Is anything inherently ugly?

The answer is yes

The only mainstream opinion website I read regularly is Slate, because Slate is basically 100 percent advice columns at this point. It runs at least three advice columns, most running multiple times a week, and I probably have learn more from Slate about contemporary life amongst left-liberal and progressive people than I do from any novel or work of journalism.

And I'm careful to add "left liberal or progressive" because almost everything you read in Slate is about a left-of-center person (usually, but not always, college-educated) confronting some rather ordinary problem. One column, which I tried fruitlessly to find and link to for this article, was about a mother who is wondering what to tell her daughter when the girl asks, "Am I pretty?"

And in response the advice columnist or essayist (it may have been a personal essay rather than an advice column), went through her three conflicting feelings (Hegel would call these the three 'moments' of her response). The first was to say: "Of course you're pretty! You're beautiful!" The second was to say, "Looks don't matter, they don't count. It doesn't matter if you're pretty!" And the third was to say "All girls are beautiful!"

All of these were very sincere positions on her part, particularly the last one. What kids can't understand is that, to adult eyes, most kids are unbearably beautiful. They're so aglow with promise. They have unwrinkled skin and clear limbs. They're like Greek statues, ready to fight the Gods. And that the differences between a pretty tween and an unpretty one honestly aren't that huge from this side of middle age. And I'm not saying they all have inner beauty, I'm just saying that from our perspective, youth itself has such an overpowering beauty that it's absurd to distinguish further within that category.

Of course part of the joy of youth is that the truest answer is also the falsest. Because to young people they're not in a phase of life--they're in the heart of life itself. Whether they're pretty compared to middle-aged people is absolutely immaterial to them. What they care about is whether they're the prettiest person in homeroom.

So they have their perspective, and we have ours. But does this mean that, from our perspective, there is no such thing as ugliness? Must we be like Barbie, in her eponymous movie, who looks at the old woman on the bench and says "You're so beautiful!" MUST WE LOVE OUR CELLULITE THE WAY THAT BARBIE PRESUMABLY COMES TO LOVE THE CELLULITE THAT SHE DEVELOPS MIDWAY THROUGH HER EPONYMOUS FILM?

In other words, does ugliness exist, or is it all about our point of view?

Personally, I come down on the former side. Ugliness exists. And yet, most things, also have some beauty, and with the right point of view we can see that beauty. However, the beauty of ugly things tends to be rather general and conceptual (of the "all girls are beautiful" variety) while the beauty of beautiful things tends to be specific ("I find the features of this specific person to be particularly beautiful")., and, to me, the latter is infinitely more interesting and fruitful.

I had this thought while writing recently about the view from my own window. I see this view every day, and yet I recently was like "I live in San Francisco, an objectively gorgeous place, so I should try to enjoy my own glamorous and romantic life." I went to my window, with its clear blue sky and view of the Mission below, and the green-brown grass of Potrero Hill in the background, with the cerulean Bay behind it, and I stared there, hearing the sound of silence, hearing as Yasunari Kawabata put it, 'The sound of the mountain'" (which is both beautiful and terrifying, "It was like wind, far away, but with a depth like a rumbling of the earth… The sound stopped, and he was suddenly afraid. A chill passed over him, as if he had been notified that death was approaching.")

So if the view from my window is beautiful and transcendent, is it possible to have an ugly view? A draining, immanent view?

My drive to school to drop off my daughter is full of ugly things: I drive on Bayshore, past a Lowe's and a Jack In The Box and several hardware and liquor stores--a typical exurban wasteland. I drive on this street so much, and am trapped in traffic so long, that I've developed a parasocial relationship with the ambulance-drivers on their Billboards ("Rachel, if I get into an accident, I want you to call Habbas Law, don't go with Call-Ash, and definitely don't pick Sweet James! Habbas is a father and son, I like that they're a family business.")

It's pretty ugly, but it's certainly possible to find it beautiful. I think the beauty is in the light--the light of the evening and the morning. The beautiful, warm, human quality it gives to the street, which is, after all, full of very necessary establishments (I've picked up little odds and ends at that Lowe's many a time!)

