My wife with our cat Sophie.
“Good news!”
My wife is holding our cat, Sophie, in the garden. My wife says: “Good news!” I think shouldn’t I be the judge of that, she may well be right, but what if her ‘good’ news is that Sophie is pregnant. I don’t want a litter of kittens. Her ‘good’ news may be my worst nightmare.
People don’t call you and say: “Indifferent news!” But maybe they should. I’m sure it is up to the receiver of any news to infer whether it is good or bad.
Steven Bradbury and Adolf Anderssen
After Steven Bradbury won the gold medal for the men's short track 1000 metres event at the Salt Lake City 2002 Winter Olympic Games, he said in an interview:
I was the oldest bloke in the field and I knew that, skating four races back to back, I wasn't going to have any petrol left in the tank. So there was no point in getting there and mixing it up because I was going to be in last place anyway. So (I figured) I might as well stay out of the way and be in last place and hope that some people get tangled up
No one would say he didn’t win the race: he was the first to cross the line, but did he win because he was the best skater on the day? He managed to stay on his feet, which takes skill, something the other four competitors lacked the skill to do. And what makes his gold medal win so entertaining is how flawed it is. Bradbury was last in the pack from the very beginning. He never looked like a winner, he was the donkey in the race. The race unfolded like a Shakespearean comedy, like Bottom receiving the affection of Titania – it is high comedy for the obvious reasons. Adolf Anderssen’s brilliant win at chess is similar and not.
London, 1851. Adolf Anderssen plays what is believed to be the most beautiful game of chess ever. The game is now referred to as the Immergrun Partie (Evergreen Partie), a poetic German term. A game that many chess masters instruct should be learnt by rote. When Anderssen mates, his opponent is ahead in material: a queen, two rooks and a bishop (23 points). Not that it matters, Anderrsen won with two knights and a bishop (9 points).
Anderssen’s victory is recorded like this: White 1 – Black 0. The digital record doesn’t capture how the game was won, and it is how it was won that is beautiful. All chess results are representative of a win or loss, draw, or stalemate. I’ve played many games of chess, and I would like to say all the results have been wins, but they haven’t. I have received many losses, enough draws, and not as many stalemates. In all my games I have never played a game that has resembled anything like Anderssen’s Immergrun Partie,and I can’t imagine I ever will.
Fitting trophy
When I was a teenager, a mate of mine got a girl pregnant. He was sixteen and so was she. He was upset by this as they hadn’t planned to have a child. I remember talking to his mother about his anxiety. His mum was quite philosophical about what had happened. She said: “If you’re going to play the game, you have to accept the trophy.” Fitting.
Good
In a democratic world where political correctness has gone mad there are seemingly endless ways to identify beauty. Everything is beautiful. The word is losing any agreed understanding, or maybe it never had one. If so, maybe the word is redundant. Rather than saying “That is beautiful” we should just say “I like that”. But I don’t think so. Beauty is a moral judgment. If I’m given the choice between a yellow balloon or a black balloon I would take the yellow balloon. My reasons for taking the yellow balloon are:
The yellow is good for me
As opposed to bad for me. This is a subjective truth that has no serious consequence. But what about stealing?
Stealing is good for me.
Stealing is good for the thief in that he gets what he wants, but is it good that it makes him a thief? The problem is with the word good, it needs special attention.
Apropos
The digestive system is beautiful, spider webs are beautiful, bird nests are beautiful, and the sound of thunder is beautiful. The natural world goes without say, it is good: it is what it is and it couldn’t be more fitting to what it is – it is Apropos.
It is unfortunate that I am now forced to retreat into semantics. Unfortunately, in an argument about beauty semantics is going to be difficult to avoid. A word I have stumbled onto that may help define how we begin to reinvestigate beauty is the word apropos. I want to use it as in fitting, or to the purpose, or opportunely. That is when something is Apropos - we can’t imagine how it could be more fitting to the purpose. Bradbury’s slapstick victory and Anderssen’s disguised strategy are not simply competitive, they excite us not just because the result was a win. There is another emotive force at work, there is an art to how their victories unfolded. And it is this that art (poetry and painting and the like) is able to capture (at times). When it does, it is something that resonates so fittingly with us, all of us, that we deem it beautiful.
Now, I’m not pretending to have unlocked some ultimate truth (if there is such a thing), and I certainly haven’t uncovered the secret to what beauty is. All I’m trying to offer is a method for separating what beauty may be from everything else.
Apropos in action
In James Joyce’s Ulysses we can find the gritty and the pretty in words. Words so Apropos that we can label them beautiful.
