Beauty #6

I'm limping up the stairs to my apartment.

In the course of the past four hours I've been crushed, stepped on, kicked in the head, and gotten into a shoving match with a 200+ pound guy with a shaved head. I've wrecked a pair of jeans, lost my favorite pair of leather cuffs, and accumulated an impressive collection of sore spots that will definitely turn ugly shades of black and blue by morning. 

I can't remember the last time I felt this happy.

***

I have a beastly temper. 

It doesn't take much to trigger it either. Or rather, it wouldn't take much to trigger it if it weren't under such tight control. I keep it coiled up inside of me in a box that makes the Pandorica look like a dollar store lockbox. 

It's the reality of being an adult, is it not? You assess your personality for assets and liabilities. You amplify your assets and make every attempt to limit your liabilities and square them away as best as possible. Over the years I've learned to deal with my liabilities (depression, anxiety, a hair-trigger temper) pretty productively (usually by channeling them into some sort of grueling endurance event). And it works. It works really, really well for the depression and anxiety. The anger is another issue. I find that after a hard run or long uphill bike ride it's not that I'm not angry. It's that I'm too tired to care. 

So the anger is always there, just below the surface, even though most people wouldn't guess its existence. 

***

Tonight found me in a ton of smudgey black makeup and knee high boots congenially kicking the shit out of a bunch of people (predominately dudes) that I'd never met. 

Have I mentioned that I love punks? 

I cut my teeth on post-hardcore, post-punk bands. I was in my first mosh pit at fourteen and have been in so many that I've lost count. As I've grown older and my musical tastes have diversified, I've been to fewer punk shows, but I still love the wacky sense of community in a good pit. There's angry dancing and elbows and intense physical pain. There's getting kicked in the head by a crowd-surfer. There's shoving matches that look like they might break out into actual fights until the crowd swirls again and people move away from one another. There's also the knowledge that if you slip and fall, someone will be there to pick you up. There's the ability to reach out and grab someone around the waist when the crowd behind you is pushing too hard. There are the hugs that happen when your favorite song comes on and you're standing next to an equally sweaty, beer-drenched person who also happens to love the same song. 

Have I mentioned that I love mosh pits?

There's an elegance and a beauty to the ebb and flow of the people dancing and ricocheting off one another. I can never throw myself into a pit without thinking about Dylan Thomas:

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

My adult life is unbelievably buttoned-up. It's tailored dresses and briefcases. Budgets and bills. Meeting someone who doesn't necessarily want to stay up until 4am talking existentialism and Michel Foucault and Waiting for Godot but who you can take home and introduce to your family. Adulthood is about learning to quiet anger and frustration, finding ways to accept them as part of your daily existence and ignore them until they go away.

Punk shows aren't like that.

They're a place where you get to be furious and frustrated, where anger isn't a liability, but an asset. You can rage against all the things that piss you off about your life and the world around you without having to turn the volume down. Your anger can be let out of its box and people either won't notice or won't care.

No, it's note quite that they won't care. It's that they'll understand.

It's amazing how once you get the space just let it all out that rage gets transformed into something else--a kind of crazy exuberance, a strange, mad joy that doesn't just belong to you but to the entire pit, the whole show. You're still raging against the dying of the light, but about halfway through the show it also becomes a celebration that you've experienced any light at all.  

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. 

Beauty #4

This is one of the few pictures taken of me that I, without any reservations, love.

It's me, crossing the Headwaters of the Mississippi up at Itasca for the first time. 

I was an invited third wheel into a nascent relationship. Things were a little awkward (I was along for a weekend trip I didn't know was a weekend trip until much later) until I mentioned that I had never seen the Headwaters of the Mississippi River. The couple took me to the Headwaters and I nearly lost my mind for joy.

I've had a lifelong love affair with the Mississippi River. Whether it was because I read Mark Twain early on or the fact that it links my early years in Wisconsin and my later years in Minnesota. That river has wound its way throughout my entire life and crossing its Headwaters for the first time was one of the most profoundly spiritual moments of my life.

When I wrote in the first post that I fear a sort of Loss of the Creature moments with these entries, this was the one I was thinking about. Unless you've stood at the Headwaters or seen the Mississippi where it empties into the Gulf, it's difficult to describe the beauty and fragility of the river. It's a force onto itself. 

I return the Headwaters once every few years and take off my shoes (always in the fall. I've got to go sometime when the weather is warm) and wade around. I like knowing that however polluted and full of Asian Carp the river is even a hundred miles downstream that this place exists. That there is this one moment in space and time where the Mighty Mississippi is just a stream that you can walk across. 

