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The Qualities of Beauty
A conversation with J. Ruth Gendler

by D. Patrick Miller

 

“Our hearts yearn for beauty. In the Kabbalah, beauty, called tiferet, is where spirit and form meet and the human and divine are in balance. Linked to compassion and harmony, beauty is at the very center of the Tree of Life.”

Although we often treat beauty as a superficial quality of appearance, it can be felt as a radiant resource at the heart of our lives. In Notes on the Need for Beauty, J. Ruth Gendler offers us many new ways to look at this elusive, complex, and paradoxical quality. She illuminates the riddles of beauty and ugliness, considers the relationship between beauty and love, and gives voice to the soul’s need for beauty.

Ruth was the first writer I ever met to successfully self-publish her work. The Book of Qualities was launched independently in 1984 and taken over a few years later by HarperCollins. Worldwide, the wise and winsome volume of poetic prose that characterizes such qualities as Pleasure, Anger, Terror, Beauty, and Change has sold over a quarter-million copies. It has also been widely excerpted and adapted for theater and dance performances, and inspired countless workshops and classes for both adults and children that Ruth has conducted as an independent teacher of creativity and a California Poet in the Schools. The idea of the Qualities has also been used by many teachers to teach personification and values. Ruth compiled a HarperCollins poetry anthology entitled Changing Light: The Eternal Cycle of Night and Day, which featured an international selection of myths, poems and prayers accompanied by 35 of Gendler’s paintings and collages. She has been offering workshops and classes on different faces of creativity for twenty years.

Ruth Gendler and the Lineage Dance Company in “Beneath the Skin: An Exploration of Human Qualities” at the 2008 Pasadena Arts Festival. Photo by Richard Stangl

In Notes on the Need for Beauty (DaCapo Press, 2007; order below), illustrated with her own drawings, Ruth unifies the energies of writing and art in an authoritative yet open-minded manner. While Notes provides the sort of exhaustive overview of its subject that one might expect of an academic treatise, Ruth’s style favors wonder and feeling over intellectual analysis. If one is looking for a concise philosophical summary of the meaning of beauty, a scathing indictment of the beauty industry, or ten tips for maintaining a gorgeous complexion, Notes on the Need for Beauty is not the book to open. But if you’re curious about the meaning of beauty in your life and willing to have that curiosity deepened and enriched, Ruth Gendler’s explorations will certainly take you there.

“I’ve asked people in my classes to write about what they’re a connoisseur of,” Ruth told me. “That’s a way to know what we think is beautiful. I could say I’m a connoisseur of colors or textures, but really I’m a connoisseur of questions. I like the idea of leaning into questions, growing into questions, and getting different answers to the same questions. The questions themselves are beautiful.”

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Indigo Bowl and Ladder © 2005 J. Ruth Gendler

Out of all the qualities you’ve written about, how did you choose beauty for an extended study?
Gendler: When I was twenty-four, well before I’d written Qualities, I wrote four pages that I titled “Notes on the Need for Beauty.” This was essentially a rant about modern ugliness. I was working an office job and I was aware of disliking the flatness of the Xerox machine, the terrible carpet in airports, the rudeness of some people… and I had an increasing sense of our lack of contact with nature. I felt there was a lot of ugliness in the world, and that it was subtly and not so subtly harming us. So I had this idea, in the form of a lament, a long time ago. Traveling to Bali, I had an epiphany that beauty is stronger and more immense than the ugliness we are so often surrounded with.  Then while I was there, I noticed a genuine sweetness to life that further enhanced my thinking about beauty.

There have always been two strands to my experience. One is a feeling that there’s so much beauty in our lives if we just stop and look: pick up that stone and bring it in, or watch kids moving on a playground. There are so many opportunities to see beauty in our lives if we’re really looking. The other strand of experience is that seems to be a lot of harshness, a thoughtlessness in our cultural environment. We live lives that are so separated from making things with craft and intention.

Recently I saw a documentary about the photographer Edward Burtynsky, who does amazing pictures of industrial waste, shipbreaking, and other “decline of civilization” scenes which have what you might call a terrible beauty. Is beauty always attractive? Can we say there’s such a thing as “terrible beauty” without changing the meaning of the word?
Gendler: People have asked me, is gasoline beautiful? Can a microphone be beautiful?  I’ll talk about things like that, but I prefer to talk about beauty and ugliness. In fact people are surprised that I talk so much about ugliness. As a vast generalization, the last hundred years or so have seen a lot of art focused on being truthful or confrontational, and deliberately not being pretty or decorative. There’s a lot of wonderful art made that way, but we’ve also become afraid of art that’s noble or uplifting. These are complex questions. It’s not an assignment for artists right now to create works of beauty, but often artists assume that if they try to create beauty, it will be taken only as decoration, or fodder for advertising.

