The Premise Of Beauty Poem by Denis Mair

Who says that beauty is only in the eye of the beholder? The fact that THERE IS A BEHOLDER who possesses a SENSE OF BEAUTY is more mysterious and beautiful than any particular object could ever be!

The soul hankers for life's full adventure, and beauty holds up signposts towards aliveness and flourishing. Beauty lets us envision life's inner workings breaking thru to the surface. There is a storehouse filled with many aspects of beauty; once we've been enticed to enter by one doorway, we want to see all other aspects. Sometimes it's the vulnerability and strength of a tender young life; sometimes it is simple grace; sometimes it is dappled and layered; sometimes it is sadly transient. Each phase presents possibilities of life-force for us to resonate with.

We need to remember that beauty is a built-in heuristic that can guide imperfect, finite beings in their lifelong journey of knowing and growing. It is a better heuristic than instrumental rationality, because it mobilizes the whole person down to the core. It is an ever-unfinished quest that motivates finite beings to explore each other's inner worlds. It is horizontally unifying and vertically enticing.

Consider that even a five-month-old child comes equipped with an aesthetic sense. (I discovered that while enduring difficult times in my family: I carried my little grandson into the chapel at Providence Hospital and showed him a woodcarving of the Madonna and child. "Ahh! "...Contained in his sigh was an unmistakable mixture of amazement and pleasure.)

Meander anywhere through the material substrate of life, and you'll find a telos of beauty knitting things together. Such is the original potential of Being, a dance of energy suspended over the void. Its interlocking symmetries pave the way, and then a panoply of forms emerges. Yet in our states of composite consciousness, we cannot always make good on our birthright.

Even the fabric of abstract relations in mathematics contains beauty if we know how to look. Take a non-repeating decimal like π,3.14159... It stretches out to infinity and never repeats itself. The number π is more than just the ratio of a circle's radius to circumference: it has been found elsewhere, for example in the ratio of energy levels between higher and lower electron shells around the nucleus of an atom.[1] Based on the principle of pan-aestheticism I see in nature, I think that such transcendental numbers may contain intricate structural symmetries...but we need to use the right mathematical function to go in there and "read" or extract them. I think that the energy dance within vacuum foam may be like vines curling around the trellises of those universal mathematical constants.

Where is beauty not to be found? As I get older, I want to console and redeem myself by searching for its sources, so every question leads me back to the question of finding beauty.

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Note: [1] The mathematician Cliff Pickover has a webpage titled THE FIFTEEN MOST FAMOUS TRANSCENDENTAL NUMBERS. He says, "The digits of "pi" and "e" never end, nor has anyone detected an orderly pattern in their arrangement." So he thinks the arrangement is random, but I don't believe it. The proto-universe is full of pattern even before anything exists. We have no cognitive "antennae" yet to detect the beauty of patterns in transcendental numbers.