The Brooklyn Rail

If Iris Murdoch were alive today, she’d be reading Rosalind Belben. I imagine Murdoch would delight in the Shakespearean, or even Chaucerian, that peeks through. She would respect that in Belben “philosophy” isn’t something to be cordoned off from the safety of descriptive prose, but a prescription against near-sightedness in any observation. Perhaps above all, Murdoch would return to Belben’s work again and again because they follow the same maxim: there is no greater crime than to water down one’s mind. Instead, the aim is to see things closely and get it right. For Belben, this means looking just as intently at the ugly, dark, and defecatory as one would apprehend the lofty and sublime.

Etymologically, the “mare” in “nightmare” is a Germanic goblin that sits on a sleeper’s chest, paralyzing him. The frustration of paralysis and the release from crushing weight both pervade Is Beauty Good, most directly in the repeated dream of a young elephant placing its forefeet on the dreamer's stomach. But the implication only emerges in reflection, “I blame nightmares. If we didn't experience such intense frustration in dreams, and unfariness, if we didn't travel so much in them and have diff[iculty] getting in touch, we might not in daylight be so frantic, it's the memory of what has happened in dreams that affects us, it keeps thumping us, is it any wonder.” That word, “thumping,” perfectly captures why everyone should read Rosalind Belben.

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And so, as Fritz is going home in one of those elderly Berlin trams they keep in the east, he stares from the window and is suddenly hit, he thinks, by paradox: if what is ugly didn’t strike me as ugly, he thinks, I shouldn’t mind staring at it, I shouldn’t feel pained by my journey home; if I were indifferent, if each building, old and new, struck me indifferently, my journey home would be not a matter of seeing but of being jolted and dreaming of coffee and biscuits and sometimes cake; and my journey would be soothing; and my journey would be a rest, since I must be weary. If we are so susceptible to what we perceive as beautiful, and to what we perceive as offending that sense, is beauty good? Fritz asks himself.

And, sitting, or standing, with binoculars, in his uniform, at an angular window in a tower above a dirty white wall, he says to his friend, that woman, there, who has come by train through fields full of mist and fog and dim sunlight, full of the early morning, when shapes of horses loom out of the passing countryside and retreat, that woman has thought in the train about horses; and how horses will stare into the distance and make contented noises with their nostrils, seem to like a view, a fine day, a landscape of quietly moving things, seem to like sun, sun cool enough to warm and yet bring no flies; seem to have, don’t you reckon, a kind of aesthetic appreciation of what’s around them; to have an idea of beauty. That woman there? his friend says. Certainly, says Fritz.

He says to his friend, what use is a sense of beauty, if it brings also a sense of ugliness and repulsion and distress when we’re faced with things which offend it? And why do we wrinkle our metaphorical noses at meat that’s creeping with blowfly maggots, whereas it is actually beautiful to see how rotten meat is cleaned up and eaten down.

What do horses dream of, I wonder, he says; of fine views? and clean crisp air? and sun on their backs, a frosty morning ablaze with scent? We look at dogs as they dream and watch their legs working and hear their yapping, or the grunting echo of a whoof from a big dog, and their skin twitches, they pant, and we know they are running after a rabbit or rushing round gorse bushes peering in, braving the prickles; but what do horses dream of?

We feel pain, says Fritz, because we need to feel pain, it saves us from being burnt, or hurt, or from walking blindly into danger, breaking a bone; but what does a sense of beauty save us from; what purpose is there in our being coruscated by passing uglinesses; there is little that is moral about beauty; or does it reinforce somehow our notion of moral good: is beauty good?

Why must we describe to ourselves continually what we see? Buildings and people and vegetables and clothing, a dusty wind blowing in the streets, why do we have to remark on it at all, poverty and misery and greed and unkindness, illness and depression. Why do we bother? Why do we bother even to be tired, and lonely. And if we are so hideous to them, why do they come to gawp at us?

I go home, Fritz says, having looked through binoculars at ugly people all day, seeing all the ugly people, all the ugly buildings, all the ugliness, and some better things, pretty people, handsome buildings, sights agreeable to my eye, home to my mother, who is plain but loved and familiar, to my supper which is the same, to my bed which is comfortable, holds me in its arms, to dream.

I swallow a gold crown eating supper, so in the morning have to take my shit apart, and the next morning too, and that my sister finds quite nauseatingly ugly, though she doesn’t have to see it, and which I, interested only in the beauty of finding it, my crown, don’t find at all appalling.

Where would we be if we didn’t shit, I say to my sister, it’s a harmless method of disposal. Harmless, she says, carrying all those diseases? Worse, far worse, I tell her, if the diseases had to come out through our mouths.

If there is a purpose in a thing, I think, does that render it beautiful, the scavenging animals, the blowflies, the worms and the maggots?

We have mechanisms for neutralising, Fritz says to his friend. I wonder if we don’t have too strong a mechanism for neutralising in our minds the ugly or the sordid, the brutal and the cruel, we come to terms with it too easily, and it’s a mistake.

We have minds which swallow and digest and regurgitate the unwholesome as wholesomeness.

I don’t suppose horses do that.

I dream of diving into a black pool, in which, very far down, is a ruin of girders, a trap, holding some treasure or secret I want, without a thought, to get; but with my second dive I am suddenly afraid, imagining how it would be if I entered the tangle, the boxlike structure of girders, and wanted to breathe, to rise to the surface, and was trapped, by girders, by my panic, having to clamber, and the murkiness of the water was most unattractive. I couldn’t see why I had to dive in and enter the tangle and retrieve the secret or the treasure of it, the beauty within, so I refused to dive, I shirked it.

I wonder if horses dream like that? he says. I don’t suppose so.

If horses? or that woman?, she’s still there, says his friend.