Sign of the times
Letting the ugly become beautiful
Of course the baby fawn nestled in the meadow makes our heart start up and sing. But what about the rusted aluminum sign that reads, “Exhaust Reader” next to an auto shop next to a motel whose stucco looks gnawed and ablated? Where the shopping cart people, should I pull over in this 90+ degree heat that smells sulphurous and films my hair and eyes, would these people, too, confer and concur that yes, all of this is ugly?
Today my creativity challenge for myself was to make the ugly beautiful. Let’s figure out how.
Just use the music
When I say the ugly thing out loud, how do the words susserate and whisper among each other? “Exhaust Reader” is four syllables that each have the same stress—all are equal to the ear. Maybe you want to write a piece of music that is equal to the ear, a stair of chords exactly measured toward the next one, four sharp strums you can build a song from.
Do the opposite
If I had my druthers, how would I make that shitty motel divine? I could write a story of a child being cared for in Room 9, when she cries I can lift her into someone’s arms and give comfort. I can make a tired person who is unhoused finally, finally find a soft place to land. I can paint an abstract of the stucco, the amoebas and bulges somehow echoing mold, lakes viewed from an airplane, a set of oblong rocks used to cross rushing waters.
Judge not
When I saw the “Exhaust Reader” sign near that jenky-ass auto shop, I didn’t think of it being a business owner’s pride and joy. I judged it from the outside. What is nice about exhaust? It’s pretty bad, right? But what if someone was an “exhaust reader”—they were reading species of tiredness in the world. Exhaust means the burning things have a place to get out into air. Exhaust means we can sleep and be healed from it. Exhaust reading could be a way we look out into the world and see our tired fellow travelers, and send them compassion, thus lessening our own despair at how much everything feels like right now, how heavy and dark and smoky our eyes can be.
So this is what I made. I hope you like it:
Exhaust Reader
The rusty sign on the side
of the road: “exhaust reader”
has to do with the innards
of cars, the wire, metal, fiberglass and fluid
but I am an exhaust reader. I look
for the places where
the world is worn, thin
exhausted from replicating, reproducing
making everything new, decaying apace
the made making yet another decision to burst
into bloom. when I watch a couple at dinner
saying nothing the entire meal, watching them eat,
watching the food disappear, the couple transparent
digesting something no one should have to eat
I am the exhaust reader
when I look for smoke on the horizon, to tell me
all is lost. when I look to see all
my pipes are clear, the pipes that allow me to sing
just like this to you.