Mid-week Muse-ings

Beauty on the divided brain

We Can Wake Sleeping Beauty with a Right Brain Kiss

I have promised to get back to the theme of Beauty that I only touched on during my first mid-week musing. In that post, I compared what Martijn Doolaard is doing in his Italian mountain retreat to Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a famous book that is enjoying a kind of renaissance on its half century anniversary. Pirsig tried to define Beauty that he called ‘quality’ intellectually, whereas Doolaard, who is an artist and artisan, knows how to create Beauty with his hands and is leading what I would call a life infused with Beauty. But since we live in an age of science that demands definitions, let’s ask ourselves what is Beauty, really? How do you define and create it in our ugly world? That is what I am attempting to muse about today and I am aware that I am overreaching…

And immediately, I ran into problems with defining Beauty. It’s impossible because it is something subjective and highly personal yet somehow, universal. While we can point at aspects of Beauty such as harmony, order and coherence or its mathematical expression in the Fibonacci numbers or the Golden Mean found in nature as well as in art and architecture, it is evanescent, as hard to pin down as a fragrance yet just as intimate and powerful. Above all, Beauty is an experience that goes beyond the abstraction of language and mathematics. For example, the great international art collector Gulbenkian always claimed that he knew he was standing before a masterpiece when his stomach hurt. Similarly, many people get goosebumps listening to a great aria or Stairway to Heaven covered by the Seattle rock band, Heart. Others talk about their heart literally skipping a beat walking through a great building like the cathedral of Notre-Dame or weeping at the beauty of a song by Leonard Cohen or even a movie. We are literally moved physically by Beauty in all its forms because it is visceral, an experience that cannot be faked. Your body knows.

The trouble is we live in a world where the body, as well as the arts, beauty, and the sense of the sacred are disrespected and regarded as, at best, nice fantasies that we can indulge in but should never take too seriously.  A world that in the words of the great philosopher Iain McGilchrist is ‘…more fit for computers than humans…we have become hubristic, entitled, resentful and power hungry animals…the Left Brain mode of analysis without context has created sustained incoherence…it creates maps of the world, nothing wrong with that unless you mistake it for the world.

McGilchrist, a rare thinker who easily navigates between science as well as philosophy and poetry, delivered these damning words during his recent Darwin Lecture at Cambridge, positing that we need a revolution in thought to solve what he calls our terrifying Metacrisis. In other words, how do we create a World of Beauty instead of continuing with bloody mess we’ve made?

The opening words of this landmark lecture are worth pondering because they sum up in one very long sentence what is ailing us, so here they are, jotted down by me as I listened in stop/go mode:

Is there a connection between realism, the appreciation of uniqueness, a capacity for understanding melody and harmony, an aptitude for appreciating time, a sense of humour, the ability to read body language, to sustain attention and the flight or fight mode or, on the other hand, between a talent for manipulation, a givenness to literalism, to theory at the expense of experience, unreasonable optimism and a preoccupation with detail as well as a loss of a sense of the living body within its place a focus on body parts—perhaps not.

Yet I assure you, there is a such a connection in either case. It is rooted deep in us and is quite coherent once one understands what underlies the pattern.

McGilchrist knows what he is talking about, and he has a cure for us though we may find it not to our liking. The reason is that we are deeply accustomed to a particular kind of Attention, a way of looking at the world described in the second part of the sentence. It is rooted in the Left Brain, which is fabulous for grabbing, control, manipulation, analysis, and building models and maps without actually comprehending what they mean. To understand, to put together what we have taken apart, we need to return to the Right Brain and its particular way of attending to the world in a broad, wholistic manner that creates context, meaning and ultimately, Beauty itself.

McGilchrist has some observation about Beauty that I found enlightening in view of my problems with definition. He puts Beauty into the category of ontological givens.

 In the west, we have a tradition that deems important three great values: Goodness, Beauty, and Truth. Each of them is an aspect of the Sacred…they are not something we created but are ontological in nature and belong to the ground of being, which is given.

In other words, we are so bereft of the sense of Beauty in our lives because we are forever paying attention with the Left Brain, which doesn’t know what it is or what it means, while insisting that it alone knows anything worth knowing. It is a familiar conundrum for anyone who has wondered why postmodern art is so often a haven for ugly, awful, politicised stuff that nobody wants to see or listen to. We continue to feed off the culture created decades and centuries ago, prefer ring not to think too hard about the lack of great new works in any genre except perhaps literature. We are still producing beautiful, thrilling, and funny stories because the printed word is a function of left brain attention. But music, theatre and the visual arts are not doing so well; they seem somehow asphyxiated, unable to breathe and flourish as they once did.

All of this is very abstract meta philosophy, but it is the only framework I have discovered that offers a way out of the ugly intellectual and spiritual corner we’re trapped in. McGilchrist ends the lecture by negating what we usually do when we want to offer ‘solutions to problems’: a bullet point list of Things we should DO.

No, he warns, that is what the left brain always does, and it won’t help at all. What is needed is a change of heart, a change that begins on the inside, a fundamental shift that integrates the left brain into the wise, humane, and ultimately more intelligent right brain attention. We need both kinds, but allowing the self-righteous left brain to run the world is to run it into the ground. We should stop and consider what we are doing and where we are going. Once again, we have to ask, Who Are We? What does it mean to be Human in the Age of AI?

If you find all this a bit too impersonal, I hear you. I’m a writer so I am a left brain addict and learning how to pay attention with the other, right brain in my head is not normal for me either. I find that painting, listening to music, reading and writing poetry, going out into nature and stroking a cat on the sidewalk all help. Above all, I have taken a big step back from all the hate filled words infesting the Internet. Hatred, in case you were wondering, lives in the Left Brain. If we want to live a more beautiful life, we should be very careful not to get infested with this virus. It is insidious and will make you ill. Choose Beauty instead, even if you have largely forgotten how.

McGilchrist says that metaphorical thinking lives in the right brain, so let’s do a little right brain thought experiment. Let’s consider the story of Sleeping Beauty, generally interpreted to mean the erotic awaking of a young woman via a kiss by a young man in a different key.  

If we imagine our entire culture as the metaphorical Sleeping Beauty, the story suddenly gets a new life, so to speak. It shows that we can take on the role of the transforming Prince by getting re-acquainted with Imagination/Intuition/Faith/Love and thus, bring Sleeping Beauty out of her coma.  Once we are awake to these, our half-forgotten right brain functions, we will be able to rise from our procrustean bed of preconceived (left brain) notions and live the life we were meant to live: a life in which Beauty plays the starring role.