Several years ago, I started rereading some of the literature that I hadn’t seen since high school. I realized that I hadn’t really been reading for full enjoyment and fulfillment. I had just been letting my eyes glance over the words and getting the gist of things. Now I read slowly, trying to soak up all of the metaphors and beauty of the writing, itself, and understand what the author was imparting. Profound writing, written literature, painting, or music, has to have some kind of insight and voice for depth. It must leave us more enlightened somehow. Pasternak, through his title character, goes into this in the middle of Dr. Zhivago.

I came upon English Romantic poet, John Keats’s, Ode on a Grecian Urn. He wrote it in 1819 when he was only twenty-three years old. Wow, what depth and elegance…and he had such perception and writing technique at the young age of twenty-three! (He would only live two more years.) Finally finding the depth of this piece in my late fifties was quite awakening. Never more would I read any literature just to get through it and forget it. That’s cheating both the author and myself.

So what’s the big deal about this poem? First of all, one can get a very good analysis of it at this page from the Poetry Foundation. The text is on the left and a poem guide  on the right. It’s very clear and concise and not at all a slog, so please don’t hesitate to go there and read it.

Essentially, Keats tells us of the imagery on an ancient relic, which was found after lying buried for hundreds and hundreds of years. The pastoral scenes etched on it are frozen in time: a young couple in love on the verge of a kiss, animals being brought to market, and musicians playing. All of this is merely a document of what they may have meant to the audience in the time of the urn’s creation. One can only guess, given the evidence on the urn, itself. Beyond that, one can barely guess at its meaning in the future. The only way the contemporary audience can parse the urn’s images is by the milieu of their own time, their filters and priorities.

The salient lines, of course, are:

         “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all 

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

We know what that means but it still leaves us wondering, pondering on our own. It gave me the most valuable thing a piece of art can do, and that is to make me think. What do these concepts, truth and beauty, mean, anyway? 

Here they are inextricably linked, each defining the other. A big part of truth, for me in our time, is sincerity. No put-ons. No selling a bill of crummy goods. If there is anything false about it, a con game, then, by definition, it’s not beautiful. No BS. Truth, then, has to be honest and intentional.

Beauty is a tougher nut to crack, but must be some kind of portal to understanding the world and our place in it.  This can be the case with the most denotative kind of work, such as an essay, book, or representative painting or sculpture; or, perhaps even more powerfully, through an abstract work of music, dance, or abstract expressionism of the New York school of the 1950’s. If some kind of creative utterance leads to this understanding, its truth, then both flower within us. Of course, what one can find beautiful is somewhat subjective. The concept of beauty being in the eye of the beholder goes back probably as far as the ancient Greeks, contemporaneous with Keats’s urn.

Flash forward to about five years ago. I was tasked by the boss in my then job to enlighten the group on not just what we propose funding, but why, and do this not just on the level of each individual application, but for the field in general. I expounded at least half of my presentation time on Ode on a Grecian Urn. I could see, even hear, the eyes rolling. “Ugh! Are you kidding me?” they seemed to be saying? “What is this, high school English class? Where’s the data? Where’s the ROI?” (see my thoughts on that term in this post.) The shrug of the indifferent is hard to address. The best, most concise comeback I’ve ever encountered is in lines from the beginning of An Iliad, by Denis O’Hare and and Lisa Peterson, their modern, one-actor play after Homer. “I know this doesn’t mean very much to you…but it does to me.” This actually works. If one can sense a person’s sincerity of elucidation, joy, and depth found in a work of art, it can really draw in their interlocutor. The best teachers have this power. Well, my presentation ended and a couple of people actually thanked me for the change pace in a meeting.

OK, so let’s get to the motto of Pistocelli Services, Pondering Truth – Pursuing Beauty.

We support the arts. The best (and even some of the mediocre) of it leaves us with some kind of understanding of our world and our place in it. Those truths are beautiful. In the end, it’s all about understanding. Some of this understanding is pleasant. Think of Renoir’s Sisters on the Terrace or Marieschi’s Venice. It can also be as challenging as the struggles found in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman or a late self-portrait of Ivan Albright. in the latter type, there is nobility in facing life’s harshness with honesty and objectivity. I am taken by Eugene O’Neill’s quote on truth and beauty, “If a person is to get the meaning of life he must learn to like the facts about himself — ugly as they may seem to his sentimental vanity — before he can learn the truth behind the facts. And the truth is never ugly.”

So there you have it in a nutshell or, for any Iberophiles, Calderón’s call button.

We at Pistocelli Services ponder truth in pursuing beauty and vice versa. We do it in our times with our artists and arts organizations. That’s the best, most satisfying way I have to pass my day. May it bring you all, dear readers, the same!