"Beauty May Be Skin Deep, but Ugly is to the Bone."
I don't know who said it, but as I have gotten older, I find it rings more true. This December is known for being the month that celebrates the ultimate expression of beauty: art, in all its forms. From ELLE's December issue devoted to art ranging from architects, artists, fashion, and acting, to the BAFTA Awards earlier this month, the limits of art were paraded and strewn about at a time of year where beauty surfaces and itself is constantly being contested in terms of meaning.
"The Most Wonderful Time of the Year"
Kids jingle belling, carolers, and giving it seems have been replaced with parking lot fiascoes, rudeness, and anger. The most wonderful and what we associate as the most beautiful time of the year, the Christmas/Hanukkah season , seems to be getting uglier and uglier. It was only after reading Umberto Eco's just released On Ugliness, documenting the history of beauty and ugliness in art and society, did I myself begin to wonder about the term beauty, its level of subjectivity and what encompasses it.
When scientists try to 'truthify' beauty they place empirical borders on it such as symmetry and proportion. According to these standards Brad Pitt may be the most beautiful person in the world, and well, many probably wouldn't contest that. However, if we found out Brad Pitt beat Angelina, would that make him less beautiful, possibly even, dare I say, ugly?
"There is No Ugliness in Nature"
Then again, Marcus Aurelius contended that there was only beauty in nature because it was created in the image of its maker. That's an equalizer! I do believe there is no ugliness in nature, until humans intervene and try to play God. That is what happened to Adam and Eve and now why we find ourselves limited in brain capacity. We aren't meant to know all or be all, but many of us try to, this is where materialism and the ego go hungry and get fed, by money, greed, vanity, and well the rest of the deadly sins. This is what I see happening everyday as people compete for the biggest and best presents to give one another during the holiday season, and honestly, it's quite sad. However, this loathing and ugliness, which won Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now praise on Oprah, is not limited, but rather simply exacerbated by this time of year. The ego creates this ugliness that creeps into society and is displayed in the elements of the sensory eye: art, fashion, and therefore limits and at the same time obscures the meaning of beauty.
Perfection in the Imperfections
What Aurelius was really getting at when he said the thing about nature not being ugly, was that God was perfect, and since all of nature, including humanity was created in His image, it too was inherently perfect and as such, beautiful. We have come to associate perfection for beauty, and our computer-like minds always attempt to quantify everything, including these two synonymous terms.
Empirical research has yielded the mathematical formula that our perceptions seem to match. However, it can't account for the beauty we see with our hearts, like the perfect child who suffers from down syndrome or the child born without an arm. They are still perfect and beautiful not in the sense of the eye, but in the sense of the heart. And 2011 looking back was a year full of that kind of beauty, perhaps the truest form, and what God intended for us to see it with. Unfortunately, ego and vanity still got in the way of seeing the real inherent beauty and perfection in what is, and many kids were lost to suicides this year. Luckily, Gaga who fights for the LGBT community and wears gender bending garbs, alongside Adele whose voice is bigger than just her frame, have shown us that beauty starts within. Our hope for 2012 is that this trend continues and that 2012 yields more of these truly beautiful people. But what do we even mean by "truly beautiful?" We mean, people, untouched or airbrushed that do genuinely good and natural things because they want to and they want us to, too. We here at Chasing Pumas resolve this year to see beauty not with our eyes, but with the tool God intended it to be seen, our hearts and we hope you do too.
Happy New Year Pumas!
xoxo,
Pina and the chasing pumas family
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