Mr Bloom entered and sat in the vacant place. He pulled the door to after him and slammed it tight till it shut. He passed an arm through the armstrap and looked seriously from the open carriage window at the lowered blinds of the avenue. One dragged aside: an old woman peeping. Nose white-flattened against the pane.[pp.84]
Nose white-flattened against the pane. Could that line be more physical? The old woman’s face squashed against the glass with enough force to press the blood away from her snout. The ‘white-flattened’ is Apropos since she is watching a funeral procession, and it is Apropos that she is old. Apropos that Joyce finds a short blunt description to describe such a passing detail.
Leopold Bloom leaves the butchershop quickly to catch up with the ‘nextdoor girl’ with the ‘vigorous hips’ he was perving on. He hoped:
To catch up and walk behind her if she went slowly, behind her moving hams. [pp. 57]
Apropos that Joyce describes her buttocks as hams, moving hams. Bloom’s mind, like anyone’s, flicks from one thing to another, mingling thoughts new and old. Because of this Bloom sees a meaty arse while at the butchers.
Bloom having a shit:
Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big to bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! [pp.66]
The Apropos ‘column’ straddles the columns of texts he reads and the shape of a human stool. He is involved in both at the same time: Bloom’s eyes travelling down the page as a turd travels down through his bowels. The elongated movement creates a quiet sinking mood. So relaxed Bloom stays seated:
He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. [pp.66]
Someone so at ease with themself they sit half naked in their own stink. Not a pretty topic, but beautifully described.
Earlier, Stephen Dedalus watches a couple’s dog at the beach.
Their dog ambled about a bank of dwindling sand, trotting, sniffing on all sides. Looking for something lost in a past life. Suddenly he made off like a bounding hare, ears flung back, chasing the shadow of a lowskimming gull. The man’s shrieked whistle struck his limp ears. He turned, bounded back, came nearer, trotted on twinkling shanks. On a field tenny a buck, trippant, proper, unattired. At the lacefringe of the tide he halted with stiff forehoofs, seawardpointed ears. His snout lifted barks at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, everyninth, breaking, splashing, from far, from further out, waves and waves. [pp. 46]
I don’t consciously remember ever watching a dog chase a birds shadow, but I will now. Joyce’s empathy stays with the dog and continues to extend with ‘twinkling shanks’. And his accurate ‘lacefringe’ will forever change how I see the tide-line on a sand beach. But Joyce doesn’t allow us to get lost in a poet’s paradise. He brings us back to the realness of reality. The dog finds a carcass on the beach. The dog’s master cuts through the somewhat humbling-sombre mood with:
– Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel.
Then the master kicks Tatters. How Apropos to who we are: humans without humanity. Joyce continues with the futility of man in creation, focusing on the sea and how it is guided by the cosmos.
Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms, hising up their petticoats, in whispering water swaying and upturning coy silver fronds. Day by day : night by night : lifted, flooded and let fall. Lord, they are weary : and, whispered to, they sigh. Saint Ambrose heard it, sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting the fullness of their times, diebus ac noctibus iniurias patiens ingemiscit. To no end gathered : vainly then released, forth flowing, wending back : loom to the moon. [pp.49]
(The Latin: ‘Days and nights groan over wrongs’ (Rom. 8:22)). The alliterated w and l, and the true metaphor “loom to the moon” are not natural thoughts. We don’t think these feelings in words, but we do feel small in front of the ocean and its relationship with the sun and the moon. Explaining that feeling of insignificance when confronted with the sublime evocatively has been passed on and on, everyone has had a go, and many have captured how they’ve felt and taken us where they’ve been with little symbols, while many have failed.
The chapter ends with Dedalus searching himself for his handkerchief: he can’t find it.
He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully. For the rest let look who will.
Nevermind
People now have good taste in bad – people point to the kitsch as something of worth. The kitsch is fitting to what it is: brash, loud, shiny, and tasteless, even common. I’m originally from Goulburn. I’ve seen enough panel van art and tattoos, eaten enough hamburgers with the lot, and conversed with budgie fanciers and greyhound trainers. eX de Medici’s work may be exciting for Canberra middle-class public servants who still think tattoos are taboo, but her work isn’t so exciting when you catch up with neighbourhood friends who have come out of Goulburn jail with the word “smile” tattooed on their gums. Nevertheless, some believe contemporary artists are being intellectually creative and therefore what they do is more than what it is. But for me it is too often a poor attempt at an analogous relationship with the natural world. It is the high baroque, the rococo, it is the same shininess that struck Narcissus – a celebration of ourselves and nothing other.
