Beauty and/as Sacrifice

The nature of sacrifice is never enclosed into a simple transaction. It is never truly a this for that. On the contrary, sacrifice for all its humiliation or punishment accords both parties an equal respect because it demands an exchange of self(ves). It is giving and receiving simultaneously for the good of both and its currency, while only superficially utilitarian and economical, the cause and effect of its exchange is none other than the work of two for one. In simpler words, the giver(s)/receiver(s) enter into a covenant that binds them into the promise of uniting and dissolving into one another.

It is here where Death again comes knocking on our doors. How and why can Death be indeed a muse for us and perhaps the real and only inspiration for anything that is Beautiful? Quite succinctly, Death reminds us of the stark deficiency of the temporal, the now of everything we see, touch, taste, smell and hear. Our vision of it can be likened to an astronaut or sea explorer who gazes into an abyss. One knows that it runs deep but one can't possibly know how deep it runs or at what point that which is immediate becomes profound. Similarly our fascination with death is not so much in knowing that it comes but when it comes and whether or not eternity begins then, or before? I have always remarked that in facing the future we get anxious in not knowing when the present ceases to be so and gives way to eternity. Just when does eternity begin?

Beauty is not a supplement. It is truth. But our knowledge of her is limited because of the displacement caused by Time. We perceive her, but only partially. We know her but we have limited faculties to know how lacking our experience of her is. We are moving to her nonetheless because 'reason' compels us to. The perfect ordering of creation is not static, it tends to a resolution in the future. Thus, we are sailing in an ocean of misery but we have Beauty to hope for and Art as our rudder.

We now return to what this has got to do with architecture. Time and time again, I have found the most profound analogy between the visible and the invisible realities of Beauty are in the words of Jean Luc Marion's "Crossing the Visible". My continuous meditation on his hypothesis of the idol and ikon have nourished me throughout my early 'career' in seeking and opening a window to the unfathomable divine in the earthly.

In his 'treatise' concerning the fundamental differences between the ikon and idol, he sums up that whereas the gaze towards the idol is fixed upon the tangible qualities, the vision of the ikon is an unveiling journey of seeking the divine when the divine also seeks us. He makes comparisons between icons even and makes some poignant remarks about faith. For example, he comments that a religious experience of the one who gazes into an icon of our Lady is only realized when he who beholds the 'image' is also conscious of the gaze of the Madonna on him. In fact, his words (I am merely paraphrasing here) are so profound that one can perhaps extend this same understanding to the appreciation of all art forms besides the visual.

Furthermore, this knowledge concerning the religious experience of 'ikonic' beauty can also be deepened with its thematic coupling with the sacrificial nature of beauty. After all, can we not also conclude that the covenant of sacrifice and the ikonic properties of it complement each other so well, such that without sacrifice there is no ikonic vision and vice versa? Without this 'self-sacrifice' to the divine, we cannot hope for the divine to gaze on us. If the artist does not sacrifice his interests to the Divine Author, his work falls short of the worthiness of our eyes, both visible and invisible. In addressing what John Tavener calls the Dark Age of Art, he proposes that artists must learn once again to be vulnerable, to meditate and to act under the dictates of inspiration. He further supplements his argument by his vehement criticisms of post Renaissance art in the western world. He strongly opines that never before have the 'practical' uses of music as both artistic skill and healing been so divorced. It would be absurd to any Middle Age man or Sufi or mystic to suggest that music wasn't divinely inspired, he says.

The more one contemplates Beauty the more one realizes the interweaving of all things 'necessary' to practical human life. It is only in the past 3 centuries that the interdependence between the divine and earthly has been so severed that humans have erroneously begun to believe that these two 'polarities' cannot work together, nor should they be allowed to. And with the supposed 'death' of religion it is easy to see how values such as sacrifice and hope seem to find little place when we consider what pleasures us in our societies and in our own personal spheres. We conveniently forget that beauty,pleasure and delight in their broadest sense has not only until recently been always the common pursuit of the Divine and the earthly. We have severed ourselves from the primordial nature of Beauty as the feast that pleases both us and the Divine. Is this not the real Life meant for us? The Life that we were meant to live abundantly?

(next: The limited joy of our idolatry)

Carving the Cave - Inside Out

Following the previous thread on death, we now arrive at its relationship to Beauty; and by that, dare I say also involves Truth. In the words of John Paul and John Tavener (the contemporary) what is Beauty but the splendour of the True?

What is this Truth that I am speaking of here? What is true about Death, following my previous 'argument' on the necessity of Beauty to cross the threshold into eternity? It concerns Depth. The most primordial characteristic of Beauty has always been depth. By this I mean to say that the subject is always conscious of the object of desire as being an external to himself. The magnanimity of this truth goes beyond the relative affection between the beholder and the beloved. It also concerns the epiphany of separation, that of having a premonition of the union of all creation as prototype and culmination. The beholder in a sense, realizes that he is both Beholder and Beloved but because of time, they are separated.

As such, it can be said that Life is the displacement of Time and Beauty. We sense these in all things beautiful; a kind of force that runs toward an Eternity that has neither a back nor front, though we are conscious at the moment that we are in an intermediate location that encompasses both time and space. We see it's beauty as proceeding from something, somewhere else and that somehow the vision of it appears predestined, the guest and host find themselves invited to an unknown feast by an Other.

And we crave for it, not so much because we crave for eternity but because all separated things naturally seek reunion. We are separated, Beauty and Truth are now separated from Time because of Life. It is this depth, this potential that announces to us that our Beloved while real and true is clouded, veiled for now but will be unveiled at a later Time. And all beautiful things which proceed from the Beloved, this Only Beauty while distracting us by its temporal beauty, upon closer contemplation only signifies a later, a fuller Beauty in the next; a next we can only meet after Life has come to its close.

All we behold to be beautiful is now both sign, a foreshadowing and a premonition because of Depth. And how may we approach it more, since Truth always attract the beautiful other than by carving ourselves a cave so that the deeper we get into it the more we understand what Light/Truth is because of its relative absence. Enlightenment only arrives out of sacrifice!