On Libra, Beauty & Justice
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Everyday at two o’clock, people gather at the Bowes Museum to observe the winding up and subsequent performance of the 250 year old Silver Swan. Three clocks—one for the glass water, one for the music box and one for the swan—activate the performance where 30 pounds of silver move within a bed of twirling glass rods, wherein flickering silver and gold fish swim. Crafted to be an “exact replica” of a female mute swan, every detail of the swan, from each carefully made feather to the shimmering glass water it swims in, is a work of art. The feathers, resembling silver leaves, mirror the bed of delicate silver folds which are placed around the base of the artwork like a horizontal frame. These flecks of silver hide a series of complex mechanisms which drive the movement of the swan, water and generate atmosphere through music. Yet, as we watch, the mechanics seem to disappear, leaving us in awe of a spectacle that breathes life into metal.
The renowned American writer Mark Twain documented his observation of the swan in a section of The Innocents Abroad, where he described the swan as having “had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes."
What we are seeing as an observer of the Silver Swan is not the concept of what a generic swan is, but rather the Silver Swan captures the essence of a very particular moment of a particular swan, immortalized in silver and glass. You could think of the human who winds up the swan, then, as not winding up, but rather winding back time for everyone to observe that particular moment replicated ad infinitum.
As J.F Martel describes in his book Art in the Age of Artifice, beauty always concerns the particular. Something is always beautiful in this moment or time— always in the singular. The swan is beautiful not because it is a “perfect replica” of a generic swan, but rather because it is THE Silver Swan—a singular being. At its core, the creators, John Joseph Merlin and James Cox, were driven by a desire to emulate the natural spectacle where water and sky, sea and bird, glass and silver, intertwine in a graceful dance. This creation is not just of the physical swan, but the replication of movements which are too immortalized as mechanical clockwork. This clockwork breathes life into that immortalized experience of the sky and water merging, as the swan sits peacefully on the glass rods and dips it’s neck into the glass substance to retrieve a fish. This act of replication goes beyond merely imitating movement; it involves capturing the wisdom and elegance that the swan represents in ancient traditions.
The swan, as a water bird and a symbol of wisdom, grace and beauty is then a perfect introduction to the topic of this essay: libra, beauty and justice. Similar to the swan bridging the sky above and waters below, there is an ancient story about a being who exists amongst the churning foam of ancient seas. A vision from the primeval clash of sky and earth, emerges with grace unmatched, a deity of love and beauty: Aphrodite.
Aphrodite is one of the only gods who is unbegotten. She is not born, but rather emerges from the sea foam after Cronus castrated Uranus and threw his parts into the sea. Uranus is the personification of the sky and one of the Greek primordial deities. Perhaps, then, if it was a piece of the sky that fell into the waters below, Aphrodite could be thought of as being birthed from the womb of Gaia herself after being touched by a fragment of the above. Her conception is a manifestation of this contact; a mediator between the sky of the above and the sky of the below. We could then think of beauty as the manifestation of that which merges the above and the below.
Venus was the Roman version of Aphrodite. Venus, too, is of course the planetary ruler of Libra. One might think it curious or ponder the relationship between Libra’s symbol of scales alongside it’s rulership of Venus; the planet associated with love and beauty. The scales, however, can actually unearth the true meaning of this connection.
The etymology of the word scale means "to divide". This is fascinating considering Libra is often associated with the act of partnership, 1:1 connections, which might bring about language moreso associated with a coming together rather than moving apart. The scales however, as referencing within its etymology, requires division in order to function. The scales work through seperation: through comparing and contrasting. Scales work by weighing something against something else. The goal of Libra is not to simply compare and contrast the self with the other, it is to achieve equilibrium with the other. This is personified in the ancient story of Ma’at; the winged Egyptian goddess of truth, justice, balance and order. This precedes the Greek and Roman goddesses of justice, Themis and Justice respectively. All three goddesses were characterized by the holding of a scale. The scales of Ma’at were used to weigh the deeds of the soul, and was done by weighing the feather of Ma’at against the heart; the center of the soul as thought by the ancient Egyptians. If the heart was heavier than the feather, it signified that the soul could not pass to the afterlife. Ma’at and thus the scales in turn become symbols of the threshold to the underworld or darkness, similar to the way Libra functions as a threshold from the light side of the zodiac to the dark.
