Beauty #5

I fell in love with Doctor Who from the first episode.

I adore Doctor Who. And by adore, I mean, you know adore. I wear my "Blink" t-shirt regularly. I can quote whole long soliloquies from the show. I have cried during every Doctor Regeneration I've seen (I am, admittedly, a bit behind on the Classic series). I refuse to watch the Matt Smith Regeneration until I'm in a less emotional space (which will be sometime next January after lunch). When I want to tell someone that I love them I say "I  ♥♥ you like I love Doctor Who."

I know, right?

I started the series with the Christopher Eccleston reboot. And it was pretty good. A little kitschy, but certainly enjoyable. I watched the first season shortly after I finished Battlestar Galactica, which just destroyed me on an emotional level, and a little goofiness was in order.

But, oh, the David Tennant series.

I was bound to love it from the moment he stepped onto screen. David Tennant is brown-eyed, skinny, and Scottish. With great hair. And he was playing a brilliant time-traveler with a superhero complex.

Yeah. Bound to love him.

This is to say nothing of the fact that I thought Russell T. Davies an excellent story-teller. And that you got all of the shining genuis of Steven Moffat without any of the downfalls (a dearth of intelligent female characters, no real consequences in any of his universes, too-clever-by-half syndrome). But what I love(d) most about the David Tennant series was his ability to make me feel something, whether it was goofy joy or anger and holyfuckingshitripmyheartoutofmychest sadness.

It feels weird to be talking about a television show as beautiful in the same series where I'll be talking about Hamlet, Auden, Faure's Requiem Mass (Spoilers, Sweetie). As though comparing a British sci-fi television show with which I have a total fangirl relationship to capital A Art somehow diminishes either of them.

As I've been writing these posts, I've been ruminating on what, for me, moves something from the realm of "loveliness" or "brilliantly crafted" to something beautiful. How is it possible for me to put a four minute segment of Who the same category and a painting by Matisse?

During the course of the week I consume a not insignificant amount of emotional material. Thursday I read a case of a woman whose boyfriend beat her (literally) senseless and then attempted to set her on fire. Then I came home and read Graham Greene's The End of the Affair and listened to some Bach cello suites.

This was not an unusual day for me.

When you live on the edge of the bell curve, high dynamic range of emotionalism and consume highly emotional content day in and out, it takes a little more to push you over the edge, to really pack an emotional wallop that sticks with you over the course of time. During any given week a novel, a Lorde song, a comment made in passing may all move me, but it's the things I remember at the end of a few years, that still impact me when I see or hear them again that are allowed to move out of the "impactful" group and into the "beautiful" group.

There were two moments from the David Tennant run on Who that I considered for this post although (again, Spoilers, Sweetie) this won't be his only appearance. They both come from the same season and have, I suppose the same theme, which is 10's love for Rose.

I am a total sucker for a good star-crossed lovers story and how more star-crossed can you be than an un-aging spacetime traveler who falls in love with a human woman? This clip comes from the last four-ish minutes of the episode "Doomsday," which I have only watched in its entirety once (I can't stand to sit through an hour f television when I know the ending is going to murder me emotionally). I have, however, twice in the past four years, used this four minutes as a break glass in case of emotional emergency. When I'm too emotionally exhausted to deal with said emotions, I've cued up these last four minutes and allowed the catharsis of them to help me deal with my own shit. (Full disclosure, I couldn't even watch the whole video for this post because right now it's too much.)

I'm not the only person who has this emotional reaction to Who or even the only person to have this emotional reaction to this episode of Who. A friend of mine refuses to watch it because "it reminds [her] of every horrible, gut-wrenching, heart-shredding breakup" she's ever had.

In the end, isn't that what art, what beauty is supposed to do? To reach inside of us and tear out our guts and show them to us? To squeeze our heart and our lungs until we feel like we might die and remind us this is what it means to be human? 

At least, that's what I've always thought it was supposed to do. That's why, with very little embarrassment, I can leave 10 and Rose here, amid Matisse and Auden and Faure.

Allons-y. 

Ashes

For Corein, some thoughts on hope, Ash Wednesday, and Lent

***

When I was 18, my AP English teacher--perhaps the adult I admired most--dropped the equivalent of a literary time bomb into my hands.

To this day I remember, with a cinematic amount of clarity, the three most important novels I've ever read. They were all novels he made me read and were novels that he told me would change my life. He was, of course, right. To this day I can remember lying in the grass of my parent's backyard and lazily finishing The Great Gatsby and feeling, for the first time, that I wanted To Be a Writer. I can remember the hum of my old dorm fridge as I curled in my favorite flowered armchair my second year in college and deciding that if I ever had I daughter I would name her Frances after Franny Glass's character. I remember being 18, angsty, looking forward to the conclusion of high school and leaving for college in the fall.

