I allow myself a brain washing poetry writing from time to time, it is refreshing and that kind of a chaos takes a lots of pressure off in the creative way.
I don't think that our nature or life can be summed up under the 'ugly beauty of life on planet Earth', for me personally, it's the status of our mind that creates variation of the beauty towards that dissonance of the pain and misery we all have to transgress either into or transcend above it.
You are right that outside of perception, nothing can be said to be other than that which it is, without any sort of categorization such as "ugly" or "beautiful." It is merely the original wholeness of reality that gets limited by the confines of the energetic capacity of our nervous system. As you mentioned, we can also increase this by our intention and daily practice to transcend those limits, to the best of our ability. Thanks for the insightful comment @aschatria :)