The Power Of Beauty in anticlimatic

And why Art is more important than Science.

There are many different types of Love songs. Love songs about new romance butterflies. Love songs about loss and grief. Love songs about separation and yearning. Love songs about bitterness and resentment. Love songs about romantic triangles. Love songs about our parents or communities. And then there is the type I’d like to discuss today, songs I’ll only describe as almost religious in nature- songs that share the same DNA as the monastery chants of olde, what I like to call an “Appeal To Beauty” type of love song.

These are songs written in the shadow of God, if we can be loose with the G word. They are songs from an individual gazing up at something that is enormous, pouring words onto paper in an effort to cope with and evict the flooding barrage of feelings that our senses have created in us. These are the seeds of inspiration.

The urge to evict these feelings so we may breathe again is only half of the equation. Because while we must suddenly labor to expel thoughts and feelings just for the sake of getting them out, the process takes on an additional goal:

What if, instead of throwing all these oddly shaped blocks out of our brains willy-nilly, we organized them in front of us instead- perhaps into something like a ladder, or a staircase, so that maybe we could ourselves climb somewhere nearer to that towering sublime Thing?

The best example of this song I know of is a Nick Cave song called What Can I Give you? The first few lines of it are unique, in that they form one sentence at the end, but each part is delivered with a pause between the next, and each sentence has a completely different meaning as additional words are provided, to the effect that once the full sentence is laid out, it actually contains a handful of other sentences- like a wooden nesting doll.

All my life (suggestion of a long wait/eternity)
I’ve failed (resignation, aged defeat)
to see (personal failure, failure of individual ability)
one good thing (failure of the world to have Value, being failed BY the world)
standing (failure of the world’s integrity/strength)
in front of me (finally tying all of the above together with a qualifier of proximity/personal attachment)

From here, the music pivots- into the building towards the chorus. A feeling like something has happened, or interrupted the despair:

And the planets gravitate around you! (massive, cosmic)
And the stars, the stars surround you! (beautiful, twinkling)
And the angels, in heaven adore you! (pure, and Good)
And the saints, the saints all stand and applaud you! (validated, respected)

<chorus>

Galaxies collide (cosmic chaos, turmoil)
They shower down around you (standing unaffected, untouched)
I searched, I stumbled, and then I found you (discovery at last)
In your robe (double imagery of domestic maternal duty/royalty)
In your crown (singularly regal)
Reaching low Dear, reaching low down to the ground (low in the shadow of God, or in this case- a Woman).

I think Beauty, though subjective in and of itself, has gotten a bad wrap as a concept over the last couple decades. Its importance seems to have been marginalized by other objectives, as though that importance has been muddled or forgotten. It’s possible to validate the subjective nature of it without invalidating particular preferences, in fact one can hardly go without the other- but in recent times I feel like the deeper purpose of Beauty has been lost in a larger focus on its collateral damage.

The deepest purpose of it is wholly organic. Its function is to be a seed.

Truth is all that you need,
You bury that seed,
It’s everything beautiful-

And that sound
It comes from the underground
It’s all inside you now
It’s everything beautiful-

Being in the presence of Beauty fills one with both the tools and the materials to beget More Beauty. Think of European architecture, or very old Victorian libraries, and how just living among those spaces opens more doors to the creation of similarly spirited spaces, real OR imaginary.

Science might be a logical system of understanding what IS, a little better, but it’s Art that opens up new worlds entirely for exploration.