The Spindle and the Kiss: Sleeping Beauty's Urgent Message for Our Age
How Beauty Was Put to Sleep — and How Art Awakens Her
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This piece originally appeared on my personal Substack, Clinsights, here.
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The Spindle and the Kiss: Sleeping Beauty’s Urgent Message for Our Age
The princess pricked her finger with the spindle,
and fell down upon the bed, and lay in a deep sleep.
Real Art serves to wake people up to the light of Truth, while the “dark arts” of modernity tend to lull people asleep, trapping them within a web of fears and falsehoods. Glamour presented as beauty, entertainment presented as art, and fear peddling presented as “news” are but a few examples.
In the story of Sleeping Beauty, princess Aurora, pricks her finger on a spindle. The spindle is no small symbol. In fact, it symbolizes the ever-spinning, ever-growing machine of modernity. It is this machine that spins the thread of our fate with its wheels and its dangerous “needles” that continually “prick our finger” through the curse of its never-ending spinning. It advances. It demands. It grinds. It consumes. It gets bigger. And it curses us with noise, distraction, urgency, and manufactured fear. Each wound is small. Our sleep is deep.
This curse has nearly succeeded in purging true beauty from our society. It has become a curse woven into the fabric of our lives. Beauty sleeps: Sleeping Beauty.
Meanwhile, the “true love’s kiss” which can awaken Beauty — awaken us to beauty — is a symbol of the awakening power of True Art, which is always infused with the true love of the artist; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
The modern world would like for Beauty to remain sleeping. But we can wake her up through the power of love transmitted to each other through our art.
Of course, art is merely an echo of the ultimate expression of “true love’s kiss” — the kiss of the Divine; the creative grace that wakes us up to the larger truth of reality.
We have, collectively, “pricked our finger” on the spindle of the world and are asleep. And, it is the artists, who imbue their work with the “kiss” of their true love, who provide a means of awakening. When we “kiss” their artworks, we are provided an opportunity to experience a moment of awakening. Beauty awakens through us.
Lewis Hyde, in his book, The Gift, said it better than I can:
Sometimes, then, if we are awake, if the artist really was gifted, the work will induce a moment of grace, a communion, a period during which we too know the hidden coherence of our being and feel the fullness of our lives…any such art is itself a gift, a cordial to the soul.
That moment of grace is the kiss.
For a breath of time, we awaken. We remember. We remember that we are more than consumers and cogs. We remember Beauty.
The “dark artists” of modernity find the true substance of art — beauty — painful; for beauty burns away false ambition, an effect that those who choose to live in darkness would prefer to avoid. That’s why they cursed beauty to sleep in the first place!
But, deep inside, they know that they have turned away from the light, and beauty, delivered to them through real Art, is simply too painful of a reminder to their tiny, fragmented, souls that they have willfully denied the good and are keeping themselves trapped in a prison of their own making. So they try to avoid beauty as much as possible. That’s much easier in a world that has been all but purged of true beauty.
This avoidance has manifested visibly on a cultural level in the modern world as an ongoing war against beauty. We see this avoidance of beauty everywhere: in modern “architecture,” in modern “art,” in “music,” in modern “media,” and in the everyday world around us. I, personally, find it almost physically painful to look upon the areas where we have mowed down beautiful trees to build endless miles of cheap, ugly CMU boxes — our shrines to The Modern Machine and its twin goals of “progress” and “profit.” If we’re going to scrape away the beauty of nature for a building, don’t we have a responsibility to make that building beautiful? This obvious fact is something the ancients understood far better than we do, and we still visit buildings built hundreds of years ago just to marvel at their beauty; and to remember the divine mastery that is possible in the hands of humanity. With our god-like technology, we could be making the world more beautiful with each passing year. But, through us, Beauty Sleeps.
In fact, “true love’s kiss” is the most useful and important function of the modern artist: casting the counter-spells of beauty that awaken others; to awaken “sleeping beauty.” Modern artists, through the power of their art, have been granted the ability to awaken souls from the slumber of modernity and the power to remind humanity of the dangers of the machine-ruled world we are building.
Even her name tells the story: Aurora — Dawn. When Beauty awakens, the light returns. So, if you ever despair that your art does not matter, remember this: she will not awaken through argument. Sleeping Beauty awakens with a kiss. And every true work of art carries one.
PS - This is one of the themes I explore in my forthcoming book, The Sovereign Artist: The Liberating Power of the Creative Act. If interested, you can join the waitlist here.
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I feel this truth deep in my cells. As I always say, art is a medicine for the ills of the modern world. Thank you.