Tim Wyatt – England
Tim Wyatt, the storyteller
Just like you, I’m formulating my next life right here and now. Each one of us can choose to do this consciously as I’m trying to do. Or we can leave it to something we call chance or fate. But one way or another, what we’ve done in this life will shape subsequent appearances in human form anyway whether we like it or not. This is, of course, that unbreakable law of cause and effect – the law of karma – at work. This is a ubiquitous but deeply misunderstood principle.
One thing I do intend to carry over into my next bodily existence – hopefully with even more intensity and vigour than in the current one – is my ongoing war against ugliness in all its many frightful guises. I’ve been engaged in low-level guerilla-style skirmishes and sometimes full-frontal confrontations with it for decades. And I’m losing badly.
I’ve railed against creeping ugliness throughout this life and after rest and recuperation on the inner planes for however long that takes, I intend to be back urging that harmony prevail especially in the built environment. I hope that one day we can finally outlaw the brutalist fantasies of hubristic architects seeking accolades and international awards for their monstrous creations. I will continue this crusade against ugliness.
Hidden somewhere in the majority of people – openly recognised or deeply disguised – is an innate love of beauty and its close cousin harmony. Virtually everyone possesses this capacity to some degree, although as with everything there are always huge variations and some exceptions. This appreciation of beauty varies enormously from the ultra-sensitive aesthete at one end of the spectrum to the fully paid-up philistine at the other.
Ugliness in whatever form it takes – be it an eye-sore structure or a bruising street encounter – is injurious to health and well-being. It is damaging because it causes disease, distress and disharmony. It fractures the equilibrium. It disturbs the natural balance of things. In today’s world much ugliness abounds. It represents a key wellspring of much disorder and chaos. This ugliness is a direct by-product of our contemporary mentality.
Beauty and ugliness both impact on our spirits and leave their indelible marks on our souls, too. Human beings are designed to operate along harmonic lines and when that is disrupted or destroyed in any way it triggers chains of negative events. Beauty has an intrinsic and archetypal healing capacity. Ugliness only has corrosive properties.
Beauty in physical structures means proportionality, sacred geometry and classical principles employed by builders, masons and architects down the millennia to create magnificent edifices. These principles have largely been abandoned. Many of the world’s jagged and asymmetric cityscapes today shriek disharmony as they despoil the skyline, imprison those who occupy them and cast haunting shadows over those who pass beneath them. Walking past them not only makes you feel dwarfed, but you also sense that they’re about to attack and consume you.
We do indeed live on a beautiful planet which we have progressively looted and polluted - especially over the past two and a half centuries during our endless drive for something called ‘progress’ – in a merciless and senseless quest to ‘tame nature’ and subjugate her to our service. Industry has created its own toxic brands of ugliness with brutal-looking factories, poisonous emissions and often questionable, useless products which are redundant as soon as they have rolled off the production line. Whilst very occasionally impressive and imposing during the nineteenth century, the aesthetics of industrial infrastructure have become progressively more utilitarian, offensive and utterly de-humanising. Having said that, constructing an aesthetically pleasing oil refinery might prove somewhat challenging even for the greenest eco-tech!
Imagine for a moment what would happen if human activity suddenly ceased. Beauty would immediately return. Without human intervention this planet would rapidly return to its pristine, natural state which is one of beauty in billions of different forms. Within a few decades most modern buildings would have crumbled. Within a century or two there would be few signs that humans ever lived here apart from gigantic structures like the Great Pyramid or the Hoover Dam. Large portions of the planet once occupied by dense cities would have become reclaimed by even denser woodland or jungle once again. Centuries later archaeologists would discover the faintest remains of ancient structures but probably only those built of stone. The steel and concrete would have turned to dust long ago with only shards of glass revealing tantalising signs of a once mighty civilization. Should humans return, the future investigators of the past will speculate as to the motives behind its demise.
Our ancestors understood the natural energies of the earth and the balance they created and sustained. They knew about harmoniously using and preserving the landscape by employing techniques of balance such as the feng shui system of the Chinese which dictated where and where not structures could be built. To them the landscape was alive and even conscious. Its harmony had to be preserved and perpetuated. Now the landscape is largely seen as dead, functional and this is why it is so often despoiled by disastrous design.
Nowhere on Earth should ugliness be permitted in any form whether for practical, functional, financial or opportunistic reasons. There is no place for it anywhere in this world. It constitutes a form of self-harm and aggression against the very planet we call home as well as everyone on it.
