The Problem of Beauty-- 1. Why Is This Thing Beautiful?

I've had some interesting feedback. Nothing makes it clearer what you need to say than the honest responses of readers. Blogging is great for digging at truth. Surely, even Socrates would approve of it! (Now, there's a really good article that needs to be written!) The vital issue I haven't touched yet is the problem of beauty. I've asserted that Americans look sloppy and our clothing is often ugly. Here are the refutations I'm hearing:

- It's just your opinion that Americans look sloppy.
- Caring about aesthetics isn't important to people who are independent thinkers.
- Ugly clothes aren't new--c.f. the leisure suit.

To an extent, I grant all of these are true. Therefore, let me take a different tack in explaining my larger point. Here's the question now: How do we define what is beautiful and what is ugly? Perhaps this is the angle I should have begun with all along. Let's examine it.

I could come at this from two different directions: what makes something beautiful, or what makes something ugly. My husband advises it would be easiest to start at beauty, and so I shall. Let me go directly to the beauty that is attracting me these days: India's traditional aesthetic. Since I'm wildly smitten with their textiles, I'll begin there. But I'll begin there after I've established some important points.

First, let me establish that my reader and I agree that the word beautiful means something more than "I, personally, perhaps even idiosyncratically, like it." Everyone has specific taste, I'm not denying that, but there are qualities and principles that render some things beautiful. Even if you wouldn't wear it or display it, we are faced with things in the world that we must concede are beautiful. If I'm Rousseau or Emerson, I call to my reader's mind a sunset. Anyone want to argue that a colorful sunset is not beautiful? Didn't think so. Wait, hold on--there's always a guy in the back who wants to make an argument that his cousin has a retinal disorder that makes colorful sunsets agonizing to look at. Fine. It's possible to find a sunset painful--but that is not an argument against the beauty of sunsets; it's just a believe-it-or-not fact about that guy's cousin. In the end, no one is going to take a serious stand against the statement, "Sunsets are beautiful."

I had to bring up Rousseau and Emerson because the Romantics rear their carefully tousled heads when beauty is the topic. Romanticism unnerves me because it is relativistic and elitist, a great intellectual trap. It is no mistake that it arises with capitalism-they need each other. This will be the subject of other posts, I'm sure. Let me just make the note here announcing that I want to consider beauty without the sticky residue of Romanticism and it may not be possible to do so. I'm hoping I need only make use of their beauty-in-nature argument to put to rest the notion that beauty is too subjective to ever be discussed outside of simple statements of personal preference.

So then, is it possible to extend this assertion that beautiful things exist to the realm of material culture? Can we discuss the beauty of man-made objects? Surely we can all agree that this is beautiful:

That's a page from the Book of Hours. Anyone want to throw down that this is not beautiful? I'm not asking if it is your favorite image in the world. I'm not asking if you would hang it on a wall in your home. It may not be your taste exactly--but it is beautiful. (In choosing such an artifact, rather than a painting by Davinci or a sculpture by Michelangelo, I'm disclosing my alliance with the Arts and Crafts movement. I'm going to be employing their arguments, so c.f. William Morris on all that follows.) So, what makes it beautiful? Let me hazard an answer--and I'm interested in any other answers I'm missing, so let me know. The two most obvious reasons it strikes us as beautiful are the graceful lines and harmonious colors. I'd also say that it has a unique quality that renders it beautiful in the way a painting or sculpture is not: it is a text that has meaning in addition to its lovely images. It is an intensely human thing--a beautifully human thing--to create text and render it aesthetically pleasing. It's not the floral images that are the beautiful part. It is all beautiful. The print is no less pleasing than the leaves and flowers. So, why is the script also beautiful? It's not meticulously perfect. A computer could generate a more flawless text. Interestingly, I hear my students' voices in my head now. My generation might have asserted that this beautiful thing could be improved upon with some digital retouching. However, I think young people today would generally argue against that. There is a new appreciation for the telltale signs of a human hand at work. This gives me hope. Can I get a general agreement that this page from the Book of Hours is beautiful because of its hand-made quality? Would anyone want to go on record as the person who does not find the hand-crafted quality of this appealing? Anyone?

Identity Epiphanies in Rome

I have been away from this blog too long.

I was in Rome for a week last month. It was a pilgrimage for my mother and there is actually much to say about it as such. However, since I am using this blog to bat around material related to my book project, I'll confine myself to the experiments in the truth of material culture that this short visit occasioned.

On the Sunday evening I was there, I had the privilege of meeting Peter Gonsalves, the author of Clothing for Liberation which I reviewed for the Southwest Journal of Cultures. (SIDE NOTE TO GRAD STUDENTS OF RHETORIC and/or COMMUNICATION: This book is a great model for your own writing. Consider it a lesson in how to turn a history or pop culture interest into an object of serious scholarly analysis.) As seemed to be the case with almost everything on the Rome trip, my meeting with Peter was the result of a series of happy accidents so well timed that anyone would be tempted to call them fated. In researching for my own writing last spring, I came across Peter's book literally days after its US publication date. That made it not only a book I needed to read, but one I wanted to review for the Journal. I read the author's bio note and realized that he lived in Rome. I had just booked my mother's trip to Rome at that time and gleefully seized an opportunity to combine the pilgrimage for my mother with research for my book.