But does beauty always attract? Is that a defining characteristic of the quality?
Gendler: I try to keep several definitions of beauty going, and enlarge the definitions over time. I do make a distinction between beauty and physical attractiveness, because the latter has an agenda which includes the continuation of the species. I think there are so many other kinds of beauty. One of my definitions is that beauty is the road between the senses and the soul, or the road between the intimate – the fine-fringed leaf – and the immense, the mountains and the sky and the stars.

James Hillman’s definition is that beauty is how the gods attract us into life. I find beauty to be dynamic and energetic, something that is in relationship, rather than a static quality of things. Beauty also changes all the time, even on the level of the attractiveness of people. If you look into a yoga class when people are just coming in and looking tired, then look again an hour and a half later, some of those same people are radiant. Even attractiveness has to do with being lit from within.

Living Story © 2004 J. Ruth Gendler

For all its focus on cosmetic appearances, do you think America is a particularly unbeautiful culture?
Gendler: I haven’t lived in another culture long enough to answer that. Anecdotally, there seem to be cultures that move much more slowly. The pace we move at works against a personal relationship to beauty. As I write in the book, I think beauty thrives on attention. Anyone who’s made art or listened closely to music knows that; when we give our attention to something, we can go so much deeper into it. On the other hand, there are so many Americas with different kinds of ethnic beauty. Perhaps it’s the common culture of advertising and mass marketing that makes America seem ugly in general.

My understanding is that the Japanese language has a larger, more complex vocabulary for beauty. There is the paradoxical phrase wabi-sabi, which is a celebration of the humble, the impermanent, the irregular. It’s not so involved with separating beauty from ugliness; it’s a condition of coming to terms with what you consider ugly. It was a reaction to the tea ceremony becoming very ornate; there was a rediscovery of beauty in the humble.

Then there is the idea of jolie-laide, a French phrase meaning “pretty/ugly.” It’s associated with people who are not thought of as pretty or gorgeous in the usual sense, but are nonetheless compelling and attractive. Joanne Gitlin, a writer who reviewed a biography of Coco Chanel, described her as jolie-laide and commented, “Even a homely Frenchwoman can make a pretty American look as bland as Barbie.” We’ve gotten so involved with what’s pretty or decorative, but there’s a greatness in beauty that goes beyond those qualities.

 At one point you wrote, “No one is allowed to be beautiful for long.” What did you mean by that?
Gendler: I think that’s best understood by women in our culture. Look at how much delight the tabloids take in dressing down celebrities as they age. There’s a mixture of envy and contempt in our celebrity culture, a kind of meanness around women and their appearance.

I do wonder sometimes if it’s harder for women nowadays because of the exponential increase in Photoshopped imagery. People are comparing their faces to those of people who don’t actually exist. One thing that influences my feelings about this is my experience with Eutony movement, a wonderful European practice of somatic awareness and yoga. People aren’t static, and how they look actually changes all the time. But we’re dominated by static visual images that are held up to us as ideals. I heard a story about an African man describing a beautiful woman without reference to her looks; he talked only about how she carried herself and what her voice was like, everything that had to do with that woman in motion.

Speaking of Photoshop, I’m an addict myself because there are wonderful visual things one can do with it, so much more easily than in the days of cut-and-paste. But are we losing touch with the physical craft of beauty in a digital age?
Gendler: The more time I spend on the computer, the more time I need in the garden! I’m uncomfortable making huge generalizations about culture, but I do wonder about how we stay embodied, stay in our senses when the trend is toward ever more mental activity. How do we pay attention to the inner rhythms of human beings, of plants and animals? The speed of life now is so seductive; we can do everything so fast that I don’t know how we’re going to learn to be patient and go deeper. My whole life is a struggle between patience and impatience. I have a very fast mind; on the other hand, I change rather slowly. I get interested in a lot of things, but I also need to stay with some of them for a long time. I’m overwhelmed with the amount of information, choice, and noise we have. I like to say that beauty opens the door to wisdom and creativity, but that door is pretty quiet; you have to listen carefully as it opens.

This reminds me of advice from a holistic health teacher, that one of the most effective natural antidotes to anxiety is to deliberately notice details of the world around you. In other words, paying closer attention to your surroundings actually counters fear. So this makes me think that whenever we’re in fear, part of the problem is that we’re alienated from beauty.
Gendler:In The Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez, the story of four sisters who fought against the Dominican Republic dictator Trujillo, there’s a passage from a letter by a political prisoner who says, “After the fear, the hardest thing to get used to is the lack of beauty.” While Victor Frankl was in a concentration camp, just noticing the experience of the sunset or remembering his wife’s face gave him something to keep going for. And he came out and developed Logotherapy. Beauty doesn’t save everybody, but it can inspire people to act with love for the world. I don’t want to say that beauty can save us all, but it does inspire us to come forward with what we care about, or to protect what we care about. In that sense beauty is deeply ecological; the whole ecology movement is based on beauty because we don’t want to destroy the earth’s magnificence.