When I was in college I took a lot of LSD. Too much LSD. And I was also very messy, never cleaned my dorm room. So I spent a lot of time staring at my messy desk and floor while on LSD. And one day something clicked, and I suddenly saw the mess as a series of traces: I'd picked up this book this morning; I'd found that book on the street; this spill was from when I was rushing to change my music, because my friends had dropped by; this candy wrapper had come to me from that party with the Halloween in Spring theme; this speck of mud was from when the drunk girl hugged me after mud-wrestling (it was college, what can I say?) Anyway, the trashes multiplied--each of them connected to my own actions, to me moving through the world with intention, living my own concrete, specific life. I hadn't read Proust at that point, but the effect was akin to the madeleine--the sense that we can only truly live life in retrospect, in our memory, because the first time we go through it, life is too immediate and obscure. Looking at my messy depth, I could suddenly hold, all at once, the entirety of the space in my life since the desk had last been cleaned.

But does this mean that untidiness isn't ugly? Why is an untidy desk worse than a clean one? Perhaps a clean desk is a simple object, aesthetically--its beauty is readily accessible at a glance--while the dirty desk has a more complex beauty, requiring more insight and more contemplation? Seen in this way, ugliness becomes evidence of a deeper beauty, and beauty becomes evidence of shallowness.

Of course, I was motivated to find the ugly desk beautiful, because I didn't want to clean it (and, while high on LSD, was probably unable to). Even the cleanest desk is also a set of traces, and perhaps the clean desk, with its specks and smudges, would contain just as much meaning. I can't say--I've never contemplated a clean desk before, only dirty ones. Maybe ugliness is good precisely because, if we have the right mindset, we are motivated to look harder at it.

Even though I've seen (and can still see!) the beauty in a disorderly desk, that doesn't mean, however, that I can't see the beauty in a clean one. Leaving aside the functional aspect, can we decide which desk is more beautiful, the ugly one or the clean one? And which landscape is more beautiful: Is it the proliferation of pastel houses that I see from my window? Or the desolate exurban wasteland on Bayshore Avenue?

It depends. In the case of the dirty desk, the disorder encodes more meaning--a broader expanse of lived-in time. I don't think that's true for the exurban wasteland. The exurban wasteland, because it has the same sky and light, gives some of the same aesthetic effect as the view from my window, but less so. I also can never view it with as much calm and peace as the view from my window. And when I'm not safe in my car the wasteland also gives off a sense of physical unease that makes contemplation difficult.

Both beauty and ugliness are infinitely variable. When it comes to human bodies and human environments, we have the option of rearranging them to maximize beauty and minimize ugliness. I could easily clean my desk, while still allowing for artful disorder--I could even maximise the sense of lived-in time by keeping only, say, coffee cups on the desk, or only receipts, or only books or notebooks, and clearing away all objects that don't convey a sense of my body passing through and past this space.

And some things can beautiful in very narrow ways. This is true of much physical beauty, for instance. You look at someone and you immediately understand the source of their beauty. They have a good waist / hip ratio and a symmetrical face, and they're posed with an ever-so-slight dynamism. It's a sterile beauty, which is of credit to the object, but contains nothing universal or elevating.

I've been thinking a lot about this union of the universal and particular as I listen to classical music. Sometimes it seems like the best classical music is directly channeling transcendence--that its taken lightning, pure emotion and pure meaning and shoved all that transcendence into my brain.

And yet, the classical music also has a specific content: specific instruments, specific melodies, and, more importantly, specific emotional content and a specific progression. For instance, Beethoven's 5th (which I've been listening to a lot) has a sweeping, powerful 1st movement, but the second movement starts quite different--sprightly, like a slow stream or brook. Then it moves a bit faster, and for a moment seems shorn of the weight of the first movement--more playful, less heroic, less ideal. But slowly those weightier themes creep back in. That's all a very specific choice. If I wasn't interested in that playfulness maybe it wouldn't be for me. And yet...the point of a symphony is that it asserts the importance of its themes, that it forces you to listen to its progression, that it begs you to see the unity of the whole.

