Aesthetic as Lens to Life

Have you ever paused to define your aesthetic?

I recently interviewed K-Ming Chang for Write-minded, and I was taken by the way she discussed how she followed language to find her story.

“I’m interested in the language serving itself, and reveling in the language and sound as their own form of meaning and beauty,” she said.

As I listened to her talk about her writing process, I thought about how she allowed herself to be comfortable in the uncertainty of creation, how she let the story speak to her. In following language to find her story, she trusts her aesthetic as a tool to open up the world, to reveal life.

I’m interested in this because so often the word aesthetic is trivialized. An aesthetic is often seen as focused on determining the beauty of an object, and an aesthete is seen as someone who is removed from real life, immersed in art, perhaps even decadently so.

During the Enlightenment, the word aesthetic was used as a synonym for beauty, whether discussing the natural world, gardens, interior decorating, or even mathematics.

In my book, The Art of Brevity, I wanted to open up the definition of what aesthetic means beyond any notion of surface beauty and consider how an aesthetic is a framework to express and understand life. I think of how the Greek term aisthesis means sensual perception, so an aesthetic is rooted in the feeling of experience. 

Bence Nanay defines aesthetics as being simply “ways of perceiving the world that are really rewarding and special” in his Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception. According to Nanay, an aesthetic goes beyond any consideration of the art world to include everyday experiences such as the beauty of autumn leaves or the light of the setting sun falling on the kitchen table.

So what we consider “high art” has no more claims on aesthetics than sitcoms, tattoos, or punk rock. Aesthetics is everywhere. It is one of the most important aspects of our life. 

I make the case in my book that an aesthetic is our lens upon the world, so our aesthetic actually holds an existential position.

An unheroic way to write?

So, for me, for example, an aesthetic of brevity helped me return to direct sensation because it made me notice the world differently, to notice small stories that weren’t insignificant just because of their size, and to bring a poet’s intense focus on language to capture them.

I was recently talking to a friend who read my book, and she made the comment that writing with an aesthetic of brevity is an unheroic way to write. She meant that as a good thing—as in writing the great American novel is a heroic, muscular thing to do because its heft is meant to make a mark, whereas tiny stories are humble, they don’t cry out to be noticed or to tell the whole story.

They’re less about certainty than uncertainty, and that’s part of their gift: ambiguity and humility, an acceptance of uncertainty.  

Ambiguity is an unheralded gift of brevity, and I think it’s interesting how K-Ming went into how her style of writing can sometimes be disorienting. We generally like definite, tangible answers—scientific proofs, algorithms, data—but so much of life resides in ambiguity. And capturing the ambiguity of life is tied to an aesthetic.

An aesthetic might seem distant from a belief system or a faith, yet an aesthetic forms the foundation for how a story or belief is expressed. So an aesthetic determines how we experience life and how we express it.

Writing in between

I always say that life isn’t a round, complete circle—it’s shaped by fragments, shards, and pinpricks. In fact, K-Ming relates her plots to tapestries, and I relate to that because I like to think of my plots as a collage of snapshots. And for me, the fragments of tiny stories perfectly capture the disconnections that I am fascinated by in life. 

In K-Ming’s flash piece, “Footnotes on a Love Story,” which is the story I first read by her, she uses the form of the footnote to decenter the “main” story that’s told in the primary textual space of the page. In the footnotes, we learn of another love story as we read through a series of lenses that shift the meaning of the story and provide more layers, context, and counterpoints.

Footnotes are often skipped over by readers. Even though they’re designed to deepen knowledge of the content, they can also be seen as extras, facts that didn’t earn their way into the main text of a narrative. By design, they exist in the margins. 

By placing so much of the story in footnotes, K-Ming asks where the center of the story is, and if, in fact, the “main” story is the main story because the main story becomes a type of footnote itself—it’s a story that lives in between other stories.

So her aesthetic invites in the question of betweenness. By being told in this way, the story possesses new boundaries and exists in a liminal state by definition.

That’s what is so delightful about reading K-Ming—the terrain of the story is always shifting and surprising.

I believe an aesthetic is a person’s expression of something that can only be described as an expression of the divine. Not in the religious sense, but in the sense that your aesthetic forms itself around the way you feel the most fundamental pulse of life.

Vassily Kandinsky said that his love for art was the only way to approach spirituality: “Art is the only language that the soul can hear.”

How do you feel the most fundamental pulse of life?

Questions for you:

• What are three words you would use to describe your aesthetic?

• What lens does your aesthetic hold up to the world? What does it allow in? What does it not allow in?

• Per the Nanay quote above, how does your aesthetic provide a way to perceive the world in ways that are “really rewarding and special.”

Because an aesthetic reveals a secret soul

“Everything that is dead quivers. Not only the things of poetry, stars, wood, flowers, but even a white trouser button glittering out of a puddle in the street. Everything has a secret soul, which is silent more often than it speaks.”

~ Vassily Kandinsky

Kandinsky would make up original colors for a painting and then throw them out afterward so they could never be replicated.

He argued that artistic experiences were all about feeling, and different colors affected mood. Yellow could disturb, while blue might make people feel good.

Kandinsky was also a “synesthete”: he heard colors and saw music.

Because K-Ming Chang’s aesthetic is a poem

Because an aesthetic is a pen to write different stories

“In my own writing life, the idea of the fragment and how it might suggest the fractures and dislocations of memories and border-crossings is a recurring fascination.”

~ Sadia Quraeshi Shepard

An aesthetic becomes a world view. A moral stance. A political stance. Neither can exist without an aesthetic shaping them, holding them.

Because an aesthetic leads to truth

“One grows so tired, in American public life, of the certitudes and platitudes, the megaphone mouths and stadium praise, influencers and effluencers and the whole tsunami of slop that comes pouring into our lives like toxic sludge. One wants a teller in a time like this.”

~ Christian Wiman

An aesthetic allows you to be a teller. A truth teller.

Because, hey, The Art of Brevity

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