Don't Be Ugly: An Aesthetic Matrix of Value
Steven Schroeder
presented at Midwestern State University, Wichita Falls, Texas, November 2005

I begin by rejecting a prioris and resisting generalizations.

But where Ludwig Wittgenstein and my grandmother agree, I make exceptions. Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus that “there can be no ethical propositions... Ethics and aesthetics are one.” My grandmother, even more gnomic in this instance than Wittgenstein, enfolded her moral philosophy in the juxtaposition of two expressions that have been known to give non-southerners fits: “Don’t be ugly. Be sweet.”

Both the positive and the negative matter, though you will often hear one without the other. (It is common for idiomatic expressions to be truncated. Think of “She doesn’t know me from Adam,” which carries so much more weight if you assume the missing “off ox.”) If Granny said “Be sweet,” you knew she also meant “Don’t be ugly.” And if she said “Don’t be ugly,” you knew she meant “Be sweet”—and you knew it was time for serious self-examination to determine what particular breach of decorum had led her to this more weighty injunction. I leave it to sociologists and applied linguists to count the frequency of these expressions in current usage, though I suspect that the homogenizing tendencies of linguistic practice in the United States may have suppressed it a bit. It would be interesting to map it across time, though historical documentation might be hard to come by. Since Wichita Falls is on the very edge of the South, it is also worth considering a geographic map. But philosophers and poets are licensed for qualitative research, so I’ll stick to anecdotal evidence and leave quantification to colleagues in the social sciences.

Together, the two expressions in the juxtaposition describe a moral continuum in aesthetic terms. And they do it in aesthetic terms that are multidimensional: the opposite of “ugly” is not “pretty” or “beautiful.” It is “sweet.” I could go on all day about the synesthetic implications of this. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but you usually have to depend on your tongue to tell you if something is sweet. In a culture that is so dominated by consumption that, like some heroine in a nineteenth century novel or a Puccini opera, we’re dying of it, moral philosophies that pivot on taste demand at least a second look. But I leave synesthesia aside for now to get back to a mapping project that is somewhere between topology and taxonomy.

Granny’s expression intersects with one I associate with my German Lutheran grandfather, though I suspect it originated with my Scots-Irish grandma: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything.” Again, a continuum—this one intended as a guide to proper linguistic behavior in public. In this case, the opposite of (or, more accurately, the alternative to) “nice” is “nothing.”

Growing up in the Texas Panhandle after Wichita Falls, I learned to take nothing seriously. I was primed for Wittgenstein’s conclusion, “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen,” and could work my way back from my upbringing through his argument—which is an argument about language, but also about aesthetics and ethics—about what one can and cannot say as well as what one can and cannot do.

But to take up the synesthetic note again for just a moment, nothing is about seeing as surely as it is about saying—and I am convinced that the relationship between the two accounts for the convergence of Wittgenstein’s moral philosophy with my grandmother’s and defines a space worthy of exploration.

So far, this convergence gives us an intersection of two continua.

The first is primarily descriptive:

ugly sweet



but also prescriptive:

Act in ways that may be described as sweet. Don’t act in ways that may be described as ugly. (Or, more specifically, act in ways that your grandmother would describe as sweet, not in ways that she would describe as ugly.) Though it is prescriptive, this is also at once descriptive, social, and traditional, bringing the weight of an earlier generation to bear on a later one by making the earlier generation’s descriptive act normative (“the theory of description matters most...,” Wallace Stevens wrote). But this is no abstract earlier generation: it is your grandmother. Having watched grandmothers silence more than one rowdy adolescent on a Chicago bus with nothing more than a look, I think this particular move from description to prescription remains possible.

The second embodies a (mostly) prescriptive logic vis-à-vis public speech:

nothing nice



Actually, “nothing” is not the opposite of “nice.” It is an acceptable “neutral” alternative between nice and its unnamed opposite. But not entirely neutral. One effect of the continuum is to give added weight to the nothing said that accompanies the look in the example of the grandmother on the bus. Given this continuum, if you say nothing, it is because you have nothing nice to say. Odds are, this is because what you are witnessing is ugly; and perceptive participants in the scene enter into the self-examination I mentioned before, searching for the breach of decorum that has turned things ugly. The result is sometimes not only silence but also stillness, at least for a time. (A reminder of another variation on Granny’s moral philosophy: “Be still,” which had as much to do with sound as with motion.) But I don’t want to jump the gun here. Thinking of Allison Krause singing “you say it best when you say nothing at all,” I am reminded that there is a nothing you say when you witness something ugly and can think of nothing nice, but there is also a nothing to be said that is beautiful in its own right.

