A Thing of Beauty

[by Zenas Ubere for Hearts Unfiltered, Edition II]

image by Zenas Ubere

Two memories come to mind.

In the first, somewhere in Gwarimpa, I leaned against the rail by a road on high ground and watched a neighbourhood below. It was morning and the buildings were swathed in fog, their roofs wet with dew. The sight was so pleasant that it seemed like something cut out from a Disney cartoon. And then the sun began its ascent above the horizon, and its rays splashed through the fog to give the air a golden tinge. My heart slowed. I looked on, charmed by the view.

In the second, I jogged along Adadevoh Way in Jahi. To my left, beyond the expanse of empty land, the silhouette of a rock stood at a distance, its outline marked out in the heavy fog. A slice of the sun surfaced from behind the rock. My legs stopped. The sun rose into fullness. As its light blended with the fog, it appeared as if gold dust had been sprinkled into the air.

I recount these to revisit moments when a sight imbued with beauty slowed my heart. In recent times, I have more consciously sought out such moments– in nature, films, music, visual arts, and books. I do these for several reasons. For one, this place of slowness, of unhurried habituation in a moment, is the well from which my creativity springs. For another, I seek them for healing – to heal my heart from the wear induced by the arduous task of survival.

What does observing a thing of beauty have to do with healing? one may ask. The heart, after all, is merely a muscle, which circulates blood. But the heart is also a vessel that can hold more than blood. Among many things, it can hold the weight of an ache, of love, and of longing. In Igbo, we say, “E bum gi n’obi.” I carry you in my heart. This is said to a person to affirm that one has not forgotten them, that, in one’s heart, they will always have a room.

The heart as a vessel, a vessel in which one’s interior life is built.

The interior life, which faces inward, is a life private to each person. And it is built by the things we absorb. The exterior life, which is the part people around us bear witness to, constitutes the activities we partake in to be a part of the external world. Certain activities in the exterior life, such as having a good time with friends, can enrich the interior life. However, at times, activities from our exterior lives can also put us under strain, chipping away bits of our internal built environment, causing our hearts to wear. And it is here that observing a thing of beauty can function as repair.

In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry writes that “the moment of perceiving something beautiful confers on the perceiver the gift of life.” What is healing if not a movement towards life? And so to put off the strain from the activities of my daily life, to seek repair, I turn to the beauty in art, in nature, the kind that slows and heals the heart.

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About the Contributor

Zenas Ubere was selected for LOATAD’s 2023 West African Writers Residency and the SBMEN & Goethe Institut Art Writing and Criticism Workshop. He is a 2024 editorial fellow at Tender Photo and the coordinator of Lolwe Academy.