Nick Gellatly
Breathing Is Beautiful
Week six of the Ruskin Module was about beauty, and it was delivered by someone who arrived in bright colours and asked us to breathe before she asked us anything else. I went in expecting an argument about aesthetics. I came out having written a question in my notebook that I have not yet been able to answer.
The pink balloon
Dr Beatriz Acevedo is an artist, a writer, a National Teaching Fellow and, on the evidence of Wednesday morning, one of the happiest presences in higher education. She runs a project called A Beautiful University. Every illustration in her slides is her own.
She opened with breathing. Not as a wellness gesture but as a proposition: breathing is beautiful. There was a pink balloon involved. I am fifty-nine years old and I sat in a seminar room on a grey October morning imagining a pink balloon inflating and deflating in my chest, and I can report that it worked!
Image: slide 2, Breathing is beautiful
The whole session was built to ask rather than tell. A Padlet before we started. Live polls. A stretch halfway through. If you have sat through many lectures you will know how rare it is to be asked what you think before being told what to think, and how much more you remember afterwards.
What beauty costs
The argument came in three movements. Beauty pays, beauty costs more than it pays, and beauty is not the kind of thing we have been told it is.
The first movement was quick. There is a beauty premium: better wellbeing, better grades, better jobs, the halo effect by which we assume the good-looking are also good. Established, acknowledged, and then dismantled for the next fifteen slides.
The cost is extraordinary. The UK beauty industry is worth twenty-seven billion pounds, and the average person spends at least forty-six pounds a month on it. One line in my notes, underlined twice: the cosmetics industry has appropriated the word beauty. It has, too. Say the word in ordinary conversation and most people picture a shelf.
Image: slide 11, the £27 billion figure
Then the Commons. The Women and Equalities Committee ran a body image survey that drew nearly eight thousand responses, and found that 61% of adults and 66% of children feel negative or very negative about their body image most of the time. Two thirds of children.
She followed it with two minutes of video in which adults and then children were asked what one thing they would change about their body. The adults all had an answer ready. The children mostly wanted to be mermaids. That is the hinge of the whole lecture and it does not need a word of commentary.
And none of it is new. Lead-based creams to whiten the skin. Corsets to narrow the waist. Jill Burke’s work on Renaissance beauty manuals, where beauty was currency and the advice was already being sold back to women as self-care. We did not invent this. We have simply industrialised it.
The bit I found hard to write
Image: Slide 23 Beauty as we know it
Slide twenty-three lists what the beauty system runs on. Lookism, ageism, ableism, fatphobia, racism, sexism. I stopped writing at the fourth one.
I have been overweight for most of my life. The thing about being a fat man in public is not the clothes or the chairs or the stairs. It is that a certain number of people regard you as fair game, and you never know in advance which ones.
Sniggers from schoolchildren. Shouted abuse from a car while I was out on my bike. Something unrepeatable from a van window, more than once. And some years ago a group of young men who circled me in the street and chanted ‘who ate all the pies’, over and over, for several minutes, until they got bored and wandered off.
I have had bariatric surgery. I have used GLP-1 drugs. Both of those are facts rather than confessions, and I am not interested in presenting either as a triumph or as a failure. They are simply things that happened to a body I have been at war with for a very long time.
In my notes from the lecture I wrote down a question and did not answer it. Can I be fat and beautiful? I still do not know. What I did notice is that I find it an easy thing to believe about other people and an almost impossible thing to believe about myself, and that asymmetry is probably the most useful thing I took away on Wednesday.
Here is the part I would not have chosen the price for, but would not now give back. Years of being treated as the wrong shape in public has left me with a fairly reliable instinct for who in a room is bracing themselves. I can usually spot the person who has come in expecting to be looked at and found wanting, because for a long time that person was me and on some days it still is.
That instinct is the whole reason I am building a café.
The turn
And then the lecture turned, and this is where it earned its place on a module about happiness.
Beauty, Beatriz argued, is not a property you own or lack. It is a relation you are in. With other people, with nature, with other species, with yourself, with whatever you understand to be larger than all of it. Organised under three words: being, belonging, becoming.
Image: slide 24, being, belonging, becoming
She grounded it in two ideas from well outside the European canon. Sumak Kawsay, from Andean indigenous thought, usually translated as good living, and offered explicitly as an alternative to development. And Iwa l’ewa, from the Yoruba, which holds that inner character is beauty, that the interior configuration of a person is itself an aesthetic form.
Both put the good life in community and in character rather than in appearance. Neither needed a before and after photograph.
There was a line in my own notes that I had better own up to, because I wrote it in capitals. Challenge the notion of beauty and make it ours. How I decide what beauty is, for me, is important. That is a thing I have been told before and never quite believed. I am not sure I believe it yet. But I wrote it down.
And then the phrase that made me put the pen down. ‘Beauty as hospitality’.
Because that is exactly what the café is. Not a beautiful room in the sense of being nicely decorated. A room that is hospitable, and therefore beautiful, and the order of those two things matters. Byung-Chul Han turned up earlier in the lecture arguing that we have collapsed beauty into smoothness. Smartphones, filters, the frictionless. Rus 137 on 2 December will be rather homespun, and I had been thinking of that as a budget constraint. After Wednesday I am thinking of it as the argument.
Three beautiful things
She sent us away with an exercise borrowed from positive psychology. At the end of the day, write down three beautiful things you have noticed in people, three in nature, and three in general, and why.
The point is not the list. The point is that we are extremely bad at noticing the good things we already have, and noticing them is good for us.
In people, I had: Beatriz’s bright colours. People telling stories, and the laughing that goes with it. A bright smile.
In general, I had: the background I have built for my Teams calls, which I am unreasonably fond of. People watching. And people who are unapologetically wearing exactly what they like, who I think are the bravest people in any room.
In nature I wrote nothing at all. It was a grey Wednesday in October and I was indoors. I am choosing to regard that as a reasonable response to the weather rather than a failure of attention, though I suspect it was both.
Image: slide 38, what do you take away from today
So… A lecture about beauty, delivered by a woman in bright colours, which began with a pink balloon and ended with me writing a question in a notebook that I cannot answer.
One last thing. I have invited Beatriz to the Queerly Beloved Café on 2 December. She spent two hours arguing that beauty is hospitality, in a university, to a room full of people she had asked to breathe first. If that is not someone to invite to a pop-up café about belonging, I do not know who is.
And I notice, writing that, that inviting people is the one part of this I have never found difficult.
With thanks to Dr Beatriz Acevedo
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