Category: 21st Century Thoughts

Somewhere along the way, we learned a suspicious equation:

beauty = avoidance
joy = ignorance
aesthetic pleasure = moral failure

Art history disagrees.

The creation of art has rarely been a lounge chair on a sunny terrace. More often, it’s been a hand pressed to the wall in a burning building, testing for heat, searching for the exit, steadying the trembling. People have turned to images in plague years, war years, famine years, and exile years. Not because they were indifferent, but because the human psyche cannot metabolize catastrophe in a single sitting.

We do not live on truth alone. We live on truth with a pulse.

Beauty, then, isn’t a sugar coating.

It’s a nutrient.

It’s one of the ways we remain human while the world tries, daily, to render us numb.

Beauty as companionship, not denial

Behold: the modern feed, a corridor of sirens and screams. The news arrives like a tumultuous weather system. Uninvited, invasive, changing the pressure in the room. Many of us are walking around with a body that thinks it’s still in emergency mode: shoulders near the ears, jaw locked like a stubborn gate, breath held as if air must be rationed.

And then someone posts a painting. A small still life. A luminous face. A forest green drapery, a gold-edged sleeve. The comments split into two camps: How can you post this now? versus Thank you, I needed this.

I’m realizing that this is where Guggums lives: in the tender seam between those reactions. Not to arbitrate who is correct, but to ask a more useful question:

What if beauty isn’t a detour from reality, but a way to stay with it?

What if art, at its best, is not denial?
Perhaps it is companionship.

Community care isn’t always a grand sweeping movement. Sometimes it’s a “quiet room.”

When people say “community care,” we often imagine action: fundraising, organizing, showing up, building the infrastructure of survival. Yes. Absolutely. No argument from me; bring the banners, bring the water, bring the phone chargers.

But community care also includes something subtler: regulation.

A community of dysregulated nervous systems cannot sustain long-term work. If your body is constantly braced for impact, even your compassion will start to feel like a task you’re failing.

This is why we should make space for art.

Not art that says, “Everything is fine.”
Art that says, “You are here. I am here. Breathe with me.”

Companionship, not denial.

What the painters knew: the eye can be a lifeline

Let us wander back through a few centuries, as one does.

The medieval icon: a stare that holds you steady

Icons aren’t “pretty.” They are present. Their gold grounds do not mimic the world; they insist that another kind of reality is available, one where your suffering is seen without spectacle. The gaze is frontal, unwavering. Not entertainment. Not escape.

A companion.

The Dutch still life: attention as resistance

A lemon peel spirals. A wineglass catches light. The tablecloth wrinkles like a small landscape. In eras shadowed by death (and yes, the Dutch knew plague and war intimately), still lifes were not naive. They were meditations on time, fragility, and the holiness of the ordinary.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do is look slowly.

The Pre-Raphaelite dream: beauty with a bruise

Those lush greens and medieval reveries? They weren’t just aesthetic indulgence. They were a protest against industrial brutality, against a world flattening into soot and speed. Their beauty wasn’t complacent; it was insistent.

Art doesn’t always solve. It often stays.

The difference between tone deaf and tender

So how do we share beauty without sounding like we’re handing someone a lavender-scented bandage for a broken bone?

Here’s the difference, distilled:

Tone deaf beauty says: “Look at this and stop feeling bad.”
Tender beauty says: “Look at this while you feel what you feel.”

Tone deaf beauty insists on a pivot.
Tender beauty offers a parallel lane.

Tone deaf beauty performs positivity.
Tender beauty practices presence.

Tone deaf beauty centers the poster’s comfort (“let’s keep it light!”).
Tender beauty centers the audience’s reality (“this is heavy; you’re not alone”).

If you want a rule you can carry in your pocket like a coin:

Do not use beauty to erase pain. Use beauty to accompany people who are in pain.

Somewhere along the way, “Pre-Raphaelite” became shorthand for a look: abundant hair, pale skin, some moody greenery. A woman who seems to have wandered out of a medieval daydream and into your Pinterest feed.

