Beauty

 

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Is beauty skin-deep ? This question naturally comes to mind when we see advertisements for beauty creams, beauty treatments, beauty parlours  and such like things. If the answer to this question is ‘yes’ we are a generation excelling in superficialities. If the answer is ‘no’ we must ponder over beauty as something more serious and important in life.  The overuse of beauty and beautiful has cheapened the aesthetic values normally associated with beauty. Anything that pleases the visual or auditory sense is beautiful for us – even a dinner or a loud drum beating fatalistic rhythms in a street corner performance of a monkey dance. When you see a film star coaxing people to use a whitening cream you definitely feel that beauty is skin-deep. How many people would see beauty in awe and even fear say in a raging  storm ? Beauty often chases you out of your senses and when senses are suspended the mind perceives, the heart feels a soulfulness in a hair-raising experience.

But normally by beauty we mean a thing, object, experience or scene that pleases our senses, that is, brings to a harmonious balancing of all senses and gives the perceiver a sense of joy. John Keats’ immortal lines – A thing of beauty is a joy for ever / Its loveliness increases / It will never / Pass into nothingness – posit a beautiful truth which time can never falsify. Beauty is a truth, its’ a value and like all great values it transcends the ephemeral levels of reality. Beauty  evokes joy, happiness and makes life worthwhile. The odd, ugly and the eccentric also create beauty as most post-cubism artists have shown. To see beauty even in ugliness is a kind of aesthetic temper available in sensitive human beings. But people of discerning minds would normally agree with Hegel’s view that beauty embodies spirituality in sensual forms. The art form or nature or a woman may evoke sensuality but if the form is devoid of spiritual content beauty will at best be skin-deep. The classical idea of balance, harmony, symmetry and rhythm as the basic essence of beauty is still valid. A form, whether in nature or art, must have the equilibrium of balance, harmony, symmetry and rhythm to create beauty that moves the beholder to an ecstatic height of love: Not passion, soulful love. Beauty is not an object to possess  nor is it a sweet to eat: It is an experience to cherish, with love.

Finally, does beauty lie in the beholder’s eye? Well, yes, provided the beholder has a cognitive universe in his/her mind and soul.