“To me, beauty is agency.”
This sentence, which I first heard 6 months ago in an interview of Neri Oxman, has proven to be one of the most stubborn earworms of my life. A self-described “material ecologist,” Neri believes her job as a designer is not to manipulate material but to build a future in which the human world springs directly from nature’s needs. Considering how varied those needs are, and how at odds they can be at every scale – ecologically, societally, even within ourselves – is there harmony to be found at all?
“There is no harmony in the universe.”
Deep in the Manu Rainforest, walking back to my hut in the early morning, I can’t distinguish droplets of mist from gnats and moths. Born in the wake of yesterday’s downpour, the new generation of insects crowds my headlamp, relentlessly battering my forehead and scraping my eyelashes. To my left, leafcutter ants stream down the Cecropia tree, carrying chopped green bits on their backs. They braid messily down the path so that I can’t avoid stepping on them. I give way to the violence, swatting with welt-caked hands, squishing with knee-high boots that protect me from coral snakes and vipers.
—
Earlier in the rainy season, the collapse of a barrier in a nearby tributary unleashed a flood into the retreat center, wiping out their supplies and crafts, wrecking structures that they’d cut, planed, and painstakingly crafted. Steve, a shaman in training, consulted the river spirits: Why?
We were angry at the gold miners, came the answer. Spirits make mistakes too.
—
Usually their motives are more mysterious. In the community hut, Vicky, Steve’s mother, tears up as she describes the loss of her 3-year old son, who was swept away by the Madre de Dios many years ago. “The river spirits wanted him back. I don’t know why.” She wipes her eyes and turns to Steve, and for a moment they look at each other with the same devious smile. “They leave us with the ugly ones.”
For the Harakbut people, spirits are an evasive but mundane presence, to cry about and joke about, agents of devastating consequence and minute trifles. They’re everywhere – in the water, in the trees, and quite literally in your face: gnats crowding your headlamp.
I think of my old home in San Francisco, where the wellsprings of life are slow, distant presences. Squares of farmland from the airplane window. A lone ocean liner on the horizon, lit orange in the golden hour.
—
While visiting the Amazon, Werner Herzog gave a colorful rant on the thicket of life around him:
There is some sort of a harmony… It’s the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle… we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel…
We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe.
On some level, this is obvious – on another, unacceptable. Is that really the message of the Amazon, that the world is a mess, that monkeys eat monkeys and bugs eat bugs?
Or is it that the essence of this “overwhelming and collective murder” is somehow deeply moving, intrinsically worthwhile, even beautiful?
He’s right about one thing though. We, as people, are unfinished.
“Nature is beautiful, not because it changes beautifully, but simply because it changes.”
If there’s one artist whose work I find truly ugly, it’s Nam June Paik, the father of video art. Most of his pieces are brutalist constructions of screeching, beeping, and epileptically blinking televisions. One is a shittily built robot shitting metal. It’s the artistic equivalent of getting your eyes ripped out by a horde of Amazonian ants.
There’s a harsh truth buried in his gnarled messes of metal and plastic: this is our world now. Paik, who “spoke many languages, none of them well,” once said in his heavily accented English, “Skin has become inadequate in interfacing with reality. Technology has become the body’s new membrane of existence.”
When you look at it this way, the beauty is in our search for a voice through machines that terrify us, frustrate us, and grate against our senses. We speak through machinery in the accent of flesh.
We have no choice. As Paik says, “There is no rewind button for life.”
—
George Oppen echoes this line in an interlude about the simple lives of our ancestors:
They made small objects
Of wood and the bones of fish
And of stone. They talked,
Families talked.
They gathered in council
And spoke, carrying objects.
They were credulous,
Their things shone in the forest.They were patient
With the world.
This will never return, never,
Unless having reached their limitsThey will begin over, that is,
Over and over
Yes, it’s easy to see beauty – even when surrounded by death and suffering – when your things shine in the forest, when life is a dance of expression and surrender, when your family huddles for warmth each night under the stars. But for most of us, this world is gone, and Oppen’s point is that there are two possibilities: (1) we are continuously unfolding into brave new worlds, or (2) we’re witnessing stages in an endlessly repeating cycle of birth and death.
