Monday, June 21, 2010

The Pursuit of Beauty

There was a time when Irish monks and clerics held on to the last vestiges of Western culture in their monasteries, waiting for a time when people would once again be able to understand and cultivate their cultural and spiritual heritage.  What level of degeneracy forced these men into a social cocoon?  Are such times upon us again?

The times are so thickly dark that your critical spoon can stand straight up in them.  Engaging in social criticism becomes a more personally weighty affair when you cannot find anything positive to write about.  Recent months have brought me to the question:  On the macro-social level, are we really doing everything wrong?  It certainly appears that way.

I am starting to believe that many individuals choose to live in ignorance in order to protect their hearts.  When your eyes are open and your heart is attuned to truth, then just going into the world can be a heart-rending experience.  True love -- rather than being a vehicle for blind acceptance -- causes us to desire the ideal for each person.  We want men to live informed, beautiful, faithful, and inspired lives, and at the end we want their souls to peacefully drift into an ecstatic meeting with their Creator.  Certainly this isn't too much to ask?  Why can't every man be lead to the truths of his origin, potential, and destiny?

Yet with the sheer difficulty of life -- just dealing with administrative tasks alone can be spiritually crippling -- the urge for escapism can be great.  When what you escape to dwells in the lowest reaches beneath human dignity, the large scale social effects are soon to follow.

***

As a lifelong hockey fan, I journeyed joyfully into the streets of Chicago, happy to be here to celebrate the long-awaited Stanley Cup.  I came to celebrate and soak up the joy.  What I came away with was a sour feeling in my stomach.  While the parade was a joyous affair, it all degenerated from there.  As the masses pressed upon themselves and the alcohol flowed freely, joy was the last thing that people were feeling.  You could see it on people's faces as we inched closer to the main stage -- there was a real tension present.  People pushed and shoved and nearly stampeded at one point.  Many who did not show up already drunk struggled to catch-up to their belligerent compatriots.  One man joyfully climbed and defaced public property, while ten yards away from him some drunken college girls clambered upon a city vehicle, beginning a mock strip-tease.  The shirtless young men next to me yelled "take it off," while I couldn't help but marvel at their shallow, sunken, and clueless eyes.  These people weren't fans, and they were hardly people.  Through it all, the sheer joy of victory was forgotten, the greater spiritual lesson lost before it could even be considered.

Such mass gatherings of people are a good place to gauge the state of a society.  Where do our general values lie?  What is our capacity to experience beauty, victory, and joy?  Can anything be done to reverse our cultural degeneration, or has it reached a terminal velocity on the path to social collapse?

At such times, I am reaffirmed in my mission as an artist.  I cannot be certain whether my music shall find mass appeal or a small niche audience, or whether it will ever be counted worthy of remembrance.  Yet the sheer audacity to follow the certain call of Beauty inspires me.  Beauty has been rejected by the modernists and twisted by popular culture, yet it still desires to be manifested truthfully.

What is Beauty, you say?  It is not subjective in the least.  It is not an opinion.  Beauty is Truth.  Truth is Love, and Love is God.  Beauty cannot be represented unless one is turned in the direction of God.  Some artists do this purposefully, while others -- in imitating nature -- do so inadvertently.  Yet there is no other way to Beauty, because Beauty is the person of divinity.

The creation and cultivation of Beauty is my part to play in this game.  Perhaps we are the vanguard of a revolution in Truth, where beauty, faith, and reason will once again be the ruling pillars of Western society.  Yet if these pillars erode entirely, our society will collapse.  The trial and cleansing by fire will come, as it has throughout history whenever man forgets his place.

The Irish monks truly did save civilization, preserving the blueprints to the pillars of western society.  The world around them was drunken, brutal, and indifferent.  Yet these men retained their sanity, preserved what was good, and prayed for a better day.  Regardless of what happens, we must do the same.