Ugliness Everywhere All at Once
I have started to see ugliness everywhere, but also to accept its integrity.
Last night I ate a plump, gorgeous tuna wrap while waiting for the S train. As I ate, I looked down at the ground and saw a bare chicken wing, small bits of flesh rotting on its ends in the temperate fall air. To the left of my left foot, as I scanned the ground mindlessly, I saw a spotted lanternfly, so squished that its body had become paint on the concrete.
The ugliness of everything is everywhere.
Walking a sweet corgi the other day as news of the Hamas attack entered my phone and, intravenously, my consciousness, I found that the corgi was sniffing a newly dead whole bird, a morning dove, bloated and bashed and, in my startled disgust, I yanked the dog away, as if clutching my pearls. How could she?
In a few days the terrible irony prickled up my hunched and craning neck as I, comfortable and fluffy as a corgi on my own couch, scrolled through video after video of bloodless dead baby, mouths open as if asleep, and then a 4-year-old, her useless limbs like rubber shellacked over by an opaque rubble dust.
Suddenly ugliness is everywhere and the moral injury rains down from every direction, but the joke of it is that “war,” “siege,” “massacre” has always looked like this and the only thing that’s new is that now
I watch it.
Before it was a paragraph of a textbook and, struggling to stay awake late some high school evening, I would arrange dates and wars on flashcards, each one scrawled and some highlighted, thinking absolutely never of mothers screaming to hold their little girl again, just once more before she’s buried. Every flashcard, actually, meant precisely this, all those dates I could remember only with silly mnemonic devices, clever tricks to make me care about old, old ghosts.
The joke of it is that war has always looked like this, except that now I watch it, glowing, exploding, seeping from my phone and I’m unable to look away.
Once you see disgustingness, it’s everywhere. And the flip side has also become true:
I saw a rainbow yesterday on Atlantic Avenue. An industrial street where you’d never expect one. The rainbow seemed to me a very big deal.
Small talk with strangers, which normally I despise, means more to me lately. If I choose to talk to a stranger, it might be just a little harder, someday, to kill them, instead.
Choosing to be human, now that I know the ugliness that comes so easily to us all, seems extraordinary. And you choose it over and over again in every moment.
It’s a privilege, though, to be kind. I have no illusion that if my life were shitty, I’d be terrible, too. To be nice is the ultimate luxury. To be kind is a heroism that not everyone has the liberty to choose.
You, your family and all of my dear, darling Jewish friends have been at the top of my heart and thoughts. How can this kind of horror even be contemplated, much less accomplished? You have a magical way of putting into words what my heart is feeling. We must never look away, we must never forget. Thank you for putting this into words.
Thank you so much for tuning in to talking with strangers, and I do it as often as I can. Kindness and hearing other people can only lead to more understanding and, with persistence and care, a better world.