Moving: How to Frame a Beautiful World
I am sitting on the corner of 71st and Broadway on the phone with my mother, telling her, “I didn’t get the job, but!” when a pigeon shits its days’ worth of New York refuse down my hair and bare shoulder, just missing the seam of my dress.
Holding my hair in a knot to contain the excrement and huffing up the street in my blood-stained interview shoes, I find a Trader Joes and dip inside, on the hunt for a public bathroom. Three escalator rides later I find one, unravel the twist over the sink and try scrubbing my hair clean with paper towels and hand soap.
A young girl with blue lipstick and blue eyeshadow then emerges from a stall. I implore her for a hairbrush or dry shampoo, her blue hair too short to warrant owning either, noticing the hair before the delivery and just needing to vent to someone. Reveling in her wide, sincere blue eyes, she looks at me square and says, “I think your hair looks fine…”
I want it to be just that: me and a sapphire New Yorker in a (perhaps, somehow) romantic public bathroom exchange. She spits truth and I’m fine. Roll the credits over the rest of the day. But instead, I explain to the teen that she doesn’t understand, that “a pigeon shit on my goddamn head.”
At this, a middle-aged woman walks in and something beautiful happens. All of a sudden I’m no longer a tourist begging for direction in a bathroom; I am the embodiment of all that is primal and poised, standing in between two distant generations of women, laughing as the elder extends me a Hail Mary in the form of “ah yes, it happens to the best of us,” like an invitation to join a sisterhood of tough luck big city feminism, collectively symbolized by sitting on the wrong bench at the wrong time.
***
“Beauty brings copies of itself into being,” says Elaine Scarry. “It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people.” She means something about art and why we recreate what we do — why we look at a lily growing out of a passing lane and decide it should be photographed and framed, painted later and downloaded as a Bing-sponsored background. But I think she might also be nodding to some divine universal will, perpetually reimagining beauty from circumstance, over and over ad infinitum; and the hands that curate and forge these copies in some more palatable way for the masses. I think that dutiful gift isn’t solely the artist’s responsibility.
So think of me again, standing back on 71st and Broadway with my phone to my ear, smelling of bird, sweat, and Trader Joe’s hand soap. Think of Johnny on the other line: a sexy Italian paraplegic who in this exact moment I am probably in love with; who loves me too but it’s not the right time so calls me vague things like “darlin’” and “lady” and promises to visit me in the city in two years when he has his Masters and things are different.
Think of Johnny because our relationship would end before I moved to the city. Because I saw him every day for four years but wouldn’t look because I didn’t think I could — because I thought I’d stare at his legs and feel too conflicted with pity to treat him how he deserved. Because I sat in ugly mental stasis for so long before loving him at the absolute worst time, but even moving at a dead end was still so worth it.
And that’s why I’m smiling now, with the optimism he bequeaths me: the statistical likelihood of being shit on by a bird somehow implying that I am one in 10,000, that something will come of the interview, that the image of me streaked in bird feces brings pleasure, pride, hope to him with no hesitation.
Because there is a beauty you can only find on the other side of your worst— a masochistic primal joy that bleeds and burns and haunts the walls of the Met and the Guggenheim.
***
Vincent van Gogh once said that “If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere” which is sort of tragic if you think about it, because van Gogh truly did love nature, and yet still felt tortured in the midst of all his discovered beauties. I don’t think he was lying; I think he understood that beauty is an emergent comfort while we accept that nature may be at once lovely and cruel. I think beauty is the recreative guise for the practiced optimist — optimism not necessarily implying absolute happiness.
…beauty is an emergent comfort while we accept that nature may be at once lovely and cruel.
Van Gogh pops into my head as I head towards the airport, returning to Ohio from my impromptu trip to NYC where my first shot at becoming a big city editor was thwarted by some hotshot from FoodNetwork.com. Or at least that’s how I want to explain my kind rejection. The rest doesn’t serve my ego very much.
Regardless, boarding the Newark AirTrain, I feel somehow more motivated than ever because just 24 hours in the city has recharged my creative outlook for weeks to come. Cranked up on coffee, high on downtown exhaust fumes, I board the crammed train car, giddily taking my place at the back-left corner.
We are a racially vibrant bunch — normal for New Jersey/may-as-well-be-New York — which is important to note, because we are all coexisting splendidly until we slow to a stop at Terminal C and what appears to be the East Coast reincarnate of the late Queen of England shuffles in with her equally high-nosed husband. He dons a tweed suit, flat cap, and quaffed white whiskers from ear to ear. Our homeostasis shifts in favor of the elderly high-brow Caucasian.
The next stop is Terminal B, at which we pick up a young and slender man with deep brown complexion. He is bashful and apologetic about squeezing in, and so rests his hand briefly upon the white-on-white man’s back to express his regards. He in turn rejects this gesture, pulling away from the touch and visibly stiffening, there on out shaking his head in a not-so-subtle rhythm.
The East Coast Queen, his assumed matrimonial partner, seems oblivious to her husband’s disgust. We will, however, grant her a pass on the matter, for her verticality is decidedly under-par with the rest of we sardines.