Picturing the continua as intersecting axes gives us this taxonomy/topography:

nice

ugly nothing sweet

the unnamed opposite of nice

The upper right quadrant describes a space that could range from “sweet silence” through “nice, sweet speech.” The lower left quadrant describes a space that could range from “ugly silence” through “ugly speech that is not nice.” Now, we’ll have to think about whether there is a place on this map (in the lower right quadrant) for “sweet speech that is not nice” (which, I suspect, would be a kind of temptation—perhaps the language of the serpent in Eden) and (in the upper left quadrant) for speech that is “nice and ugly.”

This two-dimensional representation may be misleading to the extent that it applies only to speech. That is suggested in the continuum from nice to its unnamed opposite, but the ugly-sweet continuum applies to all behavior. To extend the space into three dimensions, we need to consider generalizations from “nice” (and not nice) speech to other kinds of behavior. That’s not difficult to do in the South, where ethics not only collapses into aesthetics but also into etiquette. George Lakoff has done groundbreaking work on the spatial orientation of value judgments that might well direct our attention to phrases like “down and dirty,” which I suspect would be close to both “nice and ugly” and “not nice but sweet” in the Southern lexicon. On first blush, the three-dimensional space we are looking for might be an octahedron that reaches from “down and dirty” through the plane figure defined by the intersection of nice-not nice with sweet-ugly to up and (presumably) clean.

Now, I am not going to presume to pass judgment on the moral taxonomy of my homeland. I’m confident my granny would call that ugly. But I must say that the experience of it, along with the Plains eyes I developed growing up in the Panhandle have played a role in my turn to poetry: “I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it.”

In a world prone to ugliness, the three-dimensional taxonomy described so far would direct us to silence and stillness: keep still, say nothing. That could result in the kind of passivity that responds to evil by waiting for it to pass, a passivity of which the South has been accused—as in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” which is a quintessentially Southern moral document. If you are going to stir things up, you are going to have to give an account, or you will be accused of turning things ugly. Do note that the young man—and King was young when he wrote this—articulating a moral justification for action does so between an ugly passivity and a “grandmother” (Rosa Parks was 42, so she was a young grandmother, and a figurative one) who sat on a bus and would not move. King had to explain why he was not doing nothing (in the North, nothing would have to be explained, as I think Malcolm X understood); and, as a theorist of “passive” resistance, King had to explain how not doing nothing could still be still, not ugly.

But I am in danger of drifting too far east (though Malcolm X was born in Nebraska and had more of the Plains in him than people seem to realize). Birmingham and Montgomery and Atlanta present a different variation on nothing than the Panhandle. The Panhandle interests me especially for its visual possibilities, its contribution to seeing nothing. Shall we see what that enables us to say about what we cannot say?

In the “Lecture on Nothing” I cited a moment ago with reference to my turn to poetry, John Cage, a New Yorker, writes about the experience of driving across Kansas. (I am confident that folks here will understand this reference to Kansas at the beginning of a turn to the Texas Panhandle.) Kansas, Cage says, is like nothing on earth, which, for a New Yorker, is refreshing. Not like Arizona, where one is driven to look at everything at once. Now, a composer who said of his musicircus that “you won’t hear anything, you’ll hear everything” and celebrated a Joycean aesthetic of “here comes everybody” would not be averse to seeing everything at once. But, he says, we need the Kansas in us.

Yes. And not so we can fill it with Arizona or New York.

The Kansas in us is at the center of the matrix sketched in the first part of this talk—like the nothing at the center of the hub around which a wheel turns. Whether we are discussing Taoism or Texas, there is a risk of turning this into nothing more than a truism about everything “needing” its opposite, a truism that has often led to ugly justifications of evil as “necessary.” While nothing may underwrite the claim that good “needs” evil or the equally pernicious one that what is, is good, Cage’s Kansas in us and the nothing at the center of our matrix take a different turn.

The wrong turn, I think, made as often in Taoism as in Texas (perhaps more often, since the Tao is older than Texas), is to harmony as a state of static equilibrium. Ethically, this has played prominently in pietistic traditions that have stopped at what is is good. Martin Luther King’s slant on this, that the arc of the universe is toward justice, attends to harmony but reinstates an aesthetically dynamic dimension: the universe arcs, and it arcs toward, rather than simply spinning in stasis. It is, we might say, twisted, twisting. Sabbath rest has been described in similar terms as a dynamic element in time’s rhythm. And the Tao Te Ching’s evocation of water has a similar effect. Even if it is simply occupying low spaces, water moves. Steve Goodman caught this in a simple song after one look at the Grand Canyon, and Toni Morrison saw it when she referred to floods as the memory of water. I find it significant that a long obsession with symmetry gave us Newtonian physics with its perfect circles, its equal and opposite actions, and its action at a distance; but it was a turn to permutations that spawned group theory and underscored a quantum universe. Symmetry, yes, but never total. This is the difference between a fractal universe and a mechanical one. It is a “not quite” that makes fractal symmetries strange, and it is a “not quite” that creates interest on the border (as Kierkegaard noted) between the aesthetic and the ethical, that may carry us from the silence of quietism to the silence of nonviolent resistance. When John Cage urged us to imitate Nature in her manner of operation, he recognized that the “strange,” the interesting, what we do not understand, are more natural than the systems we have devised to contain them.

