“In the Inuit tale of Skeleton Woman, a woman who had turned to bones and lay twisting and turning beneath the sea was pulled up in the net of a fisherman. When he first glimpsed this horrifying catch, the fisherman was appalled and wanted only to push her back into the depths. But his own humanity got the better of him, and he took her back to his snowhouse and carefully revived her by untangling her bones and laying them out aright. By and by she became again a whole woman, fleshy, warm-blooded, sensual.
Both Sir Gawain and the fisherman show us that the beauty of the other is revealed only when we stop wishing for the ugliness to disappear, and accept the other person fully. But acceptance alone is not enough. Loving the ugly back to its original beauty is a task that cannot be accomplished passively. Active loving is necessary…
The fisherman can’t dump that heap of bones on the beach and head home, consoling himself that somebody else will take the trouble to deal with the problem. To restore beauty, it is necessary to give beauty abundantly, even as instinct tells us to flee. In other words, we have to begin the metamorphosis by transforming our own expectations of what it is possible for us to do. We must move beyond the confines of what is safe and familiar, and even desired, and say Yes! to the scary, but compelling, possibility before us. Or, as the contemporary scholar of myth, Roberto Calasso, puts it, it is necessary to touch the monster. “The monster can pardon the hero who has killed him. But he will never pardon the hero who would not deign to touch him.”
Daring to touch the unbeautiful, we realize that not only are we not dragged down into something loathsome, but that just the reverse occurs. We feel empowered, joyous, connected with the other. To give beauty—to our own misshapen selves, to another person, to a group of people, even to a damaged place on the earth—is to move past the fear or repugnance that keep us separate from life itself. To restore beauty is to marry the world, outside us and within.”
–Trebbe Johnson on active love and redemption in “Beauty Redeemed,” from our winter 2010 issue of Parabola, “Beauty."
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Art credit: excerpt from Angela Barrett’s illustrated edition of the Brothers Grimm’s Beauty and the Beast.
