Cringe

RAYMUND FERNANDEZ

After all, not everything has to be beautiful,” the young teacher said. Since the topic was art, the older teacher could only think to himself: If a thing is not beautiful, would people look at it? And if people did not look at it, could it really exist?

As always, the argument depends on definitions. But take care to understand that definitions can’t be subjective.

If by subjective we mean that beauty and meaning are up to the individual to decide, then discourse becomes impossible.

For if something can mean anything, how can we talk about them?

Beauty and meaning are relative.

They are relative to how they are universally defined. But again, take care to understand that every culture is a universal set even if every culture is a subset of bigger universes; like world culture, or imperialist culture.

Beauty and meaning are cultural.

They are relative that way, but not subjective.

Plato said, Beauty is the object of love.

It’s a good starting point.

But what if the subject of the art is not loveable?

The picture of the titan god Cronus devouring his children cannot be loveable.

Does this mean that Goya’s painting of that theme can not be beautiful?

That would seem to be so. And yet, Goya’s “Cronus Devouring his Children,” has been called one of the great masterpieces of its time. It speaks of the nature of power in a time of violence.

Goya had seen the democratic ideals of the French Revolution fall into the “Reign of Terror,” leading to Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Spain where Goya was a painter of the Royal Court.

He had seen war. He had seen power devouring everything in its path. How can that possibly be loveable?

There must be something about the painting that is loveable and therefore beautiful.

Or why would so many gaze for so long and repeatedly into its hypnotic horror? It cannot be the topic or the subject that is beautiful.

It must be something else. it must be something perceivable though invisible. Poets often speak of “voice.”

Even as you read this text, you imagine it being spoken to you by an entity.

That entity exists subliminally.

You may not be conscious or aware of it. Indeed, the less aware you are the more powerful this poetic voice is. It can speak to you like “God.”

As it is speaking to you now in this essay. It is speaking to you this way, as God, just simply by a stroke of technique. The writer did it simply by not, using the pronoun “I.”

For as soon as I say “I,” you are cued to begin reading this voice only as I, Kinutil, speaking to you:

Not the all knowing God.

In painting, this “voice” translates to “gaze.” Thus, in “Cronus Devouring his Children,” we see not just the ugly Cronus eating a bloody man-child even as his own flesh falls from his bones like so much corrupted meat

. The great Spanish painter, Francisco Goya y Lucientes, is not, himself, depicted in the painting. Because he is invisible, Goya’s gaze becomes, for us, more powerful. This undefined gaze looking into the horrific condition of humans as they consume and are consumed by power works into our minds like the judgement-gaze of God.

The painting makes us cringe in the face of so much ugliness and violence.

But what we feel is a secret hypnotic beauty.

That Goya and his gaze are invisible only makes us reach deeper into our souls to where this secret beauty is located.

Everything about poetry, art, and design, must be beautiful to be considered and so, therefore, exist. But only the great poet, painter, and designer, knows how to make us feel beauty only by the strange quality of its cringe.