Twinkle Lights

From the window of the city bus, an enormous tower twinkles with a thousand lights. Out of the corner of my eye it’s pretty, in a slightly irritating sort of way. Then I remember that there are no walls on that building: it’s under construction, concrete floor after concrete floor, with plastic netting to keep debris from the sidewalks. It’s windy tonight, gusting through those empty spaces, whipping the netting in front of the bare hanging bulbs and, from far away: twinkle. As I describe this to myself the thought is so bleak and beautiful that it feels something inside me starts to break apart into hot, misshapen globs: oh, it’s my heart, melting.

And of course it makes me think of the fairy castle lights. Driving down a certain highway of my hometown, if you squinted, you’d see a delicate set of towers made entirely of lights, irresistibly magical. With eyes open, or in the daytime: the oil refinery. Not that we knew, more than vaguely, what an oil refinery was or did. We knew it was ugly, dirty and industrial. We knew, if we let ourselves think about it, that oil is maybe one of the dirtiest things of all. And that we were complicit in its dirtiness; everyone, but we, in that town, in particular. So the fairy castles were an illusion of many kinds, a glamour on the ugliness at the center of our daily commute. But also, real. The lights did actually shine in the darkness, and were actually beautiful; you couldn’t deny it. Sometimes the squinting made me feel a little sick. Sometimes, when I could hold the ugliness and the magic together in my mind, something different.

One of the reasons I dream about leaving this town is to escape a feeling of complicity. In the highrises rising by the day, the homeless increasing every month, the pinched faces on the city bus, the nonunionized workers in the concrete shells, the guys selling scarves at tables on the sidewalk below, the prophet with his blanket and shopping cart, the coldness required to dress beautifully and look straight ahead. But where could I go where I wasn’t a part of something ugly, even if it’s just killing something alive to eat it every day?

Once this winter I heard Ta-Nehisi Coates, talking about Carolyn Forche, writing about war crimes, “there is no other way to say this.” He said that it was enough to make true art out of horror; that one is not required to make change. Illuminating the beautiful struggle is its own job. It’s hard to know if he is right. Almost every day I feel mired in unmet responsibility, coveting and sickened by unearned beauty, buffeted by and resentful of uncaused misery. I feel I must do something, and do not know what it is, and do nothing.

But I know that it is true that knowing or imagining or describing the terrible bleakness tangled up in beauty feels like a kind of freedom, a release like a stiff drink or a confession. This twinkle, it’s the wind in the plastic and concrete, the trouble lights swinging hundreds of feet up on an empty stage. It is like a confession of sin, acknowledging the sweetness of it and its sourness and horror, letting them flow together like blood and tears and wine. The world’s purity is in its inextricability, every wonder hitched to a horror and every crime with some unlikely shine, if only in the language we can use to describe it. The highrise twinkles in the dusk. It is beautiful. It is terrible. It is.