#6 Beauty & Radical Joy
Dear friends & colleagues, dear faraway nearby,
I hope this letter finds you in a place of hope and if not, that this letter helps you to connect to a place where you are able to believe in the potentiality of things. Oh, and in case you're wondering, let's just pretend that this letter finds you at the very end of June :-)
I like to use June for a Mid-year check-in, to adjust my intentions I've set at the beginning of the year and to take temperature of the things that happened and what I like to do with the second half of the year. It's a time a like to flip through journals and I did find notes about two books that informed this letter:
In 2020 I've read Elaine Scarry, "On Beauty and Being Just" and really liked her connection between beauty and justice. In her book she talks that beauty presses us for a greater concern for justice and that both words, beauty and justice, have a shared English synonyme: fairness.
"Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable"
[...]
“Our desire for beauty is likely to outlast its object because, as Kant once observed, unlike all other pleasures, the pleasure we take in beauty is inexhaustible. No matter how long beautiful things endure, they cannot out-endure our longing for them.”
[...]
“Beauty as lifesaving.
Beauty quickens. It adrenalizes. It makes the heart beat faster. It makes life more vivid, animated, living worth living.”[..]
“Beauty as a “greeting”. At the moment one comes into the presence of something beautiful, it greets you. It lifts away from the neutral background as though coming forward to welcome you – as thought the object were designated to “fit” your perception.”
[...]
When one goes on to find “better,” or “higher,” or “truer,” or “more enduring,” or “more widely agreed upon” forms of beauty, what happens to our regard for the less good, less high, less true, less enduring, less universal instances? Simone Weil says, “He who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the world itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before.” I have tried to set forth the view here that beauty really is allied with truth. This is not to say that what is beautiful is also true. There certainly are objects in which “the beautiful” and “the true” do converge, such as the statement “1 = 1.” This may be why, though the vocabulary of beauty has been banished or driven underground in the humanities for the last two decades, it has been openly in play in those Šelds that aspire to have “truth” as their object—math, physics, astrophysics, chemistry, biochemistry— where every day in laboratories and seminar rooms participants speak of problems that are “nice,” theories that are “pretty,” solutions that are “beautiful,” approaches that are “elegant,” “simple.” The participants differ, though, on whether a theory’s being “pretty” is predictive of, or instead independent of, its being “true"."
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The second notes I came across were about the poet Toi Derricotte and one line in her poem “The Telly Cycle, “joy is an act of resistance.” With that one line, she gave so many an opportunity to rethink the work of transformative justice.
Here an unfinished list of things that brought me joy lately:
The loud laughter of my baby and the repeated acts of joy this little human encounters throughout the day
Being fully vaccinated and finally able to committ to shy future plans
Friends and family
Revisiting notebooks & journals
Long walks in the cooling climate of the forest, in particular during the latest heat wave
Being able to visit my favorite Chinese restaurant in ages
Getting a new haircut
Being able to cross the border and visit some family members
Rhubarb cake (My absolute favorite recipe is this one> [German])
Gardens a social gathering space
Things I've been working on
I wrote about Claude Bühler who is the founder of the feminist venue "Salon Vert" sort of a micro residency program where she invites female and queer musicians and artists. We talked about art a container of values and her understanding of founding a feminist network. Read the whole piece here> [German]
I had the absolute pleasure to do this conversation with artist and actress Tina Engel in the context of her new exhibition at Galerie Michaela Helfrich in Berlin. We talked about the dark side of fairy tales, the wisdom of age and the deep source of inspiration from nature. See our conversation here> [German]
Recommendations
Reading
V&A insists it has ‘responsibility’ to tell truth about collections
How Tove Jansson’s love of nature shaped the world of the Moomins
I participated in the conference #writingwithcare (rage) where motherhood and writing was debated and came across the manifest of more mothers for the arts
The climate crisis requires a new culture and politics, not just new tech
I can't wait! Venice Biennale 2022 title inspired by Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington
Other arts are political, why not gardening?
What brought you joy lately? What new practice of radical joy are you trying to practice? I'd love to hear from you. Just reply to this letter or send me a message via anabelroro@gmail.com
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Thank you for being here, your presence is a gift.
In Joy and with Care,
Anabel