Beauty #3

I attended one of those snooty college preparatory schools. The kind where an emphasis is put on The Classics. My four years there were basically an agonizing, protracted course in Great Books, Great Poetry. As a result, I made some interesting literary decisions. I memorized The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock at sixteen. I read Lolita before I was really old enough to understand what was going on. 

During my first year of college I had a professor who introduced me to poetry that didn't require footnotes or a working Latin and German vocabulary (I'm looking at you, Eliot). She reinvigorated my love of poetry and my desire to one day be a poet myself.

Garrison Keillor and The Writer's Almanac picked up where that professor had left off. I read the poems on the website every day. When a poem strikes me, I cue up the audio and listen to Garrison read it (he really does have a very fine voice).

I found Eleanor Lerman through The Writer's Almanac, through this poem particularly. One of her lines in particular just knocks me out. It simultaneously expresses one of those moments that is so mundane and so odd that you have to stop and think to yourself "Did I slip into a Neil Gaiman novel?"

I'll let you guess what line it was.

Starfish
by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you were born at a good time. Because you were able to listen when people spoke to you. Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

Beauty #2

If I had to pick one word to describe myself it would be exuberant.

I have, admittedly, some emotional connection to Dale Chihuly's work. From the ages of sixteen to eighteen, I spent the majority of my time in the Milwaukee Art Museum (more on this in a later post). I had two favorite pieces there that I would go visit on a bi-weekly basis. The first was a huge abstract expressionist canvas. The second was a glass sculpture by Chihuly.

When my very first boyfriend and I started dating, he (having picked up on my love for Chihuly) took me to an exhibit of his work and it was  . . . remarkable. Of all of the art exhibits I've seen in the course of my life, it was one that stuck with me. I can still remember walking through the rooms marveling that something could both fragile and, well, exuberant.

The excitement I feel over walking into a new art museum (because, let's get real, that's where I spend my vacations) and finding a Chihuly can only be compared to the excitement I feel running into an old friend in an unexpected place. It's an emotional, physical reaction to the sheer loveliness of the thing, and upwelling of joy that I'm too much of a hack to be able to describe.

Beauty #1

When I was getting a degree in Jesus, I chose the most esoteric branch of theology I could uncover.

I went into graduate school knowing that I had one intense theological question. I wanted to understand grace, how we were redeemed, why it had to happen through the crucifixion of a Palestinian Jew.

I also knew that I wanted to be a poet (rereading some of those old poems is embarrassing. Roundly I think switching to narcissistic, unproductive self-probing was a better move). I knew that while I loved (and continue to love) encountering new ideas, using bits of my brain that hadn't had a workout in awhile, I also loved simply being moved by the beauty of something.

During my first Theological Aesthetics class the professor started the course by playing Mary Oliver reading Mary Oliver. He followed it when some of Glen Goldberg's performance of The Goldberg Variations.

I was smitten.

One of the underlying tenets of Theological Aesthetics is that we come from Beauty. We talked extensively about what it meant when we said that God was Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. How Beauty and beauty interact in the world. The role that grace plays in our lives. We also listened to a lot of incredible music (I heard Faure's Requiem mass there for the first time) read some astounding poetry, and looked at heart-meltingly good art.

I loved that class. If I could have simply done a degree in Aesthetics and ignored the whole "I'm not terribly sure about this Jesus-died-for-my-sins" thing I would probably still be a Catholic. They're discussions I miss having, little bits of Roman Catholicism that still catch my eye heart now and again.

One of the times I miss Theological Aesthetics the most is during Lent. It sounds crazy, I know, but have you ever been to a really good service on a Catholic High Holy Day? Ash Wednesday, Tenebrae services, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday are all magnificent when they're done well. So today when I was scrolling through a social media feed and I saw a fellow theologian's comment that every day during Lent he was going to try to post something beautiful (because we come from Beauty), I sat back and my chair and thought "Huh. That's an idea worth stealing."

Because regardless of my feelings about J.C. specifically or God generally, I do believe that we come from Beauty. We live in a universe that is improbable, complex, and stunningly, breath-takingly beautiful. I don't know about everyone else, but I have a tendency to get a little caught up in thebusislatei'vegottagogroceryshoppingwherearethetpsreports that I can forget about it. So (hopefully) once a day during Lent (I can't help it. I feel an upwelling of religiosity this time of year) I'm going to be posting something I find beautiful.

I admit some trepidation in doing this. First because the things I'm sharing are, well, it's hard to explain. The best I can do is that they're not things that are close to my heart. They are my heart. Opening up is always a scary, free-fall-y thing for me. This time it feels particularly intense.

