The Lissome Issue N°6 – Deep Beauty

Lissome, adjective, late 18th century, abbreviation from lithe + -some
Synonyms: gentle, calm, gracious, kind

Pronouncing the feeling of watching long, graceful blades of grass swishing in the breeze, “lissome” is an attempt to explain something that is fundamentally ineffable, a moment of serene awareness that you’ve experienced but never had a word for. That kind and gentle awareness of ourselves and, as a consequence, of our surroundings, is the larger story that inspires us at Lissome.

In this issue:

THE LISSOME N°6: Deep Beauty

What is beauty?

The artist Agnes Martin once described beauty as the mystery of life. For thinkers, artists and wisdom seekers throughout history, beauty has belonged to the same realm as truth, goodness or love. And yet today, it can feel like an uneasy word. Hollowed out by the advertising and entertainment industries, beauty is often reduced to surface appeal or desire engineered for consumption. So much around us claims to be beautiful, especially in this time of constant acceleration and visual saturation. But what is beauty, really? And what is its role in our lives, in our human experience?

The question feels urgent as we are living through a period of profound technological, ecological and cultural transformation, while our attention is increasingly fragmented and many of the forces shaping our lives pull us towards speed, abstraction and disconnection. What makes beauty relevant in our time?

Across 144 pages of essays, conversations, photography, art and visual storytelling, Deep Beauty follows this question into unexpected places: from Arizona Muse reflecting on the difference between looking pretty and living in beauty, to the astonishing diversity of sheep and the terroir of wool; from a journey into Taiwan’s world of wild tea to the spells, dreams and prayers once woven into cloth. The Major Arcana is reimagined as a journey towards stewardship, while William Morris takes us back to a radical understanding of beauty as inseparable from everyday life, craft and social change. The Major Arcana is reimagined as a journey towards stewardship, while William Morris takes us back to a radical understanding of beauty as inseparable from everyday life, craft and social change. From there, Beauty as World-Making traces a darker path from the Futurists’ intoxication with speed to the increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic currents emerging from Silicon Valley – and asks what kind of future we are being persuaded to desire.

Deep Beauty invites us to take beauty seriously. As something luminous and unsettling, intimate and political. As a way of paying attention. As a practice through which we might become more alive to what surrounds us, more discerning about what asks for our desire, and more capable of imagining what else might be possible.