Beauty for our own good

and other shower thoughts

Jun 06, 2024

Since the last letter, The Nature Library has opened its new premises in Irvine and marked its first books borrowed and returned, and I’ve already had to buy more shelves. It travelled to Kirkwall as part of Orkney Nature Festival and soon it’ll be host to its first public event in the new space — a fitting one to mention in this letter, since both are about beauty.

Stone and Flower: on Kathleen Raine and Barbara Hepworth
Kathleen Raine's first poetry collection Stone and Flower (1943) was illustrated by Barbara Hepworth, bringing together two great artistic minds for a collaboration formed by the natural world. On Friday 14 June I’ll be joined by novelist Kirsten MacQuarrie to talk about Raine and Hepworth’s partnership of precision and passion. Kirsten will highlight poetry and prose that reflects Raine's relationship with nature and explore the elements that shaped women’s lives in wartime, while I’ll share insights from Hepworth's work and other library texts on our relationship to stone.

Book tickets for Stone and Flower

Maidens World Ocean Day Festival
I’m trying to keep the opening hours in Irvine as consistent as possible, particularly in these first few months while it finds its feet, but the library will be closed this coming Sunday 9 June while I speak at Maidens World Ocean Day Festival. Friday and Saturday will be open as normal! I apologise for any inconvenience, and if you’re near Maidens I hope you can make it along.

The letter below is on beauty and knowing in our soul, maybe, what is beautiful, and what is good, and what happens when it’s taken away.

Beauty for our own good

As far as I know, there’s no need for the strand of hair plastered to the shower wall to be so beautiful. It was laid there with care after spotting it wrapped around my arm, intercepting before it slid down the plughole. I press my fingertip to the glass and swirl it around, curling the hair up like a sleeping cat, to be dealt with shortly. Steam fills the shower and clings to the hair, stringing it with tiny jewels, one after the other, weighing down the royal subject until it grows so heavy it begins to lift off and let the light shine through. Light bends inside each bead of water and stuffs each one with rainbows. The whole thing quivers in the swirling vapour that surrounds and becomes it. Shower water has that same not-quite-natural tint also seen in swimming pools and water fountains, reflecting the aquamarine gleam of porcelain and glass. Occasionally one liquid jewel falls off and crashes to the floor, but it’s immediately repaired, god forbid one should be missing. I am pruning myself in captivation, utterly dazzled by the display.

There’s no need, either, for the beauty a winter frost, sprinkling glitter over every parked car and pavement, every crushed can and silver wrapper. Or the beauty of sunlight on still water—skinkling it’s called, to glitter, gleam, sparkle, scintillate—water so still it looks viscous, each flash of light on its surface a drip drip of the sun melting into the sea. And when you put your head underwater you see where it ended up, spilled on the seafloor and slipping over rocks and between legs and fingers. Which makes me think of sunbeams splicing through the water’s surface, which makes me think of the shards of light that come in from the window and pull a mote of dust into the spotlight for a birl in the sun before spinning back off into the shadows. And then there’s the moonlight draping over a lover’s face, a shimmering silver veil that just happens to fall onto that particular square of the bed at this particular moment, touching that particular cheek from two hundred thousand miles away.

I don’t wear jewellery and have never been one for diamonds (which isn’t to say I’d turn my nose up at them), but I’m pulled like a magpie towards what glitters, sparkles and glints. One bright light is blinding, obtrusive and obnoxious with its forceful push against the sensitive retina. We look away, can only take it in small doses. “We have really only that one light,” writes Annie Dillard of the sun in Seeing, “one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on this planet seems aware of this strange, powerful taboo that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that.”

But just a flash, just a tiny flicker of the brightest we can handle for as long as we can handle it. To let any more in would be to, as Annie says, let “our eyes be blasted forever”. As a blown out match would perhaps lose its magic if the smell were everlasting, the beauty is the limitation, in knowing its availability to us is finite.

There’s no need for the beauty of all that light though, is there? Not in an evolutionary sense, not in the way a flower displays colours and shapes to entice the butterflies and the bees, or a bird attracts a mate with plumage so elaborate that most of us humans don’t even acknowledge the modest female of the species, erasing her name from the natural vocabulary if ever introducing it in the first place — the name ‘peacock’ refers only to the male. And it’s not only our eyes which sense beauty. “Besides its wonderful tail”, writes Philip Street in Colour in Animals, “the male lyrebird also possesses a voice which is richer and more beautiful than that of any other bird”. There are no judges here, no trained avian vocal coaches to determine what is beautiful and what is not. It’s suggested here that we simply know when we hear it (more importantly, so does the female lyrebird).

I cannot imagine it is only human people who know this beauty in their flesh.
Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway

If there’s no need for them be beautiful individually they do, I think, illustrate a universal need for beauty itself, and a shared understanding of what is beautiful, just as our tongue recoils at the taste of something that might be poison. Some things are fact. Our need for water exists regardless of our taste for it. Is there a known and necessary measure of beauty in us, one that is part of our nature rather than a result of our nurture? Is there a true as water meaning of what is good and what is bad? Some of what we understand as ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is taught but I think there’s a lot which is not, things which point to goodness as a finger points out of a window to say ‘It is raining’. It is good. Which is to say—I hope this is obvious—that it works in the opposite direction. Even if someone tells me that war is necessary (is it?), surely we both know that it is fundamentally a Bad Thing. We know that there is no legal way to kill a child. Human beings seem to have some kind of shared understanding of what is good and what is bad.

