Aesthetic Gaze Crossing the Worlds
I. Vision and Style
If the One has created the multiverse in order to surrender itself to the infinite, unceasing aesthetic contemplation of all that is, then there is no longer time not to live a life in which each moment would not be an ethical–aesthetic form and idea, worthy of the admiration of the One.
Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science (§290) insists: “One thing is needful. – To ‘give style’ to one’s character – a great and rare art!”[1] This statement offers a view of life not as something subjected only to the accidental flow driven by the instincts of survival and the conventional forms of cultural existence. It invites us to regard life as something to which an aesthetic form can be given.
Thinking about shaping life as Nietzsche envisioned it, striving to find an individual form and framework, a style of looking and seeing, the significance of aesthetic observation crystallizes. Moreover, the aesthetic vision that comes from different parts of the world, imbued with distinctive apprehensions, is able to expand our perceptual horizon. For everyday life, filled with the necessity of habit and repetition, becomes like a mechanism that works only in one mode. Therefore, our aim could be, with the help of the aesthetic gaze woven into the fabric of everyday life, to make life itself, its separate moments and segments, aesthetically charged.
Examples of such aesthetic perception resound in distant cultures. Sei Shōnagon (966–1017) - Japanese poet, writer, and lady-in-waiting - in The Pillow Book lists “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster”: “Sparrows feeding their young. To pass a place where babies are playing. To sleep in a room where some fine incense has been burnt. To notice that one’s elegant Chinese mirror has become a little cloudy. To see a gentleman stop his carriage before one’s gate and instruct his attendants to announce his arrival. To wash one’s hair, make one’s toilet, and put on scented robes; even if not a soul sees one, these preparations still produce an inner pleasure. It is night and one is expecting a visitor. Suddenly one is startled by the sound of rain-drops, which the wind blows against the shutters.”[2] Thus, aesthetic vision begins with style — not as superficial decoration, but as gaze. Nietzsche and Sei Shōnagon together affirm that to live aesthetically means to see differently, to transform repetition into beauty, and to endow the ordinary with significance.
The re-enlivening of everyday life, or the re-enchantment of the quotidian, carries with it the ability to see things - those to which we have become so accustomed or so close that we no longer notice their particular beauty – and to endow them with a new image. Things and processes which, because of the habits of the mind, you consider deplorable, since they evoke ugliness or decay, can be seen as if reflected in a new light. This constant restoration of enchantment gives us, metaphorically speaking, different eyes with which to look upon things that are small, large, ugly, beautiful, neutral; things that inspire love, hatred, but most importantly of all – things that resonate. And for this reason, to borrow a gaze, to borrow a perspective from a distant culture, creates a rupture in the gravitational field of vision. It offers the possibility of filling the scaffolding of everyday life with the unusual. Perhaps only for a moment, if we accept Schopenhauer’s harsh insight: “Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents.”[3]
The Chinese Song dynasty poet Su Shi (Su Dongpo; 1037–1101) expresses this need for another perspective in his poem Written on the Wall at West Forest Temple: “Seen across, it is ridges; seen from the side, it is peaks. From far or near, from high or low – each view is different. I cannot make out the true face of Mount Lu, only because I myself am within this very mountain.” Habit and location limit our perspective because we are too close. Changing our view means stepping outside the mountain and finally seeing its face.
The Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei (699–761), in his poem Deer Enclosure, provides another model of aesthetic vision: “Empty mountains, no man is seen, but the sound of people’s voices is heard. Returning sunlight enters the deep forest, and shines again on green moss.”. Emptiness here is not absence, but resonance - what Chinese aesthetics calls yijing, the poetic realm. This is the sphere where sight opens into consciousness, where perception itself becomes a poetic event.
Thus, there is justification for Rainer Maria Rilke’s words in Letters to a Young Poet: “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in a prison, whose walls let none of the world’s sounds reach your senses – would you not still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memory? Turn your attention thither.”[4] Poverty is not in life, but in perception. The aesthetic gaze restores enchantment to the everyday by offering the possibility of discovering its hidden wealth.
II. Re-enchantment and Poetic Consciousness
This is not an exercise in cultural appropriation; this is an exercise in aesthetic self-cultivation. The notions of beauty, the aesthetic observation of impermanence, the aesthetics of beginnings and endings, that we find in Asian philosophies, are all means for attaining a state of consciousness that otherwise lies beyond everyday accessibility. These states of consciousness can be compared to reading: when we read a poem, the meeting of the reader’s eyes with the printed words in the book, the imagined but unfathomable intention of the poet, produces a third element — the moment of poetic consciousness. And this moment of poetic consciousness lifts the reader, even if only for an instant, above the familiar structures of the everyday. For the everyday might simply be covered with asphalt, cement, and glass, rigid forms of the city whose beauty has been lost to the onlooker. For this state of consciousness, this brief moment, carries an aesthetic quality in itself, for it creates ripples that oscillate through the fabric of human life.