Finding the email address for a scholar in Rome is not easy. I did a number of online searches and found nothing. I tried calling his publisher who gave me a generic email address that no one ever answered. I tried contacting his religious order (turns out, Peter Gonsalves is a Catholic priest in addition to being a scholar). But even the contacts I could reach with his order were unable to get me connected with the man himself. And so, I resorted to Facebook, and that finally worked. (Lesson learned: email really is dead. Social media are what's happening now.) From reading his book, it was clear to me that Peter was a serious Gandhian. He never says he considers himself a follower of Gandhi's principles in the book, but his reverential tone and lack of cynicism were tip offs. The fact that he was educated in my discipline, Gandhi's principles, and Catholicism made him someone with whom I very much wanted to exchange ideas. Peter responded to my post on the Facebook page for his book and we emailed a couple of times. I felt foolish outlining my project to him--I was only just beginning to pull the concept of the book together--but I so very much wanted to toss my idea in front of someone in my own field who was of a like mind. I originally approached him by saying that I was reviewing his book and wanted to video a short interview with him to post on the Journal. He cordially agreed to meet me when I was in Rome.

Between the time I exchanged emails with Peter and the time of my visit to Rome, I found myself ethically obliged to quit my job because of several incidents of corruption, hypocrisy, and abuse from above. I spent a month reordering my entire life and it was by turns exciting and terrifying. The terror came as I contemplated relative poverty. Even when I could believe my husband's reassurances that we would be fine financially, I was haunted by a frightening sense of not knowing myself anymore. I was suddenly no longer a professor. I had a greater love and commitment to my book project, but I wasn't sure who I was writing as. This identity crisis was intensified when I contemplated my meeting with Peter Gonsalves.

One of my greatest weaknesses is that I have a poor sense of how I come across to others. (Shall I blame the dyslexia? Mild autism?) So, of course, I fumbled in my first contact with Peter. I was so eager to convince him to take me seriously that I put my professional credentials up front immediately: "I'm a Rhetorician." "I'm writing a book." "I have a journal." Peter later told me he felt anxiety about meeting me because he imagined that a rhetorician was going to put a camera on him and shoot "a lot of hard questions" at him. So, ironically, I arrived in Rome as anxious about who the hell this poor man was meeting as the poor man himself. Fresh from the shock of my sudden change of lifestyle, I was too shaken to focus clearly. We arranged to meet Sunday night. He would meet me at my hotel and we would go find a cafe in which to talk. I had no idea how I would present myself.

Peter & I Sunday evening

Peter Gonsalves generously spoke with me for hours. I found myself telling him about my harrowing experiences at work and my resignation. He said all the things I needed to hear. He offered excellent advice, both professionally and spiritually. Most importantly, he was a mirror for me to see my new self for the first time. Perhaps I will find a way to write about the whole experience of revisioning myself. For now, I'll just say that during the conversation, I told him that I wanted to pull together the time and courage to walk through some typical Italian clothing stores and look in the labels to see if "made in Italy" was as extinct as "made in the USA." I suspected it was not. Peter said he assumed the place for clothing shopping was certainly the via dei Condotti. I dared to contradict him. Condotti is the designer clothing street at the foot of the Spanish Steps. Only the very rich would shop there. I told him I was interested in what the average Italian bought. As he walked me back to my hotel, Peter suggested that he would be happy to lend me his excellent Italian to ask some of the groups of college-age women walking past where they bought their clothes. He warned me that they would say via dei Condotti. I thought not. It was absolutely certain that the people passing us did not shop on that street; they were perfectly middle class. I can't speak Italian but I can understand it a little, so, when Peter asked the first group of women, I needed no translation for the simple response they gave. The first thing every one of them said was the via dei Condotti. I had to ask Peter to follow up with the question, "Where did you buy the coat you're wearing now?" They looked sheepish at this and demurred to say. Peter explained that I was a foreign visitor researching Italian clothing choices. This made the gals chatty. Those who would confess, said they had bought much of what they were wearing on that very street. So, I was right in assuming that my hotel's neighborhood shops carried what most of the Italians were really wearing. But Peter was right in predicting that via dei Condotti would be every Italian's answer to my question.

Spot the tourists on the via dei Condotti!

And so, this brings me back to pondering identity. If I asked Americans where they shopped for clothes, they wouldn't be shy to admit they buy their clothes at a local shop rather than a designer showroom. What is this Italian reluctance to admit that price is an issue in selecting clothes? Did they assume the question was what fashions do you prefer, not what do you actually wear? It is certainly obvious that the average Italian dresses much better than the average American. Their clothing is stylish, tailored, and in excellent condition. Ours is usually not. And, sure enough, when I visited the clothing stores on that middle-class street (and it seems every other store is a clothing store in Italy), more than half the labels read "Made in Italy." And so, now this brings me back around to the subject matter of my book. It is often observed that Americans dress sloppily. The assumption is always that this is the result of some cultural / aesthetic / moral failing on our part. But isn't it possible that we dress badly because of what we are offered in our stores? I think so. And isn't it therefore possible that what we have lost is more than manufacturing jobs since our country gave up clothing manufacture?  When we leave our clothing production to the lowest bidder, are we are losing an aspect of our identity? Have we lost--or, rather, had taken from us--an identification with the aesthetics of our clothes? I'm thinking that Americans toss on an over-sized T-shirt, baggy jeans with frayed hems dragging the ground, and dirty athletic shoes because they don't have any identity when it comes to clothing. It is something to cover their nakedness, nothing more. The only great valor is in finding serviceable garments at a cheap price.

Now, before everyone says it, let me: not all Americans have given up on personal appearance. There is still a percentage of us who are exceptions to the rule. But look around at our fellow Americans and tell me there isn't a rule. As a rule, we look dumpy. And I want to insist that this isn't our own fault. This has been foisted on us by an industry that wants to sell us volume instead of quality. We gain closets stuffed with cheap double-knit junk but at the price of our sense of who we are.