flaws

It's been raining and I just looked out of the window at the backyard and, where there is grass, it is covered in fresh green blades with glistening droplets of water on them. It's beautiful and yet it's just an ordinary, everyday thing - water on grass. 

I wrote an essay once with the thesis that beauty is an expression of the relationship between humanity and nature. I began with, 'beauty is the complication of a rule...' or something like that, and everyone I shared it with asked, but what is the rule?....you don't explain what the rule is. But I didn't have a particular rule in mind. What I was saying is that the complication of a rule (as a dynamic) is one way to think about beauty. I read some books....Ars Poetica by Horace, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful by Edmund Burke, the poem 'Ars Poetica' by Archibald Macleish, parts of Biographia Literaria by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, especially the part about imagination, and a few others....I read all kinds of stuff, thinking about my thesis, and it seemed to me that a general theme was that beauty was the complication of a rule. 

I used to really like the idea that beauty is expressed through flaws. I remember hearing the concept of the 'flawed masterpiece' and I think the idea is that something is a masterpiece but it is flawed and the flaws mar it a bit but, because it's a masterpiece, the flaw(s) don't completely ruin it. But I like the idea that the flaws are what make it a masterpiece. I did an internet search just now, and the former seems to be the prevailing view. But I don't like that idea. I think that real masterpieces achieve a kind of perfection (which means that they are flawless), but perfection in this world is.....complicated. They're perfect in the same way that people can be perfect or an experience can be perfect - they're fully integrated and everything belongs in the picture. 

One of the things I had in mind in saying that beauty is an expression of the relationship between humanity and nature, is 'the ruin'. And the reason why I was thinking about ruins (e.g. Wordsworth's Tinturn Abbey) is because the course for which I was writing the essay was about the treatment of nature in literature. Ruins were something of a preoccupation with the Romantic era poets and artists. So, I was thinking about ruins and it occurred to me that a ruin is a collaborative work between humanity and nature. People build something and then, over time, nature turns that building into a ruin. 

It seems like all the beauty is contributed by nature. Like, when I looked at the grass with the droplets on it, I wasn't doing anything to create that. But actually, my contribution was just as great, in a way. Because I was the one who saw the beauty. I might not have even looked or not had the thought about how beautiful it was, and then that instance of beauty would not have been....instantiated (I like talking like a coder these days).