A Beautiful Mystery

Murad Saÿen
12/10/2005

There are certain things that are so commonplace in our lives that we learn to ignore them. Breathing is an example of this. How often do you actually remember that you are breathing? And even more pertinent for this discussion: how often do you breathe consciously? If you are like me, the answer is: not very often. Yet, all the world’s schools of meditation have converged around the recognition that this is one of the premier ‘skeleton keys’, if you will, to peace of mind, good health, grounded and sane behavior in the face of great stress, and even the portal to transcendent awareness. Sheesh! Knowing all of this, one must ask, why am I not paying attention to my breath every waking moment? Hey, if it was that easy, you would, and so would I. But, it isn’t.
Likewise, we go through our lives with an almost infinite variety of sources of beauty, all around us. And, for the most part, we learn to ignore them. Beauty is pleasurable; it gives us a good feeling when we stop to allow it into our busy minds…and hearts. I would even argue that beauty is a great deal more than that, in the same way that our breath is more than tidal air exchanging gases to fire our metabolism. Beauty is, in fact, one of the most enduring and durable mysteries that exists for humans.
During a summer term at college, I registered for a course in the philosophy of aesthetics. I anticipated that—as a lifelong artist--“Now, I will get to understand beauty”. But, at the end of the term, after spending ten weeks grinding through Santayana with my left-brain, I didn’t know any more than when the term began. I had theory, facts and ponderous thinking around it. In fact, I had it pretty well surrounded, but the bugger just wouldn’t surrender. When I was making my living as a painter, I kept a dog-eared copy of Goethe’s Theory of Color with me as I moved from place to place. Same deal. He did a lot of circuitous thinking, but it began to seem that beauty, like many other sensual experiences, cannot really be touched with words, and thoughts. Would you be able to describe a symphony to a friend, even one that had moved you deeply? I doubt it.
So, what is this quality that is so instantaneously recognizable and so able to touch us in the depths of our being, and yet so elusive when you try to pin it down?
Well, I have an idea about that. My sense is that Beauty, in all of its infinite variety, is a kind of visual code. It has elements, such as harmony of line, shape and color, and these have their own language, outside of the realm of ‘stinking thinking’. It also has a universal underlying language of symbolic content. Certain things tap into our unconscious mind, perhaps even at the level of our brain-stem. Seeing a particular object, image or quality can trigger emotions in us because it is resonating with the source of those feelings. Our susceptibility to Beauty may just well be encoded in our DNA.
For example: some years back, researchers theorized that pastoral scenes of savannah-like environments touched a place in humans that went all the way back to the earliest hominids who emerged from the arboreal forests, onto the plains of Africa. I read about this in Newsweek and it didn’t get very esoteric about why they arrived at this conclusion, but when I read this, my immediate reaction was, “I knew it”. There was just something there that felt right. I will never really know if those anthropologists were right. I suspect they won’t either. But, I do know that when I am in a situation where Beauty is the primary experience of the moment, I get this strange feeling that I am in a place where time has ceased to exist. I am in all moments at once. Hey, I warned you that it’s a mystery. But, isn’t it a delightful one to contemplate?
My wife and I are empty nesters; our kids are grown and gone. We cherish our visits with them and feel very blessed that they are all such fine people. But, we replaced them with a pair of female golden retrievers. Well, okay, we didn’t really replace the kids, we just got some canine kids. I often photograph these two dogs, and sometimes I am so struck by how beautiful they are that it brings tears to my eyes. The other evening, we were having a tennis ball session on the lawn, and one of them, Emmy, sat down about fifteen feet in front of me. She just sat there, looking across the street, into the sunset. I ran for a camera, and did succeed in getting a shot of her that I love. When I ask myself what I was responding to, I come up with a complex of elements. First of all, she is a brown-eyed beauty in her own right. But, what made me run to get a camera, was the light that was falling on her. It was soft and warm, had some fleeting shadows from tree branches, and it made her and the entire scene look almost magical.
I fell for a puddle last year. Sounds silly, right? But, I walked a half-mile back to the house, got a camera and tripod, and went back to take pictures of dead oak leaves in a pool of water. The overhead branches and the blue sky were reflected from the surface, but beneath that surface was a russet, umber and gold mosaic of dead leaves that, even now, I cannot take my eyes off of. The more you honor Beauty, the more it reveals itself to you. That has been my experience over a lifetime of being an artist, and simply an admirer of this mystical code that is shining its message almost wherever you look.