Beauty and Its Wake

There is a line I have always loved in Victor Hugo's novel, Toilers of the Sea (Les Travailleurs de la Mer): "Melancholy is the joy of being sad."

In the novel, Gilliat, a noble but modest fisherman dedicates himself to recovering the steam engine from a shipwrecked vessel off the Guernsey coast. The owner of the ship promises to whomever can bring back the said machine can have his niece, Durechette's hand in marriage. 

Gilliat has been in love with Durechette since she first wrote his name in the snow on the way home from church. Of course this should give the reader some indication of the novel's outcome. Like Hugo's other famed masterpiece, Paris de Notre-Dame (aka The Hunchback of Notre Dame), there is no happy ending. The protagonist takes on the quest but he is vanquished by the transience of human promises. 

The novel is classic and tragic because the character is doomed from the beginning. We relate to his quest (though the scenes wherein Hugo describes the method by which Gilliat recovers the steam engine can be tedious) and in the novel's final chapter, the hero resigns himself to his fate, letting the very sea he fought against take him to the next world. 

I wasn't so much haunted by the novel when I read it in my late teens,  more the ideas, the simplicity of the story. The joy of being sad resonated with me. Even to this day.

There's nothing like rain on a Sunday morning in August. I like it because it rains on the beaches where people might want to go. It rains on the soccer fields and playgrounds. It means people have to go inside themselves instead of escaping into the exterior where so much of life takes place. It means even the desolate can be beautiful.

And if we don't visit ourselves, or listen to quieter thoughts, television and other digital distractions won't help. The reason we are faced with harder things is because we refuse to see reality, to see how impenetrable and complex life is. Who hasn't returned from a terrible illness to fall in love with the mundane things one has previously overlooked? I also think of the oft quoted Tennyson remark of it being better in life to love and lose as opposed to never having the chance to love.

These thoughts have lead me to think that without beauty, there would be no melancholy. Why else would we feel down or lost? It means something momentous, something beautiful has come into our lives and passed on. Melancholy is the daily mourning for the greater episodes in life. 

In the wake of beautiful moments, we are left with the spreading absence. A song we love can be played over and over again. For some of us, songs imprint themselves, capturing the fragments of what we once felt. I can't listen to "All I Want Is You" by U2 without thinking of a blonde, Polish girl I knew when I was thirteen. And with the song's first few lines, summer evenings unfold in my thoughts, I can hear crickets, there are walks to the movies when the local mall had a theatre. I see her ahead of me, the flickering cascade of sunlight through the trees, the luxurious but wistful gasp of summer's first cooler winds. And maybe it is because of her I love short hair that curls around behind ears, it is her that makes me think another summer of her beauty is so impossible because she has passed and the time of being young, that young has moved on. 

The song becomes a comfortless surrogate. Words and music taking the place of moments, making the ephemeral seem less harsh. And for those song writers and singers, the very music they created came from the passing wake in which beauty had come and gone.

I am reminded of the Caurapañcāśikā by the 11th century Kasmiri poet, Bilhana (Chaurus in E. Powys Mather's rendition of the poem). According to legend, the young Brahman poet fell in love and had an affair with the king's daughter. The king looked down upon the union and imprisoned the poet. On the night before his execution, Bilhana wrote his famous work.

The fifty stanzas together create a tender kaleidoscope of love and its joys. The reader can see the lovers, their frolicking, their hours spent in bed. Bilhana describes the princess with such detail, from her citron-breast to the indent of her cheek, and her black eyes. He describes her feet then her anxiety the day he is captured. Then he goes on to write happily about books, the wise men he met, the learning he acquired. He also appreciates the mountains and the people he has seen in life, from fisherman to the men in the fields at harvest.

Even now 

If my girl with lotus eyes came to me again

Weary with the dear weight of young love,

Again I would give her to these starved twins of arms

And from her mouth drink down the heavy wine,

As a reeling pirate bee in fluttered ease

Steals up the honey from the nenuphar.

I can't think of a more solemn, more beautiful, more melancholy poem to read. Powys' translation, entitled 'Black Marigolds' makes every stanza wistful yet powerful and the depth of the poet's love resonates through the translation in a way others can't.

What makes his translation so strong and clear is the use of the words 'Even now' which take the place of the Sanskrit 'adyapi'. 'Even now' gives the English reader a sense of lament and retrospection as well as resignation, the poet's being ahead of all parting, to quote Rainer Maria Rilke.

The poem is the poet's last chance to give the world his art. It is beautiful in the way beauty can be complex, uncomfortable and grief stricken. Despite the sorrow, there is no anger nor regret in the poem which is why it transcends epochs and eras. Instead of wailing and grieving, using his words to smash at the prison walls, the poet has used his final words wisely. In short, the poem is a blessing, a forgiving, a benediction for what he has experienced and will soon lose. There is understanding and release by the end. 

It is strange to think that had a man lived, been given his freedom, would we have such a beautiful work of literature? In some traditions, the poem ends happily with the poet being freed. Others suggest that the king was so impressed with the young man's writing that he let him go free. 

But are these just lies to make it easier to love the story? Hollywood endings are preferred but they rarely deliver a sense of reality. In the contrived race to the airport, in the confession in front of a room of strangers, the hero always seems too heroic and oddly pathetic. Their words of love and regret become a deux ex machina, a 'god from the machine' to save the already nonsensical story. In real life people break up but they often sleep together and get back together and break up again. It isn't cold turkey - not always - and the melancholy knowledge that two people who try so hard but are not meant to stay together is too complex for most movie audiences.

And as a result most romantic comedies aren't really beautiful the way candy isn't nutritious. We take pleasure but there is a different pleasure in literature, in art, in great music and in universal stories. Instead of the fake comfort that dissolves in the rising theatre lights, we are in the presence of questions and stranger, sometimes unsettling feelings, eyes wet, heads shaking. For what its worth, it is familiar because it speaks to the universal in us all. Life is more intriguing and the enticing mystery unquiet but worth approaching when something stirs us away from the pre-fabricated. 

The romantic comedy I saw in my friends company, my Polish girl nearby, is not memorable. But I remember the walk home, her hand to her hair, the barking of a dog beyond a white fence and the closing lips of night. When I went to a different high school than her, we rarely saw each other again but I read Toilers of the Sea, listened to U2 and discovered 'Black Marigolds'. From out of the wake of her beauty came my longing to understand other aspects of beauty, to be closer to beauty because there was a large part of me afraid of what might happen had I pursued her.

In some ways I think I love beauty more philosophically than the surface reality. I think I've fallen in love once and since then, I rarely meet beauty that matches the beauty I find in great conversations and the generosity of others. I am blessed with many wondrous moments and people I encounter and continue to know. And in the the absence of beauty I have moved on into the pursuit to find it elsewhere, in art, in dreams and ideas. With the sadness of its passing, another catalyst for understanding, appreciating, and sometimes, letting go.

For Plato, we begin with many beautiful bodies to love until eventually we focus on beauty itself. We love Beauty. In truth, it will lead us to the Good.

I don't think I can argue with that.