'On Beauty and Being Just', part 3

[fiefoe]

Scarry is not alone in her obsession with 'this green pliancy designed to capture and restructure light'. As she puts it, 'the palm frond is the model from which, or more accurately the instrument with which, Matisse paints'. (While digging for Matisse images referred to in this article, I turned up this highly gratifying link.)

__ The signature of a palm is its striped light.

__ The palm now has emphatic fronds. It is brown, like the painter’s brush, it is as though the painting in turn paints us, plaiting braids of light across the surface of our skin. Above her head, the huge open window—open sky, open sea, open sail, open palm—seems the picture of the airy music she is playing, a picture painted with the brush of her bow.

__ If each calls out for attention that has no destination beyond itself, each seems self-centered, too fragile to support the gravity of our immense regard. But beautiful things, as Matisse shows, always carry greetings from other worlds within them. In surrendering to his leaf-light, one is carried to other shorelines as inevitably as Odysseus is carried back to Delos. What happens when there is no immortal realm behind the beautiful person or thing is just what happens when there is an immortal realm behind the beautiful person or thing: the perceiver is led to a more capacious regard for the world.

__ If a beautiful palm tree one day ceases to be so, has it defaulted on a promise? ... No matter how long beautiful things endure, they cannot out-endure our longing for them.

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