This past summer I took the boys up to the mountains along with half a dozen or so other dads and their sons. There were lots of laughter, hewn trees, empty bullet jackets, and bad sleep. Just to break things up we took some rough roads up a mountainside to catch a sunset.
The hilltop was barren save for a few fire spared pines. Scraps of the once substantial forest lay sideways and sun bleached. The ground, where there was not tufts of heather and sage grass, was pebbled with chewed mountain and every foot step felt like your shoes were munching breakfast cereal. East, hulking spires of cumulonimbus slipped across the prairie on their hazy rain shafts leaving trails like celestial slugs.
West overlooked a wide green valley that ran north to south, was pinched off at the ends by canyon, and bounded to the far side with soft and treeless hills gently undulating southward, and made one consider rolling the course of it inside a tractor tire. Up the middle meandered a glistening river throwing out its hips in slalom curves. A geologists friend blamed it for the wide valley, accusing it of eating away the sides of the valley over millennia of erosion. I didn’t buy it; I’ve never seen a more innocent looking piece of tinsel. Perhaps it could be cited for loitering, as it appeared to be taking its time getting wherever it was going. I was told, also, it watered a herd of bison.
It was one of those valleys that excited the imagination of hidden ecosystems lost to time, where wooly mammoths might still stomp across the permafrost and some aboriginal group thought extinct still hunted and roamed, bone-nosed and speaking in clicks. Until, that is, you see the unmistakable glint of sun on windshield and the scar-road running cross wise in a straight line, an instant cue of modernity. Nature abhors straight lines – they are boring.
I took a moment off to myself and thought about something my son had just said to me a few minutes before, looking out to the west, how he wanted to be there already – heaven – and how he wished he could just drop the black rucksack of anxiety that has been stooping his shoulders and pulling his head groundward. He was sitting on a sideways tree husk older than both of us. Putting my hand on his shoulder and sharing in his thirst is what I should have done. Instead, I brought up some completely forgettable theological point, which I’m sure is still there on the mountainside, having dropped dead with lameness after it left my mouth. But I was there with him.
The sun slid down over the valley and blushed the underbellies of the low hanging clouds and electrified their rims with neon golds and silvers. There is something of a life cycle to all sunsets. Beginning with the baby blues and blushing pinks of a nursery; it grows quickly, maturing to the vibrant purples and vivid yellows of its strength, and finally ends in a splash of blood and orange. All days die violently.
Mountain shadows from the western lip crawled across the valley and up to meet us, the vampyric cold waiting for the last of the suns rays before searching out open necks and bare arms to suck heat. Nesting night swelled in the shadows under the hems of trees and skittered with movements caught only by the corners of eyes. Wind sucked hair and tugged the heather and scraped ragged clouds across a high, cold moon.
Descending on the mountain, and boiling up from the marrow to meet it, the mysterium tremendum, the creature-feeling of bewildering personal nothingness, the rare scent of the dread modern man has psychologized to dust. “God”, the generic title, is too sterile, canny, and unable to account for the shuddering spirit in the moment. YHWH, however its lost vowels are pronounced, is the only Name boundless enough to wrestle a pantheon of celestial powers who also call themselves gods; the only One who out-wilds the the untamed elohim, whose feet start fires, which lust and chomp to dance under the zodiac. I was the least real thing present.
Its times like these, the culmination of the human experience, with the burden of all the beauty weighing on my heart and creation unbuttoning her blouse to reveal her mysteries, I find myself impulsively needing to document by taking pics with my stupid phone.
Why? Why do I need to look at beautiful and momentous events happening in front of my eyes on a 4-inch screen? Why do I need to livestream what is live? What is with the needling preference for a two-dimensional settlement with fourth-dimensional life? Why do I lather like a she-donkey in heat and lunge for my phone?
I will tell you why: I am a Beauty trapper.
This is no compliment. Such a crime will get banished from fairyland forever. Might as well try to saddle a unicorn. I am very lucky I have not yet been caught.
My tool for trapping I always carry on my person. Sometimes I set the trap where I expect Beauty to be. But if she show up unexpectedly, I have my noose in my front pocket. It is preeminently portable and can hold infinite pelts under its black glass cover. Once trapped, I can feel her when I will, make her sing at my whim. I can duplicate, replicate, transmit, omit and edit her to my liking, all to prevent that most wild and painful attribute of Beauty – evanescence.