I don’t know which is scarier.
“A story is like a snow globe.”
So we search for agency. Nature changes, and we respond with art, stories, action. Maybe, we tell one another, any beauty or ugliness, humor or pain that we imagine is a matter of how we see the whole.
To George Saunders, a beautiful story is an image of an occurrence steeped in the dreams, desires, and sorrows of everyone involved,
like a snow globe that you can walk around and go, “Oh, if I imagined these events from this point of view, it would look like this. If I change the perspective, it looks like that.” In the end, the holographic view of the story would be infused with total compassion because you'd know every angle and they would all seem completely reasonable.
The higher view.
“The monster was exploding.”
Contrast this with the view from the trenches. Ugly things: people unknowingly controlled by deceptive political voices; processed meats cobbled from obscure byproducts of factory farms; credit default swaps on subprime mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations. Things where underlying forces are disguised, convoluted, and dangerous. Monsters.
In the final chapter of The Big Short, about the housing bubble of the 2000s, Michael Lewis paints a disturbing picture:
The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan there was no sign anything important had just happened. The force that would affect all of their lives was hidden from their view. That was the problem with money: What people did with it had consequences, but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other.
Our culture is so odd, the forces of agency so buried, that we often can’t comprehend its oddness. And when we can’t, things get ugly.
“The plan is an illusion.”
In Toward an Architecture, Le Corbusier says something baffling: “The plan is an illusion.”
A beautiful blueprint, he says, isn’t the goal; the goal is a beautiful place for people to live, to walk, to enact their own lives under the guiding intention of the architect:
To make a plan is to clarify, to fix ideas … It is ordering these ideas such that they become intelligible, feasible, and transmissible. So it is necessary to manifest a clear intention.
In reality, axes are not perceived in the bird’s-eye views shown in plans on the drawing board, but from the ground, by a man standing erect and looking before him.
—
Guitar at his side, folk singer Zhang Gasong looks longingly out of his window on a drive through a desert plane.
“It’s so flat, so barren,” he says.
“Yes.” The driver sits silently at the wheel for a bit, then responds, “It wasn’t always this way. There were mountains here. Before the government flattened them.”
“Reality itself is too twisted.”
LAS VEGAS, FEB 2024 — Living at home tests your patience. In my family, every decision is fraught with conflict: Should we get knife cut or hand-pulled noodles? Should we wait for the waiters to clear the table or sit down now? Everyone feels responsible for the decisions of everyone else. It’s a mess, a tangled canopy of vines, orchids, and insects.
A beautiful mess. Like the Las Vegas desert valley that we live in. It’s a town of manipulation, disguise, and greed – and yet, from where I stand on the city’s westernmost rim, it looks like an oasis of light and wonder in an arid basin. I can’t decide what to think about it.
“No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs,” says Raoul in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. “Reality itself is too twisted.”
—
Am I making a mistake, uprooting my life in California to live here, moving to New York in March? In a few ways, almost certainly. But life itself is too twisted to worry about fucking it up.
—
Like so many of Robert Frost’s poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is about a dilemma:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Sometimes the choice is about one beautiful thing over another. You surrender to the woods, or you surrender to the city. Choose your weapon.
✤
Some related art
Beauty is agency – or, more precisely, beauty is clarity of agency. Beauty is the staggering awareness of countless motivations, viewpoints, and life forces opposing and harmonizing toward mysterious ends.
Ugliness is torture, war, frustration, the view of the one buried in uncontrollable forces. There can be both at once. Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them” takes a higher view of the cruel indifference of war:
Forward he cried
From the rear to front line
Die-ie-ie-iedThe general sat
And the lines on the map
Moved from side to side
In one of the ugliest situations of possible – masses of young people dying for no reason – Roger Waters finds a chilling affirmation of life, the nobility of taking the burden of injustice with grace and courage.
—
Jimi Hendrix is the epitome of finding a voice through machines – a howling, haunting voice that smacks you right in the chest.
—
Buddhist Mandalas often depict immense cosmic struggle and earthly suffering in a beautifully circular composition. This one is not exactly that – it’s a depiction of a palace with the goddess Jnanadakini at the center. But it’s gorgeous so, here.