The Libido for the Beautiful

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Advanced Buttocks”—Chapter title in Jane Fonda’sWorkout Book, 1984

“Love beauty; it is the shadow of God on the universe.”—Gabriela Mistral

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—8/1/11—Waiting for a ship to take us downstream, I tell you the Rhine was a verdant dream. The Lorelei waited to sing us a tune, but the gorge itself made the tone deaf swoon. Spotting our steamer, I woke from a daze—she was beating upstream through a silver haze. The current was swift, but the motors were stout—strong on a diet of schnitzel and kraut. But first the Argo faced an uphill turn—in very tight quarters, switch bow and stern. “Come hard to starboard,” the captain said. “Cut both engines, and needle the thread.” Suddenly silent, the boat was a ball, no longer rising, not yet in its fall. Hugely, it quivered right up to the pier on which a mate stepped, scratching an ear, looping a rope over a worn cleat, securing the ship’s steel to stone and concrete. The finish of it stirred some warm applause—others just gaped who were given to pause, for motion is beauty in a sure hand, compared to an urn that squats on a stand.

Of course, I’m toying with you, Gentle Reader.

If you have any ear (except one cast from tin), you detected my rhyme in the first paragraph and rolled imperceptibly to the rhythm disguised as prose. Rhythm and rhyme once were prerequisites for poetry, just as melody was a given for music, but just as hemlines rise and fall, aesthetic standards change. An art historian once calculated the vital statistics for the Paleolithic statuette known as the “Venus of Willendorf” at 96”-89”-96” if inflated to life size. Twenty thousand years ago, a woman with 96”-hips could pop out babies the way we spit watermelon seeds, and run little risk of dying. Breadth of beam, therefore, was gorgeous because it was healthy for mother and child.

In the description of the river boat approaching the landing at St. Goarshausen, my implicit argument is for controlled action, a sometimes overlooked component of beauty. The mastery displayed by that anonymous captain was more beautiful to me at the time than the 45-carat Hope Diamond or any rose in the Smithsonian’s flower garden. Today, I’m not so sure. Vermeer’s “View of Delft” is quiescence personified, yet it is an unqualified artistic glory. It is, indeed, exquisite, a word I reserve for the most beautiful things of this world, yet it is quite still. Not permanent, mind you, just still. We should also remember that every night, janitors the world over sweep up the dust of masterpieces and discard it without the slightest ceremony.

Living or dead, natural or artificial, moving or still, Edmund Burke argued that true beauty is recognized by making the viewer fall in love with it. For me, these love-inducing beauties include my first automobile, a 1930 Model A with red-wire spokes; Mary Barbara, the roan mare on whose back I learned to ride; my wife, Ingrid, of course; and our children.

Ingrid enjoys telling the story of going to the Bad Helmstedt Opera with her elderly boss when she was about 18 and discovering to her delight that she was seated in the box closest to the stage. During the performance of “Madama Butterfly,” she noticed Lt. Pinkerton, the tenor, singing to her, or so it seemed. When it was over, he gathered some bouquets thrown on the stage, stepped to the apron, and handed the object of his attention a long-stemmed rose. The tenor, of course, had exquisite taste, and I, of course, concur, for she is the physical evidence of God’s benevolence to me.

While classical critics consider order, perfection, and symmetry to be the hallmarks of beauty, the Romantics tend to find it in disorder, imperfection, and asymmetry. Ingrid’s bee-stung upper lip is a “flaw” cherished by writers such as Leo Tolstoy, who wrote, “As is always the case with perfectly charming women, her defect—the pouting lip and half-open mouth—seemed her peculiar, her characteristic beauty.”

Our daughter’s “defect,” or so Anja thought, was a sprinkling of freckles scattered across the bridge of her nose and cheek bones. She wanted to cover them with make-up until I told her something my mother had told me:“A face without freckles is the night without stars.” On the frame of her mirror, I taped Gerard Manley Hopkins’s line, “Glory be to God for dappled things—for skies of couple-color” and, adding a line of my own, “a creamy bisque with a pinch of pepper.” With time, she accepted her gifts in the realization that Nature had been very generous to her and her mother.

The quest for perfection is a time-consuming and sometimes dangerous pursuit because, once the ideal is identified, everything else pales by comparison. Until the Enlightenment, no one had considered one race superior to another, nor had they formally classified people as part of anything but the human race. Then, in the 1770s, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist who’d never traveled outside of Europe, examined an unblemished skull from the Caucasus and pronounced it more beautiful than any other in the Göttingen University collection. Thus was born “Caucasian,” “pinpointing” the people originally from the area between Iceland and India. Inasmuch as the 18th century was the age of Linnaeus, Diderot, and Johnson, Blumenbach began thinking of a way to order the colorful entirety of humanity based on the “beauty” of their skulls and the concentration of melanin in their skin. I’m afraid he didn’t do us any favors by ranking the five races he defined. Unfortunately, he was seduced by beauty, and there was no helping him.

The film critic John Simon once began a review by saying, “. . . truth is not beauty, beauty is not truth, and that is not all you need to know.” I immediately copied that clever spin-off of John Keats’s verses into the margins of the text I use when teaching his odes. Surely, E=MC² is a beautiful truth but not every truth, like Hitler’s reason for despising the Jews, is as elegant or absolute as Einstein’s. And while the relation between mass and energy is important, there’s a great deal more we need in order to fix dinner or rear a family. So just what is Keats saying to his peers in the “Grecian Ode”?

It all hinges on the antecedent of “that” in the penultimate line. The full sense is not “beauty is truth, truth beauty”; instead, it is (and I paraphrase),“When time lays waste your generation, art like the urn will stand amid the ashes. It is art’s relatively ‘permanent’ beauty (remember the museum dust), not a fair figure or the empty promises of the church, that is man’s chief consolation in a world of flux.” I like to remind students that the Greek pot Keats was so enamored of has already “outlived” the Olympians by a millennium.

When I asked Ingrid whether she thought perfection was a prerequisite for beauty, she said, “Venus with no arms is still a catch.” Her point is well taken. Gore Vidal thought “character has a tendency to ruin looks,” but intelligence, humor, and grace, I contend, are truer beauty marks than a mole on a pretty face or the normal complement of limbs.

What ultimately matters is not matter at all.

The worth of our currency has nothing to do with its age or condition. Coin collectors will argue that point, but not the bank.