Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Beauty preaches truth;truth guides us to honesty



Let us assume that you are a very social type of person and have an affable personality.  Quite often, you visit your friends, neighbors and relatives. Visiting some houses, you are astonished to find costly antiques, photo frames depicting scintillating sceneries and luxurious paintings. In few houses, you mostly find the photos of religious deities. The pictorial depiction of these deities invariably includes the Goddess Laxmi, Rama & Sita flanked in the midst of deer in the forest, blessing hand of Saibaba and the crucifixion of Christ. All these religious pictures will prompt you to opine in the first instance that the inhabitants may not be atheists at all and a firm believer of religious rituals. By putting various pictures of divinity, they prove that they are the great worshippers of God and unless God’s blessings are not showered on them, their survival becomes critical. So, by hanging the photos of these deities, they want to cloister themselves in a religious environment. This could be one reason.  Second, by showing the photos of various sacred deities, they want to appreciate the beauty of religious truth and make a point of discussion during the social gatherings.

The lovers of English literatures are pellucid of Keat’s famous line,“ Beauty is truth and truth is beauty.” When the pictures of deities and goddesses are in front of you during your sitting and lazing in the room, some of you may like to introspect the religion attached therein and ponder on the same. Some others may simply take it as a beauty being expressed from the pictures. There are others, who with all their profundity and reverence for deities bow their heads with folded hands to the pictures to seek blessings.  People who introspect and try to find out what the preachings the pictures convey is less in percentage. A number of people take these photos of deities as a medium to express their morning rituals to worship for a split of a second.  If you take the crucifixion picture of Jesus, it has an elusive nature of thoughts, which only creates an illusion unless you understand the nitty-gritty of the Christian religion. If you manage to understand the inner meanings of the pictorial beauty, you get a kind of teachings and once you are attached to it, you become more sensitive to the said beauty. One thing is very sure; the nature of both beauty and truth is illusory. Truth has many facets, it has certainty, it has uncertainty and it may also be a lie.

In his famous creation of literary, namely “Ode on a Gracian Urn,” where Keats has expressed this above masterpiece line, is beyond anybody’s imagination what he really wanted to transpire. Was he meaning, “Beauty is an eternal truth or and truth is always a beauty.”  If that being the case, then the truth can never be an uncertainty or it cannot be a lie at any cost.  But in reality, we know this is malice. 

Beauty is another word of concord and harmony, the entwining of myriads of opposites, light and shade, sound and silence, hullabaloo and solitude, fullness and emptiness.  Unity always reveals the harmony of above conjoining factors and one is complementing the other.  The truth, which has a beauty, must have a light, sound, liveliness and honest confession at least mentally. Similarly, various beautiful things, namely your observing of a blooming  red rose in the morning hours, a wave surges up in the midst of the ocean and then the ridge of water curling into an arched form and breaking on the shore or the moonlight on a full moon when spreads across the rooftop or in an open ground with a slow but steady whizzing sound of air, have a certain truth behind their  existence. 

The creation of a beautiful  work of an art such as painting is nothing but a deep worship to augment creativity. Most of us have not that ability to engage in these types of creativities, but at least as a proxy to admire those creativities and beauties, we worship them.  In this way, we get a consideration that if we are not creators, we are admirers and devotees to the said beauties. Though Keat’s lines, prima-facie, may be illusory, but he made explicitly and emphatically clear that the nature of art has a beauty and that has a truth, which is a fact.

Argumentatively, by depicting pictures of Gods and Goddesses, many people want to explain the atmosphere of religiosity in their abode and how far it is true in reality except a cursory salutation that too with an urge to get blessings; is anybody’s guess.  Still, people find pride to put those photos of various deities as per their choices to get it adored of the beautification of their rooms and houses by others..  By putting photos of Gods and Goddess, if you want to become inclined to a particular religion and become a devotee to worship, it is a commendable effort; otherwise why put the photos of deities? If that is not the reality, then you can very well put an artwork, landscape, abstract art or simply a decorative piece.  By putting photos of these artistic beauties, you can appreciate the beauty and the truth behind the same. But to get the preachings from the beauty and become a devotee to God and Goddess and to worship a particular religion, there is no need of depicting the same to the walls of the rooms; you can even mentally do the same.

If you want to appreciate and admire a beautiful creation as Keats did, you can very well fix any art or artistic work in your rooms.


No comments: