I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (via junkycosmonaut)

zenhabits:

Summer in Berlin, via conorberlin

robot-heart:

Tea - Freshly brewed and Freshly Clicked (by anshu_si)

The New Normal

Every day, I am amazed. I’m amazed by the things people build, by the depth of a person’s being. I am amazed by the fact that these things are readily available for me to witness.

I’ve marveled over the fact that friendship is changing because connections are changing. Not so long ago, friendships were largely determined by geographic proximity to another person. As the web becomes more pervasive, location is being replaced by other factors more conducive to true connection: interests, beliefs, ambitions.

I’ve noticed, too, that as these connections run deeper, another effect has emerged: the New Normal.

Twenty years ago, as I was growing up, people shared very little of themselves with others. A close-knit group of best friends could claim to know each other very well, but even that paradigm, in retrospect, seems one of closely guarded selves.

For contrast, take the recent piece over on Deliberatism, in which Eric Karjaluoto laments the effect of Facebook and the like on his life. Eric speaks with remarkable candor, giving us a glimpse of the inner workings of his psyche. By doing so, it feels as if I know a small portion of Eric better than I knew most of my ‘best friends’ growing up. By baring his soul, he’s uncovered a portion of mine in one simple, truthful piece of writing.

This is a trend I see more and more around the web, and I couldn’t be more ecstatic about its implications.

We all hid(e) the more neurotic, darker regions of our brains from our circles. In fact, we still do. Somehow, though, the web has made full disclosure a more inviting prospect. Perhaps because our words can now float in the ether, with no threat of immediate rejection, we are freed to shed more light on the corners of ourselves so long neglected.

The result, if this trend continues, will be deeper connections, since we are no longer connecting by favorite ballplayers, or soccer matches, or the watercooler, or through some mutual acquaintance. We are connecting to people across the world by threads as yet unseen, from places we’ve been afraid to access ourselves, let alone reveal to the world. This is crucial to our understanding of the world. If we hide so much of ourselves, how can we expect to gain a true understanding of our world, since we, essentially, create the reality that we occupy?

This candor, this truth, reminds me of the Slow Web Movement, but feels much more deliberate, more profound, more meaningful. Call it the Deep Web Movement. Show me who you are. I will reciprocate, and the web- the world- will be a better place for it. After all, our reality is, at its simplest level, a vast network of connections between you, me, and everyone in-between. Our world can only go as deep as those connections. Be you. All of you, without censors. This is the New Normal.

On Beauty

To reach its current position among our society and our psyches, beauty has had a long and arduous journey. It constantly redefines itself as human tastes evolve. In On Beauty, Umberto Eco summarized the ever-changing role of beauty thusly:

Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country.

Knowing that the role of beauty has been so “immutable,” I find myself wondering how we would currently define the concept. To a pessimist, the question would yield a depressing answer: one need only to glance at the stick figures in the latest Vogue Magazine to conclude that beauty is a 98-pound blonde who eats every three days.

Centuries ago, that wasn’t the case. In fact, quite the opposite was true. Women were revered for their shapeliness, as it suggested a natural ability to give birth. Birthing hips were beautiful.

The process of the evolution of beauty brings to mind a story from philosopher Daniel Dennett regarding sweetness. The question asked is, simply, why are sweet things sweet? Dennett tells us that during man’s hunter/ gatherer days, our bodies developed a penchant for sugar because we needed the calories sugar offered to fuel our long days of hunting. Rigorous activity called for many calories, and since sugary foods had high caloric content, we developed a taste for sugar as a byproduct of our lifestyle. Today, evolution simply hasn’t had time to catch up. We no longer live that way, now leading much more sedentary lifestyles (in comparison), so our sweet tooths do more damage than good.

The same could be happening to our concept of beauty.

The Turning Point

In the early 1900s, Oskar Kokoschka began to tamper with the concept of beauty. Early in his career, Kokoshka began to focus on the idea of truth as beauty, and in doing so, turned the art world on its head.

Until Kokoschka’s arrival, art was largely revered for its adherence to one concept: the more aesthetically pleasing (read: beautiful), the better. Instead of trying to mirror reality, though, Kokoschka deliberately distorted it to reveal a hidden inner truth.

Kokoshka began to create, in traditional terms, ugly things. To his mind, however, they were in fact more beautiful than works past, simply because they revealed a truth hitherto unnoticed- a truth that the traditional concept of beauty could never reveal.

The Academy of Fine Art rejected his work, stating that if he were going to skew reality, the least he could do was make reality more “beautiful.”

Kokoshka persisted in painting what he saw below the surface, and the face of art began to change: truth was beginning to rival beauty. Indeed, truth was beauty. This was his lesson to the world: a thing is not beautiful because of superficial aesthetic qualities, but for what it reveals about human nature. This is the mantra that must define the next phase of our evolution.

Our Role

The question, of course, is how to proceed. After all, the idea of realigning truth with beauty seems to be quite an abstract one. For a concrete, modern example, take a look at what Jonah Lehrer (yes, I know he’s been discredited, but the piece is still fantastic and appropriate) wrote in the June edition of The New Yorker in the essay The Virtues of Daydreaming. Lehrer quotes Virginia Woolf, who encapsulates the process of daydreaming:

Certainly she was losing consciousness of outer things. And as she
lost consciousness of outer things … her mind kept throwing up from its
depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a
fountain spurting.

Lehrer expands on this concept, saying “A daydream is that fountain spurting, spilling strange new thoughts into the stream of consciousness. And these spurts turn out to be surprisingly useful.”

Lehrer’s point is that daydreaming has, to this point, been largely viewed as a useless thing, the product of a lazy or undisciplined mind. The piece goes on to cite multiple studies that suggest that mind-wandering can be an extremely valuable tool in generating ideas and solving problems. More often than not, our unconscious minds are much better at problem-solving than our conscious minds are, so daydreaming may actually be a valuable tool when properly understood.

This type of thinking exemplifies a profound shift in the way we operate in the world: question an existing mode of thought, test it, and use the results to better understand our minds.

What has been done, then? Truth has been given a rank above all else, and out of that truth emerges a better world. What better definition of beauty can there be?

This type of thinking must not only persist, but thrive, and with the proliferation of the widening access to information, it’s easier than ever to do so. When anyone can publish (and read what’s published), more outdated concepts can be questioned. In fact, the collective intelligence effect may make us more adept than ever at interpreting the truth of our reality.

All around us, truth bubbles below the surface of our reality. When it tries to escape through the medium of our minds, we must recognize it for what it is: Beauty, disguised as Truth.