On the Beautiful and the Sublime

  I have heard a peasant calling beautiful the ordered disposition of his farm, or what he called ordered, an invisible pattern of work superimposed to the land, together with its expectancies, projects and dreams. Homer came to mind, calling beautiful the wind when it blew the sail in a propitious manner. How conditioned to our basic emotions our sense of beauty! The best poets have n-arized them so much that they seem new entities. And these entities, when they are related to the social emotions give the ground for our modern sense of beauty. Sexual attraction, the tool for the perpetuation of the species, became the cosmic force of a blessed existence, the rewards of paradise, the inexhaustible fountain of energy and delight. Motherhood, no less divine and beautiful in our songs, gave a model for the understanding of the universe, and we contemplate it through the eyes of art in religious ecstasy, i.e., in a self-reassuring communal action.

  What do we mean when we say that a person is beautiful? Besides the mating intentions, conscious or unconscious, it is basically an statement of approval, the fact that someone fits in our plans, in a narrative about life and ourselves that can be more or less transcendentalized, but that expresses basically the emotion of the peasant in relation to his land. And what do we mean when we say that a thing or an action is beautiful? Well, the very same statement of approval. The concept of beautiful is related to property and possession, to the actions of pertaining and belonging, which imply a narrative of identity, which demand the reassurance of identity. In this sense is opposed to the experience of the sublime, which annihilates identity. Our concept of beautiful shows our limitations, the frontiers of our individuation, our narrative of identity, and therefore, is a secondary concept for the artist of the limen, like a subsidiary reference frame forgotten when the adventure of creation begins.