Anam Cara

Though we have become more helpless and hopeless, we have grown keenly aware of the urgency and necessity for real and positive change. We grow increasingly deaf to the worn platitudes of staid authority. Their forced, didactic tones no longer reach our need. Now we want the experience itself, not the analysis or the membership card to some new syndrome. Notions of self-improvement have become banal and wearisome. The zealots of analysis have become blind. In contrast, beauty offers us refreshment, elevation and remembrance of our true origin and real destination. In this sense, the Beautiful is the true priestess of individuation, inviting us to engage the infinite design that shapes our days and dreams. She does not force on us any manufactured coherence towards which we must falsely strain; this is the diametrical opposite of all forms of fundamentalism. She invites us to surrender so that we can participate in the forming of a new and vital coherence that is native to our desire. In such unsheltered and uncertain times we yearn for this order and coherence, which brings the emerging forms of our own growth into rhythm with the concealed order of creation. Hans-Georg Gadamer catches this need beautifully when he says ‘the experience of the beautiful . . . is the invocation of a potentially whole and holy order of things, wherever it may be’. Indeed, it is part of the disturbance of the Beautiful that her graceful force dissolves the old cages that confine us as prisoners in the unlived life. Beauty is not just a call to growth, it is a transforming presence wherein we unfold towards growth almost before we realize it. Our deepest self-knowledge unfolds as we are embraced by Beauty.

‘T

HE

I

NVOCATION OF A

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HOLE AND

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OLY

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RDER OF

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HINGS’

THIS BOOK PRESUMES THE EXISTENCE AND AUTONOMY OF THE Beautiful as a threshold which holds the real and the ideal in connection and conversation with each other. It does not set out to ground this philosophically; that would be the task of a purely philosophical work. Rather it is intended as a series of encounters with various forms of the Beautiful. The majesty of beauty is its gracious wholesomeness. The Beautiful unifies feeling, thought and dream. The form of this book endeavours to mirror this at-one-ment. This acquaintance coaxes the soul to the land of wonder where the journey becomes a bright path between source and horizon, awakening and surrender. Perhaps, through awakening our hearts to beauty, we can all come to know more intimately what John Keats meant when he wrote: ‘I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds’ (Letter, 18 Oct. 1818).

Kathleen Raine says: ‘Strangest of all is the ease with which the vision is lost, consciousness contracts, we forget over and over again, until recollection is stirred by some icon of that beauty. Then we remember and wonder why we ever forgot.’ Beauty is an endless and elusive theme. What beauty is can never be finally said. This exploration is limited and tentative, yet the hope is that this series of little icons of the Beautiful may compose their own mosaic to become a book that you might dream into . . .

S

WANLIGHT

I.M. TONY O’MALLEY

If it could say itself January

Might brighten its syllables on the frost

Of these first New Year days whose cold is blue.

Meanwhile in this corner of its silence

A weak winter sun lowers down behind

The moor that rises away from the lake.

Beyond reach of light, the shadowed water

Succumbs to this darkening of spirit

That would deny the bog today’s twilight.

All of a sudden something else breaks through

To appear at the far end of the lake

In two diagrams of white, uneven light.

I have never seen white so absolute

And alone, glistening in awkward form

Dreaming across the water a bright path.

As it stirs and changes I see what it is:

Two swans have found the mirror in the lake

Where a V of horizon lets light through

To make them light-source and light-shape in one.

Now they swim and fade through windows of reed

And disrobe the lake of apparition.

I look and look into their vanishing

See nothing. Departing that perfect ground

I knew I had been hungry for blessing.

1

T

HE

C

ALL OF

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EAUTY

Thy light alone –

Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’

EVERY LIFE IS BRAIDED WITH LUMINOUS MOMENTS.