On Beauty: Essays, Reviews, Fiction, and Plays

By Wally Swist

Beauty is relative—however, it is also abundant and perennial. One type of beauty may diminish and morph into a deeper philosophical truth. Beauty can take the guise of morality and define the outer reaches of what it means to be fully human—to grow into that.

The film Amour, directed by Michael Haneke, which was made in 2012 and won the Palme d’Or, is, ostensibly, all about beauty and what is beautiful about life, as well as what are intrinsic elements of living that may be seen as being opposite to beauty. The film’s characters are a husband and a wife, two former music teachers, in their twilight weeks and days. Jean-Louis Trintignant is Georges and Emmanuele Riva is Anne. They are retired. They are cultured. They read, go to concerts, enjoy each other’s conversation, and still love each other—for the most part. Anne once shocks Georges by saying, as wives often enough stun their husbands by their appraisals of their characters, “You’re a monster sometimes.” However, she clarifies that declarative sentence by adding: “But very kind.” That is beautiful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adelaide Books Publishers
• Release date: Feb 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781950437160

Wally Swist

Wally Swist’s books include Huang Po and the Dimensions of Love (Southern Illinois University Press, 2012); The Daodejing: A New Interpretation, with David Breeden and Steven Schroeder (Lamar University Literary Press, 2015); Candling the Eggs (Shanti Arts, LLC, 2017); and The Map of Eternity (Shanti Arts, LLC, 2018). His poems and prose have appeared in many publications, including Appalachia, Anchor: Where Spirituality and Social Justice Meet, Arts: The Arts in Religion and Theology, Commonweal, and North American Review.

Book preview

ON BEAUTY

ON BEAUTY

Essays, Reviews, Fiction, and Plays

by

Wally Swist

Adelaide Books

New York/Lisbon

2018

ON BEAUTY

Essays, Reviews, Fiction, and Plays

By Wally Swist

Copyright © by Wally Swist

Cover design © 2018 Adelaide Books

Published by Adelaide Books, New York / Lisbon

adelaidebooks.org

Editor-in-Chief

Stevan V. Nikolic

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

manner whatsoever without written permission from the author except in

the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For any information, please address Adelaide Books

at [e-mail]

or write to:

Adelaide Books

244 Fifth Ave. Suite D27

New York, NY, 10001

ISBN-10: 1-950437-16-7

ISBN-13: 978-1-950437-16-0

CONTENTS

Preface

On Beauty

Enthymemes as Philosophy, Poetry, and Political Discourse

Instructions Within: The Poetry of Necessity

The Poetry of Astonishment: Rereading Garden Time by W. S Merwin

A Quiet Passion

Passions and Ancient Days: Eroticism and the Historical World

The Art of Give and Take

The Labyrinth of Solitude

On Beauty: Evanescence and the Eternal

Fiction

The Glen

The Nutcracker: A Version Edited and Rewritten for the Moscow Ballet

Plays

The Torn Shirt

Epistles: A Love Story

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Preface

This collection of nonfiction, fiction, and drama coalesced due to my having seen the deeply human Michael Haneke film, Amour (2012), with the superb pairing of veteran actors Jean-Luis Trintignant and the now late Emmanuel Riva. The acting is impeccable. The storyline of one spouse caring for another struck a chord in me. Its cello-like tremolo still resounds within. My response to viewing the film for the first time in October 2017 was to write a short essay On Beauty. The film, in my estimation, portrayed the beauty of the long-married, as the characters Georges and Anne, and Georges’ determination to care for his wife. Theirs was a tacit love—one which transcended itself in the terrible daily rigors of caretaking for an ailing spouse, as well as being the ailing spouse who was aware she was descending further into helplessness, despite the heroic and loving dedication of her husband. It is just simply a gorgeous, but tough, movie. I found it also a testament to the beauty of being alive in the world. Beauty, as I see it, is not just rose petals and French lace, or the arpeggios in the third movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonatas, but even moreso the tough, often uncertain, and persevering beauty of loving someone, anyone, one, or many.