The Bird of Imagining © 2004 J. Ruth Gendler

When we want a beautiful piece of art, what are we really trying to possess? A form of magic, a reminder of God, a reminder of a better reality?
Gendler:It may be something that’s just in tune with our being, that helps us live in a more harmonious way. I’m speaking more as the maker of art, but when I think of what I want in my environment, it’s pictures or objects that bring me more harmony with myself. I’m not talking about status-driven art collecting. Even in that case, what the personality is doing and what the soul is doing may be two different things.

How does one’s grasp of beauty mature over time? Are there things that used to be beautiful that no longer are, or do you now see beauty in things that never caught your eye before?
Gendler: At the moment I can’t think of anything that I once saw beauty in that I don’t now. I’ve heard people talk about that, like the rug that once pleased a woman but doesn’t anymore. I certainly feel like I can see beauty in things and people that I didn’t use to. I can much better appreciate the beauty of imperfections in people now; I think that’s a way of maturing.

In the book I tell the story of a Montessori teacher who goes to substitute, and first sees the class as a group of kids who are so ordinary compared to those she usually teaches –“My kids are so beautiful!” Then when she returns to her own class she realizes that her kids seem more beautiful because she knows them. In terms of romance, we may fall out of love as we stop seeing beauty in the other; but the reverse can also be true, that as you get to know a person or a place better, you see more beauty.

Then, do you think you see more beauty when you’re not projecting it?
Gendler: Of course! I think that the more we truly see, the more we see beauty. Most of the time I’m not beyond polarity, living in a state where I think everything is beautiful, but many things that weren’t beautiful to me before I was immersed in these questions have become so. For me, one of the most useful definitions of ugliness is anything that numbs our hearts and souls. So there is a moral component to ugliness, in that sense. I have a tremendous respect for craft, intention, and making something well. I love the Thomas Merton quote that a Shaker chair is beautiful because it’s made by someone who believes an angel could sit in it.  I hinted at that when I wrote in the Contentment quality that she knows where everything comes from—who dyed the yarn and who wove the rug and who planted the apricot trees.

Is there a connection between beauty and spirituality?
Gendler: There are many, many connections. The first one that comes to mind is the beauty of light, radiance, and color. Sunrise and starlight are both beautiful and historically sacred. I think of a line from the poet Kathleen Raine: “not that the light is holy, but that the holy is the light.” The fact that the second chapter in my book is about light is my way of bowing to the light, something that’s absolutely physical and absolutely spiritual. But these are hard things to talk about! I like to imagine light in our bones. So much of my personal journey has been to feel more embodied rather than transcendent, so I’m not always oriented to the language of spirituality.

We think we’re seeing what is, but often we’re very far from what is; we’re seeing our fears or wishes. We have so little ability to look at ourselves; in fact we can’t see half of ourselves because we can’t see our backs! We really do mirror each other, and mirroring is different than projecting on each other. The question is whether we can offer a more loving reflection, a clearer mirror. That’s where beauty may be found.

How can we increase the experience of beauty in our lives?
Gendler: We are given so much that’s wonderful in our lives; there is beauty in so many ordinary places. I write about walking in several parts of the book. One of the easiest ways to rediscover beauty is to take a walk every day. Someone asked me if that doesn’t get boring, and all I could say was, “It’s never the same.” The light is different every day, even at the same time of day. There’s so much to notice in our environment that connects us, if we let it.

In the film “Wings of Desire,” the angel has all the wisdom and the immensity of eternity, but he’s hungry to know what the color red is, or what the weight of a stone is, or what it’s like to be cold. As I’ve looked at that movie over the years, it’s such a beautiful song of praise to what we get every day, being alive. Even with all our suffering, we are in the midst of great beauty.

For more information on Ruth Gendler’s artwork and public appearances, go to www.ruthgendler.com.

Photo portraits of Ruth Gendler by D. Patrick Miller.

D. Patrick Miller is a widely published magazine writer, independent publisher, and literary consultant. His latest book is Understanding A Course in Miracles: The History, Message, and Legacy of a Spiritual Path for Today (Celestial Arts). He is a member of the Authors Guild and serves as president of the northern California chapter of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA).

For information on excerpting, reprinting, or reposting this interview, contact info@fearlessbooks.com.

 

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