This clip from the film American Beauty touches on some fundamental ideas about beauty.

One, we can find it, if we are open, in the most unexpected places.

Two, we need to be open, simple and vulnerable to see it. Beauty is a communion.

Three, the experience of beauty can connect us to the deepest aspects of being, of the divine. That connection is like a memory of something dear but lost in the hurly burly of life.

Four, contained in that experience is also the mystical perception that everything is just as it should be.

Five, the vulnerability is attractive. I don’t mean in a romantic sense but in the sense of community.

This little three-minute clip contains a lot. It takes the first thirty seconds to set the stage. Then tell me if you too don’t see a moment of real magic as a plastic bag floats and dances in the breeze.

I live in LA. The city of the new, the shiny and the detailed (or young, hip and botoxed, depending if you are talking inanimate or animate). Here, older is suspect.

But time ages stuff. Grinds it relentlessly. Some things age well. Others poorly.

Most high-tech stuff, TVs, computers, iphones, doesn’t age well, mainly because it breaks or is obsolete before it really becomes an issue. 

Think of something that does age well. Say a wooden axe handle. Use enhances it. The oil, sweat and friction of a hand sliding on wood ten thousand times enriches it. The Japanese have a name for that — wabi sabi. The word contains a sacred quality. It is the beauty of the humble and worn. Wear creates the patina of life. What life is doing to everything everywhere all the time. We can fight it. We can buy new stuff relentlessly. A consumer society doesn’t tend to produce stuff that ages well. By definition. Its motto is dump and replace. 

Or we can embrace patina. Find beauty in it. 

What a wildly different relationship we would have to our stuff and how different our economy would function if the beautiful wear and texture of time were valued rather than abhorred.

 

I realized later in the week that Chronos, incremental linear time, was horizontal. It connected one moment to the next in an endless string of events. Kiaros, that moment that opens to the present in a suspended state of wonder or being, that is vertical time.

 We live in chronos obviously most of the time. Our entertainment and news is chopped into smaller and smaller pieces because it appears no one, although in fact I doubt this is actually true, has time for more. A bite size piece of news can’t contain real content. You can’t have discourse without content. What you get instead is reaction and outrage.

 Kairos, vertical time, is mystical time. A moment held by the song of a bird connects us to that.  We can go deeper. And deeper. Kairos embraces all, gives us our spiritual compass and our awareness of the sacred. And like a dive in a pool we get wet whether the dive is deep or shallow.

 This is where we find beauty. In mystical time. What seems so perplexing to me as an artist is giving expression to it. Technique and craft are like chronos. Linear, mundane, necessary. Kairos is like the vertical juice of life disgorged on the page. They do coexist and compliment each other. It’s creating the flow of them both, at the same time,  that is the trick.

Appreciating beauty is a matter of attention. The quality of our attention is largely determined by time.

 The Greeks realized this and had two words for time. One was chronos, from where we get the words chronometer and chronic. This is the time of appointments, schedules, and calendars.  Ordinary time, passing time, forty-hour workweek time, run out of time. Quantitative time.

 Then there is kairos. This is qualitative time. Special time. Now. That moment where we break out of chronos into a moment of truth, of wonder, of being.

 The grim reaper is a symbol of chronos. While kairos represents life.

 We can only do so much to live in kairos. Just think of the books that tell us to be here now or that exhort the one hundred things we must do or see before we die. If the journey happens in chronos time we will arrive frustrated, exhausted, and late — obviously missing the point of the trip. While a moment of kairos could happen, now.

 Kairos keeps her own schedule. The American poet Randell Jarrell describes it:

“A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightening five or six times.”

 Jarrell implies the poet is living open to, if not actually in, kairos.  His life is lived with antennas raised, poised and willing. He may be touched by kairos daily living like this.

 But in this quote he means being hit by the experience so hard that even after translating it into words he felt the experience still came through. He was talking more about giving expression to kairos, not just experiencing it.

 The great art historian Kenneth Clark once said you could take the work of any artist and destroy all of it except the three or four best works and their reputation would stand on the foundation of those three or four pieces. The three or four pieces when lightening struck.