For example, the Japanese tradition of wabi-sabi offers one such perspective: an observation that embraces the transient and the imperfect. Tanizaki Jun’ichirō in In Praise of Shadows observes: “This is a reflection of our way of thinking: beauty lies not in the object itself, but in the pattern of the shadows created by each object, the light and the darkness.”[5] Wabi-sabi means seeing imperfection and incompleteness not as defects, but as sources of radiance. A cracked bowl, a withered branch, a shadowed wall — each is a vessel of beauty. Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694) deepens this sensibility further with haiku: “A crow / has settled on a bare branch /autumn evening.[6] The withered branch, the crow, the autumn twilight — together they affirm impermanence not as loss but as presence.
The “borrowing” of aesthetic vision is not ornamental, but existential. To borrow another’s gaze is to allow oneself to be unbalanced, to strive to see through eyes that do not share our habits. This is why Chinese aesthetics values dan (blandness): it allows a distancing from saturation, a way of perceiving the subtle and the barely visible. Pale yellows, muted browns, translucent ink washes - these do not create excess of color and form, but depth.
Impressionism offers a Western parallel. Claude Monet’s brushwork invites the viewer to a vision of the world that seems to appear when the eyes are half-closed, letting light dissolve into shimmer. To see as Monet saw is to expand perception by loosening its grip on fixed forms. The world itself becomes dreamlike, not because it has changed, but because the gaze has shifted.
This cultivation of aesthetic observation is therefore also a possibility of enhancing the contemplative life. Contemplative life slows the incessant stream of impressions in the mind, which tend to disappear as quickly as Chinese characters written with water on hot stones: the water evaporates, leaving no trace. So too do our impressions vanish, unless aesthetic attention holds them. The re-enchantment of the everyday is thus a discipline of slowing, of holding, of attentive seeing.
III. Memory, Transcendence, and Autumnal Aesthetics
My grandparents’ house has already passed into the mythical reality of memory that so strongly resembles Marcel Proust’s description of childhood in Remembrance of Things Past. These memories are saturated with an aesthetic vision of things. I remember vividly, driven by boredom, I would sometimes take a mirror, turn it, and hold it above my chest so that the ceiling would be reflected in it, and then I would walk around the house, looking at the mirror and at the reflection of the ceiling, inducing within myself the feeling of strangeness. It was as if you looked down at the earth but saw the shimmering sky above you.
Proust describes the power of memory in The Captive: “The only true voyage of discovery, the only really rejuvenating experience, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is…”[7] Memory is precisely such another gaze, displacing us from the present into a vantage point that reveals the ordinary as strange.
And it is not an invitation to escape the everyday. It is an invitation to repopulate the everyday with points of transcendence, that act as dynamic vectors leading into aesthetic feeling. Aesthetic feeling that both enriches and draws from examples in other cultures.
We no longer consider the eating of potatoes or bell peppers, as well as the use of spices, as cultural appropriation, for they have simply become part of our daily diet. But some of us might object that looking toward other cultures for the sake of cultivating an aesthetic gaze is not compatible with our identity. Yet I would like to turn this objection into something else, namely, that ways of looking, forms of perception, and capacities to inhabit different aesthetic horizons are just as important as the food we eat or the drinks we imbibe.
Here the metaphor can be extended: just as the diet must be varied for the sake of health, so too must the aesthetic range be varied for vitality. To feed only on the familiar means to impoverish perception. To borrow ‘other eyes’, other ways of seeing, means to enrich the palette of life. Thus memory, epiphany, and nourishment converge. The mirror in the childhood house, the madeleine in Proust’s novel, the cracking asphalt that resembles Egyptian hieroglyphs – each is an invitation to transcend everyday life in its very midst.
