A writer writes all the time.  And everywhere.  We carry little notebooks, we scribble this and that, and scraps of paper tumble out of our pockets -- holding little bits of Present Time that we captured -- or tried to capture -- on paper.  Here is one of mine.  In succeeding months, there will be more.  Taken together, they should make an elegy on happiness -- in particular, what makes me happy.   And they may, in part, answer the question of why I am happy -- despite this, despite that.  And perhaps by reading them, you the reader will find something for yourself.
 

The Necessity of Beauty

            June 9, 1997 --  Yesterday my daughter and I drove to Portland.  She had an appointment, and the location of the appointment was very conveniently just across from Riverfront Park.
            It was the last day of the annual Portland Rose Festival.  The dragon boat races were in the final heats, the visiting Naval ships were open for tours, and the entire river front was packed with people.
            It was also a gorgeous day -- the first true summer day we've had this year.  As we drove up the interstate from Corvallis to Portland, we could clearly see the ridge lines of the Cascade Mountains, still outlined with snow.  Sticking above the ridge line as we drove east on Highway 34 was North Sister, the most northerly of the Three Sisters, a cluster of more than three volcanoes just east of the Central Cascades.
            As we approached Salem on I5, we got a beautiful view of snow-capped Mt. Jefferson, and just north of Salem, we had glimpses of the lower slopes of Mt. Hood.  As we drew nearer to Portland, the clouds hiding the peak of Mt. Hood were dissipating, until we could see the entire mountain, with only a flange of atmospheric clouds at about 1500 meters.
            Then, as we rounded the curves leading into downtown Portland, straight in front of us was the looming southern slope of Mt. St. Helens.
            Twenty years ago, we would have seen the most beautiful stratovolcano on the west coast, majestic and tranquil in the glitter of sunlight on snow.
            But in 1980, all that changed.  In a few short months, Mt. St. Helens changed from a vision of almost sacred beauty and a symbol of the refreshment of the mountains, to an ugly steaming caldera, spewing ash and venting sulfur.  Those of us who witnessed the transformation still haven't quite adjusted to its now ominous, rounded form, still cloaked in snow on a bright June day.
            The gaping caldera faces north, so a stranger to Portland, looking north, would see only a huge rounded mountain, dazzling white beneath summer sun.  Those who never saw its beauty before cannot comprehend the mixture of sorrow and fear I now feel whenever I see the mountain -- sorrow that such beauty will never again exist there in my lifetime, indeed probably not in the lifetimes of my great-grandchildren.
            And fear.  The fear of another eruption from Mt. St. Helens, but even more plausibly, a similar or worse eruption from Mt. Hood.  Such an eruption would destroy much more than forests, streams, lakes and campgrounds, and would kill many more than 57 people.
            So, yesterday, while my daughter went to her appointment, I sat at the outdoor restaurant at Riverplace, watching the dragon boats racing to the finish and intermittently drinking in the beauty of our remaining stratovolcano.
            Glistening snow blending with powdery cloud, lavender haze fading up into limpid sky blue....  I imbibed beauty, storing it away for a future when it may exist no more.
            In former days, I seldom set myself to the strict task of silently imbibing beauty.  I saw it.  I know I saw it.  I'm pretty sure that I appreciated it.  A field of bright flowers would catch my eye, and I would look for a few seconds....  But then I would hurry on, to do the other, more urgent things that crowded my life, and in doing so, made my life.
            In a way, I thought in that moment, my chronic illness has been like a volcanic eruption -- wiping out beauty that I hardly knew existed.  In a swoop, it was gone, perhaps forever.  The things I focussed on before I fell ill had disappeared, blown away, leaving me to contemplate a wasteland.
            At least, that is what I thought in those first few years of my illness.  My science career blown to bits -- nothing but a big hole -- a kind of personal caldera of empty destruction.  All that might have taken its place had been blasted, too, for I could not read a few pages of a book or an article in a newspaper without tiring.  I could not stay awake more than 6 hours a day.  I could not even take care of myself.
            My life was like that blasted terrain north of Mt. St. Helens -- everything I'd tried to cultivate was gone.
            I don't remember when I first began to look around for beauty.  Perhaps it was on the daily walks with the dogs.  Dogs have to be walked.  They might be content to lie at my side for hours at a time, but sooner or later, they need to go out.
