Swinging With Bums
After dropping my son off at daycamp, my daughter spotted a park and squealed "Can we? Can we?". Ear to ear smile. Infectious enthusiasm. Full on little girl charm with the gold stars and tiny hearts. Her blonde hair kills me. I have no stock in resistance.
It wasn't until we slammed the car doors and walked toward the playground equipment that I saw the park's lush grass littered with bums. Most were sleeping. There were a couple heroin (or some opiate) addicts sitting on a bench, freshly fixed, nodding and scratching unconsciously at their tranquilized skin.
"Good morning." I waved.
"Is it?"
Well if we're splitting hairs, I suppose it's relative. I'm doing this middle class thing with the mortgage and anxiety disorders and you're too high to care about being homeless. Is it a good morning? Who can tell? At least we're both still raging against stasis, smart ass.
The red, yellow, and green playground equipment was shaded beneath a big blue canopy. It was an oasis of good times surrounded by a desert of hard luck. Laverne (my daughter) stared longingly at the swings with her finger in her mouth, weighing her options.
LAVERNE: I want to swing, Daddy. But there's a dead man in the grass. Ew. Yucky dead man. Ew.
BHJ: He's not dead, sweetie. He's sleeping. He doesn't have a house so he sleeps in the grass.
LAVERNE: Gracious, Father. Perhaps we could spare him a couple pounds so that he might procure a meat pie.
Wait. I'm not Charles Dickens.
The truth of the matter is that my daughter giggled and wheeed her fool head off on the swing, urging me to push her higher. Developmentally speaking, one might assume that she's too young and selfish to empathize with the plight of others. But I don't know about all that. That story arises from assumptions about how a person should react to a man sleeping in the grass.
But society's ills aside, there's playing to be done.
She pumped the swing and her pink Converse soared, blonde hair trailing and flapping. She was beautiful. Against the stark background of poverty and addiction, this smiling spoiled piece of privileged white affluence struck me as sublimely fucking beautiful. Here was no activist rallying for change. Just a little girl with a tenacious taste for pleasure.
The world's messed up and there's no end to it. War, poverty, environmental devastation. We live these lives in the vague shadows of dusk's twilight. The sun is setting on American dominance, Western civilization, life on earth. The writing's on the wall. This ship is going down. But something defiant inside of me shuns all the frantic attempts to address the issues, to treat the various symptoms of decay on an individual basis. I don't march. I don't protest. I don't write my congressman long letters that decry injustice.
Don't get me wrong. I admire your noble attempts to make a difference. I quietly support you. But for myself I feel disenchanted by all that. My business is with the prevalent crisis in perception that undermines any serious movement toward change. My business is with beauty.
I'm inspired by the intuition that saving the world wouldn't be such a big monstrous chore if there were more beauty in it. To find the world beautiful would mean loving it. Saving it follows. Freely and naturally from a fundamental desire to do so, like feeding a baby. Babies are cute. We want to help them.
And so I'm a beauty stalker always on the lookout. I want to be submerged in beautiful things and write about beautiful things. I want to poke beauty with a stick and make her show her face. We must free beauty from the confines of roses and sunsets and find her everywhere. In concrete, the congestion of traffic, in bums sleeping on the vivid green grass - even death. There's beauty in the way things end. We can rejoice in it all coming apart.
And so, yeah, my daughter laughs and swings surrounded by hopelessness. Because her Daddy upholds the value of a radical optimism in the face of an informed pessimism that doesn't look away from the facts. The city is burning. But God the fire is pretty. It's so orange and wild and reckless. Look close. The fire. It's laughing at the dark.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Reader Comments (37)
Fire is one of the most beautiful things there is. And yes, the light does laugh at the dark.. it mocks it because the darkness is powerless to the light.
Excellent post, as always, sir.
Thank you. I needed a little bit of beauty today.
And I've now found my first little piece of beauty for the day - thank you. Now, to find some more - where are those matches...
Little girls will swing.
Awesome. Totally resonates with me. Thanks.
I don't buy it, despite the words. Beauty cannot be everywhere. There needs to be dirt in order to see the beauty. We need the dirt, even if it swept under the rug. You revel in the dirt. You can say it is beautiful and your words can make it beautiful, but it is not beautiful. It is only beautiful because we know that is really dirt.
Oh Neil. Dirt isn't really anything. Are you telling me you have a line on dirt as dirt? So, you've got the dirt on dirt, do you?
And yet... there is so much beauty in dirt too.
I think y'all should move to a reservation and call Laverne "Swings with Bums." You can be "Searches for Beauty." Mrs J can be "Comforts the Dying," and your son can be "Drums like a Madman." If I make it out there to visit again, I'll become "Obsesses with Vincent."
Oh, and leave the dirt to Alice in Chains.
There's a kitten in my living room. I rescued her from a Wolf Worm that seemed intent on burrowing along under the skin of her neck to her brain. It was an ugly thing, that worm...but a beautiful piece of work, too, if you can admire the mechanics of a thing without caring much for the form or function.
