Beauty

Beauty is the ultimate motive for everything.

I developed this phrase, in a fevered pre-sleep, while meditating on the meaning of another phrase, this one already well known, ‘beauty will save the world’.

The second phrase comes from a character in a novel, The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The character, who suffers from epilepsy, reasons that with deep concentration, he can develop a perspective on his disease that renders it beautiful, because how could a truth that is accurately understood, be anything other than beautiful, since it is as much a part of creation as one that is more commonly and conventionally appreciated.

So my phrase, ‘beauty is the ultimate motive for everything’, tries to fill in the contours of Dostoevsky’s claim by playing on the double meanings of two words that it contains: ‘ultimate’ and ‘motive’. The first, ‘ultimate’, denotes for me ‘last’ as well as ‘best’; while ‘motive’ denotes both ‘reason’ as well as ‘design’, as in the word ‘motif’.

I got there with the help of another Dostoevsky quote, this time from the novel Demons.

‘Man can live without science, he can live without bread, but without beauty, he can no longer live, because there would no longer be anything to do to the world. The whole secret is here, the whole of history is here’.

In the midst of this meditation, whIch extended throughout the night and into the morning, as well as into the days following, I happened to see a story on a population that lived by scavenging in an enormous garbage dump that was kilometers long. In fact, an entire village has emerged around this dump as people found enough to use, eat and sell from their scavenging alone, to create an economy.

What use would beauty be to these people, I asked myself, to put Dostoevsky’s idiot’s claim, and the other quote, to the test, and what would it look like, what form would it take? These people certainly live without the benefit of science, at least as it is understood in contemporary terms, and as far as bread is concerned, if the term is construed to mean a regular and wholesome food supply, then it is their sad fate to demonstrate that this is also possible.

But what beauty could there possibly be in such a life, and how would it serve as the the ultimate motive, to use my phrase, to keep on living? Before I answer this question, I want to take a brief detour to the theme of reason, as a kind of anti-beauty. Now, reason, and logic, can certainly be beautiful, but they are not sufficient to serve as the ultimate motive, here with a stress on the ‘mot’ of motive, as found in the words emotion, in the spiritual register, and ‘motion’ in the physical one. What might be the reason for getting up each morning with the expectation or hope (and here’s a clue), of finding something to eat, or use, or sell in order to live another day?

No, reason or logic are not sufficient, but beauty is. Only beauty, in the form of imagination, of a better tomorrow and a better life, serves as a sufficient motive. Reason and logic could lead equally to conclusions that life will get better or worse, but probably the latter. Only beauty, and the need for beauty, and the strategies for fulfilling that need, provide a motive, because it fosters that most irrational and illogical of emotions - hope.

So, as always, at some point, I have to ask what any of this has to do with plants. Answering this question never causes any anxiety, because anything and everything has to do with plants. Simply put, plants provide beauty in abundance and without asking for anything in return. They cling tenaciously to rocks in any wind, push themselves up through cracks in sidewalks and asphalted roads, assaulted by traffic and exhaust, producing their leaves and flowers, extending their roots, in search of light, water and nutrition, to continue the existence of their kind into the future. What could be more inspiring, what could be more analogous and concordant, to a group of people who live with similar grit, determination and ingenuity?