Beauty Will Save the World
Staring into plastic, looking at tiny heads, delineated by squares.
This has been my life since the disease started to spread. I am really grateful for Zoom, and I do not hear enough gratitude for this tool. I do think it should be seen as an artistic tool, as I see stewarding a digital campfire as an emerging artistic discipline.
Perhaps “emerging” is the wrong word here, and maybe “vanishing” would be a better one. This could be a vanishing discipline that is only beautiful in the liminal, in between the worlds. I came across this quote from Dostoevsky today, and I think it is profoundly true:
Beauty will save the world.
Sure, being ugly has its place, and I think ugliness is something for all of us to get into the right relationship with, but let us not be shy about wanting beauty. There is something intrinsically valuable about it, and playing towards a beautiful life is a beautiful thing.
There is great poverty in the view that beauty is only found in the physical. This degrades the value of beauty, and ultimately makes it ugly. A new month is upon us, and we can become artists of the month, and attempt to make it beautiful. Why stop there though? We can be artists of the day, of the moment, and yeah, we can be artists of Zoom rooms too.
2020 is coming to an end, and collectively it seemed ugly, but it was the most beautiful year of my life, probably because I approached the year as an artist. It is debatable if this was a conscious choice. The daemon felt piercing, and almost uninvited, but he was invited. I did ask God for direction when I received the bad news, and the daemon visited me shortly after.
I am less interested in fame or success these days, and I am super interested in beauty, and beautiful things. I want to create beauty, and I want to help midwife a beautiful world. Being in the right relationship is being in a beautiful relationship, and this should not seem like a controversial thing to say.
I do not think it is wise to shame your ugly, or transgressively pretend it is beautiful when it is not. Love your ugly, but do not settle for it with semantic tricks. The world of settlers is coming to an end, and a beautiful world will soon be in our reach, so do your part, and start beautifying what is in your reach.
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