So ultimately I think what seems to be the most sweeping and generous answer to your daughter ("All girls are beautiful!") comes off as the most dull and philistinical. Yes, all girls are beautiful, but people don't want to be loved for their abstract humanity. They want to be loved in all their gorgeous specificity--and it's precisely this love that parents are most able to offer their kids! Like at the end of that wonderful movie, Eighth Grade (directed by our finest auteur, Bo Burnham) where the girl asks "If you weren't my dad, would you even like me?"

And he's like, of course I would! I'm glad I know you! You're a really, really cool kid. You're so interesting.

And in that moment we see it's true! She's a really fun, special kid who just hasn't found the right people--folks who are capable of appreciating her. Now can we imagine a kid who is unlovable, ugly, uninteresting? Yes, absolutely we can. And that would be a rather interesting advice column, no? I wouldn't love my child if they weren't my kid, what do I tell them when they ask if they're beautiful? The answer, obviously, is that you lie.

The truth is that "beautiful" and "ugly" are inexact, overly-general terms. Every object exists on multiple aesthetic levels. Everything is beautiful in its universality (it's a miracle we are alive, etc,) and some people are able to find beauty in everything, either because they are on LSD or because they have a very contemplative nature. Furthermore, some relationships are so emotionally strong that the universal and individual become wedded together against our will (my dirty desk is beautiful because it is *mine*), and some things are beautiful in easy, readily understandable, and rather prosaic ways (i.e. girls with a low waist / hip ratio and symmetrical faces), and some things have a very particular, specific beauty--the perfect melding of universal and particular, so we not only see their beauty, but seeing their beauty makes us see and love the beauty in all things. And it's the latter possibility that we'd hope to see both in our children and in the art we create and, hopefully, in our desks once we finally clean them.

Personal Note

The Israel-Palestine war is horrific. The government of Israel’s treatment of Gaza has been callous and murderous, and the lawless atmosphere in the West Bank is perhaps even worse, with its armed bands, reminiscent of the KKK, running people off their lands and out of their homes—killing them if they don’t comply. But who am I to judge? Within my lifetime, America has undertaken a war of choice that killed a half a million people and destabilized the entire Middle East, and we don’t boycott every journal that supported the Iraq war! So I personally don’t really see why the war in Israel means we have to, for instance, boycott a poetry magazine.

But because of the hubbub, I’ve been off Twitter since Oct 7. It’s not intentional—it’s simply that every time I log on, it’s full of ridiculous takes, and I immediately log off. As a result, my mental health has improved, and I’ve become much more level-headed and less worried about life and the future. Just a relief to not see full-on panic constantly. Being away from social media has been so great that I’ve also limited my exposure to Substack. This is a great social media site, but it’s still a lot of people talking all at once! As a result, I’ve been slow to answer blog comments. I read them all as they come in, but I want to think about my responses and be fair to the commenters. So I am sorry if I don’t respond to your comments for a few days—I will get to them eventually!

Articles I Liked:

• Good apposite take on cancel culture by

  Thomas Zimmer

• Good article by

  BDM
  about Vertigo, which made me appreciate the film a lot more. It’s not my favorite film, to be honest. My favorite character was Midge, and that was mostly because she seemed like an escapee from a much different, more coherent film.

• Joshua Doležal
  writes about the increasing distrust of public schools

• Cecily Carver
  writes about In The Mood For Love, my vote for the best movie of all time.

Capsules:

• Saw Priscilla. It was a beautiful movie, where two beautiful people played a number of beautiful scenes. But it was thematically rather thin: yes, Priscilla was small and virginal and trapped forever in her own dream of teenage love. No girl on Earth could’ve resisted what Elvis offered: a perfect, chaste, romantic, American heartthrob of a boyfriend, with danger and sex appeal constantly running underneath. But…after the first half hour, we kind of understood that. The movie didn’t develop or expand upon that theme. More Bling Ring than Lost In Translation.