to deck a corpse

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From

 

Spiritual Morality and Aesthetic Culture

 

by Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura

 

 

There cannot be a well imagined greater shock to the sense of beauty than

the attempt to deck a corpse. The endeavour to decorate the things of this

world by means of our mundane resources, is very similar to the attempt to

beautify a dead body. The result is a foregone conclusion. Our aesthetic

favourite of this moment is discarded at the next in favour of others who

also are replaced by others in their turn. The king who lives in the most

costly style has no more liking for the showy splendours of his royal state,

when they are not renewed, than the pauper has for his old tattered rags.

Familiarity breeds contempt for all things of this world on account of their

inherent ugliness which is found out on actual contact.

 

Poets and painters rely upon the equally futile resources of their limited

imagination for masking the inherent ugliness of the conditions of mundane

existence. Such imagining is not intended to lead us to the reality.

Goldsmith truly hit the function of the worldly poet and artist when he

declared that their wisdom consisted in innocently amusing the imagination

in this dream of life. The imagination does not want anything that is not

new and also not its liking, and its liking is ever directed downward to its

kindred point of the flesh, or the corpse. It is not possible even for the

imagination to deceive itself regarding the naturally loathsome character of

the dead body, the ultimate source of its inspiration. The imagination of

man is no more competent judge of his real aesthetic needs than his

scientific acumen. Both are directed to mundane objectives which are

essentially ugly and unwholesome.

 

There can be no abiding value in poetry unless both the poet and his

surroundings are radically changed into entities that do not irresistibly

and unaesthetically drag us down to the most rotten things of this world. It

is no true poetry that seeks to disguise this fact by the external

embellishments of rhythm and vocabulary. Such ingenuity can only amuse those

to whom it is a novelty, and can do so only till the trick does not grow

stale. It is the logical nemesis of this state of things that commerce is

rapidly getting hold of every department of this make-believe aesthetics.

The tailor is making the man, because strangely enough man wants to be made

by him in seeming despair of any better alternative.