Beauty isn’t really skin deep. Some people are prettier than others and that’s life. But you probably know this already. Like me, you look in the mirror thinking how ugly you are compared to the others around you. Perhaps more as the days progress; some have more wrinkles and skin blotches to invade pretty, young faces. Our friends and families may say nice things about us, but deep down, the issue of beauty remains. We’re kinda ugly. Beauty is reserved for the gifted. Now this issue will either grind away at you or even drive you batshit crazy. Or not. Maybe you might realize that you’re pretty enough even though you’re not perfect. But in the short story Life by Daniel Arenson as presented in The Alien Chronicles ed. by David Gatewood, it just wasn’t an option.
Eliana, the scientist to first download the image of the ugly alien, is the first to fall victim. She’s desperate to make discoveries, namely, discoveries about the existence of alien life in the universe. Her whole career centers around this hope. She is the dreamer with no life, no friends. Just the lonely hunt for alien life. Then, it happens. The download comes through. The first photo of aliens! Eliana takes a look and goes completely batshit crazy. Why? Because the alien beasties are horribly ugly. The security guard downstairs hears her scream, as she falls to the floor, only to come up and look at the same photo. He does the same. The aliens are so ugly that everyone goes crazy just looking at them.
At this point, I lower the book and laugh out loud. An alien this ugly? Wow. I mean, what did they expect? Frank Sinatra in space? The Michael Buble of the starts? Where’s the professionalism? You’d think that if you’re hunting for aliens, aesthetics wouldn’t be the measuring stick to judge them by – especially as scientists.
Dr. Robert Jensen is the closest, cheapest, psychiatrist in town. His beat up, dented Corolla barely makes it to the Agency. When he gets there, he meets Dr. Sullivan, Chief of the Agency. Jensen’s job is to figure out why these scientists lost their minds as almost fifteen of them have been reduced to a catatonic state. And after they do, can saying nothing else than, “So ugly.”
Dr. Sullivan has the photo right there. But he admonishes Jensen not to look at. These aliens are so hideous, that he’s afraid Jensen will go catatonic too. But Jensen is no wimp. He insists on looking at the photo, and eventually does. It turns out that the alien isn’t ugly after all, although it depends on which alien you’re thinking about. As I said, humans can be so ugly. We’re not angels, after all.
“An angel,” Jensen thought, “They photographed an angel.” He goes on to think: “She was the sky itself. She was the light of the stars, the dust of space, the soft embrace of night. She is a goddess. She was love. She was purity. She was the song of space, music taken form, solid and liquid, light and darkness, life. She was life.“
But he doesn’t stop there because the beauty is transcendent in a bad way. For Jensen looks at his fingers holding the paper and suddenly realizes how old and gnarly they look. He looks over to Dr. Sullivan’s face that now seems more like a “network of wrinkles, pores, blemishes, an old path of filth.” From that point forward, every human being, including Jensen himself, looks horribly ugly. We humans, compared to the rest of alienkind, are nothing short than repugnant.
Dr. Jensen falls to his side in a catatonic state, another victim of the alien photo. We humans, it seems, just don’t measure up out there, the place of gorgeous, angelic creatures worthy of the heavens from which they sprung.
Now, that’s a great story. Most of the stories in The Alien Chronicles had a twist, but this was certainly the best of the best. It encapsulates our obsession with beauty and the self-esteem that comes with every person. In the Western world, beauty was probably resurrected from the humanists in the 15th century who tried to emulate the wisdom of the ancients. Both Greece and Rome had their notions of beauty and prized one winning face over another. The dark ages, before the Renaissance, I’m sure beauty was important but not philosophized like our humanist philosophe who strove for maximum beauty.
So, when you think of it, this story truly exemplifies the virtues of the Renaissance which would soon give birth to the Modern Mind. After hundreds of years, beauty can still sway us as if portraying virtue in some way. I mean, what if the aliens look angelic but are the most grotesque threat to humankind? Beauty doesn’t always come from the gods, you know.