14. Beauty Everyday...

Ordinary Notes and some lessons learned.

Aug 17, 2023

In her extraordinary work, Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe speaks of a practice she calls ‘beauty everyday’. In her words: (this is) “where I take photographs of flowers, trees, the light, clouds, the sky, moss, water, many things, in order to try to insist beauty into my head and into the world.”

As I sat watching the sun set on this day, I was struck by the way that witnessing something so beautiful has the power to force you out of your own head and its many limitations- even if only momentarily- and back into the vastness of creation, and I found myself thinking of this practice, wondering if I’m doing a good enough job of insisting beauty into my head and into the world and how transformative this practice might be.

I’m aware that this isn’t something that always comes very easily to me and more recently it has felt harder, still. However, I recognise that it is something that must be done if we are to live well: we have to insist beauty into ourselves, into those around us, into our spaces, into our behaviour, into our every day. We also have to find a way to notice when the beauty that is out there is insisting on making itself known, even as our heads are bowed so low in anguish there’s a chance we might miss it entirely.

“…Knowing that every day that I left the house, many of the people whom I encountered did not think me precious and showed me so, my mother gave me the space to be precious – as in vulnerable, as in cherished. It is through her that I first learned that beauty is a practice, that beauty is a method, and that a vessel is also “a person into whom some quality (such as grace) is infused.”

I know that much of my love for Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes lies in the fact that this book is a love letter to her mother. I know that I find solace in the ways she reveres her, misses her and grieves for her so loudly- how she describes what it means to live your mother’s death but also how she bears witness to the life her mother lived and the way she lived it.

In her earlier work, ‘In the Wake: On Blackness and Being’, Sharpe speaks of how her family faced serious financial hardship following her father’s death, but even while they couldn’t afford to heat their home or repair the holes and cracks from water damage and dealt with the reality of utilities being cut off for nonpayment, she credits her mother for the way she was still able to bring beauty into the house and how she ‘worked at joy’.

This phrase- the whole passage, really- was a much-needed reminder that joy can (and should) be worked at but there will also be times when misery, sadness, anger and other less joyful emotions are appropriate responses to the circumstances in which we find ourselves and it’s OK if finding joy really does feel like work. Perhaps the hope is that if we can, somehow, still find a way to seek the beauty in every day, eventually (even if not always) we’ll get to the point where we’re alert enough to it that finding joy feels less a little less effortful.

I finished Ordinary Notes last month and this past weekend I revisited it, going through all of my tabs and the passages I’d underlined and copying the most significant into my notebook and, in doing so, I was reminded once again of how rich a body of work it really is. It is a treasure trove of inspiration, ideas and information and, ultimately, the product of not only Sharpe’s own work but also the work of the many other people, things, and moments she has taken note of.

“Before Beloved were Kindred and Corregidora, and after them At the Full and Change of the Moon. These books changed what I thought a novel that took slavery and the enslaved people as its subject could do and how it could animate those enslaved people who did and did not survive its hold.”

The endnotes are extensive, as are the acknowledgments, which is testament to the fact that, in many ways, this particular book could only have come about because of Sharpe’s ability to see not only the suffering, the injustice, the brutality, and the chaos in the world but also the beauty that might counteract it and/or give us ways and words to navigate it. What is also clear is just how deeply she cares about it all.

There’s a lesson here, I think. Something to do with just how significantly we are all impacted by the things we are choosing to take note of which is, perhaps, even more reason for us to work at joy, to find a way to notice beauty every day, to be mindful of others and to care deeply about it all.

“Care is complicated, misused. It is often mobilised to exact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it. I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.”

The fact that this letter has entirely become about Ordinary Notes wasn’t completely intentional but, if you’ve read the book, I’m sure you’ll agree with me when I say that there’s so much more that could be said about it. As for the other books I’d planned to talk about, they’ll just have to wait until next time but I’ve read some really good ones and I look forward to sharing them with you.

Until then, keep well.

Tasnim