The Death of Beauty

Ugliness surrounds us

“I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they're like little flowers. I've always said that if you have a name for something, like 'cut' or 'bruise,' people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don't know what it is, it can be very beautiful.”
― David Lynch

I used to dislike children. It was the smell.

I always associated children with this particular smell. It was like plastic and dirty diapers, drool and rotten milk. I smelled it everytime I walked into a house with kids. I tried to avoid children as much as I could. I didn’t want the stench to permeate into my home, my hands, my life

Not to mention the toys made of bright primary colors, scattered toys, diaper pails, wet wipes, pink ruffled jumpers covered in snot. It all seemed so ugly and ungainly. It spilled outward in all directions. It wasn’t just a smell to me. It was an infection.Like if I had a child I would become something less than human. A parasite’s host, my body and mind a place where nothing could live but children’s babble and applesauce.

I wanted to live a sterile life. A beautiful life. There were no children in my palace of bones and champagne. I did not want to be holding an infant while I wrote late into the night, went to strange parties, walked downtown at 4 in the morning, crawled out of bed to get my espresso and starved myself in the afternoon. Children would break my porcelain pretensions that I had of myself. They didn't make good characters in stories because they never did what they were told. They existed only to demand and to stay up late and keep you from the darkest and most romantic corners of the world.

I should've known it was a lie. All those things I thought were beautiful were hollow, like a face made out of a silver mold that's empty on the inside when you turn it around.

When my daughter was born I rediscovered beauty. It was not flat and austere. It was warm, and messy, and chaotic. Beauty was the life that flushed to cheeks, those quiet feedings at three in the morning.

I had run from it because that kind of Beauty cannot be controlled. Life always rushes and spills out. It bursts seams and stains good clothing. It gorges itself on the unexpected. It cannot be starved or frozen out.

And the smell. It wasn't plastic. It was flowers and blood.

Now I stop by breweries, or coffee shops, or libraries, and I'm struck by how empty they are. Beautiful decorations have been replaced by a hard ugliness. Everything is industrial metal, ugly carpeting, gray and hard backed and plastic, designed to keep you moving on. Concrete receptacles and concrete bar tops and people who make sure never to look over or glance or smile at a stranger lest they invite something unexpected into their careful and curated world.

Had it always been like that? Or had I only just noticed, so enamored was I with the idea that they represented and not the thing itself?

Freeways block the sun, and buildings are designed to be interchangeable, and rows of apartments line the cities that look like molds for gray candy when you see them from an airplane. Tents of homeless people line the streets. There are faces that are only designed to be beautiful under ring lights, when the camera is on, and then there are the faces of people who have already accepted they are dead.

And I wonder what it does to a person, day in and day out, to go outside and see trash everywhere, and people with faces like ghouls, haunted by their own failure and their own memories, or perhaps even worse, so empty inside that they’re not haunted at all. It's no coincidence that in many strategy games beauty increases morale. An ugly world breeds ugly thoughts.

We convinced ourselves that we could become anything, and in that sense damned ourselves by committing to nothing. Beauty bleeds from all our industries. Sometimes walking alongside rows of shops in Austin I feel as if I'm walking inside the sterile rows of a hospital. There's nothing warm. Nothing inviting. It's all supposed to be efficient. So efficient that it's almost removed the human element entirely.

I dream of a world where beauty is allowed to come back. But if we want beauty again, we'd have to welcome back experience. And if we want experience, we'd have to understand that sometimes when we walk outside we don't always get exactly what we ask for. We have to allow ourselves to be surprised, and challenged, and hurt.

The unexpected arises. And with that, life itself, generating perfect beauty over and over again.

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