My AP teacher truly had a gift for understanding adolescents. In what I largely consider one of the greatest teaching decisions ever made, he gave a group of affluent suburban kids The Great Gatsby to study. And we talked at length about materialism and longing; greed and spiritual shallowness. As a relatively lower-middle-class kid in a school where 17-year olds drove BWM's and Audi's, Gatsby fascinated and repelled me. Fitzgerald's prose made me realize, finally, that I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing. Jay Gatsby scared me into discovering that I didn't want only wealth, possessions, notoriety. For four years I had watched the students around me get $400 prom dresses and expensive cars and thought that it was what I wanted. Gatsby forced me to think about wanting something else.

But the brilliance of this particular teaching decision is twofold. First, Gatsby. Second, Larry Darrell.

Larry is the protagonist of a largely under-appreciated novel by W.S. Maugham, The Razor's Edge. Outside of those of us who took AP English, I haven't run across many people who've read the book. I'll spare you an entire synopsis of the plot. Suffice it to say, it is one young man's quest for wisdom and spiritual fulfillment after WWI, costs be damned. It is a very ordinary little novel; certainly, Maugham's prose has nothing of Fitzgerald. But unlike The Great Gatsby it is a novel that haunts me not because of its style but because of its characters. It is earnest in a way that reminds you of every (sober) conversation you ever had after 2:00 AM in someone's dorm room, when questions of morals, ethics, and God all took on a kind of monumental importance. It's that kind of novel. It appealed tremendously to my 18-year old self. I was nothing if not earnest and was, more often than not painfully, sincere in that way you only seem to be during your adolescence.

***

I find myself missing Lent. I woke up yesterday with an inexpressible longing to go to church--to go to Catholic Church, actually and receive my ashes. It went so far that I actually called the local Cathedral and asked about distribution of ashes and mass. Then I saw one of those news stories that reminds me why I gave up Christianity, to say nothing of Roman Catholicism. 

I still miss Lent. 

I always liked Lent. I like any holiday that makes you stop and take stock of where you've been, where you are, where you want to be. I liked that, in a culture of indulgence and instant-gratification, there was still this tiny space where restraint and simplicity were held up as virtues. Where we were asked to take a long, hard look at ourselves and decide what is keeping us from spiritual progression. 

I've particularly always liked Ash Wednesday. As a Christian, I think I was supposed to find Easter the most meaningful. Afterall, what is death with the promise of Resurrection? But the outward symbols of Ash Wednesday, the external reminders of our own impermanence (remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return) and the subsequent examination of what in your brief life is important and what is expendable has always appealed to me. 

This is what I miss when I say that I miss Lent. When I chucked Christ's Resurrection by the wayside, I inadvertently chucked the possibility of my own resurrection--at least, as far as I've always understood it--along with it. And so, on a day where many of my friends are thinking about death and the resurrection I find myself just thinking about death.

It's less gloomy than it sounds, actually. Perhaps "thinking about death" isn't quite the right way to express it. I find myself thinking about impermanence. About what is important in this life. About what I want from life and who I want to be. This year, without the Resurrection to look forward to, without the assured promise of a tomorrow, I find that I am more interested in my actions right now. It's related to what I said two weeks ago in my post about grace and wanting to participate in my own salvation. I want my good deeds to count for something, and I want the life I lead in this world to count for something. Since I've decided to put the Resurrection on the shelf, such as it is, I find myself more preoccupied with figuring out how I want my life to matter here and now.

I feel a little closer to that 18 year old who was so moved by Larry Darrell and his quest for understanding and peace. It's funny. I've spent the past ten years trying to become more educated, cultivated, and worldly. The only thing I've become is less sincere. Somewhere in the process of growing up, I managed to forget that the life I was striving for wasn't exactly what I had set out to achieve. And of course, no one is the person they wanted to be when they were 18. You make choices and they have consequences. You compromise and rethink positions and sometimes you change for the better. And sometimes you look up from your mountain of work and social obligations, tests and oil changes, trips to the grocery store and fights with the guy you're dating and wonder "how in the hell did I get here?"

When I was 18 I marked heavily in my books. In my copy of The Razor's Edge this passage was the most heavily marked. It is one that I find running through my mind, today, when Christians everywhere are called to think of impermanence.

If the rose at noon has lost the beauty it had at dawn, the beauty it had then was real. Nothing in the world is permanent, and we're foolish when we ask anything to last, but surely we're still more foolish not to take delight in it while we have it. If change is of the essence of existence one would have thought it only sensible to make it the premise of our philosophy. We can none of us step into the same river twice, but the river flows on and the other river we step into is cool and refreshing too.

I cannot, nor do I want to be the same person I was at 18. I've changed, and for the most part I am grateful for those changes. But today, thinking about impermanence and yes, about death, I can't help but long for the sincerity, for the earnestness I once had. I can't help but feel like they're here, somewhere, beneath the detritus of work and a life post-graduate school, underneath the piles of decisions and consequences and compromises and that if I am just patient enough, I'll be able to find them again. And that if I do, my own imperfect, impermanent life will be all the richer for having them back.