Issue 6: Seeing the Wonder

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In praise of ugly beauty

by Staff

We are captivated by a narrow view of beauty. Standard, uniform, balanced beautiful beauty. Look at magazine covers. Not just for fashion and fitness. Look at the home and garden magazines, look at the car and pet magazines. All the “beauty” is similar. Smooth and “perfect.”

Why is it only a majestic sunset in some “exotic” place that’s wonderful? Can’t it be a lily in a field, grass on the boulevard, the colors of a sparrow? In our glossy hair, swoosh shoe, shiny car, Botox lips culture we need to undermine our beautiful beauty with a new praise for ugly beauty.

Why can’t pimples be pretty too? Let’s do that, can we? Let’s make ordinary things beautiful. I want pimples and wrinkles. Let’s see glistening pores and hair on the ears.

My “sunset” photo is of the tree in my back yard, and it’s not in bloom or anything; it’s of the cat curling its font paws. My beautiful is ordinary and full of an unrecognized, unvalorized, uncommodified beauty. This is a conciliatory vision which plucks celebrities from the red carpet, hoses them down with makeup remover, and sets them down on a sidewalk beside the rest of us carrying groceries home for supper on an overcast day.

Because beauty has been coopted, we need a new phrase for the common beauty, the ineffableness of the ordinary: let’s call it ugly beauty. - Text: Aiden Enns; Photo: Montana, USA, by Darryl Brown

Reprinted in Geez 06, Summer 2007. Subscribe to Geez

Comment

  1. Hi,
    You’re onto something here! I’m an amateur photographer and I love finding ugly beauty in the unexpected places of my city – in fact, inspired by this I’m going to set up a Flickr group dedicated to it!
    (oh, hang about, there already is one, I’ll just join that instead.)
    http://www.flickr.com/groups/prettyugly/

    — Matt Wilson · Jun 22, 11:36 AM · #

  2. Definitely on to something! Sometimes I find myself caught up in an intense desire to be seen as beautiful. Odd because its not something I demand of others as much as I demand of myself. Ironically, I actually end up feeling grotesque the more I think about and strive to be beautiful. Right now I’m lying in bed with zit cream on my face in my underwear. Not exactly feeling so pretty – but you’ve got me thinking about how I can begin to rethink and retrain my mind to see beauty in myself, others and the world. Thankyou and I love that you want to see pimples. Give me a shout, I have plenty.

    — Lindsay · Jul 10, 05:17 AM · #

  3. there is so much beauty in life that we miss. we need to step back, stop moving, and examine. we’re so busy soaking up society’s ideal of beauty that we miss the real beauty. beauty in tears. beauty in laughter. authentic. genuine. beauty is. we need to stop and open our eyes.

    — Carla · Aug 14, 12:15 PM · #

  4. perhaps the problem is creating categories of beauty and then discounting everything else that doesn’t fit those categories. beauty is more about a way of seeing than about some “ideal form” out there that we’re trying to seek and identify.

    — dilys · Aug 24, 03:05 AM · #

  5. This article should hit uncomfortably close to home: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200709/quirk

    — Ryan McD · Sep 21, 02:35 PM · #

  6. Reminds me of a story that I dearly, dearly love to tell:

    I sprained my ankle at my sister’s wedding…right before I was to be the usher.

    Afterward, I stayed the night at the minister’s mother-in-law’s place (he’s a long-time buddy from college). His mother-in-law got me a nice foot soak and helped me ace bandage my foot and ankle.

    The next morning, I drove to the nearby Friends meeting with a grocery bag covering my ace bandaged foot (because it was raining). While driving, I hear Eva Cassidy’s rendition of “Wade in the Water” and it shakes me to my very core…and I end up driving to a completely different destination from the local Friends meeting.

    I eventually get back on track and get there. Right at as the meeting settles into worship, I get up and head for the lav. It’s downstairs and I hobble down and back into the meeting room and sit down.

    I see a man who just gives me this strange feeling…a sense that he “doesn’t belong.” He’s sitting on one bench alone. I hear dogs barking and notice that the windows are open; I frequently joke about that fact, making points about Quakers’ love of gardens and such. These are HUGE dogs, pit bulls at least, if not rottweilers or great danes. Their barking gets louder and more…passionate. Eventually the man gets up and stomps out of the meetinghouse. Some time around the end of meeting, a woman mentions that she was thinking of the song “Wade in the Water,” at which point I actually remember what the song’s referring to. I think of the pool at Bethesda, and the pain in my ankle just doesn’t seem so bad.

    So when I’ve heard other Quakers complain about noise during meeting, I tell them this story. When I want to bitch and complain about everything going wrong in my day to day life, I try to remind myself to practice what I preach. Even so, I can’t get even more bent out of shape about that, because I’d become even more deeply mired in ingratitude for what.

    — Josh H · Apr 9, 10:18 PM · #

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