“When you write, you lay out a line of words,” writes Annie Dillard in The Writing Life. “The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, of have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow or this time next year.”
When I set out to explore how I came to discover beauty, I thought the path would be easy. But the more I scrawled about it, the more the exploration became wider and deeper. But I just kept scribbling until I landed on ONE undeniable truth. The first thing of beauty I ever saw was my mother’s face.
My mother was a very cute baby.
From these photos, I see that my mother, unlike me, was quite the young lady, well coifed and well bejeweled. Plus she had the best posture!
I have very few, if any, photos of my mother between the age of 14 and when she got married in 1951. She was 23 years old and my father was 25 years old.
In 1952, my mother gave birth to my sister, Lauren, and then exactly 13 months later — ME!
I would grow up to look most like her out of all of her five daughters. She was my first glimpse of beauty and somehow looking at her, watching her, I would begin to discover a whole world of beauty around me, beauty I initially associated with love. But as I grew older, beauty would begin to confuse me. “There is no beauty without some strangeness,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe. In the years ahead, I would also begin to witness the strangeness.
In a comment in my last post, Beth wrote: “I learned to appreciate beauty on my own, but am sure that I was influenced by my mother’s appreciation of it, too.”
I was, too, but what she found beautiful and what I found beautiful would diverge with lasting consequences, both wonderful and awful.
Visual beauty? I guess that’s where I stumble here. Who defines visual beauty and what is it? Is it like porn, we know it when we see it?
Neola — this is perhaps the main reason why wrestling with this has been so difficult. For me, it was visual beauty initially because of my eye defect. It would become auditory because my mother loved music, but mostly it was me trying to focus on a world where I saw two of everything. I wasn’t all that hindered by this anomaly until I discovered letters of the alphabet and numbers, or, more to the point, when my mother discovered that I had discovered them and could make no sense of them. I believe I was around four years old.
One other thing — writing about discovering beauty is not unlike discovering that the earth is not round. Beauty is a HUGE topic, encompassing the physical (symmetry, health), inner (kindness, character), the natural world, artistic expression and even abstract concepts like spiritual or emotional depth.
I look back on my life and look around my home and can plainly see that a significant collection of original art and scores of shelves lined with books point to the fact that beauty, for me, was primarily visual — something I had to SEE and then understand with my own eyes.
Please note the Annie Dillard quote at the beginning of this post. I have chosen to tackle the topic of me discovering beauty with little idea of where I am headed, if anywhere.
And yet another thing, Neola — you raise a fascinating question: “Who defines visual beauty?” Who the hell knows? Plato or Socrates or any number of philosophers have written high-falutin’ essays on beauty and aesthetics that I have tried to read but are way over my head.
What is beautiful to me may not be beautiful to anyone else. A lazy example is all the gold embellishments in the Oval Office and around the White House that the current occupant of the Oval Office finds beautiful. For me, this is porn.
Another, more thoughtful example: the painting, “Mother With Dead Child” by Kathe Kollwitz. I believe it is beautiful.
https://kiamaartgallery.wordpress.com/2018/01/16/kathe-kollwitz-expressionist-printer-and-sculpture/kathe-kollowitz-woman-with-dead-child-1903/
Good Lord, the more I think and write about beauty, the more I don’t know!
Well I certainly don’t know! Impressive that you are diving in and writing.
A couple of months ago, I finished the first draft of a play called “The Harvey Girls Reunion,” in which five characters: a CHILD, a TEEN, a CHRISTIAN, a LESBIAN, a PROFESSIONAL, and an ARTIST (all representing parts of me) gather around a table to discuss how they survived a mother who impeded their ability to see themselves.
All to say, I’ve been wrestling with this all of my life. At one point in the play, the ARTIST says, “It’s not easy to look back on your life when you can’t see anything, especially if you aren’t blind.”
That, in a nutshell, has been my lifelong challenge.
Confucius said, “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
Been pondering this.
You look so much like her. Very lovely. I enjoyed seeing these old photos while sipping my morning coffee. Thank you for sharing them with us.
Thank you, Kelly. I am very flattered that you think I look so much like my mother. xoxo
I am a little out of my depth here. I suspect that all mothers are beautiful to a baby if the mothers are loving and warm and responsive. How in the world would a baby know visual beauty??
