Tromos-Omorfia

Season of Terrible Angels

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

Opalescent slick. Dragon’s eye emerging from asphalt. I would kneel and stare into the glaucous rainbow, convinced a god had wept here, milked tears into this nondescript gas station on the side of a country highway.

“It’s an oil spill,” my father explained, his brow wrinkled as he knew he must puncture my awe. “It’s actually pollution. And it means someone’s car has a dangerous leak.”

Yet the knowledge that the oil was incorrect did nothing to decrease its beauty in my eyes. In fact, it upped the contrast, sharpened the colors into something like a feeling. Anguish. Heartbreak. The first swallow of loss that is also the last taste of what is now absent. Perhaps I was attuned to these terrible dissonances because of my early childhood. Tenderness and violence could coexist and were often inextricably entangled. One of my strongest memories is of a wall covered in wooden masks. The sheen and polish of those carefully fashioned pieces of art. And I also remember what those masks saw, acting like outward faces of that wall, the only uninvolved and innocent witness to my repeated rapes.

There is the beauty of the wall. And there is the terror of what the wall is facing. There is the emptiness behind the mask and then there is the violence that emptiness records in its hollow sockets. This double-sided nature of beauty and terror, art and abjection, has been the thematic through-line of my life.

This summer the sun turned flat and blank as a copper penny. The air we take for granted made itself visible as a blushing thickness that broke and rippled like a great metallic banner across the Hudson River. On my morning runs I felt like I was smoking cigarettes as I struggled up hills that, days earlier, had been easy to zip up and down. It took a week for the science to come in. For the migraines and asthma to restrict my movement out of doors. By the time my phone chimed with an “air quality alert” I was already alert to something between awe and terror constricting both my airways and my poet’s heart.

The light was tangerine concentrate. It filled my apartment so curiously, striking itself like flint against the walls, body hungry to remake the fire from which it was born in Canada. It was this frantic and colorful display that made me more keenly aware that light is a cosmos-weary traveler, photons flung from a combusting muscle of matter at the center of our star system.  

What does it feel like to finally hit? To make contact and then to bounce? Photon cloaked in smoke, alchemized, solidified, then expelled by screaming forests, what have you felt? Was it terrible? Delicious? Both?

This summer the climate apocalypse that the global south has been familiar with for years finally reached the sterile lawns of suburbia, the glittering cityscapes of capitalist denial. This summer disasters leaked. Fires sent long-distance messages. Ashen trees tattooed themselves into our lungs. Floods consumed this sediment of cinders and flushed it into towns, washed away homes. People died. But many more animals and birds and plants died.

And it was terrible. And it also stopped me in my tracks. Red in the morning, sailor’s take warning, I thought every morning as the smoke-filled days filled with light like blood. The smoke bodied the air, gave it flesh. I could not breathe this dense smog. But I could eat it. Eyeful after eyeful of outrageous sunrises and sunsets.

What do we call this terrible thing that also compels us to stop? We have always been drawn to fireworks, meteors, volcanoes. The expanding shore beckoning us before the tidal wave. Is it in our nature to turn towards the eclipse, willingly erasing our own eyesight?

Tromos comes from the Greek word for terror and trembling. It is a feeling and movement. The thing that body does when it registers threat and then tries to dispel trauma. A shiver and dance. And Omorfia comes from the Greek for beauty. When the sky jaundiced before the tornado watch told me to take shelter this past July I thought “Terrible. Beautiful.”

When I look at the filigree of blue veins surfacing from my chest I think  “Terrible. Beautiful” knowing this vasculature anomaly actually signals the connective tissue disease that is taking my body apart.

Tromos-Omorfia. This is the season of terrible angels. Beauty that is also a siren, calling us to jump off the ship into the rocks. Light that wears a skin of trees, a smoke of blood, a kiss from a sun that will explode someday.

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