We could make a futile call for the establishment of a World Commission For Beauty & Harmony not just to call out and obliterate the ugly but to actively promote these twin noble ideas. But this would hardly work in a world where nations are not even ruled by their own politicians any longer but from the distant boardrooms of mega-corporations whose one-word raison d’etre is – profit. If it ever did take shape and had any power or influence – which I doubt it would because of vested interests – this organisation should be made up of aesthetes and not bureaucrats or politicians. Perhaps this is a mission for my next life.
Nevertheless, each nation should have an aesthetics commission or suitable body to promote and preserve beauty and proportionality and to discourage and outlaw ugliness in all its manifestations in the built environment. It’s in everyone’s interest to do this.
So why do we deliberately create so much ugliness around us – especially in terms of buildings and behaviour? Are we innately ugly within? Is it deeply contradictory human nature itself which is the problem or is something else at play here? I suggest it’s because we haven’t retained the love of beauty of previous epochs, particularly places like ancient Greece, but I can offer no explanations as to why.
In the modern, discordant world there seems to be a hard-wired belief that ugliness is somehow inevitable if not essential – a necessary offshoot of the fast-paced, acquisitive, materially-dominated age we live in. Oddly, many people seem to believe it’s something we have to accept. But why? Is it cheaper to build an ugly building rather than a beautiful one? Is ugliness a means of saving money? Is it a trade-off that we have to accept for practical reasons or due to financial constraint?
Aesthetics are very often slaughtered on the altar of modernity as if they are now redundant and unimportant. Aesthetics always seem to take second place to functionality. This is a false economy. Why does no one seem to realise that beauty adds value to everything?
Do architects understand the extent to which the built environment they create shapes behaviour? Do they care? Put people in pleasant settings and the chances are that they will behave commensurately. Put them in ugly de-humanised settings such as soulless tower-blocks or stinking slums and they will begin to behave in ways that reflect the brutalist or degraded architecture which surrounds and dominates them. Architecture is a key moulder of behaviour.
In post-war Britain they demolished thousands streets of terraced houses where everyone knew each other, upended them and turned them into 22-storey concrete towers jutting up in the clouds – new slums in the sky – where no one knew anyone anymore. And because of that the occupants’ behaviour and well-being often degenerated rapidly.
Possibly the ugliest of all environments in the modern world aren’t physical at all but in cyber-space – we’re talking about the filth-encrusted sewers of social media where verbal rape, ambush, attack, derision and destruction constitute both its junk-food menu and superstructure. Here all negativities run rampant and unchecked in a hell-fire realm of insult, mockery, narcissism and arrogance, whose very life-blood consists of pure poison and whose very existence is predicated on hatred, fear or self-aggrandisement.
Ugliness stems from a gross lack of imagination and an inability to recognise beauty as an essential element of everything and not an optional add-on. Unfortunately, Big Pharma hasn’t yet come up with an allopathic drug to counteract this debilitating disease. I doubt whether it ever will although if it did it could be hugely profitable!
It must be said that undoubtedly the ultimate ugliness casting its dark stain and demeaning shadow all across this world is war. There are few times in history where this wasn’t the case somewhere. It appears that whatever we do we cannot and haven’t been able to avoid the armed conflict option for a single day during the whole course of human civilization – however long you regard that as being. War is ugliness actualised to its furthest limits. And there are currently more than a hundred armed conflicts on this planet.
The Atlanteans fought countless wars during forgotten millennia and even their forebears the Lemurians (at least as soon as they acquired physical bodies from the mid-point of their race) probably engaged in some sort of satisfying communal violence. Since our cave-days human beings have been addicted to violence in all its myriad forms and disgusting brutality. I doubt whether there has been a single day when someone hasn’t killed, maimed or attacked someone else down the long and meandering byways of history.
War is the ultimate distillation of pure ugliness. It scars and destroys all those involved along with the scorched and degraded landscapes where these hideous acts of attrition are unleashed and played out. No one who participates in a war is left unscarred.
Does humanity somehow need armed conflict to ensure its evolution keeps rolling on? Is war some kind of weird fuel for human development? It would be tempting to say that there isn’t much evidence for the contrary.
Am I too idealistic and naïve to hope that when I’m eventually born again somewhere on this planet, the fighting may have finally subsided or even ended altogether? I’ll remain optimistically pessimistic and assume that it won’t. In which case I’ll have to focus my attention not on just on vertigo-inducing office blocks, but on doing everything I can possibly do as an individual to stop that ultimate act of ugliness – a war so severe that the final victory will be self-destruction.
Tim Wyatt’s books are available from: www.firewheelbooks.co.uk
Watch Tim’s latest film/documentary entitled “The Myth of Death”, click HERE