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Hair color 3
Here are a few synonyms for gray that appear in 432.4 of the Roget’s International Thesaurus beside my desk: “dun, drab, dingy, dull, leaden, livid; somber, sober, sad, dreary; cool, cold; iron-gray, steel-gray.” Then we’re given Quaker and pearly grays and some variations of the word silver. And off again to the land of who-wants-that? with “grizzly, grizzled” and 7 words that describe ashes. Near the end of the entry for the adjective gray we find “slate-colored, stone-colored, mouse-gray or mouse-colored.”
The color gray as lack, of liveliness, happiness, and warmth, disagrees with people’s aesthetic wishes and goals for themselves, let alone their hair. Although grizzled derives from the French grisaille, and gris simply means gray, grizzled sounds like greasy and grisly.
Timeless
1) I was attending a faculty meeting that included professors from throughout the liberal arts, and the pre-meeting banter brought this comment from a male colleague: “When I had a body.”
2) I was dating a man who said he was a mind without a body.
The first comment was made jokingly, the second was made as a self-revelation. Both came from men in their 50s, intellectuals who, from the outside, people would not perceive as physically fit.
The comments surprised me, sadly, when I heard them. Most of the time, they still do. They describe a state of loss or dissociation that verges on the unimaginable.
Do the comments indicate surrender? To nature and the “natural” course of corporeal events? To mental activity as a numbing of the body? To an inability to feel?
I think that people commonly surrender their bodies to the “ravages” of time. Men, women, older, younger. They expect to be ravaged by time.
Last week I happened upon a statement by Herbert Marcuse about the true ravages of time. Marcuse is one of my intellectual heroes, and I hadn’t read the statement in years. Here’s what stays with me, in my own words and interpretation: the concept of time conditions people for submission, for surrender to misery, tedium, and dullness; timelessness is an essential component of pleasure.
How funny!!! I just heard on the television (which I rarely watch) as I’m writing: “Time is always running out.” The result? Stress and urgency.
How I love the timelessness of writing, of playful, fascinating conversation, of making love.
- March 21, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind, Pleasure
- Comments 3
Hair color 2
My grandmother Ida’s hair–silver mixed with white, then snowier year by year. A brightness and lightness at the top of her body, at the surface of her being. Her signature style was a French twist, which she always wore. I loved her simplicity. She never colored or permed her hair or chose one of those short styles, that I see in women even of my own generation, that look stiff and extremely untouchable. I loved sitting beside Gram when she pinned up her hair. In those sweetly sensual times she was my beauty teacher. I have yet to learn how to pin up my hair with her swiftness or perfection, but she was teaching me, simply through my observing her and through wherever our light conversation turned, the love of self. And, of course, the beauty of silver, the beauty of white-as-snow.
Compulsive, pink
I asked a friend why he was giving what seemed to me like way more than enough time and energy to a project, and he said, in the clipped manner that sometimes made me laugh, “Compulsive.” Both of us laughed in mutual acknowledgment of his “condition”.
- March 2, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind
- Comments 1
