Mendacious Horror & Beauty

A decade or so ago a friend and I wrote a multi-media piece for delivery to arty folks. She was (is) a photographer. I was a “poet” and a “voice.” A recently deceased other friend put together a music score, and with the lady’s slides, the thing came together as a “happening.”

A comment CE made to the previous blog reminded me of a part of that script. It won’t be quite the same without the pictures and the music, but I’ll start with a description of at least the pictures. They were taken at Arlington Cemetery. Slide one is of a single tombstone, and as the reading proceeds the camera backs off thr0ugh 15 more shots to reveal more and more of the stone scenery. The last few pictures unfold in fairly rapid order, the final scene being what seems a million tombstones. The time is near sunset. I don’t know if the photographer got the effect with a series of filters or whether the blood-red light reflecting and growing deeper in the stones was made by the approaching sunset. Let’s say the latter.

Here’s the poem.

(No title)

Beauty has many faces, some of which
don’t seem beautiful at all
Until an eye, able to see,
Lifts layers of shallow tissue
From the heart of the thing,
Like peeling the grey, crinkly shell from the
Woven chrysalis hiding the Luna Moth.

Beautiful things
Like the bubbling innards of an active volcano
Or the torrents of rain circling
The placid eye of a storm,
Are not beautiful at all
If a thing to be beautiful
Must be beautiful in every way.

And I doubt seriously that a thing of beauty
can be a joy forever
Unless what we mean by a thing of beauty
Is the memory of the thing,
The idea of it,
The embellishable growing thing,
The crowded past,
The mixed-up heaven and hell of our lives,
The apothecary of dreams.

Time comes to meet us
Again and again colliding at the edge
Where the past ends,
The moment we call “now”…
A resurrection happens there
of all that was and is,
A transformation of tattered rags
And glorious banners
Into imagined wonder.

At least two kinds of fools abide:
Those who see no beauty
And those who see no horror.
But the wise who live next door
In the nowhere of the soul,
See the same things twice:
Once for what they are –
Beautiful or horrible –
And once again
To see the horror in beauty
And the beauty in horror.


[A few pages later, the piece ends with these words…]

We were young then,
When the ethic of sacrifice and love
Was carved into the bone of our skulls…
Young and empty,
Unbaptized
By the water flowing
from the wounded sides
of yellow orphans
Squatting in the black rubble of
God’s majestic earth
Sniffling the sweet odor of their mothers’ breast
As it burns.

We did not know except we were told.
We believed the lie, and called it truth.
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
Der Vater, der Sonne, und der Heilige Gheist.
Amen


A kind of end, a kind of beginning.