 It raises an interesting point about one person shows of thirty paintings year after year. How often does kairos affect all that work? How do we open ourselves to karios and so affect our work, staying steeped in the poetics of thought, awaiting the aesthetics of wonder. For this is where beauty resides.

 I love the short Japanese poem form of haiku, which attempts to capture the moment of kairos.                     

lighting the woodstove

he kneels absorbed

in last year’s newspaper

            —Dee Evetts

 

            Winter beach

            a piece of driftwood

            charred at one end

            —John Stevenson

 

            After the snowfall…

            deep in the pine forest

            the sound of an axe

            —   sorry don’t know who this is by.

 A good haiku cuts us into that moment. We’ve all had them, that expanded moment of connection and being. Here I think lies the foundation of beauty, and wonder, and mystery. And the foundation of art that is meaningful.

 

A couple of weeks ago, Anne, my wife, and I went to Indian Wells for a day at the tennis tournament. We intended to spend one night and come back to LA the next day.  But no hotel was available for just Saturday night in Indian Wells.

 So I pulled back on the map to see what other towns might be close by and might have a room. And then I noticed it. Mecca. By the Salton Sea.

 Mecca. Now that conjures up images and associations. Ideas of pilgrimage and arrival, of, if you’re Muslim, a life-long aspiration and calling of a place divine held lively in our imperfect world.

 I had visions of a town that would speak to distant beauty and perhaps even an interview or two of what it was like to live in Mecca. Surely a town could not have a name like that and not live up to some sort of mystical expectation.

 I said to Anne, we had to go and see it.

 Always game for a pilgrimage/wild goose chase herself, we went the next day.

 Driving from Indian Wells, Palm Desert towards Mecca one thing is immediately obvious. As the income level drops in a desert so does the green. The lush implausible lawns and verdant gated enclosures faded to the scorched grey-ochre of the desert as we moved east.

 I had done a little research on Mecca in advance of going. It’s population is 99% Indian and Hispanic. Of towns over five thousand Mecca has the lowest level of education of any town in the U.S.

 So I wasn’t expecting an oasis, a garden spot. No, I was hoping for something castoff and hard-scrabble.  A modest little town beaten by the harsh weather and the economy to a patina rich in honest beauty.

 Mecca is not that town. If you were on an outing and looking for some place with a little tree-lined main street and shops catering to idle purchases and cafes with cappuccinos, and cute homes with trim lawns and flower beds, Mecca would be a shock.

 However I was arriving with a different sensibility to what might be Mecca’s beauty. Open minded, generous, looking for ramshackle and broken.

 I fared no better.  I suppose I was shocked less than someone arriving expecting the quaint, the trim and the tidy. Nevertheless  I  too was blinded by my expectation and promise of that name, Mecca.

 Mecca, California, was a disappointment. I can’t say it doesn’t exist exactly. But the town was non-descript, featureless, barren even of eccentricities. I’m sure there are plenty. But the chances of an outsider considering looking for them seem remote.

 I managed one photo of Mecca that caught something of the place. Someone using a payphone in front of a 99 cent store.

 So we left.

 Anne noticed this sign that really summed it up. Mecca is always some distance away. A place of longing and future arrival. Coming to terms with where you are now today requires more exacting skills.

 Since we were at the Salton Sea we decided to have a look.

 For some reason I thought the Salton Sea would be like the Bonneville Salt Flats. Dry.

 But lo, the Salton Sea is huge, and wet. A real lake. The largest in California.

 We drove to a state park, learnt from a video how it was formed.  I won’t go into that here but it was created by man. By accident.

 The water is saltier than the ocean and getting saltier all the time. So the only fish that now survive in it are tilapia.  Millions of them. And hundreds of thousands rot on the shore.

 Disgusting and foul as it was I loved the dark green slimy water and the dark eyes against the white of the rotting corpses. It challenged my sense of beauty. Formally, meaning the image removed from the meaning or narrative (of dead fish), it was fascinating. Add the narrative and something appalling happens. Something apocalyptic. Which raises the idea of the sublime. A vision that sets us fearful and in awe before nature.