There's also the worry that you'll have a Loss of the Creature experience and won't get what I'm saying. I suppose that's okay. The goal is not to convert everyone to the Cult of Heart-Exploding Reactions to Things but merely to say "these are some things I find beautiful."

I hope you do too.

***

My love for Ryan Adams knows no bounds. 

I debated for awhile about how I should start this series off. I have well documented love affairs with all sorts of things: poetry, space, particle physics, the outdoors.

In the end, music won out. Of course it did. Music and fiction/poetry are the art I consume most often. Of those, music is the one that can impact my mood quickly and profoundly. The wrong song at the start of the day and I'm in a rotten mood for the duration. I'm unable to shake off the feelings it gives me like I can shake off a poem that reminds me of my ex or a book that kept me up the night before. 

So, Ryan Adams. 

Admittedly, part of me loves him because he has such a ridiculous Rock n' Roll past. He's what I think of when I think of a rockstar. He writes these songs with lyrics that just destroy me. He has an album for whatever mood I'm in. 

Usually when songs hit me in the guts, when they become songs that I know I'll listen to endlessly on repeat it's because of the lyrics (I can't help it. I always wanted to be a poet). I like well-arranged songs, and I like interesting melodies, and I'm a total sucker for complex harmonies, but it's the lyrics that usually rope me in. 

That didn't happen with this one. 

The first time I heard "New York, New York" it was the version off of the Gold album, which is very different from this version. It's a rock song, and a damn good one. I liked it instantly, but was completely enamored with the rest of the album, so I let it pass. 

Then I heard this version. 

And it just . . . hit me. The combination of the piano and Ryan's voice and the obvious emotion he feels singing it blew me out of the water. When he sings the lyric "I'm still amazed I didn't lose it/on the roof of the place/when I was drunk and I was thinking of you" I feel like he's writing about every breakup/unrequited crush I've ever had. I loved this version from the opening bars of the song.

Music is funny like that.

Ryan Adams is funny like that.

This song is funny like that. 

Note: Start the video at 1:34

Feelings

Joel Stein is an idiot.

It's a thought I've had many times over the course of the past two years. I had it the day I read the entirety of Patrick Ness's exceptional Chaos Walking trilogy. Again when I was until four in the morning reading Shipbreaker. My motion sickness kicked in when I couldn't put the Birthmarked series down. When I got off the bus and made myself a cup of ginger tea I repeated the mantra to myself.

Joel Stein is an idiot. 

***

Michelle is the only person with whom I actually enjoy going to history museums.

Scratch that. Michelle is the only person with whom I actually enjoy going to museums. 

Full stop. 

We spent the majority of the day today at the Minnesota History Center at an exhibit about Prohibition. It was incredible. It was infinitely better than I could have imagined. I stood in front of the 21st Amendment. I got my picture taken with a banner saying Votes for Women. I got to tell Michelle that William Jennings Bryan not only supported women's suffrage and the temperance movement, but also prosecuted the Scopes trial. We talked about how people we knew in Milwaukee and Northern Wisconsin had known Al Capone (no joke) and benefited directly from his largess.

It was a good day. 

Because we're both nuts for museums we spent part of the day in the Minnesota's Greatest Generation exhibit. I wandered away from her at some point and started reading the story of a Minnesota veteran who was an incredibly talented jazz musician who worked seven days a week at an laundromat and played gigs in the evenings. The story made me think of how difficult that life must have been--balancing what you love with the financial necessity of having to work and before I knew it I was tearing up in the middle of the museum.

Some people cry when they cross the finish line of a race. Others get a little misty at the top of a mountain they've hiked. Church or books or music can set others off.

I cry in museums. 

Lingering in art museums I will inevitably happen upon a piece (intentionally or otherwise) that I find so lovely I dissolve on the spot. Wandering through science museums, I think about the improbability of our own existence or stand in front of an early prototype of Voyager and consider us reaching out through the stars to find intelligent life and I break down. Perusing history museums I imagine receiving a telegram that my brother  or father or boyfriend will never come home as the result of a war and my heart feels like it's breaking. 

Michelle, being the intrepid best friend of sixteen years, is my ideal museum companion because discovering me wiping my eyes in front of a poster about a long-deceased saxophonist is no longer unusual. It's not even cause for comment. 

***

I read The Fault in Our Stars cover to cover, in about three hours. 

Today, in fact. 

I didn't time it well. I started it before the history center and finished it after, so I was already rubbed a little raw. But once I started it I couldn't put it down. It's an emotional lulu of a book, at times infuriating (No sixteen year old talks like that! What seventeen year old read Waiting for Godot?) at times hysterically funny and at times a real emotional sucker-punch. 

