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Article Excerpt
Beauty is a topic that, while at the center of discussions about the arts and aesthetics for much of history (in the West), has mostly failed to fire the critical imagination of twentieth (and now twenty-first) century thinkers, and as a consequence, does not factor significantly or centrally in contemporary notions of human flourishing. This is an unfortunate state of affairs, and the overriding ambition of the essay that follows is to begin to recuperate a notion of "beauty" that we can find valuable again. (1)
What makes something valuable? According to John Dewey, it is criticism: value arises, not from a special sense organ, but from our intelligent reflection--criticism!--on our valuations, which are themselves "incessant and inseparable from all of our activities." (2) Dewey hoped that such "criticism" and "intelligent reflection" would take place in discussions at every level of society, from the dinner table at home to the various political, social, and religious forums throughout our nation. Here I take up the conversation about the delight of beauty--how it increases the amount of good in our lives--in my capacity as a biblical scholar, using a biblical text--Song 4:1-7--to focus the discussion. Literature and the arts have always been a culture's principal means for developing, modifying, and re-imagining what it values. The Song of Songs, when it notices beauty, as in the poem of Song 4:1-7, does so in a way that accentuates many of beauty's potential goods. And it is these that will hold the bulk of my attention. As such, my emphasis is unabashedly positive and affirming. But such an emphasis should not be taken to mean that this recuperative move is risk-free, or unmindful of the real harm that may be done, and in fact has been done, in the name of "beauty." Indeed, the Song itself gives ample warning of the real--bodily--risks involved. In 5:7, for example, the woman in search of her "ruddy and radiant" (as it says in 5:10) beloved is herself found by the nightwatch, beaten violently, and stripped. Scholars have speculated variously on a rationale for the guards' actions, but the poem itself does not give any clues to what that might be. For our purpose, I offer it as a little allegory warning that there is no risk-free, fail-safe means of encountering beauty. Like any other cultural value, beauty can and has been abused. But my emphasis on the positive and the constructive is meant, among other things, to signal our own abilities to combat that abuse. One of the things that the Song helps to show us is that any concept of beauty is culturally and historically constructed, and as such it is not fated or predetermined ahead of time. By appreciating how the Song looks at beauty at one point in history, we gain some purchase on how we look on beauty. More importantly, we may recognize that our own conceptions and constructions of beauty are not static or forever fixed, but instead are open and malleable. And therefore the positive bent given to my comments here is intended to provoke and to inspire, to imagine beauty as capacious and gracious, as an experience of empathy and equality that turns us toward the other and that revels in a life-enhancing and life-embracing pleasure. But here I am running ahead of myself.
SONG 4:1-7
One does not require a great deal of prefatory comment in order to be able to appreciate the Song of Songs. This biblical composition consists of a sequence of lyric poems that celebrates human love. The poetry is graceful, sensuous, and replete with erotic imagery and allusions, and its lyricism means as much through form, sound, rhythm, image, and wordplay as through semantic content. It features the voices of two lovers, one male and one female, and their professions of love for one another. The author is anonymous, and the sequence as a whole is probably to be dated no earlier than the latter part of the Persian period (ca. 5th-4th centuries B.C.E.). (3)
The poem that serves as a touchstone for the present discussion of beauty comes from Song 4:1-7. The poem itself is fairly straightforward. Sung in the voice of the male lover, it declaims the beauty of the woman he loves. The opening and closing couplets, which form an inclusio, plainly express the poem's sole preoccupation: (I translate.) "Wow! You are so beautiful, my love,/ Wow! You are so beautiful!" (4:1a). The particle (twice repeated) that begins the poem, hinneh, "Wow!", presents what follows as the sudden and vivid perception of something unexpected--in this case, the startling appearance of something beautiful. The structure of perception at the moment one stands in the presence of beauty is often characterized as arresting, a reaction in which you draw in your breath and stop still or utter a little gasp. (4) Earlier in the sequence the woman's sighting of her beloved is similarly framed: "Hark, my beloved!/ hinneh, here he comes!/ ... hinneh, there he stands!" (2:8a, 9b). This same structure of perception is then mirrored back to the woman, and thus made narratively visible for the reader, in the very image of what she perceives: her beloved is likened to a gazelle bounding across the hillside who, upon catching sight of her, stops still and stares, as if frozen by beauty's sudden apparition (2:8-9).
In our poem the perception itself, the man's hymn to beauty, is cast in a form called a wasf (a term borrowed from Arabic which means "description"), a genre of poetry known from ancient and more modern times alike that describes the physical charms of a loved one. There are three other wasfs in the Song besides this one (5:9-16; 6:4-10; 7:2-6). While all four bear obvious family resemblances to one another, no two are exactly alike. The structure of our wasf is intentional. Its main body is divided into two symmetrical halves (4:1b-2, 3-4), each containing four couplets and featuring three similes, the last of which in each half is more elaborate than the other two (having an additional couplet). This structure is further articulated through syntax and the kind of metaphors employed in each section. In the first section, the part of the body in focus is fronted syntactically at the head of each couplet--"your eyes," "your hair," "your teeth." Each of the metaphors is drawn from the animal world, and more specifically, each features domesticated animals: "doves," (5) "goats," and "sheep." In the second section, the vehicle of the metaphor is preceded syntactically with the preposition "like" or "as": "like a scarlet thread," "like a slit of pomegranate," and "like the tower of David." The metaphors themselves no longer feature domesticated animals but the products of human culture--textiles, fruits, architecture.
The descriptive aspect of this wasf concludes in 4:5 with the man's appreciation of his lover's breasts. The intentionality of the stopping place is patent, even though other wasfs in the Song are more (physiologically) inclusive. All of the formal patterns of repetition employed to structure the main body of the description-lineation, syntax, deployment of metaphors--are here exploded, and with this change of pattern the description's closing movement is effectively announced. The simile is given in a triplet and not the couplet that otherwise pervades the whole of this poem. Both of the fronting patterns noted above are upset by the insertion of a number two at the head of the triplet. And the metaphor, though returning us to the animal world, features not a domesticated animal but the wild gazelle.
In 4:6 the man reprises and reverses the words uttered earlier by the woman in 2:17. In that earlier context, the woman, noting the onset of daylight (i.e., day's first breath when the shadows of night fall away, flee), urges her lover, imagined as a gazelle (cf. 2:8-9), to "turn" and to flee into the hills west of Jerusalem. Here the man insists, inspired by the vision of his lover's beauty, that, instead of retreating into the hills at the coming of dawn, he will go at sunset to the metaphorical (as spices do not grow in Israel) "mountain of myrrh" and "hill of frankincense," that is, to the woman's breasts, for she is "perfumed with myrrh and frankincense" (3:6). (6) His ambition is to rest, to use her own words, as a "bundle of myrrh" (cf. 1:13) in these hills of spices.
The poem concludes by replaying the man's opening exclamation of the woman's beauty (4:7). The small change at the beginning of the line, "all of you" instead of the presentative "Wow!", makes clear that the partial catalog inscribed here is intended as a collective metonym for the beauty of the woman's entire self--body, mind, and soul, which has "no flaw." (7)
With these preliminaries in place, I now move directly to a consideration of beauty and (some of) its delights as provoked by the poem. I begin by considering the specific site of beauty on display in this poem, that of the female subject. I will...
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