes the world comprehensible. I'm not theologically inclined -- it's not as though I spend any time thinking about whether there's a God or not, and compared to my wife, who devotes a lot of energy to spiritual exploration, I'm a piece of furniture. I just don't ask spiritual questions, although that doesn't mean I don't have the occasional mystical experience. I think there's something metaphorically profound, for example, in the sight of someone's breath in cold weather. But usually I keep that stuff to myself. I lack the faith you have, and it may rob my life of a necessary dimension -- it may even rob creation, as I experience it, of some of its majesty. But that's the way I am.

    Hi, Annamaria, and what a splendid name you have. I love the notion that the joy we derive from beauty gives us strength to endure the imperfections and tragedies of life. Evolutionarily speaking, that would be a novel variation: many species evolving in a way that gives joy and strength to yet another species. (Or maybe animals experience beauty, too -- I don't have any idea.)

    And like you, I see no contradiction in believing in both God and evolution; evolution would be an elegant mechanism for bringing variety to creation. I also don't see any conflict between cosmology and faith. The physicist Richard Feynman once described calculus as "the language God speaks."

    And there's no doubt in my mind that Mozart and Beethoven and Ravel and, and, and were directly in touch with some rich energy force that probably flows through all of us without our noticing it. Music is especially mystical, I think, because it's entirely abstract. All the other arts describe or enrich or capture some form of real-world experience, but music is pure spirit. Not long ago I was in a small audience at a concert in which kids -- mostly Asian, but also some Caucasians and Hispanics -- played chamber music, mostly written in Europe by people who are long dead, written for instruments that have been around for hundreds of years and which are insanely difficult to play. And I sat there and listened to the music, watched the fingers and the wrists as they brought the melodies forth, and looked at the other members of the audience, as lost in the experience as I was, and I thought, This is a perfect moment -- a room full of individuals all either producing or experiencing beauty.

    I think when life is over, the main question may be how open you've been to beauty.

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  6. Intellectually, like you I suspect, I have believed since my teenage years that the sheers scope of the universe allows for most things to happen by chance. But there has been a little niggle about the prevalence of certain things, such as the Fibonacci sequence that appears so often in nature, such as the branching of trees and the arrangement of a pine cone); and that the ratio of one number to its predecessor (the golden ration) appears in architecture as the idealized visual ratio of width to height (the Acropolis, for example). Because of this niggle, I have often thought of myself as a teleological agnostic - not quite sure of my "chance" theory because of these patterns.

    In a sense this is similar to Tim's uncertainty due to beauty. But I have to say that in my experience beauty IS in the eye of the beholder or the ear of the listener. The masterpieces of Chinese music don't strike an emotional chord in me; nor does the physical beauty of women in some cultures; nor does the art. Indeed masterpieces in my own culture sometimes don't appeal, and I have friends, sophisticated, knowledgeable friends, who don't like classical music as we know it, but are entranced by other forms.

    I guess I believe that God was invented to explain the unexplained. Even today there is so much we (or at least I) don't have a clue about. What is the universe? Does it have an edge? If, so what is the edge with? And so on.

    I also believe that humankind has deluded itself into believing that it is the most intelligent species. I think of an ant. What goes through its mind as a person walks past? Probably very little. I think it quite likely that we are surrounded by more intelligent things - and that we don't have the intellectual capacity to recognize them.

    Thanks, Tim, for a great catalyst for discussion.

    Stan

    PS. If you copy an errant comment, then delete it, you can then paste what you copied into a new one and edit it.

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  7. Well, the Fibonacci sequence does have an evolutionary "justification". It actually repesents an optimal packing strategy in a variety of situations - seeds on a sunflower head, nuts on a pinecone and so on. Branches "pack" that way to get optimal light and so on. But why do we think of it as "golden"? Have we developed some instinct about what is "right" in some sense?

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  8. It is interesting that complexity is a proof of God's existance for some. Am I wrong? I somehow remember that Einstein called the unified theory the God theory. In other words, a simple explanaion of how it all came into being was godlike for him. Complexity in biology and simplcity in physics. It's all so fascinating to think about.

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