The eye is the most autonomous of our organs. It is so because the objects of its attention are inevitably situated on the outside. Except in a mirror, the eye never sees itself. It is the last to shut down when the body is falling asleep. It stays open when the body is stricken with paralysis or dead. The eye keeps registering reality even when there is no apparent reason for doing this, and under all circumstances. The question is: why? And the answer is: because the environment is hostile. Eyesight is the instrument of adjustment to an environment which remains hostile no matter how well you have adjusted to it. The hostility of the environment grows proportionately to the length of your presence in it, and I am speaking not of old age only. In short, the eye is looking for safety. That explains the eye predilection for art in general and Venetian art in particular. That explains the eye’s appetite for beauty, as well as beauty’s own existence. For beauty is solace, since beauty is safe. It doesn’t threaten you with murder or make you sick. A statue of Apollo doesn’t bite, nor will Carpaccio’s poodle. When the eye fails to find beauty – alias solace – it commands the body to create it, or, failing that, adjusts itself to perceive virtue in ugliness. In the first instance, it relies on human genius; in the second, it draws on one’s reservoir of humility. The latter is in greater supply, and like every majority tends to make laws. Let’s have an illustration; let’s take a young maiden. At a certain age one eyes passing maidens without applied interest, without aspiring to mount them. Like a TV set left switched on in an abandoned apartment, the eye keeps sending in images of all these 5’8” miracles, complete with light chestnut hair, Perugino ovals, gazelle eyes, nurse-like bosoms, wasp waists, dark-green velvet dresses, and razor sharp tendons. An eye may zero in on them in a church at someone’s wedding or, worse still, in a bookstore’s poetry section. Reasonably farsighted or resorting to the counsel of the ear, the eye may learn their identities (which come with names as breathtaking as, say, Arabella Ferri) and, alas, their dishearteningly firm romantic affiliations. Regardless of such data’s uselessness, the eye keeps collecting it. In fact, the more useless the data, the sharper the focus. The question is why, and the answer is that beauty is always external; also, that it is the exception to the rule. That’s what – its location and its singularity – sends the eye oscillating wildly or – in militant humility’s parlance – roving. For beauty is where the eye rests. Aesthetic sense is the twin of one’s instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics. Aesthetic’s main tool, the eye, is absolutely autonomous. In its autonomy, it is inferior only to a tear.
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