Interview
Beauty in our midst
GOWRI RAMNARAYAN
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John Lane feels consumerist societies are losing their links to a rich, mythological cosmos.
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PHOTO: S. ARNEJA
TRAINED in the Slade School of Art, London, he developed his interests in the arts through years of teaching, lecturing, writing, and running courses in every continent. As chairman of the Dartington Hall Trust (founded by Leonard Elmhirst, a friend/admirer of Rabindranath Tagore), John Lane continued to promote activities that nurtured beauty. Timeless Beauty, published by the Viveka Foundation, brought the author to New Delhi for the release.
How can beauty be reclaimed in metropolitan hells, where ugliness passes for beauty? How to convince Bush and Blair that beauty is a value worth having?
Start with yourself. Today. Find time to practise the yoga of seeing. Don't get distracted by the massive destruction of the natural world. To convince the world that beauty matters, demonstrate its significance by making your home a place where friends and visitors feel renewed. Forget Bush and Blair, they didn't stop invading Iraq though millions protested. Reclaiming beauty will take a paradigm change and many generations, but that's no reason not to contemplate the sunlight on the wall of your room, a mother holding a child, a wayside weed.
Should you believe in God to believe in Beauty?
No. In fact, thought itself — and all ideologies — can get in the way of the direct, sensual apprehension of beauty. Nonetheless, look at temples and cathedrals, at all the paintings and music in the world, and you know that the worship of the Divine has stimulated the greatest beauty ever created by humankind. A sense of reverence and humility foster the spirit most conducive to creation. Not necessary to believe in the soul to believe in beauty, though it is the soul which registers beauty. Some see beauty as the evidence of God. My "religion" is to practise compassion, truth, destroy prejudice, inspire laughter — and that is really to make beauty wherever I am.
Plato's duality takes new forms today, widens the gulf between thinking and feeling. And haven't the post-modernists finally banished the need for art to be exalting?
The bane of duality can be banished by love, compassion, beauty. I suspect that Plato's divisive dualism, the later Puritanism, the overemphasis on rationalism and utilitarianism, lie at the root of much sickness. Beauty desires a contemplative, reflective, unitive mode of living, far from the West's feverishness. I don't know why much post-modernist "art" revels in ugliness. Is this symptomatic of the decadence of contemporary civilisation? Kaliyuga?
Why is your book Euro-centric, as if the West has a monopoly on ugliness? Haven't technology and consumerism ravaged the `Third World' even more?
It is Western civilisation that is destroying the delicate fabric of vernacular cultures. Ugliness, like pollution, is intrinsic to it.
You attribute the present craze for raw eroticism and rawer violence to living in the age of the intellect. But we are hardly intellect driven. Also, haven't you romanticised the past, forgetting its feudal, patriarchal iniquities?
I suspect eroticism and violence are a crude antidote to our over-intellectualised culture, creating a feeling of being alive when the drab realities of life have nothing stimulating to offer. Forgive me if I've romanticised the barbarities of the past. What I hope I've done is to appreciate the creativity of earlier societies and contrast their creative abundance with our own sterility. A serf, I guess, lived within the context of a rich (mythological) cosmos; a factory worker has lost his cultural inheritance, traditional values, folk arts. One has only to put the work of Mark Rothko beside a stained glass at Chartres to see the massive attrition of spiritual richness.
You see the crafts as our links to the cosmos. Now that they are replaced by tinsel stuff, how do we regain harmony?
Handwork is being replaced by machines. Intense propaganda for progress never considers the damage it creates. I'm pessimistic about the next century but hope that in the long run a radical change of premises will have a transformative effect.
Will beauty survive the plastic age?
(Very big sigh.) Probably not, the world is getting uglier, more aggressive, sick. I wrote my book as a wake up call. I'd like to hope my book creates an awareness of the trough of ugliness into which humankind is falling is degrading to life. There's a lot of recognition about, say, the dangers of global warming, chemical food, obesity, pollution, degradation of the natural environment. I hope to add the question of ugliness to that dismal list. One little book won't change the world, but, as they say, the longest journey starts with a simple step.
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