I understand the appeal, but when we reduce the Pre-Raphaelites to solely an aesthetic, or a vibe, we miss the thing that made their work so unnervingly alive.

The Pre-Raphaelites weren’t a hairstyle. They were a worldview.

They treated nature not as backdrop but as a living language. A river wasn’t scenery; it was fate. A flower wasn’t decoration; it was a message. The world itself seemed to press in with meaning.

And they treated stories the same way.

Myths, legends, Shakespeare, Arthurian romance… these weren’t merely escapism. They were serious material, charged with warnings and longings. Their paintings don’t merely “illustrate” a tale; they interrogate it. Who is being sanctified? Or being punished? Who is being turned into a symbol instead of allowed to be a person?

That last question matters more than ever, because the visual internet trades in symbols. A tragic girl. The beautiful woman framed as a mood, “Opheliacore,” the languid gaze, the hair like a halo. The Pre-Raphaelites gave us many of those visual templates.

They also, if we’re honest, helped build the cage: the idea that beauty is virtue, that suffering is poetic, that women look best when they are luminous and still.

Just look at Millais’ Ophelia, or Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott. Women suspended in a moment of aestheticized tragedy, turned into icons of doomed grace. (See Pre-Raphaelite Women at The Victorian Web and the Pre-Raphaelite Collection at The Tate.)

Which is why we shouldn’t throw the aesthetic away. We should wake it up.

If we love Pre-Raphaelite beauty (and of course we do!) we can love it with our eyes open, looking past the hair and ask what the painting is teaching you about desire, virtue, power, punishment, and the cost of being seen. Let the art be both gorgeous and complicated. Roses with thorns.

Because that’s the real inheritance.

Not the curls.

The way of seeing.

We all know what it feels like when someone looks at us but fails to truly see us. The rush to interpret, to categorize, to narrate each other’s intentions creates a distance that doesn’t have much to do with reality, but everything to do with projection. And when someone misreads you, when their invented story becomes louder than your actual one, there can be a sting that catches you off guard.

Misunderstanding can feel like an erasure.

I think the Pre-Raphaelites understood this tension. The world saw Elizabeth Siddal‘s face, her hair, even her posture captured endlessly. She was frequently reshaped her into symbols, ideals, and myths. A drowning woman, a tragic muse, an emblem of beauty tinged with sorrow. But these images were never the whole truth. They were reflections of the people who painted her, not the woman herself.

Siddal addressed this in her poem Lust of the Eyes

The Lust of the Eyes
Elizabeth Siddal

I care not for my Lady’s soul
Though I worship before her smile;
I care not where be my Lady’s goal
When her beauty shall lose its wile.
Low sit I down at my Lady’s feet
Gazing through her wild eyes
Smiling to think how my love will fleet
When their starlike beauty dies.
I care not if my Lady pray
To our Father which is in Heaven
But for joy my heart’s quick pulses play
For to me her love is given.
Then who shall close my Lady’s eyes
And who shall fold her hands?
Will any hearken if she cries
Up to the unknown lands?

Sometimes I think about that when modern life becomes loud, when people on social media decide who you are before knowing anything at all. It’s comforting, in a way, to realize we are not the first humans to face this. The misunderstanding is old; the ache is familiar.

But there’s another side to this story, one that feels gentler, more hopeful. 

The ones who pause.

Who take time to ask.

Those who listen without sharpening their claws.

When someone truly sees your intentions, your humor, your hopes, your contradictions, you can feel as if you are welcomed home. 

That’s the kind of seeing I want to practice more intentionally.

The soft kind. The curious kind. The kind that assumes complexity rather than malice.

The kind that remembers every person carries a thousand unspoken things.

You are not failing when others misunderstand you.

But when even a few people truly see you, they help make the rest bearable.

And maybe that’s all we can ask of each other, to try a little harder to see the person, not the projection.

Leave room for nuance.

Offer the kind of attention that feels like light and warmth rather than a searchlight.

Seen, even imperfectly, but not mistaken for someone we never were.