Beauty is fleeting, transient. She doesn’t stick around. It may be for a lingering moment, or the length of youth, but she will not stay. It must be so. Those moments in life which brand the soul only last the length of a branding – that short, searing mark of ownership. A butterfly on a rose, a sunset, a hammock swing on a perfect fall day, seven notes of a tumbling adagio – these moments transcend us and give us a glimpse of that far-off country from where Beauty springs. When the moment is passed, there is a sore spot on the heart where Beauty had landed. Grief lingers when moment passes; we miss it and want to get it back.
This sadness is not a bug of Beauty but a feature. It is Beauty flying back to her source, pricking our hearts with a wound that leaks and is only mended by eternity. She is seeing if we will look away from ourselves, follow, and transcend with her.
Still, it is a sadness all the same. And why be sad when you can not be sad?
Previous generations had to let her leave; they had no recourse to keep her except through the slow dabbing of paintbrushes. But we moderns have engineered the camera to capture these transient moments and keep them from leaving, to keep us from the grief of her passing. With the camera, we have tricked ourselves into thinking we can live in the moment forever and milk the image for the memories of how we once felt.
Capture. Interesting word choice we use about taking photographs – to imprison, to cage, to take a thing away from its natural environment. One cannot snap a picture of a beautiful thing without snipping it out of the context of life. The smells, the blood thick with thinned air thrumming in the ears, the wind blowing that piece of fallen ponytail across the face – the miracle of the senses aligning to make the fleeting moment – that is the Beauty of the moment. A moment is always the last of its kind.
Beauty is rare. By definition, it cannot be copied. Then what am I doing with the camera? Copying the image into bytes to stuff into a hard drive, or duplicate for distribution, or, what is more likely, mindlessly scrolling past an image of a life changing moment with the flick of a finger. It is like capturing the rare snow leopard, taxidermying the body, and posing it in your living room. There is nothing about the wild beast remaining, only the dusty shell of the moment of its capture – one stuffed creature among thousands.
The sunset in the image above, the one we saw, was beautiful not only because the palate of colors, but the quickening breeze, the munched rock, the scattered tree bones, the dazzling river, the ache of a son, a festering insensitivity, the spiced balm that a mountainside and a wild God far closer to barbarian than Baptist. A camera captures only the bloodless image, one of a throng imprisoned in my phone – a menagerie of unvisited memories.
Beauty cannot be captured. She ripens quickly, and is sweet while she remains. But pocket her, stuff the moment in a bag to eat later, and you will find the fruit gone and the moment missed. Missed because we spend our time with scheming as to how to cage the bird to make it sing at our whim later, instead of being still and listening to her song presently. To mitigate the pain of flown Beauty, we try to bottle the memories.
There was a small Indian boy who came upon a hidden waterfall tumbling from the unseen heights in the cliffs above, and thundering into mist and rainbows and froth. Hoping to capture the waterfall’s sublimity, he collected some of the icy water in a jar, ran home, and was disenchanted when he opened the lid for his mother in the kitchen to silence.
Of course, a caveat must be inserted. There is nothing wrong with taking pics. Photographs can help us remember where we were, what the kitchen looked like before the remodel, how adorable the kids were, and – no matter how long ago the picture was taken- how out of date your hair cut looked. They can bring us tears and gratitude. They can even take us back to the side of the mountain, or the edge of a packed concert, or the middle of a dance floor twirling with your bride. I will happily concede all of these things, and I am very grateful for the ability to freeze time in photographs generally. But they cannot resurrect a moment. And I think we can all agree that the sheer volume of images on people’s phones and the frenetic compulsion to document the ephemera of life proves my point.
But in exchange for our plan to revisit the moment in the future, we sacrifice the present staring into a screen. We want to relive in the future what we will have missed living in the present. The steaming soup cools and congeals on the plate while we fumble with photographing it. By looking forward to looking back to when we were there we give up being here. Looking through lenses defers living.
Beauty is evanescent. She fades. To truly be blessed we must be with Her when She is there, in the fleeting moment, and then let her go and go with Her. Try to capture and you will lose Her.
Thought Butter 