            Dogs are useful in that way.  They make us come out of our stupor, put on a coat, hook up the leashes and venture out.  One bad days (for me, that is) we would just walk around the block.  And so I got to know each flower bed and all its humours through the changing seasons.
            As I got better, I planted my own flower beds.  I could watch them sprout, flower and fade from the couch where I spent most days.
            Somehow, in these slow strolls or during these long stares, I began to look.  Just look.  The shape of a petal, the curve of a stem, the arch of a leaf.  Patterns on top of other patterns.  The shadings of color -- so many different kinds of pink, the different leafy greens.  the rhythm of texture and contrast -- the soft and the stark, the smooth and bumpy.
            But since I still spent most of my time in bed and the window in my bedroom was too high to see outside, there were still very many dreary hours.  The bed in which I lay was made up with a hodge-podge of old linens and even older blankets.  Mis-matched sheets and disintegrating quilts.  Lumpy pillows and tattered pillowcases.  A graduate student, which I was before I became ill, does not spend much time in bed and does not spend much money on it either.
            My illness made reading very difficult, but I could look at pictures.  So I spent hours poring over catalogs.  I decided I wanted a comforter set and matching sheets -- something very pretty.
            But we had so little money.  My daughter had dropped out of school and was working for minimum wage.  My disability allowance from the State of Oregon at that time was just $200 per month.  Thankfully, we were eligible for food stamps, so at least we didn't have to worry about eating.
            For Christmas 1992, my daughter splurged.  She bought me an entire bedding ensemble in a pattern of gorgeous pink roses.  Although the overall design was simple, the printing of the flowers and the leaves was complex, with many different colors and giving the illusion of texture.
            I loved it and enjoyed being surrounded by it.  Even in the dark, when I couldn't make out the pattern, I knew this beauty was there, all around me.
            When I awoke, the first thing I saw was a spray of pink roses, looking like a Redoute print on my bed.  I spent my lay-about afternoons tracing the petals and examining all the shades of pink on cream.
            Those hours I spent in bed, too weak for thought, were spent absorbing beauty, passively -- drinking it in through eyes too tired to look anywhere else.
            In the passing weeks, I became more cheerful.  The long hours were no longer so tedious.  I no longer dwelled on my failures -- sorrow and loss no longer seemed so heavy.
            Having nothing else to do and no energy with which to do it, I noticed this effect of beauty, how it made me smile to look at my bed, how delicious it felt to snuggle between the matching flannel sheets.  Being confined to bed now had some pleasure, and the experience of this pleasure soon improved my mood.
            And then I became well enough to start to think and to wonder at the change that beauty all by itself had worked on my mind.
            We are so puritanical in the way we arrange our lives.  We obsess about all the things we "have to" do.  We use our hours to run here and there, to meetings, to school, to jobs, to market.  We waste them stuck in traffic and fritter them ensnared by the ugliness of television.
            We cook, we clean, we type, we fidget, we shovel dirt and calculate digits.  So seldom do we ever sit in quiet and admire beauty.
            Well, we torment our children with field trips to museums and bore them with lectures about composition in painting and the History of Art.  We make "art" a job -- something we must study in order to appreciate.
            But Beauty -- simple, visual beauty -- and the joy it brings us -- is almost always missed.  We just don't know it's there because we don't see it.  We haven't got time to see it.
            Oh, we pay the usual lip service to it.  "Take time to smell the flowers!"  It's one of those maxims enshrined right up there with "Love your mother" and "Always clean up your mess."
            If we're honest with ourselves, we must admit that we are too preoccupied to do more than mouth the proverb.  We don't live any of it.
            Humans need beauty.  We need it the way we need water and food.  It feeds our spirits and hydrates our souls just as food and water do the body.
            Our species evolved in a wooded grassland beside lakes and rivers.  When we moved into caves, the caves had views of running water and verdant valleys filled with animals.  We evolved to need the visual beauty of the natural world.
            Subliminally, we all know this.  We take ours walks in the park or have picnics at the seashore.  We go to the countryside for our vacations or head to the mountains for a long weekend.
            Everyone's inner desire is to "get away from it all" -- to escape from the mechanized, cemented, asphalted, fluorescent-lighted artificiality of daily existence in our time.  Our preferred antidote is wilderness, and so many of us try to go there that our national parks cannot handle the crowds.
