Finding Beauty
By Victoria Fortune
I recently came across an article about Don McLean-- odd considering the article was over two years old, but there it was among the headlines I was skimming, as though it had resurfaced just for me. It was about McLean, now over 70, selling his “American Pie” manuscript. His hope, aside from leaving some money for his heirs, was that “anyone who might be interested will learn that this song was not a parlor game.”
The song was McLean’s attempt to capture a “photograph of America in words and music.” It’s a cynical photograph:. And in the streets the children screamed / The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed / But not a word was spoken / The church bells all were broken. “Basically in ‘American Pie,’ things are heading in the wrong direction,” [McLean] told Christie’s, according to the Newcastle Herald. “It is becoming less idyllic.” McLean, like the rest of the world, appears to have grown even more cynical since then.
“There is no poetry,” he says, glumly, “and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of ‘American Pie.’” One reader responded in the comments that McLean isn’t looking very hard if he sees no poetry or romance in the world. But I think that’s exactly the point. You have to look hard to find it.
Consider current music. I’m certainly no expert: most of the new music I hear is what my children listen to. And there are still many great songs being written with powerful, meaningful lyrics. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s “Same Love” comes to mind: When I was in church they taught me something else / If you preach hate at the service, those words aren't anointed / That Holy Water that you soak in has been poisoned. Of course, there are also plenty of vapid, inane songs, as there have always been. But what is new is the proliferation of songs with lyrics so raunchy and rife with profanity that they could never be played on the radio. There are many advantages to the internet removing gatekeepers like radio stations and editorial rooms, but an upside of those filters was that they forced artists to be creative. At least The Beatles and The Rolling Stones came up with colorful metaphors to write about drugs: “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” “Mother’s Little Helper.” This new breed of songs that revel in the crass, unvarnished vulgarity of sex, drugs and partying make no attempt to extract deeper meaning or craft well-wrought lyrics.
We’ve come to equate “authentic” with raw and unfettered by any sense of decorum. But raw and unfettered for no other purpose than to be raw and unfettered is degrading to humanity. Our political system is the epitome of this. Politicians more concerned about their careers than their constituents have left us cynical. Eloquence, the ability to inspire and persuade with words, was once a hallmark of great leadership, (along with knowledge and expertise). These days articulate politicians who attempt to convey the complex nuances of issues are criticized as elitist. Rude and offensive is perceived as “honest,” though this is just another veneer for self-serving politicians. Our president tosses words around carelessly, speaks in hyperbole, and tells us not to take what he says literally. “Words don’t matter,” he claims, as though determined to make this a reality.
Like Trump, we are an image-obsessed society, with social media squeezing our range of expression down to 140-character soundbites. (The fact that Twitter is upping the limit to 280 characters may be a hopeful sign.) The average illiterate peasant in Shakespeare’s day had a vocabulary of about 3,000 words. The average college graduate today has a vocabulary of about 700 words. Maybe we are becoming more efficient at communicating, but we are undoubtedly losing some depth and breadth of expression. Perhaps it’s my bias as a reader and writer, but I’ve never bought into the idea that a picture is worth a thousand words. Studies have shown that reading activates our imagination, our senses, emotions and intellect in ways that viewing cannot. Words do matter.
McLean offered some advice to young songwriters who are starting out: “immerse yourself in beautiful music and beautiful lyrics and think about every word you say in a song.” This is sage advice for any writer, no matter your genre. But “beautiful” is an elusive word. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and nearly impossible to define. The best description I have come across is John Keats’s in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Nature has long been where writers have found beauty, from the Romantic poets to the folk singers of the 60’s. But in a world so focused on the urban, we are losing touch with the natural world. Maybe that is why it’s harder to find beauty. In one of my favorite books, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, Shug finds God and beauty in nature and considers it a sin not to appreciate it. “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it,” she says. “People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” Sadly, so few seem to be paying any attention.
That’s not to say that beauty can’t be found in the urban world, or in the most unlikely of places. As Author Terry Tempest Williams says, “Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.”
Where do you find beauty? Some places to look, for starters:
#Sundaysentences on Twitter
The Fourteen Best Poetry Debuts of the Last Five Years
The Lost Words, a book coming out this month by author Robert Macfarlane and artist Jackie Morris, that celebrates words of nature that are falling out of use.
