The Beauty of an Ephemeral Thing

“The Japanese have a word, AWARE, for the feelings that arise from the beauty of an ephemeral thing.”

Those words were featured in an article that I came across recently while paging through a National Geographic magazine. There it paraded a number of gorgeous photos of various Japanese gardens, and flowers, like the one above, and it was while admiring the offering that I was stunned when I came across this caption, because the sentiment pierced me down to the marrow in my bones. The implied meaning nestles right up next to the way I try to view the world. In fact, once my eyes fell on them, the sentence seemed to lift off the page and floated like a melody cascading down the corridors of my central nervous system.

Ephemeral is the key word here because it hints at the magic at play behind the clockworks. It’s defined as something that lasts for only a brief moment, like an aesthetic insight, as the quote above obviously intended. It’s the flash of intuition that strips away the outward veneer of the object in order to expose the jewel, the gooey treat at the center. It’s there that we can sense the thing being seen is more than the thing itself.

I first learned about Asian cultures through Joseph Campbell, oddly enough, and it was his deep admiration of their aesthetic intuitions that stuck with me, so it did not surprise me to read that the Japanese people had such a highly developed and nuanced definition for beauty, because aesthetic clarity is a fundamental element to their collective repose as a culture. Just consider the precision of Japanese Gardens, for example, with their meditative harmony and sense of serenity. Those gardens are masterworks in aesthetic arrest and can be appreciated as visual meditations, which derives their intent from the Buddhist principle of resting the mind. Along this vein of aesthetic perfection, I remember an interesting account from Campbell where he described witnessing a Japanese Tea Ceremony first hand during a trip to Japan in the 1960’s.

Although he had read deeply about their ancient mythology and culture, he nonetheless had never actually experiencing the country in person. He didn’t realize that these Tea ceremonies were highly formal performances by artists who train for many years learning the intricacies of making, preparing, and serving Tea in these formal ceremonies. The performances themselves are tightly choreographed, with each minuet movement and facial expression of the server being precisely performed based on decades, if not centuries, of strict adherence to tradition, with the performers themselves regarded as highly respected performers. To admirers, these ceremonies are performances in perfection.

But after witnessing a performance first hand, Campbell mentioned to his Japanese host afterward how overtly formal each movement appeared to be. But his friend disagreed saying, “No Joseph, tonight was special. Our server was pushing the boundaries. At several points she risked her reputation with her boldness.”

I recall that story precisely due to his host’s sensitivity to even the most subtle of nuances, which allowed him to intuit forms of expression that are not entirely captured by the eyes. Campbell’s friend was able to see what his own untrained eyes could not, and it is in those lucid moments, if we can indeed capture them at all, that a type of revelation is communicated that can only be defined as “aware”, it seems to me. But to capture them requires a mind infused with a deep sensitivity to another realm of awareness, which is where I want to take you.

The quote below may seem like a stretch to Nietzsche admirers, but I want to pull him into this discussion in order to make a clear distinction to my intentions here. In doing so, I’ll take him somewhat out of context, but due to his own love of aesthetics, I believe he would forgive the injury. His thought comes surprisingly close to what is being suggested in the caption regarding “aware”.

“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things. Then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.”

It’s this particular inflection, “to see as beautiful what is necessary in things”, that strikes me as the same ideal, the same ephemeral recognition defined in the photo essay. To follow Nietzsche’s thought further, simply go back to the photo of the flower. We can all appreciate its intrinsic beauty, its form, texture, color, and delicacies, but they would only be attributes that we assign to it, for the flower wasn’t designed to be beautiful any more than a buzzard was designed to be repulsive. Both simply are what they are, and whatever aesthetic qualities we may assign them is purely subjective based on our own peculiar notions of beauty.

Of course, this does not mean to suggest that Nietzsche was attempting to strip the heart of our subjective tendencies, not at all, but rather to expand the canvas a bit, to see things with a more penetrating pair of eyes, to experience the thing with eyes not simply transducing photons of light into recognizable patterns, but to bring our aesthetic software fully on-line as well.

