So I had this date a few weeks ago with a Vet school student, and we came on to the esoteric concept of "the nature of beauty". Not beauty as in physically attractive or having anything to do with people at all. We were talking about how objects can become beautiful for us.

I had seen the movie "Sideways" a few weeks before. Paul Giamatti's character was a wine connoisseur. Not a professional - just a teacher who had wine tasting as a hobby. Now me, I don't really like wine all that much. Not very Italian I guess, but just never really gotten into the taste. I have gone wine tasting though with some people who know what they are talking about, and I can distinguish some of the flavors within the wine. I just don't enjoy them. Especially the fruity ones. They taste sort of overripe to my palate. But this character in "Sideways" was one of these people that are really into to it. He could draw out a lot of different things about a wine by having a sip. He knew the different types of grape, and he could tell what sort of process a wine had gone through after it had been harvested just by sipping it.

So it just so happened this Vet student had seen "Sideways", and her father was the same sort of wine connoiseur. She seemed slightly embarassed about how he would got to bars and try to engage the bartenders (who were usually just part time working stiffs) in complicated discussions about the depth and character of the wines he was drinking.

During my brief foray into the Chinese language earlier this year (following a brief, torrid relationship with a Chinese woman), I learned that calligraphy is very important to the Asian cultures. They view good handwriting as an art form. Their language is pictographic, and they don't draw as sharp a line between painting and writing as that of people using phonetic based written languages do. You can see it in traditional Asian paintings; they frequently incorporate writing, and the brush stroked lines defining shapes are sharp.

We do value good calligraphy in the West, but I don't think it is to the same degree as the Asians do. They really value words that are drawn well. There is an art to holding the brush in a certain way, in how much ink is on the brush, and how quickly it is applied. I gather that a person familiar with these techniques can look at a pictographic word done by an artist and read all sorts of things into all of it.

It's part of the premise behind the video game Okami, which I mentioned in my October 21, 2006 entry. There, the gamer plays the part of a Japanese god that has taken the shape of a white wolf. The wolf can cast magic spells by using its tail to create brush stroked symbols in the air.

Now to me, it's all one Rorschach blot. I look at those symbols, and I can understand from an abstract standpoint that they are a form of writing. I can even know that what a symbol stands for. But I don't have enough knowledge of Chinese writing to know what makes it beautiful.

One place I do find beauty is in trees. I think there is a natural beauty that everyone recognizes in trees, perhaps to a greater degree than is found Chinese pictographs. But I also think that I've reached a stage where my enhanced knowledge strengthens that sense of beauty. I remember it really hit me about a month ago. We came to this field near the top of a crest, and there were these two large, very old white oak trees there. They were magnificent. They weren't that tall, but they had these huge branches that extended out from the sides that gave the impression of a sprawling, massive strength. Just the size of the branches, and the knowledge of how much they must have weighed, and the strength that the trunk and the roots below must have to support all that weight spread out like that, it was just very impressive.

Now, my brother was with me, and it didn't hit him the same way. Or at least not to the extent that it did me. I think that what I had been learning over the past couple of years just enhanced and created a beauty and depth that didn't exist for him. The sort of sprawling strength found in those trees is characteristic of white oaks. There are other types of oaks around here - red northern oaks are much more common, and they are interesting too, with the branches go out straight and with similar angles to white oaks, but without the same horizontal sprawl that the white oaks have. And other types of trees have interesting qualities - I've mentioned the egg shape of maples and pagoda shape of white pines. And somehow those differences and my knowledge of those differences created a context within which the notion of beauty in these particular trees emerged. They were an hour and a half drive away from where I live, but I almost went back just to get pictures.

So I think that we can learn to find different things beautiful when we have knowledge and context. It ties in with the semiotic stuff I've talked about. Everything we know is tied to into these associative relationships, and the more associative relationships we see, the more likely we are (in certain situations) to derive a sense of beauty.

This vet student was a fan of the HBO TV series "Six Feet Under", and she mentioned this one episode where the undertakers were talking about the artistry of corpse preparation and arranging a coffin.

Since she was a Vet student, I remembered when I used to work at the Vet school and I once watched this one teacher who had a recently removed horse's leg joint in front of a class of students. He was dissecting the joint, pointing out the cartilage and bone and the muscle and how it all worked together, and at certain point he had this look on his face and sound in his voice like he was carried away by it all. He seemed excited and in wonder at what he was explaining. It was kind of odd because I knew that he had killed that horse as part of an experiment he was doing.

Later on, I thought about how some sort of evil society in a fantasy novel could create an artistry of torture, where facial expressions and cries of pain could be turned into a system of meaning. Sort of like "Kushiel's Dart", but instead of having a masochistic subject who got sexual pleasure, using unwilling captives. The torturers would become so immersed in the underlying symbolism that they became indifferent to the suffering, or rather they would decide that the suffering was more important as part of the symbolism.

(I didn't talk about that last bit during my date. I figured she would think I was a weirdo.)