This rose actually smells like poo
…it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. Then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.
Lester, American Beauty
Seeing this movie in the theater in early 2000 was the first (and last) time I ever had hot tamales melted into my movie theater popcorn. I loved it from start to finish — the movie, not the popcorn. It was quirky, witty, and able to blend pitch-black fatalism seamlessly with an almost spiritual reverence for the fragility and aesthetics* of mortal existence, the gleaming surface of a troubled planet. Plus, it featured Thora Birch topless, a cool Eurythmics cover of an even cooler Neil Young tune, Kevin Spacey, and lots and lots of cannabis sativa. In my opinion, the absence of any disembowelment, evisceration, or maiming more than compensates for the part where Lester gets shot in the head.
During my own darker days of the early millenial decade, I often lamented the fact my breakdown was not as pithy, emotionally satisfying, or downright cool as Lester’s was**.
As usual, I digress. My point here is that the world is beautiful — painfully, heartlessly, gloriously beautiful. It is easy to be enraged by the front pages and the headlines. It is easy to condemn the brutality of both our own natures and the grander, encompassing Nature of which they are a part. And it is easy to be appalled by the mean injustices and cruelties perpetrated on all sides, day after day, with the ceaseless and metronomic precision of a chicken processing plant. What is difficult is to appreciate the beauty of the machinery even as it cuts into us. We are human mulch for a forest whose scope we cannot fully comprehend or experience; we are aphids wandering the circumference of a single rose-petal. We compost and nourish the world with our endurance and our structure, our pleasure and our pain. It is beautiful.
*Please note that seeing beauty everywhere in the world does not imply that everything in the world is beautiful. To that end, see my previous post.
**Don’t forget about that bullet to the head, though.
