Catching a train home on Saturday evening, I became mesmerised by the apparently random array of plant life growing over and around the barrier at the back of the platform.
Long grass interspersed with weeds curled lazily around the struts of the metal structure, and I stared intently at the arrangement for a good couple of minutes. My attention quickly wandered from the scene in front of me, however, and I introspected about the reason or reasons why I found the straggling, miserable greenery so compelling.
The answer lies in my mind's inability to spot a pattern; some principle of order that reigns over and above the chaotic feedback loop of nature. Such patterns do exist, but I only know of them because I've read about them - fractals, the golden ratio, for example. At the level of my own pathetic eyes, the only constant is the lack of a constant.
In western thought, the idea of ugliness implies precisely this lack of consistency. To negate this, agree upon a set of paramaters, and you can churn out objects of beauty indefinitely. To invert ugliness, you must pay homage to homogeneity.
The eye craves regularity, and so does the tongue. This much is given away in our spoken colloquialisms: You're out of order! Sort your head out! He needs to get back on the straight and narrow! Religious metaphors are the next step.
We have tenuously established, then, that abstract concepts like beauty and attraction are linked to concepts which can be resolved by the eye. If there is a structure and a rigidity at the atomic level, or on the basis of an equation or a mathematical theorem, it is likely to bypass my flimsy senses.
Yet our plant-life possessed something about it, some quality, that caused my eye to fix to it resolutely - but that quality was not westernised, typical beauty. (The terrible irony here of equating something beautiful with something typical! The fetching down of the extraordinary, and levelling it!)
What quality did it possess? I need to think about this, and report back at some point in the future. It is not yet clear to me why the antithesis of attraction should achieve that which it appears to negate, but it does....
