Every now and then, I travel up the Essequibo River to spend weekends in a small house set on the bank in a clearing of white sand cut from the jungle. It is not easy to describe its beauty: the peace of the early morning lit by a red dawn; the flights of white birds at evening; the moods of the great river changing; moonlight blazing on the white sand and over the wide river; the feeling of the immensity of this land every way you look.
How many Guyanese know about the amazing beauty that lies in wait for them in their own land? No coral island in all the glossy brochures, no Acapulco tourist trip can begin to compare with the beauty we own ourselves and so seldom go to see.
But the fact is that beauty has no priority in the lives of most men (and, need I say, when I write men I mean women also) here or elsewhere. Even the mention of the word tends to make practical men squirm a little with embarrassment. This is not without explanation.
Every man has a hierarchy of needs. First, there is the need simply to survive. If you are starving, you cannot eat sunsets or the silver moonlight and all the beauty you will ever need will be a husk of corn and some lentil stew and a half cooked yam.
Secondly, comes the need for security – shelter, clothes and a stable life: some hope for a secure future. When a man lives day-to-day, naked to chance and circumstance, he will find beauty in the simplest sense of his own security and that of the family close to him. Beauty to a poor man is the weekly gleam of the silver coin of his pay. The golden fretwork of the stars at night does not seem lovely to a man with no roof above his head.
After survival and security, third in the hierarchy of man’s needs comes a sense of self-esteem. To be sound and whole a man must have a settled image of his own worth and usefulness in the eyes of himself and of others. For a man who has reached this stage of need beauty rests in basic education, a reasonable job, an awakening to his social usefulness. For him, no contemplation of work of art or Nature’s beauty can replace the ability to read a simple book or earn a basic livelihood useful to himself, his family and others.
So there now our brother stands – he can survive, he feels secure, he is usefully employed and knows his own worth. Only when these needs are met can the soul grow more ambitious. Only then does he have a base on which he can stand to search the world for higher meanings and discover the beauty that lies in nature and in art. Only then can he recognise deep-down what Dante wrote in the ninth book of the “Paradiso:”
“You were not born to live the lives of brutes,
But beauty to pursue and knowledge high.”
The greater part of political and economic effort must necessarily be concentrated on satisfying the first three of man’s hierarchy of needs. A nation must, as a fundamental priority, feed, shelter, educate and employ its people and make them feel safe and secure. But the hierarchy of man’s needs does not end there. The flowering of intellect, the recognition of scholarship and heritage, the appreciation of beauty, and the development of men’s creative imagination, may seem remote and unnecessary luxuries at a time when a country is struggling to meet basic needs and is marred by runaway crime. But these crowning needs are there – they should never be forgotten.
After all, what is material sufficiency for? It cannot be for its own sake because then a stuffed pig would be the most realized creature on earth. Human beings cannot and should not be so easily satisfied. They must always ask themselves Tolstoy’s question – “What do men live by?”
And that is why every struggling sign of art and the imagination, every show put on at the Cultural Centre or Playhouse, every signal of creation passing in a celebratory parade, every discovery by scientists and researchers in our remote interior jungles, every exhibition at Castellani House, every poem or novel stirring in a young person’s mind, every entry in poetry, prose and drama for the Guyana Prize, which for some unknown reason we have stopped celebrating – every one of these must be treasured by us all and honoured.
We must love the principle of beauty in all things. One weekend, a very long time ago, coming back home steeped in Essequibo beauty, I happened to read late the same night an article about the marvellous English potter, Bernard Leach, one of the very great artists of the last century. His favourite possession was a simple, ordinary Korean rice bowl, made by a village potter on an ordinary, irregular potter’s wheel. “That is as it should be,” Bernard Leach used to say of it as he caressed the rough, glazed clay. “The plain, the unagitated, the uncalculated, the harmless, the straight-forward, the natural, the innocent, the humble, the modest; where does beauty lie if not in these qualities?”
It is good to end on that note. All round us in Guyana there is beauty to be discovered. Schumacher said, “Small is beautiful.” He might have added, “Ordinary is lovely too.” Just as there is, they say, appropriate technology, so too, perhaps, we can find beauty appropriate to our time and place. As we go up and down Guyana’s lovely land – we need to seek out beauty everywhere and, matching it with our other needs, find out ourselves the poet’s truth:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
