Beauty is a doing word

Sometimes I feel to catch glimpses of a whole different way of seeing the world. They seem to come through people of exceptional insight. And life is never the same afterwards. Here are a few such moments, embracing olive trees, permaculture, local food and the story of Christmas.

I was standing under an olive tree in Israel, listening intently to Jim Fleming, an archaeologist and radical thinker with an interest in the Bible. He said to us, ‘This olive tree would be understood by Hebrew people as a thing of great beauty. Why? Because it can be used for so many things. Its wood is useful for making, for carving, for burning. Its fruit can be eaten. Its oil is used in cooking and for making soap… and so the list went on’. ‘ Such usefulness was beauty to the Hebrew mind’, said Jim. ‘Look at the Song of Songs, an erotic love poem where the lover describes a woman’s beauty in amazingly functional terms,  with hair like a flock of goats, cheeks like pomegranates and breasts like two fawns’. I didn’t know what to do with these insights. They were so much at odds with the culture I had been brought up in.

Last year we went on a permaculture design course. That also was a game changer in terms of our perpective on life, and a very similar language was used. The magic was to see all the very different uses that could be imagined for something. Old tyres became wormeries, certain woods could become musical instruments and old brassica stalks were great compost when first passed through a goat.

More recently there was a conversation about local food, based on the community-supported agriculture project some of us have been involved in. Tim, who was facilitating the conversation, summed up our deliberations by saying that we were discovering that food was a ‘doing word’. It was not a product that a consumer buys in plastic off a shelf, but something whose production we can be intimately involved with.

All these things, it seems to me, belong together in an idea of beauty as related to things that are done in the world, not to shape or form itself, as a Greek mind might have conceived it.  Are we rediscovering something here? Underneath the tinsel of Christmas is a very unglamorous story about a child, born in the poorest of circumstances, whose life became an inspiration. There again the beauty was in the doing. It was about a life lived.

For more on conventional ideas of beauty you might enjoy Melvyn Bragg In our Time

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