Hungry and beauty

It begins, presumably, very first, with the lips' soft encounter with the food; with the lukewarm milk pouring into the mouth, with the fresh, cool mango meat, the smell of fresh, freshly baked bread, with the sight of the fat, glistening lamb on the porridge, the fish's white, potent meat, and the green and yellow vegetables put in front us – with the scents and shapes and the richness of color. We sit around the table, or around the fire, big and small. We are hungry. All senses – sight, smell and taste – are set in readiness. The others have begun to supply themselves. My fingers touch the golden fresh fried sardine. I know the slim shape and texture of the fish. With my hand I bring the sardine to my mouth. Expectation increases, the whole body is ready for the meeting to take place. The food touches my lips, which fold around the food and close it into the oral cavity. As the taste spreads in my mouth and I look up and meet the mother, father or one of the others, we experience that look at each other a basic silence. The silence that now inhabits us, the silent expression in our eyes in this brief second before we continue to chew, swallow and quiet the hunger, has a pre-natal origin, and resembles the open, naked gaze of the nursing child. Words become too small, too young, too late to be able to signify the feeling that spreads in my body, which was the first life-giving meal. When it's over, it goes so fast that you have to be conscious of it, the first words can be pronounced: that it tasted, that it was beautiful, exquisite, better it can't be. That it did well.
If we are hungry after a hard day's work or a long march across the mountain, the silence persists. Then we prefer to look back and continue to eat in silence. Only the crackling of the fire or a faint smile can be heard.
Closer to the experience of truth – of the good and the beautiful – than the meal happens, it's hard to come by.

Two worlds, two lives, meet when food meets my lips: the life that is me and my body and the life I take on – the sardine, the sweet potato – and which is no longer to be its own life, to have its own form, but from now of being part of my life. The meeting is different than what I experience when my lungs are filled with the air I share with everything living, or when I drink our common life-giving water. The water and the air should retain their basic form.
But in the meeting of food with my lips, with what is me, meets what is no longer to be with what is to become. It happens many times a day and so imperceptibly that I do not think about it, it is as natural to me as the encounter with the air I breathe, the water I drink. But in the quiet meeting between my soft lips and the food there is a drama. Life's own.

The first time I saw a herd of emaciated stray dogs fighting for a bite to eat, it was a scavenger hunt, I was just a child and even had a dog, I was shaken by the violence. I probably only partially understood what was happening. The animals, which have thrown themselves over a rotten piece of meat lying dirty and half-bloody on the ground, bark, snarl, bark at each other. It's going hard. The shaggy meats chase each other away to get the most out of the carcass itself. To quench my hunger, numb the pain, I will understand later. The scene repeats itself in nature every day. Occasionally the birds see their cut to a small piece of carcass, but as soon as the predators are back, they fly up again.
The loose dog fight over food is not a beautiful sight. It can get ugly, very ugly. Some come out of the meal with tears in the skin, others do not even come again. Those of us who have studied such scenes have also noticed how the thinnest, smallest, most puzzled dog did not get food this time either, and we have followed the puppy's further fate where it is too exhausted to seek shade, with weaker and weaker breath is left in the sun, left on the dusty country road and starving to death.
Later, the sight of distressed people throwing themselves over the food released from the transport plane, which does not take the risk of landing for fear of what might happen, will burn into me. With long sticks, the guards down on the ground attack the hungry, to try to keep a kind of order and prevent the strongest, who know how to secure themselves, from taking everything. On the way back to the village, it turns out, the food is still stolen, the emaciated children with big heads robbed.
Food was also stolen in the Nazi prison camps, in camps set up to keep the hungry, poor from the south away from the tables of the rich in the north, food is also stolen because the food has already been stolen.
Could it have been the time we went into the woods and picked berries, and were completely dependent on each of us notifying the others when a danger was discovered, that we began to distribute the food equally between us? Or was it during the great drought – when old and young, big and small, yes, even the neighboring tribe, had to lay down the huge mammoth for the very first time – that we understood that we needed each other? Or did the exhausting struggle between the alpha males drain the herd to such an extent that the winter we were on our way through the snow, that we decided every now and then how the food would be distributed in the future, and the females would be treated? We just did not take the chance once again to become so vulnerable due to the males' meaningless, upsetting conflicts.
We do not know exactly when, but at a certain point in history, the flock of people did best to ensure that the flesh was cut into equal parts and the sexual pleasures more evenly distributed; at one point in history, those of us who prevented exhausting violent rivalry over food and reproduction survived.
With the food well distributed, the courtesy regulated, the incest forbidden and the pleasures proportionate, it became possible for us to manage as a large herd under very demanding conditions.
The transformation of brutally killed animals into tasty dishes, of rape into love, of stone and bone into tools, of nature into beauty and symmetry – into symbols, language and stories – is the most fascinating human animal has produced.

