Join the Revolution

When we call beauty unnecessary or self-indulgent, we’re limiting the scope of love.

By Katy Carl

Attention is love—this much we must know. If we haven’t been convinced of it by the witness of writers like Simone Weil and David Foster Wallace, or by influences stretching all the way back to St. Anthony of the Desert and his ascetic school, our own experience will have to do. We know that what we care about rivets us in a way nothing else can. I would go further: In order to attend to anything at all, we need to have learned to care about it, in some way, even if all we really care about is avoiding a negative consequence associated with ignoring it.

But what kind of love, which is to say what kind of attention, do we bring to our encounters with art? How might an essentially intellectual and aesthetic focus be compatible with, or even a precondition of, a more caritative and practical love? Could art, at times, even constitute a form of love for others?

Art absorbs and transforms, elevates and changes our capacity for attention. Yet for this very reason art and artists can garner a bad reputation for self-focus, self-indulgence. Like any creative person, like any person who values the work of the creative, I have had this kind of accusation laid at my door: How dare I focus on beauty when so much in the world is wrong? How dare I claim it helps me choose better, do better, when I do no more than most and less than many to support the poorest of the poor? In short, what good is any worldly beauty if it does not feed the hungry but only serves to flatter and soothe those who already have more than enough?

Let’s leave aside, for now, the way such questions might at times reflect the kind of rhetorical “gotcha” games driven by ressentiment and played by armchair organizers with no intention of performing the costly kenosis they so forcefully recommend to others. Let’s leave aside, too, the wastefulness of protests against beauty that destroy beauty without creating any corresponding value or benefit (soup flung on paintings; wrists chained to gallery barricades). Here I am just addressing the scrupulous skittishness that arose in me, a person who in theory advocates for supporting the arts, at the thought of actually doing so in practice. That impulse is worth taking seriously, if only because it calls attention to something that might be seriously missing from a contemporary sense of who and what the human person is.

Where most audience members probably heard it as strictly futuristic and astronomical, my mind went back in time to think of what the ancients believed about the “music of the spheres.”

When we first got together, my husband and I had agreed not to purchase each other gifts for special occasions. I still think this is not a bad suggestion for newlyweds to consider. The life we were building together, we both understood, was itself the gift. Material things were a necessary but not sufficient condition for building that life.

As a relationship matures, though, the nature of the substance which you need to build a life together can change. Time together, paying shared attention, can’t be traded for any other good. That’s the very fabric of friendship. One way we used to secure this for ourselves was by walking to the symphony, where we could easily access free concerts. But after a recent move, we were no longer living in a city where this was possible.

By my own lights, then, I shouldn’t have felt the need to defend it, but all the same I did. We found room in the budget for concert tickets to hear Vikingur Olafsson, a world-renowned pianist, play Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

For anyone who might not be familiar, the Variations are a series of thirty versions of a single aria, or short song. Not being, myself, a trained musician, I won’t attempt to describe the whole piece’s dizzying technical complications or give you the details of each distinct version. I will just tell you that each of the thirty Variations has its own character which, at the same time, relates back directly to its origin. The originating aria is repeated twice, at the beginning and end of the series, for a total of thirty-two musical flights.

Here I use the word flights purposely, both for its sense of lift and for its connotation of climb, of effort. Picture the Variations as a sort of spiral staircase, where at each point of return to origin, a new level begins. The melody turns inside out, upside down, and yet all these changes cannot make it other than the same. Or picture the movements of objects orbiting around their star: each with its own spin, but all interrelated to each other and to the same central gravitational pull. Each obeys the same rule, but each also makes its own unrepeatable contribution to a resounding fullness.

This last metaphor is the one the performer himself used. As he played the slower movements, Olafsson swayed like the arm of a metronome set loose from its arc and sent into circles. Then, at the end of the concert, after being called back for three bows to endure yet a fourth standing ovation, he hurried out and waved his hands in the common conductor’s signal for the end of a musical measure. We all laughed. He said then that if the Variations are a solar system, each individual variation is a planet, and to add to or subtract from the system would detract from the wholeness of it.

This being Houston, the space-travel metaphor worked on more than one level, but where most audience members probably heard it as strictly futuristic and astronomical, my mind went back in time to think of what the ancients believed about the “music of the spheres.” Long before revolution meant upheaval, it meant rotation. The repeated and the renewed were not contraries but corollaries. That swaying had worked as more than a mark of cadence: it had brought things full circle.

