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Truth, Beauty, and Lunatics

Truth, Beauty, and Lunatics

Last updated on: August 26, 2015 at 3:38 pm by Tom Swiss

Truth, Beauty, and Lunatics 2015-08-26T15:38:59-04:00 Tom Swiss

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I posted this on my personal blog about two years ago, but it’s been on my mind lately so I thought I’d share it with a wider audience.

Here’s how it is:

I take Ringo over the to school for a romp. As we walk across the lawn I see two small dogs running loose. I first take them to be puppies, and think that they are following someone who’s walking by, but then one of them doubles back towards us. I see that it is a chihuahua (maybe a mix, on the larger side for that breed), and that the person they were following is not stopping. They’re apparently loose dogs who got out of someone’s yard — collared, not strays. I would try to grab them, check their tags, and take them home; but with Ringo, a dog about seven times their size, straining towards them wanting to play, they are not thrilled about getting too close.

But after I take Ringo on a lap around the school and throw a tennis ball across the court for his amusement for a while, I drop him home and walk back over to the school to see if I can find the runaway dogs.

Why?

I guess I could cite the Golden Rule, how I’d want someone to help Ringo if he got loose, but honestly it didn’t enter my mind until now, when I sat down to write this.

I could talk about how compassion called me to act, pay myself a nice compliment by talking about how kind and compassionate I am, but more and more I feel like that’s not an explanation, that calling an act “compassionate” doesn’t have any explanatory power.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea of magical ritual as “poetry in the realm of acts,” a definition put forth by neo-Druid Ross Nichols. If our acts can be “poetic” when we put the appropriate level of intentionality and effort into them, then it seems to me that just as it is desirable to have our everyday language take on a bit of the beauty of poetic language (and I’ve never recognized a bright line between poetry and the “ordinary language” of prose), we would want our everyday actions to take on some of the beauty of poetic ritual action.

When I think about the things I’ve done that we might label “good” (in an ethical sense) and why I’ve done them, it seems a good explanation to say that they seemed the most beautiful — or at least, the least ugly — actions I could take at the time. I tried to put that idea in verse form, though I fear it ended up doggerel:

All that I’ve done that’s good, I’ve done
the times I tried to be
a poet in the realm of acts:
for the sake of beauty

In those moments I feel like I had no choice, in the same way that I have no choice when I sit down and try to write a poem and find that I’ve used a word that is just wrong. Some sense in my brain nags and nags at me until I fix it. It’s not something imposed from the outside: just like (let’s be honest) few will ever hear my poems, few will know how I act in these moments. But there’s some sense of beauty that compels me. Ethics becomes a matter of aesthetics.

So I take a lap around the school grounds, in search of the loose pups, because to fail to try to help them would just be ugly. But I don’t see them, and so I head home.

As I’m walking back, I see a man who looks out of place walking down Edmondson Avenue. He’s in his mid-fifties, carrying a plastic grocery bag and shuffling a little bit. And while I wish I could say I live in a neighborhood where a variety of skin tones can be found, the fact is that even though there’s a lively international corridor with Korean and Indian markets right up on Route 40 and a historically important African-American neighborhood just a mile or so away, I live in a suburb that’s awfully damn white. And this gentleman is not.

“Can you help me out?” he says to me, “I’m looking for Edmondson Avenue and Dennison Street.”

Dennison Street? I have a vague idea that it’s back towards the city. “Well, this is Edmondson, but you’re almost out to the end. I think Dennison is back that way.” I wave indistinctly to the east and walk on.

“Oh. Thanks. Got kind of turned around I guess.”

I stop in the crosswalk, turn around. “Is there a place you’re looking for, a store or a church or something?” I figure maybe he’s looking for a shelter or a mission.

“No, I’m trying to get to…” He trails off. “Do you have a cell phone?”

“No, sorry.” My phone is on my desk, not with me.

“I’m kind of lost.” He pauses and holds up his bag. “I didn’t take my medication today.”

Oh. It’s like that. I step back towards him. “You okay?”

“I’m kind of confused.”

“Do you need help? Can I call somebody for you?”

“Maybe…an ambulance?”

“All right. You just sit down here, I’ll go get my phone and call some help, okay? I’ll be right back.” I jog back home, grab my phone, dial 911, and walk back to him as I tell the dispatcher that there’s a confused man who needs some help.

I sit down and wait with him until the EMTs, and then the police, arrive. And so I hear his story, after a disjointed fashion. It turns out he’s bipolar, evidently homeless and staying with his sister. He’d come from an medical appointment with Healthcare for the Homeless downtown and got turned around getting off the bus — it turns out that Dennison Street is almost six miles away, he must have been walking the wrong way for close to two hours. I stick around for about fifteen minutes while it all gets sorted out. The EMTs check him out and find nothing serious, and one of Bmore County’s finest offers him a ride home. He shakes my hand, calls me a “godsend” (ha!), and gets in the back of the police car.

I could have just walked by and left him there. Or called 911 and not gone back. But damn, that would have been ugly. There were no great heroics here, but somehow it does seem, in a small way, a little bit beautiful.

And as I bid him farewell, cross the street, and start walking home, I look up…to see the full moon framed perfectly and inarguably in the trees above the road, as if in some benediction from the deities of aesthetics/ethics…or the guardian of lunatics.

Moon over Edmondson Avenue, Catonsville

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