Scott Fitzgerald, W. French artistic polymath, Jean Cocteau 5th July —11th October , who similarly devoted his entire life to exploring the relationship between the creative imagination and reality, had comparable sentiments about the nature of the beauteousness of art:. Beauty is made up of relationships. It derives its prestige from a specific metaphysical truth, expressed through a host of balances, imbalances, waverings, surges, halts, meanderings, and straight lines, the peculiar quality of which, as a whole, add up to a marvellous number, apparently born without pain.
Its distinguishing mark is that it judges those who judge it or imagine that they possess power to do so. Critics have no hold over it. They would have to know the minutest details of how it works and this they cannot do because the mechanics of beauty are secret. Hence the soil of an age is strewn with a litter of cogs that criticism dismantles in the same way as Charlie Chaplin dismantles an alarm clock after opening it like a tin can.
Criticism dismantles the cogs. Unable to put them back together or understand the relationships that give them life, it discards them and goes on to something else.
And beauty ticks on. Critics cannot hear it because the roar of current events clogs the ears of their souls. It takes a few moments for me to shed the dust and din of the outside environment before I can truly steep in the sacred space into which I am now subsumed. The date is serendipitous, being the day upon which Jesus rose unto heaven following his crucifixion and resurrection, as before me rises up the Christ behind the altar, a simple silhouette in charcoal.
Indeed, the overwhelming lucidity and serenity of the chapel momentarily takes my breath away as I stand in awe before the artistry of this beautiful, holy place.
