Anam Cara

KEATS SAID: ‘BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY – THAT IS ALL YE know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Keats’s famous lines concur with the medieval understanding of the Transcendentals. In both instances beauty and truth are internally linked. The search for truth is allied with the visitation of beauty. In contemporary thought, truth has become an arid and weary concept. From the practice of people’s lives, one gains a similar impression. There is a relentless search for the factual and this quest often lacks warmth or reverence. At a certain stage in our life we may wake up to the urgency of life, how short it is. Then the quest for truth becomes the ultimate project. We can often forage for years in the empty fields of self-analysis and self-improvement and sacrifice much of our real substance for specks of cold, lonesome factual truth. The wisdom of the tradition reminds us that if we choose to journey on the path of truth, it then becomes a sacred duty to walk hand in hand with beauty.

The twelfth-century Persian mystic Ibn Arabi writes of such beauty in his classic about the spiritual journey, Journey to the Lord of Power: ‘And if you do not stop . . . He reveals to you the world of formation and adornment and beauty, what is proper for the intellect to dwell upon from among the holy forms, vital breathings from beauty of form and harmony, and the overflow of languor and tenderness and mercy in all things characterized by them . . .’

There is a kindness in beauty which can inform and bless a lesser force adjacent to it. It has been shown, for instance, that when there are two harps tuned to the same frequency in a room, one a large harp and the other smaller, if a chord is struck in the bigger harp it fills and infuses the little harp with the grandeur and beauty of its resonance and brings it into tuneful harmony. Then, the little harp sounds out its own tune in its own voice. This is one of the unnoticed ways in which a child learns to become herself. Perhaps the most powerful way parents rear children is through the quality of their presence and the atmosphere that pertains in the in-between times of each day. Unconsciously, the child absorbs this and hopefully parents send out enough tuneful spirit for the child to come into harmony with her own voice. In its graciousness, beauty often touches our hearts with the grandeur and nobility of its larger resonance. In our daily lives such resonance usually eludes us. We can only awaken to it when beauty visits us. Like intimacy, beauty is reserved. It turns us towards that primal music from which all silence and language grow.

3

T

HE

M

USIC OF

B

EAUTY

Because difference constitutes music . . .

Sound is . . . the rubbing of notes between two drops of water,

the breath between the note and the silence, the sound of thought.

. . . To write is to note down the music of the world.

HÉLÈNE CIXOUS

T

HE

M

USIC OF THE

E

ARTH

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE SILENCE. BEFORE ANYTHING WAS, there was silence everywhere. As the universe was born the silence was broken in the fiery violence of becoming. As planets settled in the cold, endless night of the cosmos, silence was restored; and it was a deep and dark silence. We can imagine the cry of the first wind as it billowed against the strange curvature of new mountains and warmed over the restless, boiling oceans. In time, the earth settled and entered the adventure of its own journey. The rippling of waters and the wail of the wind were the only sounds until the arrival of the animals. Gradually the earth developed its own music. Streams gave voice to the silence of valleys. Between the mountains and the ocean, rivers ferried the long songs of landscape. In fresh spring wells the dreaming of stone mountains sounded forth. And from infinite distance the moon choreographed each sequence of tides. As the memory of the earth deepened, the wind built into a Caoineadh – a huge keening. It was as if the music of the mourning wind voiced the distilled loneliness of the earth. Who knows what presences depended on the wind in order to come to voice or how long they have waited for voice. The wind is the spirit-sound of the ancient earth.