'And Aesthetics My Primary Value'

The Louisiana poet Gail White published three poems in Peacock Journal, all freighted with serious thought and all skirting the charms of light verse. White avoids the failings of pretentiousness and mere silliness. Consider “Resemblances”: 

“Somewhere along the primrose path

That led to my seventies,

I lost the blithe agility

Of the young springbok’s knees,

 

“The swift gait of the wildebeest

Running with its herd,

And the keen eye of the crouching cat

Under the nesting bird,

 

“Retaining only the stoic love

Of the elephant for its kin

And the fierce desire of the salmon

For the stream it was nurtured in.”

 

Chronicling the losses and infirmities of aging can turn readily into a wallow in self-pity, which is ridiculous if you consider the alternative. Unspoiled youth is incompatible with longevity, and adults accept those inevitabilities with dignity and “stoic love.” White’s twelve-line, one-sentence poem reminds us that mortality is universal, what we share with the rest of the Earth’s fauna. We’re in the same boat (Noah’s ark) as nematodes and capybaras. White adds a prose statement to her poems:

 

“Aquinas, who had a gift for concise definition, once said that ‘We call that beautiful which pleases the eye.’ It’s hard to improve on the simplicity of that. Pleasing the eye, which includes reading, has always been my goal, and aesthetics my primary value. From this comes a love of art museums, travel, living next to running water, poetry, the Victorian novel, and cats. (Few things please the eye as much as a good cat). It might have been more noble if my highest value had been unconditional love, but if I’m honest, I admit I’m stuck with beauty.”

 

Not a bad place to be stuck. Beauty is one of the things that makes life worth enduring. In the final chapter of The Pleasure of Ruins (1953) – one of my favorite books -- Rose Macaulay reminds us to look at new buildings geologically, beyond the scale of a single human lifetime: “Very soon trees will be thrusting through the empty window sockets, the rose-bay and fennel blossoming within the broken walls, the brambles tangling outside them. Very soon the ruin will be enjungled, engulfed, and the appropriate creatures will revel.” It’s a chastening thought (and goes on for another half-page), like the Time Traveller’s view of the dress shop across the street from his lab in George Pal’s film of The Time Machine (1960). Macaulay gets even more apocalyptically inspired in her final sentences:

 

“Ruin must be a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings: in the objects that we see before us, we get to agree with St Thomas Aquinas, that qua enim diminutae sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt, and to feel that, in beauty, wholeness is all. But such wholesome hankerings are, it seems likely, merely a phase of our fearful and fragmented age.”

 

Macaulay takes her Latin phrase from this passage in Summa Theologica (trans. T.C. O’Brien): “Beauty must include three qualities: integrity, or completeness--since things that lack something are thereby ugly; right proportion or harmony; and brightness—we call things bright in colour beautiful.”