Anyone who has traveled in foreign cultures can not help but be struck by how ritualized the relationship between the sexes and the consumption of meals is, how the forms that regulate hunger, pleasure and sexuality permeate society – of how beauty is the driving force in society.
Whether it is the rhythmic ring dance in the Faroe Islands or the neat temple dance in Bali we attend, the fine-tuned courtesy of the Masai and Chinese peasant youths or an Easter meal in Jerusalem, a family meal in Sweden or a village meal in a Greek tavern, we experience the same: the funeral confirms and recreates the people, through in-depth aestheticization of the drives, community and togetherness. They decorate the table, decorate the food, set up flowers, wash, put on make-up and put on the finest clothes they have, they turn the surroundings and themselves into works of art of color, order and symmetry, where everything that happens, even in the middle of the party confusion, happens according to the patterns of the ritual.

In these short moments where we can look past ourselves and into what lies outside us…

The music that is played unites them, during the dance the courtesy unfolds, with the exchange of gifts they form social bonds: one day they may need each other again.
They wait to eat until everyone is served, they let the guests supply themselves first. They adapt to the cavalier or the table lady, they listen to the chosen person's signals and needs. They give each other flowers, books, pictures and music and discuss what quality is, they go in gallery, in theater, in the temple or in nature together. They cultivate beauty.
The ancient philosophers knew what they were doing when they described "the true, the beautiful and the good" as one and the same thing.

The unruly origin of beauty: The fierce hunger for food, the desire for the fertile woman or the potent man, the longing for what will happen to us in the face of the sublime image or piece of music, the strong feelings of pleasure that arise in my head when I see the mature , the yellow plums or the crispy fried chicken, the desire that awakens in the face of the beautiful, half-covered female body and her seductive smile, puts me in a direction that only leads one way.
I live in a world that has arisen without a cause, that must cease without a cause, and that consists of eating and being eaten, of being born, reproducing and disappearing. The silence that for a moment opens as the elk falls for my shot and I in my mouth transforms the animal into formless matter; which opens up as my consciousness dissolves during the speechless stage of copulation or in my silent encounter with the ever-present death, is nature, the universe's own silence. (In many religions, this silence is sacred.)
We like to close our eyes to it because it is so uncomfortable, but in these brief moments where we can look past ourselves and into what lies outside of us, there are many of those moments when we first become aware of them, we get a little insight into our world. It is a world that exists regardless of whether we exist, that has arisen for no reason, and that will cease for no reason, and that was here before we came, and will be here when we are no more. And in that world, under our narratives, it is completely silent. No opinion. No direction. Nothing.
When I try to transform this fundamental stillness of our world into beauty, I give what created me and which has no language, language and meaning. The thin, temporary, symbolic order we spin around the deepest realities of existence is another illusion, but we have nothing else. The illusion can work for a while within a – our – local order, so different types of local orders in the rest of the world can be maintained over a certain period of time.
But when the balance is really broken, when hunger takes over, desire or jealousy takes over, rivalry begins and injustice really occurs – when our narrative no longer works – the silence, which we have hitherto given language, can spread again, and we, the most peaceful of all, may behave very differently from what we do today.

In our local, capital-driven order, where everything has been turned into goods, "the beautiful, the true and the good" in the name of efficiency and freedom have parted ways. It is the trademark of modernity itself that art, science and religion recognize each other as separate, completely separate fields of knowledge and experience, unlike elsewhere in the world. In the local order of the West, the artists are proud that art has no binding function in society, does not have to relate to scientific truths or the basic needs of human beings, that it has freed itself from any context and in freedom only answers for itself.
When some artists nevertheless seek the silence of the world, and at the same time strive to transcend it, it is probably because they know that it is there, in that meeting, that art has its origin, that beauty on a deeper, more complex level formed that the narrative of the human animal takes shape. And when they are willing to take such a big risk, to go into where the actual language formation takes place – or does not happen, it is not only to enlighten us, but perhaps also in the hope that out of their art a another, possibly also better world.

But what are we, the artists in the capital-driven enclave, to do on the day it dawns on us that what maintains our local order – our consumption of nature – is creating global disorder throughout the biotope; that the food and the pleasures are dangerously unequally distributed; that our art, under the capital-driven order, has lost its function, also as a marker of freedom; that our own, local aesthetic tradition is heading towards exhaustion and before we know it the word may become incomprehensible, even to ourselves? What story should we tell each other when it dawns on us that the silence is about to spread, that the old story no longer works?
This is the second essay in a series
about the beauty.

Kiøsterud is an author and essayist. His latest release is the novel Henders verk (October, 2015)