Charles Hartshorne takes this up with respect to sound in his study of bird song. Observing that birds “adapt” to unvaried stimulation and “turn their attention elsewhere” (a poet, who is allowed to anthropomorphize can simply say they get bored), he names the moment of the turn (which varies from species to species) the “monotony-threshold” and suggests two ways to avoid it: “either by varying the activity in question, here the singing; or by pausing long enough so that other activities and lapse of memory intervene” (121). Bird song, which is one of the most beautiful things we encounter in nature, is a dynamic equilibrium of repetition and variation: too much variation and we don’t know the bird (though, from the bird’s perspective, our recognition is less important than that of other birds), too little and we don’t care to know it. Again, the Kansas in bird song can be of critical importance. There are birds that sing songs of only one or two notes made interesting by varying intervals: silence makes the song. Cage picked up on this in what is perhaps his most famous composition, 4’33”. I will insert an excerpt between this paragraph and the next.


This is, of course, a kind of joke, and jokes, like music and poetry, depend on an interplay of expectation and surprise. No surprise and we are simply bored. No expectation and we simply don’t attend. Part of Cage’s genius (which he learned, as he said, by imitating Nature in her manner of operation) was to create structures to turn our attention to what is there: tathata. (“Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,” Wallace Stevens wrote...)

The first time my granny saw the Texas Panhandle, she said nothing for a long time. Then she said, “This is the end of the world.” That is not so different from the reaction of Anglo explorers like Edwin James and Randolph Marcy when they encountered it a century before her. I don’t know what the first member of the Apache or Comanche or Kiowa nation to encounter the place in the two or three centuries before that said; but it seems that, across cultures and across languages, those who have most appreciated the place have been able to embrace its nothing, dwell on it. Others have encountered it either as an empty place to be filled (still a common outlook among developers) or as an obstacle to be overcome (often on the way to California); and they have generally failed to see nothing, which, perhaps, does not explain everything but does explain a great deal.

Failure to see nothing there justifies filling “there” up. At its most extreme, this becomes a variation on the Zionist theme of “a land without people for a people without land.” In the Panhandle, occupation took a form very close to this decades before the phrase was coined in the Middle East.

In terms of perceptual theory, the experience of the Plains might best be understood in terms of two phenomena described since the earliest surviving written records — “plains eyes” and “the loneliness.” The first describes a condition in which what is distant is clear and what is near disappears. This is evidence of the importance of edges in visual perception, recognized already by Goethe in his theory of color. On the Plains, the only edge is a distant horizon, so it is at the distant horizon that vision is possible. The “loneliness” is akin to snow blindness and also partly reflects the importance of edges. In short, no edge no thing. But it is also related to change blindness. Monotony can mean habituation, and the Plains have certainly been experienced by outsiders and newcomers as monotonous. Come to expect a place to be empty, and empty is likely to be all you see. Local eyes, more finely tuned, may detect changes and edges—see nothing—where others think there is nothing to see.

But nothing is like the “presence” of an audio recording—not silence, but the background treated as silence so a foreground can be heard against it as sound. I believe the next step, which I will have to leave to another time, depends on attending to this presence, on learning to hear the silence of it—the Kansas in it—before we rush to fill it with sound.


References

John Cage. “Lecture on Nothing.” In Silence. Wesleyan University Press, 1961. [The lecture was first printed in 1959.]

Grant Foreman. Marcy & the Gold Seekers: the Journal of Captain R.B. Marcy, With an Account of the Gold Rush Over the Southern Route. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1939.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970.

Steve Goodman, “Grand Canyon Song.” On Affordable Art. Red Pajamas, 1989.

Charles Hartshorne. Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973.

Edwin James. Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, Performed in the Years 1819 and '20, by order of the Hon. J.C. Calhoun, Sec'y of War, Under the Command of Major Stephen H. Long. From the Notes of Major Long, Mr. T. Say, and other gentlemen of the exploring party. Compiled by Edwin James, Botanist and Geologist for the Expedition. Volume II. Philadelphia: H.C. Carey and I. Lea, 1823.

Søren Kierkegaard. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968. [Originally published in Danish in 1843.]

Martin Luther King, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 16 April 1963 [accessed 1 November 2005] http://www.nobelprizes.com/nobel/peace/MLK-jail.html

George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Harper Collins, 1999.

Mario Livio. The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005.

Toni Morrison. “The Site of Memory.” In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures. Edited by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Cornel West. MIT Press, 1990.

Wallace Stevens, “Description Without Place.” In The Palm at the End of the Mind. New York: Knopf, 1971, p. 270. [Originally published in 1945.]

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. German text with English translation by C.K. Ogden. Introduction by Bertrand Russell, Routledge, 1922. [First appeared in German in 1921.]

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