The Beauty in the Ugly, Wabi Sabi, and The Twilight Zone Haiku

Travel to a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind.

Hello, Fifth Dimension Denizens!

Today you’re in for a real treat, the first Weirdo Poetry guest post! Chad Ellis Boykin is the author of The Twilight Zone Haiku, which comes out tomorrow on Halloween, October 31, 2023. I was fortunate enough to get an advanced copy of the book and it’s fantastic! It’s worth reading for the introductory essay alone. The haiku themselves are beautiful, intriguing, and will take you right back to the first time you ever watched an episode of this powerful television show.

The haiku comic below is one of four I did for Chad’s The Twilight Zone Haiku website.

The Bewitchin' Pool

backyard pool offers
different kind of escape
in the Twilight Zone

The Beauty in the Ugly, Wabi Sabi, and The Twilight Zone Haiku

By Chad Ellis Boykin

Decomposition
All things have their own winter
Hidden resplendence

As a child, I was terrified, entranced, and moved by The Twilight Zone. Particularly the episode Eye of the Beholder.

Filmed using striking chiaroscuro shadows, intense close-ups, and crooked angles, we are in a hospital room with a lonely woman whose face is covered in thick bandages.

She has just undergone her eleventh plastic surgery to “look normal”. Medical staff described her visage in whispers in the hallway as a “pitiful twisted lump of flesh”. Literally everyone is obfuscated, obscured in shadow, and all voices are disembodied because of this chillingly odd effect.

The entire piece is otherworldly.

Impending revulsion builds. You are forced to confront some ugly things inside yourself as you feel this anticipation and fear.

The bandages are slowly twisted off. The doctors and nurses gasped, “No effect!”, the surgery failed.

The stunning twist, like the kireji in haiku, is that the woman, Janet, exemplifies conventional beauty standards—but everyone else, it is finally revealed, look, to our eyes, like gruesome monsters.

Then, the real ugliness, this is a fascist world. A bellicose authoritarian leader shouts on several television screens that everyone must conform to one look, one belief, one way, as Janet runs for her life down a long, menacing corridor.        

I was reminded of Eye of the Beholder last week when reading “Using My Attention Machine to Shrink My Focus”. Here, Jason wrote about the evolution of his notebooks,

“I want to make my comics things of beauty and wonder, but it takes a lot of ugliness to make beautiful things”.

I understood exactly what he meant, but looking at the images of the notebooks, those works in progress, I was struck by the beauty of that perceived ugliness.

The Japanese concept of Wabi-Sabi¹ came rushing to mind. Wabi-Sabi is the Japanese art of accepting and appreciating the beauty in the natural cycle of growth and decay. Jason’s works-in-progress notebooks, with their evolving ideas, notes, scribbles, and artwork, are that growth cycle, uniquely beautiful just as they are.

Back to Janet running, persecuted, down the hallways and corridors. What, really, is beautiful? Ever since that childhood trip to The Twilight Zone, I never stopped asking that question.

With haiku, Weirdo Poetry, and Wabi-Sabi, there is a framework for answering it.

Same eyes, different perceptions.

Cheers,

Chad

Special Note:

Thank you to Jason for suggesting (and allowing) this guest post!

You’ll be back to your regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

If you happen to like The Twilight Zone, and haiku, you are in luck. The Twilight Zone Haiku emerges on Halloween.

Published by JobberHouse Press, The Twilight Zone Haiku contains a custom haiku for each episode of The Twilight Zone, with bonus content covering unmade episodes, the film, reboots, and a special Foreword by Tom Elliot, host of The Twilight Zone Podcast.

1. My source on Wabi-Sabi, is, “Embracing Life As It Is: Lessons From Wabi-Sabi, Haiku, and Zen” by Alan Gettis and Carol Genjo Bachmann (2018), a wonderful little read.