The kitten is cute. She will be beautiful. So I saved a little piece of future beautiful. Shall I bring her to you? Your own useless fluffball of future-beautiful?
I love finding beauty in the world. There is beauty in a steaming pile of shit if the dawn is just begun and the steam rises from it just so, and the dew glints on the grass, and light refracts around it sparking prismatic rainbows, and the air is crisp, and the day is indistinct and a slight breeze wafts the stink elsewhere, and that shit becomes the earth wherein a sunflower grows.
Shadow defines light, light defines shadow, yin, yang, dirt, beauty...all of it will fall to entropy in the end, and entropy will fall to...something we haven't defined and may never, but there's always something, until there isn't.
Shade and Sweetwater,
K (who is baking banana bread, which is making her home smell beautiful)
Marcel, you really are the guy in your header. Shining a light on all the shit and the dark and the filth.
I have to comment now before I'm too drunk to form a coherent thought.
Too late. Good entry though.
"But society's ills aside, there's playing to be done."
Oh shit are you a Republican?
And sometimes you have to create the beauty you want to see in the world. Like this post. :)
My brother in law used to be the guy sleeping in the grass. Now he has a roof, although he's still free of mortgages and anxiety disorders. My kids think he's Captain Kangaroo and love him to bits.
beauty and dirt can be one in the same if one is a cautious optimist, not that i am this person at the moment. just like insanity and reality. all a very fine, thin and quite blurry obstructed line.
marcel, love you are positive in a sea of negative surroundings and hopelessness. really wishing positive displays of glee on swings for everyone. not that i will be swinging any time soon but wish it for everyone else.
yet, another beautiful post in which i really needed to see, read and feel it's depth. more than you will ever know.
Amazing. I cried, read it again, and then read it out loud to my sister.
BHJ - You are tortured. Clearly. I keep thinking you will be funny, but I only find more pain. Sometimes eloquent. Other times rambling.
I look forward to visuals to accompany your posts, and to see just how deep your sense of futility goes. Reading your posts, I get the feeling you are stuck. I hope you find happiness.
Clearly, this is one of those posts I'm going to need to read more than once. I know I'm missing huge swathes of meaning. I can sense things in your prose that linger outside my ken. Maybe tomorrow I'll have something intelligent to say.
I -just- figured out you didn't really abandon me. I'm fucking brilliant like that.
I get what Neil is getting at; in order to know what beauty truly is there must be a contrast. While that may be true, I also understand that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Individually we face how we are going to perceive the world on a day-by-day basis, why not start off in search of beauty? Sure beats the doldrums of a world turning gray.
You rock, as always.
But, seriously, I do my part by snuggling up with the beau and sticking our laser-sight air soft gun through a crack in the window out into the world of bums/addicts/prostitues late at night and it's the most fun we have all week. It's beautiful.
(FYI: We don't actually shoot them. But to see the reaction of a dealer and his client suddenly realizing they have the beam on them... priceless. And it never fails us when we need a screamer to move down a few blocks.)
Some of the happiest people I know live in the park across the street from our apartment.
An insightful post, beautifully written.
The last phrase reminds me of a lyric from Bruce Cockburn (though the song is best known by the Barenaked Ladies!):
"got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight".
Though it doesn't sound like you see yourself as the 'kicker', it is nice to watch it all break open.
I don't want to enter the yin and yang debate. I have a head cold and can't think too deeply right now. Regardless, your writing is fantastic. I like your thoughts.
Fire can be cleansing in its own way and that is beautiful as well.
"And so I'm a beauty stalker always on the lookout. "
Your writing intimidates me..in a good way. I think.
Swinging with Bums would be the best band name ever. I used to take guys on dates to swing at the park in high school. I think they were excited until they learned that I really just wanted to swing at the park, and it wasn't just a twisted euphemism. When you get to the point where your swing is as high as it can go without spilling you out, it's truly bliss. Real bliss. Not just the word people throw around.
well, on the one hand, you could be called shallow. but the beauty you celebrate is a kid on a swing, not a fancy car. i think you're safe.
Hmmmm. I can't quite put my finger on it, but your writing feels familiar....
a nice kind of deja vu, if you will...........
Lost ya for a bit there BHJ, glad I found you again. Totally agree with VodkaMom, but who doesn't !! LOL
great post! very Emersonian . . . with a hint of T. Robbins.
sweet!
Truth in contrasts. Huge.
it's only -- if it were not for having a goddam child, for me, the ugly-gorgeous was always the very best kind.
now, my panic is a siege against me, a wall that blinds me from reveling in the bleak and the disdainful, the gravel welts on my knees and in my tongue.
So I'm a little slow on the uptake. Very glad to find your words, sir. I find beauty in them.
I wish I had written that. Thank you for the inspiration.
"Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life. Anna could have chosen another way to take her life. But the motif of death and the railway station, unforgettably bound to the birth of love, enticed her in her hour of despair with its dark beauty. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress."
- Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being"
Beautiful post.
So glad you're back.