Of course, it is well known that the scale too has remained a symbol of law and order. Lady Justice, usually depicted as blindfolded, is holding the scale with one hand and a sword in the other. The scale today, in association with Lady Justice, symbolizes a system of law that seeks to balance the scales of morality: a symmetrical relationship between crime and punishment. Whether or not the system actually functions in this way in reality is beside the point, however as Elaine Scarry points out in On Beauty and Being Just, this act of striving for symmetry is of interest in both the justice and aesthetic realm. There is etymological significance of the word ‘fair’ existing in both worlds, too. We often talk of ‘fair dealings’ and ‘fair play’ and of course use ‘fair’ as an aesthetic term synonymous with 'beauty’. As she also writes, beauty too “gives rise to the notion of distribution, to a lifesaving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the loviness aspect but in the sense of ‘a symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other’.”
The feeling of beauty is equated with a feeling of truth. Truth is understood by definition as being in the realm of objective reality. Beauty, although it may be associated with only lying in the subjective, feels as though it is objective. When one sees a beautiful thing it feels as though it is objectively that way for not just you, but everyone else too. When we experience real beauty, there is a feeling of pure, instantaneous affect usually associated with epiphanies or realizations. This instantaneity of our physiological and attention held hostage by the beautiful are why it has historically been associated with truth. The feeling when we are in the presence of beauty is that of “unselfing” — where the subjective realm of the ‘I’ dissolves and it seems as though one is looking at pure, objective reality. Like Aphrodite, beauty seems to have always been there, but simply requires the particular moment of it’s emergence for it to become visible; to move from the unseen to the seen.
“…and the mind keeps tripping backward until it at last reaches something that has no precedent, which may very well be the immortal. And one can see why beauty—by those same artists, philosophers, theologians of the Old World and the New—has been perceived to be bound up with truth. What is beautiful is in league with what is true because truth abides in the immortal sphere.”
—Elaine Scarry
When a scale is in equillibium, ultimately both sides cancel each other out, causing the scale to remain motionless in time; a kind of zero state. This state of zero, or void, is the immortal sphere. We can see the physical quality of the scale, of both physical substances seeking to abtain a kind of zero state against one another, mirrors itself in the immaterial process of what is happening in the realm of justice and beauty. The realm of justice exists only in the immaterial sphere of morality and law, such that we are seeking a ‘symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other’ and when these relations become asymmetrical in crime, we seek to balance them by ruling symmetrical punishments to the crime. In contrast, the realm of beauty could be seen as existing in both the material and immaterial sphere. However, what we are speaking of when we relate symmetry to beauty is not simply seeking a symmetrical face or a painting with symmetrical qualities, but rather a symmetry of the immaterial selves; an equating of the self and other. In these moments of being in the presence of true beauty, we seem to forget we exist. This state of symmetry of the self and other, as Scarry also points out, also seems to bring about a kind of replication.
The etymology of the word scale—“to divide”—and beauty, have this nature of division imbedded within them. Somehow, as Scarry writes, beauty “seems to insight, even to require, the act of replication. Wittgenstein says that when the eye sees something beautiful, the hand wants to draw it. Beauty brings copies of itself into being.” As Merlin and Cox observed the Silver Swan and wanted that moment to exist for all eternity and for all humankind of experience. This perpetual duplication and replication of the beautiful, then, has a clear relationship with the eternal and divine.
However, this replication of a particular instance and replication of a general term are very different. In Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, J.F martel writes about the difference between object and subject conceptions of art in the context of a sunflower. A technical drawing of a sunflower produced for a book on botanicals in comparison to a painting of a particular bouquet of sunflowers are replicating two different truths, or zero states. On the one hand, a technical drawing of a sunflower is seeking to replicate the concept of a perfect sunflower—an aggregation of all the world’s sunflowers qualities into a singular image which could never exist in the real world. The painting of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, however, is a replica of a particular moment.
The zero states of these two concepts are similarly symmetrical states. The generic zero state is explained wonderfully in a quote by Marcel Proust from his book In Search of Lost Time:
”So it is that a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a new “good book,” because he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books that he has read, whereas a good book is something special, something unforeseeable, and is made up of the sum of all the previous masterpieces but something which the most thorough assimilation… would not enable him to discover.”
Where the particulars are assimilated into a collective concept of beauty, we find the beauty is lost, becomes null as it becomes more generic. The generic sunflower, in the concept of a zero state, becomes both nothing in it’s dilution, nor does it actually exist in reality—it is simply a manifestation of a concept. It lacks a formidable substance. It is still a symmetrical state, but one which moves from the collective to the singular—it seeks to create something through concept and then forces an affect. In contrast, beauty which emerges from the particular moves from the singular to the collective. The zero state displayed in Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers, through their replication of a particular flower in a particular moment, is a zero state in that it reveals to you the
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