American Beauty

I watched American Beauty for two reasons. 1. Rebellion. It was forbidden to watch so I did. 2. I have an obsession with Kevin Spacey. I didn’t understand most of the film at the time; after all, I was breaking the rules watching it for all the wrong reasons. I never forgot the dead bird. I identified with a morbid sense of beauty long before I enshrined it. (Tragedy!, dear readers who have always considered me an absurd reincarnation of Fido who caught a bright little ray of sunshine.)

A year ago as I drove home from church I saw a bird flailing in the gutter on the side of the road after being hit. I couldn’t let it die in the gutter so I pulled over and removed my sweater to pick up the sickeningly car-beaten bird and move it to the grass. The bird was terrified. The thought occurred to me I had made the situation worse putting it on grass that would irritate and poke its already broken body. So I made a nest of my sweater and laid the bird on it to die and drove away.  All the while I cried, not for the bird but because I am haunted by the times I didn’t stop: the child who fell in the street, the couple on the scooter who had impaled themselves on rebar, the ancient man who asked me to trim his hedges on a blisteringly hot day, the time it took me to join the response to a hit and run where the man died and the woman who hit him went insane.

And looking back on it all, it was in sepia tones.

I call those moments tragically beautiful. (Does the word beautiful offend?) My life is riddled with them. And black. Solid black; the things I no longer remember unless dragged to the surface. I call this "beautiful" because it created.

I took this picture this afternoon. I’ve admired this plant from afar the whole winter. I finally had to capture it. It was aesthetically beautiful in death. An ordinary plant this summer; now, it’s paper thin walls spoke volumes to me of how something past, in death and so delicate, can be beautiful where in life it could not. I don’t celebrate my horrors. I honor what filled their place and how from these rose a phoenix. 

I’m not much of a better person but I stop now and dedicate myself to honoring the phoenix moments in us all and I remember every day we see the world as we are, not as it is. 

"It is a serious thing," says Lewis, "to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary' people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations -- these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whome we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit -- immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously -- no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment."

--C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory.

p.s. for all you Fido aficionado's out there, a redeeming aside to keep you from worrying (you know who you are--your claims I am going "Amish" are ridiculous...) Here's a little bit o' fun I smattered a good handful of un-suspecting victims via text with in a fit of  amusement. The back story here is that I have a bunch of fresh stitches throughout my scalp...  don't pat my head for a few days. I'm still down to catch a Frisbee though.