Charlotte, I have done a lot of research regarding your question about a baby knowing visual beauty. A cursory Google inquiry revealed this:
“A newborn baby’s first recognized face is almost always their mother’s, identified primarily through her unique scent and voice from the womb, though studies show they prefer face-like patterns and can visually focus on faces (8-12 inches away) soon after birth, developing clearer visual recognition in the first few weeks and months.”
More specifically about babies recognizing visual beauty:
“Babies show an innate preference for visually “attractive” faces, or faces that look like a typical human prototype, as early as one day old, spending more time looking at them than less symmetrical faces, indicating an early sense of visual appeal beyond just familiarity. While newborns recognize patterns and faces (especially parents’) within weeks, their aesthetic sense of “beauty” in terms of attractiveness emerges very early, though their vision and ability to track faces develop more noticeably by 2 to 4 months.”
Given what I believe was my mother’s concern about my eyesight the first six months of my life, she no doubt held me a lot. So what other face was I seeing on a near-constant basis? I have always had an intuitive grasp of visual appeal, and I believe I had this even with compromised eyesight because I was close to a familiar face which was aesthetically pleasing. I believe my mother was “loving and warm and responsive” to me initially, but when my increasingly crossed eyes made me look, shall we say, “damaged”, she distanced herself.
I too am a little out of my depths here, but I would probably make the argument that my mother’s sense of beauty and mine began to diverge at this point. Seriously, I don’t know for sure. I’m trying to figure this out as I go along.
This is all very complex “stuff”! I’ll add just another simple thought. I’ve been sitting each morning in Kirk’s cabin and walking in the woods almost every day with Karla, and there are moments when I feel almost breathless in response to all I’m seeing. Has seemed to me that our sense of beauty must involve some kind of deep inner, connectedness to the Creator Beyond and Within…whether we’re seeing a mother’s face holding our babyhood or Someone Immense holding all of Life in a sunrise. Not very profound, perhaps, but something I’ve been deeply feeling.
Of course your perspective is profound, Carol. Now I’m wondering how a child gets her sense of God! My hunch is that it begins with the child’s relationship to her parents. As a kid, God was very fearsome to me — a strict parent, if you will. I had no sense of God’s love or whatever role God had in creating beauty. That is all different now — again, I believe, because I began to diverge my concept of beauty and creation from my mother’s.
“Complex stuff” is an understatement.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” This statement rings true for me. But beauty also develops and changes over time. The more you are exposed to the more it changes.
With a baby, it gravitates to a parent’s face because it is familiar. As their vision gets better, there are more things to grab their attention and curiosity. It seems like a natural progression.
I’ll leave the Creator conversation to Carol.
“The more you are exposed to the more it changes.” Interesting point, Adrienne. I believe the more I was exposed to OUTSIDE of my mother’s house, the more I developed my own taste in beauty. This was a painful reality for my mother who was profoundly threatened by my individuality.
You ARE visual, but don’t minimize the role that beautiful music has played in your life. I know this because you’ve gifted me a lot of it. Are you still listening? It is a great resource for me at this time. Did your mother expose you to the beauty of music or did she sing you lullabies?
I have been making a list of how my other influenced my love of beauty, Beth. It is divided into two major categories: visual and “auditory”; “auditory” because of music, so I’ll probably change the title of that category back to “musical.” Look for a post about that.
I also have a category for “practical” like “cleaning” and “tidiness” but am not sure how that is related to beauty except my mother hated fingerprints ANYWHERE so all was pristine. She was also a terrific cook and baker which goes under visual, I guess, except I can’t really cook a damn thing now and really don’t care to. She never let her daughters use the kitchen, I assume because of the resulting fingerprints. More to come.
Beth — I also read an article this week that listening to music helps to ward off dementia. I was grateful that I have music playing most of the time every day, a gift, yes, that I inherited from my mother,
Ahh…tidiness. Both my mother and my father were compulsive about certain things with cleanliness and orderliness. I inherited this by both nurture and nature, I believe. Paul never noticed for decades of marriage how particular I am about certain things until he retired.
Thanks, Beth. Now I don’t feel so weird and alone. xoxo