It is customary to think that those who dwell in the autumn and winter of life are immersed in childhood memories, carried away by the waters of nostalgia. For those who have begun to measure the past against the eternal infinity of disappearance, time seems to slow, while consciousness itself spontaneously gives birth to the afterglow of what is gone. In some cases, the days of childhood are colored in the hues of a true golden age, filling a decayed present with meaningful joy. This joy is often accompanied by a note of melancholy: the loss of authenticity, the non-realization of abandoned possibilities. Melancholy is intensified by the fact that the fields of memory of the salad years are also inhabited by the shadows of deceased ancestors. It is a territory in which communication with them alone is possible for the urban dweller who has long since lost the sense of the animistic world. The frustrations of the present are filled with the light of childhood memory, healing or temporarily soothing, sublimating the successive manifestations of primordial dissatisfaction.
It is in this way that childhood memories, when looked at from this perspective, do not differ in their function from other pleasures through whose psychic element the cycle of a human day is spent. As consciousness flows, fluttering in the winds of psychic habits like a piece of cloth, I have no possibility of not falling into the clutches of accidental memories. They appear, seemingly, out of nowhere from the stream of consciousness, from the mill of thought, establishing a temporary reign of sights, sounds, and tactile remnants of the past. Although human beings are fundamentally based on the dominance of visual forms – with sight being the sense through which we receive most of our information – equally powerful are other senses that participate in the shaping of memory’s forms. Each of us is witness to how dominant sound is in triggering the flash of memory. A few chords are enough for the floodgates of recollection to be thrown open; when half a minute of a song has ended, you are already flowing back into the upper reaches of the river of memory, and it seems that the present ‘self’ is surrounded by fragments of past ‘selves’ like a garment impregnated with the smell of a campfire.
Many times, too, scent serves as a portal for the transformation of the shadows of the past into embodiments of the present. A cloud of perfume from a stranger can stir remnants of former obsessions that emerge from the folds of hidden memory. The smell of freshly cut grass opens the Pandora’s box of fullness and seasonal apogee – summer. But the smell of spruce ambivalently recalls both funerals and the hidden potentialities of the New Year’s darkness. The smell of fresh asphalt, the first drops of rain on a hot country road, the tarred scent of train rails. Smells, like the two faces of the Roman god Janus, gaze simultaneously into the past and into the present. Often it happens that, without our being aware of it, elements of the past intertwine with the components of present perception. In a certain sense one could say that, so long as our mental organ – the brain - functions flawlessly, the remnants of the past are always present.
The ancient Indian Buddhist philosophers who belonged to the school of “Mind-Only,” accepting that what truly exists is only consciousness and its transformations, and that the seemingly independent perceptions of material objects are only manifestations of consciousness, held that all our actions of speech, body, and mind permeate the stream of consciousness like scent. They perfume the elements of the psyche, depositing the unmanifest tendencies of action, speech, and thought as seeds, potentialities destined to grow when favorable conditions converge. Memories themselves are like these perfumings of past impressions. Thus, one may say that we are filled with the fragrances of past memories. And aesthetic perception, too, invites us to sense the fragrance of the transient character of things.
Habit is the twin brother of boredom, siblings who do not wish to meet. We flee from boredom into habit, but this pendulum keeps swinging. Therefore, the autumn mist, the smell of fallen leaves, the sharp cold of frost against the skin, the dark evenings that flow into melancholy – all this can serve and become objects of aesthetic observation, of joy and even of pleasure, if only the correct lens and the correct angle of vision are found. Boredom, when transformed with the help of attention, becomes an opening. Instead of fleeing into habit, one may linger, observe, and allow melancholy to be transformed into depth.
Moss-covered sidewalk curbs, cracks in the asphalt, the sparkling light of the dying sunset, leaves arranged in symbolic patterns that only you can read – all of this is part of an aesthetic vision that can be enhanced and supplemented with an understanding and knowledge of how representatives of other cultures – artists, writers, poets, and philosophers – have viewed the world.
***
[1] Nietzsche, F. (2001) The Gay Science, ed. B. Williams, trans. J. Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 163.
[2] Morris, I. (1991) The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon. London: Penguin Classics, p. 51.
[3] Schopenhauer, A. (1969) The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I. Translated by E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover Publications, p. 312.
[4] Rilke, R.M. (1962) Letters to a Young Poet. Transl. M.D. Herter Norton. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, pp. 19–20.
[5] Tanizaki, J. (2021) In Praise of Shadows. Transl. G. Starr. Foreword by K. Kuma. Photography and design by A. Pothecary. USA: Sopra Books, p. 63.
[6] Hass, R. (1994) The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, Issa. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, p. 13.
[7] Proust, M. (1925/2003) Remembrance of Things Past, Volume III: The Captive, The Fugitive, Time Regained. Transl. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and T. Kilmartin. London: Wordsworth Editions, 260. lpp.
