Beauty in the Ugly

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I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth – the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a-night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
Emily Dickinson

You gotta hand it to Emily Dick. She managed to write some of the most famous American poetry dealing with themes of love and sex and passion and eroticism without having once experienced love or sex or passion or eroticism. She sat virginally in that little chair overlooking her garden and just bust-a-rhymed. I think she is overrated, but I’ll tell you one thing: she was talented enough to be able to summon the words necessary to move her readers without even knowing what the words actually meant.

I, on the other hand, cannot.

My words flow from personal experience and perspective. If I am to write about the mountains, you’d better believe I’m standing in them or staring straight at them, like I am right now. I am sitting on my balcony, and as the snow falls gently and covers the white-capped ski mountain that sits majestically before me, I could easily dash off some quick accolades of the glory of winter beauty. Words to describe the smell of the firepit below me, the snowflakes on my eyelashes, the distant clomp-clomp-clomp of ski boots, and the laughter of children.

Without these sensory images, I am an empty vessel.

The point of this post is not Emily Dickinson. The point is personal perspective. Last night I deliberately stayed in an ugly airport hotel before making my way to this mountain town. I wanted to get some work done, maybe immerse myself in the city, a city that shall remain nameless due to the fact that I have some fine friends who consider that city home, despite its ugliness. However, I never felt so empty, vulnerable and uninspired to write than I felt last night.  I felt a gaping loneliness I had never experienced before. I knew I had made a mistake going there. Because the city I had pictured was not the city I saw.

The city was in full lockdown. If you’ve heard this phrase and have never personally seen it, it would disturb you. Bums on corners in the middle of the day drinking from bottles wrapped in brown paper bags. Shuttered restaurants. Defunct businesses. Deserted capital buildings. Trash in the streets, in the gutters, spewing out of sidewalk trash cans. No business men walking to and from their offices. No moms pushing babies in strollers. No runners getting their daily morning run. No one walking around with coffee cups, or standing in line for donuts. No cabs, no buses, no cars. No noise, no jubilation, no sirens. Just…nothing. An absence. Zombieland. Post-apocalyptic America.

I have visited, walked in and enjoyed most large American cities: Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia. I have always loved the energy and vibe of cities, and my work even takes me on occasion into the roughest parts of Atlantic City. But I have never EVER been afraid of a city the way I was yesterday. I was afraid of getting out of my car. I was afraid of stopping at red lights. On a fruitless 15-minute ride through the city in search of coffee and food, my car was the only one on the road. I felt true fear, and hated the city for its ugliness.

Then I felt shame. Because as a writer, if I cannot find the beauty in the ugly, I am lost. The greatest of literature contains the vast themes of rejection and pain and greed and betrayal. If the world was all about bunnies, sunshine and rainbows, we’d all still be reading Dick and Jane, and watching “Sesame Street.” But life is not always fair, or pretty, or sensible. Life can be one smelly-bitch when she wants to be. I’ve seen that up close, trust me. But the degradation of this city hit me deep in a place I didn’t know existed.

I am here in this upscale mountain town, a day early. I was not supposed to arrive until tomorrow, when I am meeting an assortment of friends. But I felt an urge bordering on hysteria to flee from that gloomy empty hotel, that defunct vapid city, to the tune of an astronomically expensive extra night here at the resort. Because here is life. Here is what I understand. Here are families, and shopping, and Golden Retrievers, and craft beer. Here my senses heighten, and I feel the words form around the experiences.

And while some things here are closed too, it is different. Here there is a sense of hope, rather than desperation. Optimism and opened hearts, instead of shuttered ones. And as I write these words to you, my music playing softly and my balcony door flung wide open to the falling snow, I remember that just twelve hours ago, I was lying in a cold bed in that lonely hotel, waiting for the sun to rise, and not really believing it would.

But the sun did rise there. As it does everywhere. Some say it rises more beautifully in some places than others, but again, isn’t that perspective? Is the glory of a sunrise any less majestic over towering cement project apartment buildings than it is over a fancy ski resort? Maybe there was beauty in that empty shattered city, beauty that I couldn’t see.

But this morning, I said a prayer of thanks that I could leave it. Because others can’t. The ugliness is part of their day-to-day lives, and they must work harder to find the beauty in the pavement, in the bottle, and in the desperation.

One day great art will result from the desperation and pain and loneliness of 2020. Great artists right now are recording the ugliness and the beauty of our time, and the death and the desperation and the despondence will be recorded through music and painting and dance and literature and sculpture. For only through the ugly can we reach the beauty.

And so it goes.