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carnivals of the offensive, often pursued for its own sake in an indulgence of what Mencken once called a "libido for the ugly"?) Ugliness is gaudy, vital, teeming with invention - grotesque and greedy for the sunlight. It is rife with energy and imagination; unlike hatred, which is concentrated and essentially cold, ugliness is a kind of explosion of vitality - in effect, the release, because the expression, of hate. The ugly thing, or moment, expresses an anterior hatred, a desire to offend, even destroy, the spectator. And for a time, it fills the field of vision and incriminates the world. We speak of the beauty of nature but rarely of its ugliness - the bleached bank of grass in drought, the decaying body of a fox at the edge of the meadow, a stinking gully on a beach in midsummer, dead miles of woods in winter, bleak 
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escarpments of hillside rock. Calling such things "ugly" seems a blasphemy - so we either ignore them or, if they are large enough (the dead hill ranges of Nevada, northern Mexican deserts, blinding miles of salt flats, wastes of the moon), we call them "awe-inspiring," or examples of the "sublime" - they invoke unease, a sense of vulnerability, even of fear, yet we can also identify in them certain of our own urges toward domination and waste, toward the assertion of ourselves against the world, against other selves; our own "ugliness" and the hatred it implies: a hatred that sovereignly negates the other, not in the complex unities of love, but in something far simpler, such as murder. We are loath to give the experience of hatred and ugliness a value equal to that of beauty and love: we resist the thought that they provide equal insight into the nature of the world. We  |
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