About Aesthetics and their Influences

Sometime back when, somewhere, sitting around a fire with a group of new found friends drinking wine and listening to music some Irish druid had brought along to the gathering, I was sitting next to a guy, and he was sorta wired and overtalking the music to me, going on about the influences of aesthetics and how they powerfully shape our world, like gravity and magnetics and sunlight and water flow and some such other stuff, and I was half listening cause he was so intense about it, and there was other stuff going on like food and the druid dancing with one of the girls and so on. Anyways the party ended and I went to where I was staying and slept and woke up and went on with the life thing, and at some point realized I had ‘missed’, not turning my full attention to his talking, something I truly did not appreciate nor really understand. He had introduced a completely new view of things, existence, reality, call it what you may, to me, not that easy to do. And I missed it, and all that remained was an echo that kept resonating and wouldn’t go away, aesthetics, aesthetics, aesthetics. So I apologize to the air around me sometimes for his sake, to the ethers in the small hope that some energy may reach him somehow, somewhere, sometime. I mean he was intense but life isn’t perfect, and there it was and so, my loss.

I mean what is are aesthetics? If I do a quick internet search I come up with various bland descriptions like ‘a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of beauty and taste’ or ‘the philosophical study of art’ or ‘the theory of beauty’ or the three or five types of aesthetics and so forth, kinda dull stuff really. So then I google ‘how do aesthetics affect our world’ and come up with references like ‘The Role of Aesthetics in World-Making‘ and how aesthetics are interactive, how we interpret beauty and how it affects us, our psychology and our responses and so on. Still not quite there.

So from my limited contemplations of that night, here are some of my vague recollections and conjectures, as I try to recall the essence of what he was talking about. Most of the above references define aesthetics from the perspective of the perceiver, i.e. ‘I like that piece of art because it is pleasing to my eye’. It is all based on my perception, I and me, as if I am defining what aesthetics are. That discussion that night was more about natural aesthetics, that have nothing to do with me, the tendency of nature to align itself into symmetries and colors, how those influences of water changing into sky, earth into fire are gravitational towards beauty itself, towards elemental arrangements of wonder, mystery, love, and if I happen to recognize it, lucky me. It’s like me deciding gravity is a good thing, whoop-de-do, as if gravity cares at all.

Real aesthetics is a force, as if existence itself is in love with itself and painting itself and dancing itself and discovering beauty over and over because it is the natural flow of things. Think about nature, why do we so often call it beautiful, from a butterfly to a vast expanse of mountains or seascape and sunset, to the nighttime stars? And aesthetics are magnetic, condensing and aligning and attracting yet more forces to itself, the elements, and primary energies that make the world go round and moons around the world and on. We are witness only, as aesthetics are part of the natural world, changing, dynamic, art of the divine, an energy moving through us, around us, to see, to hear, to feel, to nourish us like light, warmth and love.

And we are part of it, it is part of us, the inner tendencies towards the beauties of peace and kindness, health, laughter and always love and love again. It is also growth towards our greater selves, the finding of our anam cara, our internal divinity. That, there is Aesthetics, the powerful pull and subtle push to align ourselves with what makes life magical, to open ourselves to the mystery around us, to grow into that wonder. John O’Donohue once wrote in one of his books, ‘Love is always a recognition’, and my interpretation, not something you do, but something you awaken to that was always there. So it is with the aesthetic, always there, this beautiful, beautiful world, waiting to be recognized.