If a society is willing to starve people of what their souls need, it may soon have fewer qualms about depriving them of what their bodies need, too.

There’s a scene in Francois Mauriac’s novel The Woman of the Pharisees where the title character—Brigitte Pian—has been financially supporting a young Catholic couple who are living in poverty and of whom she essentially disapproves. Because the husband had at first been interested in a vocation to the priesthood, but changed his mind upon falling in love, the Jansenist-minded Brigitte believes the couple to be in spiritual danger. She implicitly hopes that her material support will tie invisible strings of obligation to the couple, bringing them under her influence and causing them to feel guilt about their joy—a guilt she believes will be medicinal.

While the wife is pregnant and in ill health, on bed rest with their first baby, the couple uses some of the money Brigitte has given them to rent a piano. Neither of them can play it, but it gives them a sense of comfort and leisure—a small taste of interior freedom—while the husband works long hours and the wife’s movements are severely restricted. Upon learning that it is her money they have spent on the piano, though, Brigitte becomes indignant and withdraws her financial support altogether. Because of this, the couple suffers terribly, not only in emotional terms but in the cruelest and most physical deprivations and losses.

I sometimes wonder if resistance to spending resources on beauty, like the resistance I at first felt about these concert tickets, doesn’t have something in common with Brigitte’s attitude. Mauriac has picked up here on something real: If a society is willing to starve people of what their souls need, it may soon have fewer qualms about depriving them of what their bodies need, too.

As humans, we have a need for the unnecessary. I believe that as soon as our circumstances allow it, we should attend to this need, in ourselves and in others. We should do so not just because we want to avoid the negative consequences of ignoring it—a kind of pinched calculation, a miserliness of spirit—but because we want to seek the kinds of shared and unifying goods that generosity alone can secure.

Each morning, each repeated hour, we face this choice: thriftily to spare our effort, or lovingly to spend it.

For days after the Olafsson concert, I walked around in a sort of delicious agony of reverence. I wish I could say that this sweet pain, pushed to birth by what I had heard, made me choose to upturn my life entirely and commit it to some new and radical good. It did not. What it did do was to give an extra quarter turn to the good actions I had already chosen.

I also think it gave me strength to accept a few small and specific sacrifices, though because we are meant to do these things in secret for the Father who sees in secret I will not tell you what they were. You might find them silly anyway. Very possibly they were silly. Still they were necessary things I had been resisting doing for a long time. That I succeeded in doing them now where I had failed before does not seem to me coincidental.

There were other effects. As a person who had heard these glorious sounds, who wanted to make space for them and for what they meant, I had to speak a little more softly in the morning when the children were fractious on the way to school. Had to turn off the constant intracranial drip of digital noise. Had to stop complaining about the consistent, repetitive hassles of every day as if these were mere obstacles rather than, in their way, reassurances of safety. Had to try to love my life, even in stasis, with the same intensity and regularity a concert pianist must bring to the stage city after city, week after week.

For if in music the same constraining consistencies could give rise to so many and such wild fluctuations and flourishes, how, in life, could I continue to feel that constraint was only limiting rather than being, also, generative: a kind of scaffold across the façade of joy under construction?

Here is where the aesthetic and the quotidian meet. Each morning, each repeated hour, we face this choice: thriftily to spare our effort, or lovingly to spend it. So often, we are tempted not to give what we have, but to save it for later. But what is “later”? When is it? Do we have any guarantee that this imagined future, this supposed “later,” is ever coming? Are we promised tomorrow? Yet without love, we can give all of our substance and still have it mean nothing.

Art meets love when it shares the logic of the woman who broke the alabaster jar of ointment over the feet of Christ before He suffered. Art goes beyond the necessary. It overflows. It lavishes resources on the sheer affirmation of the goodness of being—and thereby reminds us that such goodness may also find a home in us.

Katy Carl is editor in chief of Dappled Things magazine and author of two books from Wiseblood Books, As Earth Without Water, a novel (2021), and Fragile Objects (2023). She is a senior affiliate fellow of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society through the University of Pennsylvania and holds her MFA in fiction from the University of St. Thomas—Houston.