In fact, I believe Nietzsche introduced the phrase, “what is necessary in things”, to pull back from our subjective impressions in order to reach a deeper and far more insightful understanding of what constitutes true beauty. And it is this peculiar inflection that works as a prod to our lazy predispositions, and hopefully inspires a reevaluation of the thing being considered and to see as “beautiful” what is essential to the thing itself. This not an attempt to merely add some kind of abstract layer of metaphysical meanings, but rather to see the thing on its own terms. There is a deep poignancy here, and if we’re able to meet the challenge, it will drill right down to the marrow of rapture itself.

For my money, few have ever transformed the mere ordinary into the sublime with more poignancy than Walt Whitman. As often happens when I allow my mind to wonder around a bit, Whitman came to mind demarcating this very point, which comes from his “Leaves of Grass”.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And a cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels,
And I could come every afternoon of my life to look at the farmer’s girl boiling her iron teakettle and baking shortcake.

Here Whitman is illustrating the same ephemeral beauty, the same “awareness” at a simple blade of grass, or even the mundane chores of a country girl. Whitman was “seeing as beautiful” what is essential to each, for they each extend from the same ideal.

Stay with me now, because there is an additional layer that needs to be included that highlights this very concept. It comes from my favorite novel, Saul Bellow’s “Henderson the Rain King”, in which the astonishing King Dahfu is relating to Henderson, the books protagonist, the power that his captured lioness, Atti, had over him.

To frame this properly, King Dahfu was attempting to teach Henderson to be more ‘in the moment’ and to drop his predetermined fear of her. It was Dahfu’s hope that Henderson would learn to see Atti with fresh eyes and to appreciate her inherent nature as a wild lioness, and it is this aesthetic intuition that Bellow used as a writer to express something very close to Nietzsche’s theme noted above. The power that Atti held over the King was specifically her essential nature. This is how he described her to Henderson, as they were both secluded with her in a small underground room where there was no escape.

“You ask, what can she do for you? Many things. First, she is unavoidable. Test it, and you will find she is unavoidable…..She will make consciousness to shine. She will burnish you. She will force the present moment upon you.”

Then Dahfu strikes the magical chord.

“What a Christian might feel in Saint Sophia’s church……I absorb from lion. When she gives her tail a flex, it strikes against my heart.”

What an incredible piece of prose that Bellow gave us there with that last line. My knees still buckle at the thought.

To finish up with this little digression, I want to relate a recent moment of synchronicity that occurred the other night, and it happened directly after working on this very note. Before going to sleep, I picked up a random book to read from the stack on my nightstand, as I do every night, and picked a random page to begin. There I immediately came across an idea that is the perfect bookend for this discussion. This comes from Virginia Woolf, which at first, may not appear to match up with my flow of thought here, but stay with me, because I believe it is a critical aspect to all aesthetic appreciation. Here she describes an experience while waiting for her husband, Leonard, to join her for a picnic.

“I remember lying on the side of a hollow, waiting for Leonard to come & mushroom, & seeing a red hare loping up the side & thinking suddenly “This is Earth life.” I seemed to see how earthy it all was, & I myself, an evolved kind of hare, as if a moon-visitor saw me.”

This eerie, almost hallucinatory moment gave Woolf a sense of how she and the hare would have looked to someone who did not view them through eyes dulled by habit. This simple mental hack allowed her to de-familiarize the familiar, which is the absolute key here….to see with fresh eyes. Repetition makes even the most beautiful things appear bland, so pivoting to a different perspective can be a formidable tool we can deploy to wake ourselves up, and stand in awe at the mystery of it all.

Coming across this unique definition of AWARE has reminded me that it doesn’t take some incredible piece of art to pierce me. It’s all around me, I’m actually draped in it….. if I can simply shift my focus and allow a sense of wonder to cut through the clutter of my shallowness.

Or as Bono once sang, “vision over visibility”.