            Yet we do not make the connection between our discontent with the way we live and the fact that we are starved for beauty every day.
            The nagging unhappiness we feel must come, we assume, from not enough money or not enough things, or a tiresome boss or a tiresome spouse, cranky children or demanding parents.
            Even those lucky enough to have adequate incomes, healthy children and secure employment are dissatisfied, and they almost never know why.  Perhaps a new car or a new dress -- hmmm, a new house?  a new town?  Whence cometh the ache, the yearning of the soul?
            When I first started looking for beauty, it was because I needed to rest my eyes for hours at a time without becoming suicidally depressed by my inactivity.  Pleasure had to come from something visual or aural because I couldn't move.
            So I listened to Mozart, Bach, Puccini -- thumbed through books of pictures, perused embroidery magazines and mail order catalogs, children's picture books and collections of knitting designs.  When I came across something I particularly liked, I would look at it for long periods and return to it often.
            Though I didn't know it at the beginning, I was feeding my wasted spirit.  I was a human who needed beauty, especially of the natural world -- foliage, blossoms, blue sky and puffy clouds, the bushy tail on a fat squirrel, the brilliant blue feathers of a scrub jay.  As I looked through books, stared out the window, stared at my sheets, watched the squirrels on my walks with the dogs, my soul was being fed what it needed.  The Beauty was keeping me alive.
            In the beginning, I simply looked at something beautiful, and it began to make me whole.  As I became stronger, I actively sought beauty and found that I had to actively reject ugliness in all its many forms.
            Gradually, just as I could feel strengthened by beauty, I could feel how I was drained by ugliness.   I banned raucous, jangly music; refused to watch nihilistic dramas on television; avoided unpleasant people.
            Sometimes this meant giving up things that I had actually liked very much.  I stopped watching the dramatizations of P.D. James' novels on television and even stopped reading the novels themselves.  Commander Dalgleish moves in a dreadfully depressing world where no one is good, no one is generous, no one is sanely happy.  We cannot want to live in such a world, and the depression that comes from experiencing it, even vicariously, prevents us from getting well.
            So, I changed the channel.  In particular, I watched a lot of nature films, and began to joke that I knew the mating habits of any animal ever filmed as well as a good many of the plants!  My pets and I would cuddle up on the couch and doze in the jungle or in the mountains or under the ocean -- vicariously.
            And I did smell the flowers, both literally and figuratively.  On our daily walks, the dogs sniffed all the smells and I observed every house, admired every shining leaf, smiled at every lace curtain and window box.  I watched bees pollinating and butterflies fluttering.  It's amazing what we can observe once we slow down and just look.
            I heard how the wind made music in the branches and the birds greeted each morning.  And I shared it all with my dogs as we strolled:
            "Oh! How lovely!"
            "Isn't that a gorgeous iris!?!"
            "Look at that silly bird!"
            "What a wild storm this is!"
            They would agree -- "Arf! Arf!"  Which means, of course, "It smells good, too."
            All this should not imply that I stopped taking my medicine or stopped seeing my physician regularly.  My illness is serious, and it will take a lot more than cheerfulness and beauty to get me well.  However, I now know the value of being aware of my surroundings, how they affect my mood, my view of the world, even my will to live.
            Beauty can help us stay happy, even though we are confined at home.
            Beauty can bring joy to life, even to a life that seems ruined.
            Beauty brings Joy.  And Joy is a healer -- a slow patient healer that works without our knowing it and heals places that we didn't even realize were wounded.
            Joy heals our souls -- and there isn't a person living who does not have a wounded soul.
            Never again think that beauty is unnecessary, that beauty is frivolous, a waste of taxpayer dollars, of money better spent elsewhere.
            No.  There is no better place to spend our coin, our time, our lives than in the realm of beauty.
            Today I sit and drink it in -- the sparkle of the water flowing past, the gorgeous painted boats propelled by strong paddlers, the sunlight splashing over green grass, the snow on the volcano -- I drink it in and store it away for the good of my soul.
            And I am happy.
 

Copyright 2002 by S. E. Hoffman

 

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