What we consider to be writings about nature are more often than not writings about beauty. Beauty witnessed or, more commonly these days, beauty lost. From Dorothy Wordsworth who “never saw daffodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about and above them; some rested their heads upon these stones, as on a pillow, for weariness”, to Mary Oliver, who woke (early) each morning with a thirst for the beauty she knew was before her, to Samantha Walton who, in her 2021 book Everybody Needs Beauty writes that “People who care about the environment are often accused of being joyless and ascetic, but this makes me feel greedy for life. I don’t want just enough nature. I want more.”

There’s often a suggestion that to address the causes of climate change means a confiscation of luxuries. I agree with Samantha Walton — I don’t want less, I want more, and the level of depletion we’re experiencing is such that to ask for more is still not to ask for much. One in nine species in Scotland is threatened with extinction, and internationally the country ranks 228th out of 240 countries on the condition of its biodiversity. The Firth of Clyde has lost ten percent of its maerl beds in as many years. Around 1% of Scotland’s native pinewoods remain. These aren’t luxuries or nice-to-haves, or maybe the definition of luxury is a shifting, slippery one. Maybe sometimes ‘luxury’ is used when ‘beauty’ is meant. A healthy and abundant natural environment is beautiful, but its beauty doesn’t define it as a luxury. What is a luxury might also be beautiful. What is beautiful is not necessarily a luxury. What is necessary might also be beautiful. Beauty might also be necessary.

What happens when the earth is shorn of beauty? Light from buildings smothers the starlight, while the height of them obscures the setting sun. (One of the things that drove me out of the city was a photograph my mum sent of a sunset over Arran. When I rushed outside to see the cerise sky for myself, it was hidden behind the tenements). On roadsides in every town, spring flowers are shaved away moments after they’ve finally emerged from the ground after a long winter, grabbing what they can from the sun because, we’ve decided, their existence is an inconvenience and their colour a clutter. Rose gardens are paved over for driveways. Buildings are smoothed of any detail; no cornicing, no stonework. Not a gargoyle in sight.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not over here basking in glittering frosted landscapes, rolling around in the twinkling morning dew, singing to the birds that this is enough, my need for beauty is fulfilled, and I have not a thought towards that black linen jumpsuit, or those wide legged trousers in a different colour than the four I already have, or the face palette that convinced me that under eye definition is essential. But if everything that was considered a luxury — no, considered beautiful — was taken away, I know what ones I would sooner miss and the absence of which would even lead to a felt detriment to my health.

People with a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat

Sometimes I get an image of world leaders frolicking into the sea. I imagine them on their knees staring into rock pools, or running out the house in their pyjamas to see the aurora borealis dance above their head, gazing up in awe as pink and green light falls from the heavens into their open mouths, standing next to their neighbour and feeling, fleetingly but collectively, that right now this is the most important thing.

These visions usually occur when my despair at their actions has plunged to new depths. I imagine them experiencing beauty, undeniable know-it-in-your-soul beauty, and feeling the very composition of the inner body shift as it absorbs the nourishment its been built on. It’s naive, I know. I’m not saying, “Here, someone go show Netanyahu a savoy cabbage leaf a quarter-full with water”, holding his eyes open like a scene from A Clockwork Orange. “Now, release the butterflies!”. I’m not saying that’s what someone should do. (But has anyone tried it?) What I’m saying is that sometimes I wonder how the world would look if its leaders actually wanted the best for it, actually wanted it to be beautiful. And someone will say “Ah but Christina, to them what they’re doing is what they believe is best”. I don’t buy it. Not when 14,000 children have been killed in the space of eight months — more than 100 every day — in a five-mile wide area the length of Ardrossan to Ayr, children who don’t need to be taught that the stars above them, those untouchable stars, stars no one can take from them, are beautiful. “Evil is silly” said Toni Morrison. “It may be horrible, but at the same time it's not a compelling idea. It's predictable. It needs a tuxedo, it needs a headline, it needs blood, it needs fingernails. It needs all that costume in order to get anybody's attention.”

“The red poppies are in abundance. I took a short walk in my neighbourhood before getting locked up again. There was a small boy with his father behind my house picking flowers. He had a beautiful bunch of red poppies. He waved them at me. I smiled at him. He seemed so happy. None of us could linger in the beautiful fields. The afternoon was long but we had to be home. Curfew was about to be imposed again.”
When the Bulbul Stopped Singing, Raja Shehadeh

In When the Bulbul Stopped Singing: A Diary of Ramallah under Siege, Raja Shehadeh laments the abundant blooming of spring in a besieged city. Beauty doesn’t stop in the face of ugliness. The bulbs don’t know of bombs, not until they begin to grow up from the rubble to mark the dead. Shehadeh attends to his garden as a way of “attempting to beautify what is ugly, disorderly and derelict” and, as I write this, Fatima Bhutto asks X, “How are we supposed to absorb all this ugliness and violence?”. If an understanding of what is inherently beautiful or ugly is part of our human make up, then maybe there’s also a recommended dosage, a limit to how much we can consume before it makes us physically ill. Too much food and we feel nauseated, too many conversations at once and our head aches. Too much ugliness must have its own physical effect, weighing on the heart, forcing it to work harder and harder to keep going.

I think it’s possible to keep asking for more beauty, and necessary to say, when we feel it, “This is Good”.

“They said they were fighting the government with beauty. ‘Do you understand?’ Elena demanded of Marek, who doubtless became one of the half-million people filling Wenceslas Square. The government will fall!
Do you understand?
Kathleen Jamie, Surfacing

Thank you for reading.

Christina

song / book

I’ve been matching books to songs. The last letter was History of Lovers by Iron & Wine with The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch.

This time it’s Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor with The Body Electric by Hurray for the Riff Raff.

He shot her down, he put her body in the river
He covered her up, but I went to get her
And I said, "My girl, what happened to you now?"
I said, "My girl, we gotta stop it somehow"
The Body Electric, Hurray for the Riff Raff