As the doors slide to seal us in, the man to my left reminds the woman in between us to grab hold of the bar before we pull from the landing. It is at this moment that the cordial black man begins looking around in mild panic, likely with the realization that he has stationed himself equidistantly out of reach from all available bars, rods, and cling-able surfaces.
It is approximately two moments after this epiphany that the cabin lurches forward, leaving all bodies not actively fighting against physics flailing backwards — or rather, flailing to stay put.
Because there is a moral homeostasis, and because this balance is increasingly maintained with the gradual extinction of racist white guys, and perhaps simply because of the inadequacy of max occupation warnings in inter-airport transportation, this beautiful jerk of time and space sends our protagonist full-body into the likes of Mr. Asshole.
Excelsior humanity!
The recovery settles artfully. The villain’s fluffy white countenance roasts into thin-skinned tomato flesh. He rests like a heavy lean-to between the wall and the hero’s chest, immobilized until forced to shift back and sacrifice his safety bar.
Another law of physics: his movement catalyzes a cabin-wide reorganization, resulting in the encirclement of Mr. and Mrs. East Coast American English with smoky-eyed businesswomen, minorities, non-binary hipsters, and me: mousy Midwestern millennial graduate.
Like wild dogs, we exchange smiles, acknowledging the shift in power and eyeing down our prey. The spirit of Jack London resurrected, looming above us with his blessing of primitivism, the will of nature.
We arrive at Terminal A, jostling the white and red carcass around the pack. I migrate toward the door, nearer to our new alpha. The doors part open.
“After you, sir,” I say.
***
Before the inevitable slew of pity for the fallen elderly man, note that the beauty above is not sadistically tented solely over someone getting pinned into a wall. The scene is emblematic of some greater motion. No one was injured; we may call it, vaguely: karmic resolution. The veil between the human consciousness and whatever ushers our evolution — the creation of history, the understanding of rightness and necessary passing — it lifted, and a bit of (what felt like) hope permeated through the unknown: no frills, just simple movement. I’ve added my own frills because that is how I remain optimistic.
Because if we read reality like a book — brim with symbolism and ominous intention — we are more easily able to imagine how we might write the next chapter, or the best possible ending.
The world seems ugly now not because of its wrongness — some beauty is innately “wrong” — but because of a permeating sense of stasis. We are forward-moving beings by nature. Robert Penn Warren, notable master of various things literary, posited that “…a society with no sense of the past, with no sense of the human role as significant not merely in experiencing history but in creating it, can have no sense of destiny.” He asks, “And what kind of society is it that has no sense of destiny or no sense of self?” This active stance — existence and self as the creation of history from history — speaks to the same point.
“…a society with no sense of the past, with no sense of the human role as significant not merely in experiencing history but in creating it, can have no sense of destiny.”
Beauty is the raw admittance and observation of motion — a reveal of grotesque and shifting humanity. If we are defined by our motion, our aspirations to move, and both of these in reference to the infinite motion of others, then the only thing we can call ugly (we meaning me, Robert Warren Penn, and hopefully you) is that which refuses or denies change. This is why getting shit on by a bird and accidentally shoving a racist into a train-car wall is worth writing about. Bottom-feeder exchanges force us to see ourselves as not just solitary beings, but inextricably linked to a greater whole.
***
I’m also biased. I’m a dancer; I move for a living. Bear with me while I now stand on my soapbox and explain to you why dance is a supreme beauty we can all stand to learn from.
It’s painful to dance. My feet bleed, my toenails fall off, I sweat 24/7 and virtually always feel sore. I stare at myself in a mirror for hours on end picking myself apart and have an embarrassingly minimal social life. Most people know that, though, and they still come to shows and ask “how did you do all that?” The answer is such; we spent hours for months in perpetual motion until we all blended into one harmonious (sometimes cacophonous) microcosm. We then transported that microcosm to a stage or a park or a café and asked you to watch some felt sense of beauty manifest before you and everyone else.
It really all has nothing to do with the technique or virtue of it all. It has to do with twisting the perception of what we as humans are capable of.
Even in solo work, we harvest the motion of everyone and everything around us and try to siphon it all through our bones. If it looked “pretty” every time, it would be dishonest to the rough environ we’ve paved around us. Some dances show you the pain and the work of it all, and still it feels beautiful because it has managed to overcome the boundaries of what we see as possible in a pressurized state.
***
We need to be reminded that even in the pit of bird shit and prejudice, climate crisis and emotional destitution, we can still move. We can move on, move past, move into a place where we feel our destiny has somehow been fulfilled in the grand schema of human history.
But know that first, it will get ugly. Again and again and again. We will feel ugly, often act ugly, and we simply must demand ourselves to stand up, listen closely to our fellow downtrodden, and turn it all into something beautiful. It is no longer the artist’s responsibility to frame our world in a better light.
Works Cited
Penn Warren, Robert. Democracy and Poetry. Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Scarry, Elaine. “On Beauty and Being Just.” Yale University, 25 Mar. 1998, New Haven, tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/s/scarry00.pdf.
Van Gogh, Vincent. Letter to Theo van Gogh from London, vangoghletters.org. April 30, 1874.
