Last week I did not publish a post and have felt like a shell of a human ever since. That ends today with a quotes on beauty, a fact and advice learned from Kevin Kelly in a podcast, a recipe we tried and liked, cookies too, and what the scenery is like here. (Hint: it's gone from still-hibernating frigidity last week to "where are my t-shirts?" this week.)
1. Rebecca Solnit's Thoughts on beauty
Solnit published Orwell's Roses in October 2021. Of the many thought-provoking passages, there are these ones on beauty. (They lack page numbers because I listened to the audiobook and transcribed them later.)
The word beauty is one of those overly roomy words, frayed around the edges, ignored through overfamiliarity, often used to mean purely visual beauty. But the kinds of beauty that the Oxford English Dictionary enumerates include many that are not visual, including "that quality of a person or thing which is highly pleasing or satisfying to the mind; moral or intellectual excellence," an admirable person, an impressive or exceptionally good example of something.
In her book On Beauty and Being Just, the scholar Elaine Scarry notes that among the complaints about beauty is that contemplation of it is passive - "looking or hearing without any wish to change what one has seen or heard." It's a definition startling in its simplicity. What one does not wish to change can be the desirable condition realized, and it's where aesthetic and ethical standards meet. She contrasts that with "looking or hearing that is prelude to intervening in, changing, what one has seen or heard (as happens in the presence of injustice)." Those obsessed with productivity and injustice often disparage doing nothing, though by doing nothing we usually mean a lot of subtle actions and observations and cultivation of relationships that are doing many kinds of something. It's doing something whose value and results are not so easily quantified or commodified, and you could even argue that any or every evasion of quantifiability and commodifiability is a victory against assembly lines, authorities, and oversimplifications.
On how beauty and integrity go together:
Beauty is not only formal, and it lies not only in the superficial qualities that are appealing to the eye or ear; it lies in patterns of meaning, in invocations of values, and in connection to the life the reader is living and the world she wants to see. A dancer's gesture may be beautiful because it is precisely executed move by a highly skilled artist-athlete, but even a gracefully executed kick of a child is ugly. The meaning subverts the form, and elegance of form is always capable of being corrupted by what meaning it delivers. "The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up," Orwell wrote in his critique of the painter Salvador Dali. "If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down it it surrounds a concentration camp." Form cannot be separated from function. And the beauty - or the hideousness - can be in meaning, impact, implications, rather than appearance.
The word integrity means moral consistency and commitment, but it also means something whole and unbroken, uninjured, and it's a quality found in many beautiful things. (...)
The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced through hideous means. People die so that this mine may profit, that these shoes may be produced as cheaply as possible, that that refinery may spew these toxic fumes in the course of producing its petroleum. I have often thought about this disconnection as a lack of integrity that's pervasive in modern life.
2. Learning from Kevin Kelly
Kevin Kelly published, at the top of the month, a book full of advice. He's been a guest on a number of podcasts which is just the kind of promotion I'm most susceptible to. On Conversations with Tyler I learned that costumes are the fist things to vanish from traditional cultures because:
the amount of effort required to make clothing by hand is so enormous. The traditional way you make clothing is you make fibers from wool. You spin the threads, then they have to make into a loom.
It is an enormous amount of energy to make clothing by hand. It’s much cheaper to buy cloth. That’s one of the first things that people do when they have the ability to have money, is that they buy clothing rather than make it themselves. If you’re not taking the homemade cloth and making it into your native costume, and you’re buying a shirt — it’s just easier to put on a cotton T-shirt, which you can almost get for free. The costumes just disappear because they’re not making the entire cloth and fabric by hand.
In the Longform podcast episode, Kelly mentionned in passing his idea about "protopia" and his website offers an explanation: "(...) just because dystopias are cinematic and dramatic, and much easier to imagine, that does not make them much more likely." And, "Protopia is a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. Protopia is much much harder to visualize."
(There’s an 8 minute video about it here.)
3. Celebrating asparagus!
There are three categories of pizza in our house. In order of preference, the first is the gourmet stone-fired kind you can get at fancy restaurants, authentic Italian markets or fancy food trucks. These yield simple pizzas with the extraordinary crust that has bubbles and spots of char. The second category are home-made, they have a simple dough and are cooked at regular oven temperatures and have the toppings your family likes. The third kind are quickly delivered from easy-to-remember phone numbers.
Bearing all that in mind, our home-made pizzas are fine, not fancy, but still a treat, given I'm more willing to make waffle batter than pizza dough on a Friday night. This week, I finally made Smitten Kitchen's Shaved Asparagus Pizza. It's been on my mind a long time considering it's a recipe from her first cookbook published in 2012.
I think I resisted making it because I figured the kids wouldn't like it. I'm not wrong, but this palate-limiting belief has loosened a little in the last while since I've learned how to split meals between the things the adults want to try and the things the kids are comfortable with. The usual dough recipe I use from Jane Rodmell’s Best Summer Weekends was enough for two pizzas, theirs had pepperoni and ours had asparagus. This will absolutely now be part of our spring menu rotation.
4. A basic cookie got good reviews in our house
This recipe for Jam Thumbprint Cookies comes from Cheryl Day’s Treasury of Southern Baking (https://www.amazon.ca/Cheryl-Days-Treasury-Southern-Baking/dp/1579658415) actually garnered special notice from my little teenager.
5. Spot the birds!
Look, I'm sorry, but the landscape scenery here is dead boring. The river is high and everything is brown. But the birds are singing... If nature is not much to look at now, it has a lot to offer your ears.
I don't think I understood in Grade 12 why Silent Spring was the meaningful title it was. Even though I take pictures and look for beauty, walking the dog daily has brought me closer to what Solnit describes in Orwell's Roses:
“I have often thought that much of the beauty that moves us in the natural world is not the static visual splendor that can be captured in a picture, but time itself as patterns, recurrences, the rhythmic passage of days and seasons and years, the lunar cycle and the tides, birth and death. As harmony, organization, coherence, pattern itself is a kind of beauty, and some of the psychic distress of climate change and environmental disruption is in the shattering of this rhythm. The order that matters most is not spatial but temporal. Sometimes pictures convey this, but the habit of seeing in pictures encourages us to lose sight of the dance. Indigenous people who were sometimes despised for not appreciating nature in the English rustic tradition often appreciated it as orderly patterns in time, not as static pictorial pleasure. That is, they might be more inclined to celebrate, for example, key moments in the temporal march of the sun through the year than an exceptionally pretty sunset.”
Happy Friday!