It's the second YA novel I've read in 2014 and while it didn't have quite the same Everyoneneedstoreadthisbookimmediately quality that Eleanor & Park had (Oh, haven't you heard me talk about how much I loved that book?) it was still funny, smart, and deeply moving. I was pleased that I read it. And when I closed the book and went to make myself a cup of tea and find some tissues I thought (again):

Joel Stein is an idiot. 

***

No fewer than six acquaintances have sent me the HuffPost article "16 Habits of Highly Sensitive People." 

It's kindly meant, and I usually send back a quick "Thanks! A couple other folks have emailed this to me too!" 

What I really want to say is "Send me something peer-reviewed, with footnotes, and I might take it seriously."

Have I mentioned I'm a real snot when it comes to things that even come remotely near smelling of pop-science? 

You've probably seen the article Or, at least, if you're not a Luddite you've probably come across it in some capacity. Even without the emails, it's shown up in my Facebook newsfeed at least a zillion times in the past week. It was trending on Twitter. A workshop at a conference I attended recently made reference to it. At first I can't tell what's annoying me about the article but apparently because I'm highly sensitive, I'm more annoyed than the rest of the world.  

My feathers, I'll realize eventually, are still a little ruffled by the fallout from one of my recent posts (Note: do not tell men they have the emotional capacity of Peter Pan and that their literary heroes are entitled, passive, egotistic shitheads. Even if both are true). I'm pissed because I've been told a number of times in the past week You're too emotional. You're so sensitive. You have no place commenting on the emotions of men because you have lady feelings. Get on medication because you're clearly bi-polar. 

Here are some things I know about myself. I cry more easily than some people I know, less easily than others. I often cry when thinking about things that have no direct impact on me whatsoever. Books, television (ohmygodthedoomsdayepisodeofwho), music, museums, they all hit me hard, in the emotional solar plexus. I'm wired in such a way that I seem to be more reactive to things, good or bad. It takes me longer to process my emotions, and I'm often not ready to talk about them until weeks later. My default setting is for privacy and pushing people away. 

These things all seem to qualify me as a Highly Sensitive Person. 

***

I try not to be too fussy about the things that people read. 

When I read a book I love, I do have a slight tendency to evangelize about how wonderful and life changing it is, but all in all, I try not to judge people based on what they read. I don't, you know, always succeed (It still find myself flabbergasted when people tell me they haven't read The Great Gatsby) but I make an effort. I think people should try to read omnivorously, but because I believe it both broadens and deepens your relationship with books when you cane make connections across the things you read (if you ever want to see me have an intense geekout ask me about how The Code Book made me understand a throwaway scene in Life After Life). 

All of that said, I love YA books. 

I am an unapologetic reader of YA novels. I stopped reading Moby-Dick so that I could read The Hunger Games. Once, I went to work without sleep so that I could stay up and finish Ender's Game. When I missed Paulo Bacigalupi at the National Book Festival in September I was devastated. 

One of the most frustrating parts of becoming an adult is the feeling that everything about you needs to have a different label slapped on it. You're INTJ, you have anxiety, the results of your StrengthsFinder analysis suggest that you like bran muffins, you're experiencing obsessive-compulsive disorder, that's clinical depression talking. The feeling of constant diagnosis (sought or no) is what gets me so hot about the HuffPost article (that and lack of footnotes. Seriously, guys). There are times when a diagnosis is extremely helpful and necessary (OCD, depression, and anxiety). There are other times when it just feels like one more label. One more way in which you are not being the person you're supposed to be. It's not enough to say "you experience the world in a different way, and that's cool" instead you're a Highly Sensitive Person.

One of the reasons I love YA books is their emotional vulnerability. They're nakedly, hugely emotional in a way that so many adult novels aren't. I suspect it's because as a teenager all of your emotions and reactions to things are so intense, and so it resonates well with them. 

And it resonates with me. Not because I'm emotionally stunted or crazy (Fuck you, Joel Stein). I don't throw fits in public. I can count on one hand the number of times I've raised my voice when I've been upset. I don't smash crockery or throw things across the room. It resonates with me because my emotional hard-wiring is just different. I have a lower threshold for stimulation or reaction. When I experience an emotion (particularly a strong one like love or lust or jealousy) it hits me harder than it hits other people, But, honestly, who the fuck cares?  I read and love YA books because they hit me where I live emotionally and because they take me back to a time when having those emotions and expressing them wasn't something that need to be diagnosed. 

At least, that's what I tell myself as I use the last of my tissues to mop up after the last five pages of The Fault in Our Stars.