beauty and meaning

A brief thought. This article is intended to be without images.

Taking some time to put these things into a shape. I’ve been thinking about bits and aspects of these for a while. Taking more clarity and shape, sometimes tracking back and being totally lost again. But I have some thoughts that I wanted to jot down, maybe look at them now, or contemplating them a bit later.

 I’ve been discussing for a great while with friends, long with my friend Sam. I have some precise insights about some of these stuffs. I’ll make it short, this is kind of a think tank post.

 First, meaning. I’ve called Sam the other day while on the train from Zurich to Lausanne, we were discussing about his on going project. At some point, we said: you know what, we need meaning, we need stories and we need depth. Everything and everyone around us has a story. Some are complex, some are simple. Getting in depth in these stories: understanding the origin of a supernovas shining in the sky, understanding the coming and history of money, its printing, understanding the history of our own existence. There is a story. And I’ve discovered that, the more depth in the story and the more you understand of its details, the more beautiful something becomes. It is meaning, it is depth in intrinsic story. Then I told Sam: this is what we need in our creation: meaning. Profound meaning, stories and reason. We can coat it with shiny design details, but the most important thing is the underlying layers and layers. The more layers you get, the more complex it is and the more intemporal it becomes. You can sit on a train, but if you know that, 500 years ago, there were no train and, at its beginning, it was pain stakingly slow. You begin to be marvelled.

 Second, beauty. Some of us see beauty as a state. A paper printed with a beautiful model. Or a beautiful building. I would argue that it is aesthetics. It is plastically and aesthetically pleasant and, believe it or not, aesthetics is temporal and it will fade with time, just like yours and mine. But beauty is a dynamic. Eternally changing, adding complexity, substracting, multiplying and evolving along an axis. It also has order. If it doesn’t have a direction and an order, it is simply chaos. A newly built glass house might be aesthetically pleasant but it is not beautiful as an all time entity. Take the Parthenon as an example: overlaying layers of war, spirituality, playfulness, power, freedom, slavery culminating in what, seriously a pile of stones. But it is beautiful.

 Here lies a quite big contradiction in beauty: we create new, yet we need history for it to become or be beautiful. How? Good question. No idea, but all I know is that beauty is only achievable when dynamics and changes and layers of time are allowed to be laid on. Venice is, almost universally agreed, beautiful. We created it and we changed it gradually. It wasn’t a museum and that’s what makes it beautiful. Museums are the graveyard of beauty.

 Also: as a by story, a beauty in a relationship is not just two pretty people hanging around. No, the relationship is beautiful after time and time of layering of stories. The intensity of these layers also count, but, it is not the subject.

 Written down like this, the two intertwine: beauty and meaning share some, if not a major, characteristics. I wouldn’t go as far as to say they are the one and same thing.

 That’s all, short talk, just put it down here.