The Processes of Beauty

A proud maple stands tall in the middle of an ancient forest. Its boughs hang heavy with raindrops, and as the wind whispers through the wood, the glistening gems drop down onto the foliage below. The peaceful silence breaks with the roar of a diesel engine echoing through the forest. The majestic tree’s russet leaves rustle nervously as heavy work boots crush the surrounding underbrush, as rough and calloused hands snap an ever-rotating chainsaw into motion, as the grimy faces of manual labor rip through the core of the now-shuddering trunk. And the towering pillar falls CRASH to the ground. The lifeless hulk is carted away in the graceless funeral march of a caravan of trucks piled with lumber. A complex of unforgiving concrete looms high in the distance waiting to process raw material into symmetrical slabs of conformity. As the beautiful hardwood corpses are hauled deep into the heart of the factory, the sky rumbles with thunder. Lightning cracks as imperfections disappear into the scrap piles and thick slabs of maple are loaded onto a cargo plane and shipped halfway around the globe where an appraising eye and a well-worn hand runs over the fine grain and nods. He sets the thick boards down in his workshop, a small room filled with metal wires and stacks of sandpaper, pliers and hammers and glue, and boards in all stages of a time-honored process, “the specifics of which are a trade secret,” he winks. With all the care of a master of his craft, he slims down the wood, shapes it to exact dimensions, curves it ever so carefully, sands it finer and finer, paints on a red-velvet stain, glues the perfectly-fitting pieces together, and waits for it to dry. When all the wooden components are assembled, he threads four strings around four pegs, polishes the spruce face and maple back and sides, holds it out into the light, plucks a string to hear a pure, clean note ring through the workshop, and smiles. He lays the hand-crafted instrument in a velvet-lined case and picks up the handset of his dusty rotary phone. “Mr. Ma, your cello is ready.” Two weeks later in a vast concert hall filled completely with silent patrons sitting erect like marionettes a musician walks onstage with a bow in one hand and a velvet-red cello in the other and he sits down center stage no sheet music in sight and starts to play. The elegant melody surrounds each listener, a timeless suite spanning the ages, and as the melodies reverberate through the cello’s face the maple inwardly sighs as it feels centuries of singing the infinite song of creation— the song that never resolves— fold together simply and beautifully into graceful notes ringing through the air in a sense of completeness, of finality. There is traditional beauty in picturesque nature scenes, in undisturbed spaces of stillness and in leaving things the way they are. But modern man requires change; we alter and conform and destroy to make our lives easier and faster and better. And even though we pillage the earth and are slowly mechanizing the globe, there is yet a kind of beauty in plucking materials from their unadulterated state and using our hands— be they laborer, craftsman, or artist— to shape the raw into the refined and the merely picturesque into the magnificent. Though our lives fly ‘round faster than a spinning children’s top, true peace can be found by looking for beauty in both the natural and the industrial. The beauty of transformation should never be forgotten, or our drive to better the world every way we can is lost in the ‘done’, and absent from the ‘doing’.