Such love also is inculcated in philosophy and poetry, even the possibility of developing an artful way of mending the current antagonistic internecine political strife in America. Such ardor, in my estimation, conjures what is beautiful, often, or at least sometimes, by a desperate lack of beauty, or a loss of respect for love, through a lack of respect of it, which then leads to a consummate erosion and destruction of both love and beauty.

I open this collection, On Beauty, with an appreciation of Armour, the film, and conclude the book with a play I began a decade ago, which manifested itself in many drafts and revisions, up to its current shorter version of itself, Epistles: A Love Story. In the Michael Haneke film, love triumphs even in the face of death. In the play, love is squandered amid its own epiphanies. As many contemporary romances begin, what was once beautiful, no longer is, often due to solipsism and a sense of entitlement. Perhaps with the characters in the play there was never love but a blind need for one another. However, there was still an opportunity, even an outright gift, for both of them to experience both love and beauty. Instead the nihilism of the age brings down both these characters, both looking for a kind of Godot, as well as the relationship itself. My years attending plays at the Yale Rep, in the 70s, enriched my life immensely. During that period I saw a number of plays by the iconic playwright Sam Shepard, and I can’t say that Epistles: A Love Story isn’t inhabited by some unconscious inspiration from him.

The play, The Torn Shirt, which The Galway Review, in Ireland, has archived Epistles:

A Love Story on their website. The play opens the final section of this book. Although not intended as a preface to the second play found here, this first play, The Torn Shirt addresses bullying. The action takes place in a middle school, and is, indeed, based on my own experience. However, one of the reasons I wrote the play was largely due to the extreme amount of incidents where bullying is prevalent in school and in the workplace. The authoritarian regime of Trump has allowed for more crass and crude behaviors entering society—mostly due to the bar being lowered in that there is really no bar at all regarding how one person might treat another. With Trump, we have entered the age of vociferous darkness.

Following the essay, On Beauty, there is an essay regarding an intriguing book, agon, written by contemporary philosopher Judith Goldman. Judith’s philosophic notion of struggle is beautiful in that her intelligence shines with a cognitive beauty. Her work is significant to the intellectual life of America—something we don’t hear much about. She is a kind of an American Roland Barthes. Also, something we don’t hear much about are political heroes, such as Ashraf Fayadh, who is currently still imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for speaking out against the state. The translation of his powerful poems in Instructions Within, published by The Operating System, Lynne DeSilva-Johnson’s cutting-edge press based in Brooklyn, is more than noteworthy. Fayadh’s poems are intrinsic to human rights worldwide. There is an inherent sense of humanity intrinsic to Fayadh’s poetry. In this that poetry is instilled with beauty and courage to portray beauty.

W. S. Merwin’s poetry has been significant to me for decades. When I saw him read on my 24th birthday at Yale Law School, in the spring of 1977, I sat in one of the front rows and beamed, since he read all of my favorite Merwin poems. It was as if he were reading to me. Merwin’s poetry, probably above anyone else’s, except for possibly that of the late Jack Gilbert, has carried me and meant more to me than any other writer. Merwin’s last book, Garden Time, written in his later years, largely after he became blind, is a demonstration of beauty. In my rereading of the book, I once again experienced Merwin’s mystical realm in my witnessing what I call the poetry of astonishment.

The essays and reviews section concludes with my take on the beauty of Terence Davies film, A Quiet Passion. Davies is a filmmaker whose cinema is poetic. In this, he is a kind of poet of silences, of quiet, but one of discovering immense emotional depth. The essay, The Art of Give and Take, which I was initially given as an assignment for a new national magazine, attempts to address the lack of beauty, especially in rhetoric and thought, as well as positive intent, in our current political climate. I juxtapose that, as in a kind of dialectic, to the thought of philosopher Hannah Arendt, whom I greatly admire. In doing so, I reference the rather engaging eponymous film by Margarethe von Trotta, Hannah Arendt, whose character is portrayed by the rather accomplished actress Barbara Sukowa. Arendt’s courage and incisive philosophical vision is nothing less than both an act of love and a thing of intense beauty.

