Enable Beauty, 2nd ed.

 The options are always either Harmony or discord. Harmony is beautiful, discord is not.

I need to acknowledge right up front here that I bring a bias to this tenet. I don’t do dark, I don’t do horror, I wouldn’t hang Picasso's Guernica in my house even if i had room for it. I’m not saying that art works that examine the darker side of life and human nature are incapable of revealing some aspects of truth, I’m simply saying that I prefer to avoid them. I have a TV and several digital devices that do their best to drag me down the rabbit hole of human weakness, deprivation, hatred, lust, veniality, etc.

OK. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about Beauty. There is a wonderful scene at the beginning of the rather chilling film, Dead Poets Society. Which I do recommend, particularly if you thought Robin Williams only did comedy. The scene takes place in an English lesson when "the boys" are being taught how to evaluate poems by the teacher Williams/Keating will replace - according to a graph on which they are to chart variables like "meter," "length of line," "syllables," to arrive at a numerical indication of "the greatness of the poem." Having spent a few decades in the sometimes strange world of academic prose, this scene is not as bizarre at it seems at first blush but it does fall far afield of my personal process of assessing beauty. My process is almost totally physical and, strangely, could be measured numerically, but not on a chart, but rather by a blood pressure cuff.

I'll give you an example. The other night I was browsing around on my night time ritual Curiosity Stream and happened upon a site called Big Picture Earth. The site features videos of various "neat places" about 30 minutes in length, shot at walking speed, using only ambient sound. I clicked on one that featured a shot of gondolas in Venice, and for the next half hour I could feel my blood pressure drop, as the video walked me through some of my favorite places in La Serenissima - the sovereign state of Venice.

My reaction is similar when I encounter "all things beautiful," be they naturally occurring scenes out in the world, paintings, sculpture, faces, sounds, whatever. I pause. Often with an unintentional, but inevitable quiet inhalation. I smile. And my blood pressure drops. No, I don't have hard data for this phenomenon - but I am going to give it a shot. It is certainly a reaction that seems diametrically opposed to those I have upon encountering the "if it bleeds it leads" mantra of the anti-something social and corporate media.

My own attempts to enable beauty are, as is the case for all of us, constrained by my own abilities. Words are an environment in which I feel comfortable, so I share them here on The Wall. With varying success. Having come to peace with my inability to do representational drawing, instead I expand my doodles and photographs, and then marry them to lush and happy colors, drawn inevitably to the strains of beautiful music; also beyond my abilities - but still able to lower my blood pressure and put a smile on my face.