Although I have written little fiction, my predilection for the mythological realm is displayed in The Glen. Also, one of my favorite assignments as a writer will always be being called upon to write a new interpretation of Moscow Ballet’s Great Russian Nutcracker. My being asked to work with what was a roughed-out sketch of an idea enabled me to infuse this children’s classic with poetic prose. Both fictions were created through the art of love, which for me, often enough is writing. Also, in both works what emerges, after struggle, is an awareness of beauty.

I am quite grateful to Stevan V. Nikolic, editor and publisher of Adelaide Books who saw value in this book, On Beauty. It is my delight and honor that this volume be published by what I assess as a press of international importance—one which signals literary value and a vision of immediacy. I am also indebted to the readers of this collection of essays, reviews, fiction, and plays in that you may all engage with the rigors of beauty, of which I offer examples of here; and may those rigors inform your lives with the significance of what is beautiful. May you all find a multitude of reasons why beauty is often more immediate than we might have previously thought and that its power to transform lives and to transport them majestically evinces a more vibrant life of the spirit.

- Wally Swist

South Amherst, MA

July-September 2018

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Our task must be to free ourselves . . . by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

- Albert Einstein

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

Every angel is terrible."

- Rainer Maria Rilke,

from The Duino Elegies, The First Elegy,

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

For the Readers of this Book

ESSAYS AND REVIEWS

On Beauty

Beauty is relative—however, it is also abundant and perennial. One type of beauty may diminish and morph into a deeper philosophical truth. Beauty can take the guise of morality and define the outer reaches of what it means to be fully human—to grow into that.

The film Amour, directed by Michael Haneke, which was made in 2012 and won the Palme d’Or, is, ostensibly, all about beauty and what is beautiful about life, as well as what are intrinsic elements of living that may be seen as being opposite to beauty. The film’s characters are a husband and a wife, two former music teachers, in their twilight weeks and days. Jean-Louis Trintignant is Georges and Emmanuele Riva is Anne. They are retired. They are cultured. They read, go to concerts, enjoy each other’s conversation, and still love each other—for the most part. Anne once shocks Georges by saying, as wives often enough stun their husbands by their appraisals of their characters, You’re a monster sometimes. However, she clarifies that declarative sentence by adding: But very kind. That is beautiful.

After a lifetime of marriage to each other, Anne suffers two strokes and Georges cares for her throughout her decline. He bathes her, feeds her, exercises the leg on the side she can no longer feel, practices speech therapy with her. Many men, or wives, for that matter, would never have the wherewithal or the courage to brave such lengths—of true amour. Georges may be guilty of being a monster, in Anne’s experience, but he is the precipitant in furthering the spark of beauty between them. The drama may seem very French, something Camus or Sartre would have taken delight in, with both Georges and Anne seeing the end of their lives in plain sight; however, instead of being grim, they rise above the end of life, in uncommon transcendence. In their amour, and its tacit veracity—there are several touching scenes regarding Georges physical care for Anne, which are truly heartrending in their depth of humanity and active loving—the viewer is offered the essence of what love is and what having an affair is not. Hence, this is the irony apparent in the film’s title. In today’s world where greed, sex, and narcissism are common, the beauty of Georges and Anne is exemplary as not only a moral and cultural pedagogy without pedantry but, quite aesthetically and humanely, one act of beauty after another. Through another’s lens this might be seen as hardship and turmoil, unimaginable spousal duty and death in life.

At the film’s end, without giving anything away, Georges is clipping the flower heads from a bunch of daisies he has just purchased at the florist. He fills the kitchen sink and scissors the flowers into the water, then throws away the stems. These are meant for his Anne. Often we need to practice the art of discernment in order to see clearly. Sometimes we need to ruin the flowered stalk to create a ritual for celebration. As Anne says, in one scene, over dinner with Georges, while looking through photograph albums, It’s beautiful. Georges responds, What? Anne answers, Life. So long.

That is what constitutes perennial beauty and remains beautiful.