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Hair color 1
In a class of mine called Beauty and the Body we were talking about age and beauty, and responding to my question, “What associations come to mind regarding gray hair?” a young woman said, “Monotone.” Others seemed to silently agree. Light hair and light skin they were thinking.
Well, what about very dark black skin and black hair? What about blonde hair and Anglo skin?–in other words, another variation of light hair and light skin. Interesting, too, that we call light skin fair skin if it’s young–and fair is a synonym for pretty.
“Pale” came up and perhaps “drab” too when more students added the images in their minds. As they spoke, monotone was meaning achromatic, which translates as loss–loss of color. With a nod to Lao Tzu, those who see loss will become loss.
Battleground of beauty
A friend emailed me a photo of her a couple days post-cosmetic surgery and laser resurfacing. Her closed eyes, sores, bruises, bandages, and covered-up hair create, for me, an unidentifiable person. In the text her tone is characteristically spirited and full of humor, as she tells me that the photo was taken before she could open her eyes and that she doesn’t look much different 3 days later. She notes happily that her partner, who presumably took the picture and maybe wrote the email, kissed her. Yay, him! Whose spirit and humor complement hers.
My friend in the photo is the only close friend of mine to undergo selective cosmetic surgery, and we talked a lot about her doing it throughout the process, from her wanting the procedures to her questioning her rationale to her first consultation with the surgeon to her pre- and post-operative medications to her feelings in the late afternoon before the morning when she would enter the hospital. My friend and I were born the same year. She is deeply intelligent and thoughtful, independent, and self-accepting, and as she became clear about proceeding with the surgery, I encouraged her to go ahead with it.
- January 10, 2010
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind
- Comments 1
Maiden elder
A regular reader of this blog, a younger woman who hasn’t yet posted anything, wrote me a long and eloquent email about women, beauty, and age. She included a request:
I’d love to read your take, and others’, on the tremendous soul-accepting difference between “looking younger” and “looking more beautiful.”
Immediately, an essay that I wrote recently and haven’t yet published jumped to mind. It’s called “Maiden Elder,” and I think that the excerpt, below, that I quote from it, initiates some satisfaction to her request.
“Maiden Elder” excerpt
In Issai Chozanshi’s The Demon’s Sermon on the Martial Arts, a philosophical “guidebook” for samurai written in the eighteenth century, the demon in the title advises a swordsman, “When you follow your own true character and are not a slave to your passions and desires, your spirit will not be troubled.” Speaking from my own true character, feminism works for the freedom of all human beings, glamour grows from a person’s knowing herself and following that knowledge, and maiden and elder have little to do with a woman’s age and everything to do with her exceeding their culturally determined boundaries, such as limitations on her self-representation and self-creation, both of which I equate with self-discovery. Self-representation is an external manifestation of one’s own true character. My definitions of glamour and feminism are intended to stir the imagination. Maiden elder is a term of endearment.
- December 30, 2009
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind, Bookshelf, art, and media
- Comments 2
December butterfly
I mistook a butterfly for a yellowed bougainvillea leaf. Butterflies are not common in Tucson during the winter. I was cleaning the front porches and didn’t recognize the butterfly as itself until I’d almost swept it into the dustpan. I assumed that I’d killed the insect but noticed as I placed it on a ledge of the wall above the pavement of the porch outside my bedroom that it moved its legs. Then the weather and the shade turned too cool for me to comfortably finish my work by hosing the porches.
I returned today to hose them, having forgotten about the butterfly until I saw it on the pavement of the porch–I’d sprayed it. Inadvertently killing an animal feels utterly miserable, and that’s how I felt. I was like a child scolding herself into tears.
The butterfly’s still brilliantly yellow wings surprised me as I once again picked it up to lay it to rest where I’d left it the day before. I continued hosing and brushing away the water with a broom, now and then looking at the butterfly, feeling both sad and humiliated by my unawareness of it until I’d damaged it. I found myself apologizing to the butterfly and thanking it for its beauty. Before I went indoors I noticed the butterfly stand up. I saw it walk.
Just looked . . . after several hours. Bedroom door open, the butterfly, bright and delicate as a petal and a step away from me, contrasts with the clean red concrete of the porch floor. Maybe the lightest breeze earlier in the day had animated the butterfly, so that I thought it still lived.
Other people might show you a photo. Indeed, I took one before beginning this paragraph. But I deleted the picture from my camera within less than a minute. Beauty can be a peace that asks for privacy.
Incandescence
Celebrities interest me very little, though lately I’ve been reading about the phenomenon of celebrity. Such as David Haven Blake’s Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, from which the reader learns about the construction of fame in 19th-century America, and through that, facts about the foundation of today’s fame-as-the-manipulation-of-people, both the celebrity and the public. The worship of personality, the invasion of a so-called personality’s privacy, the publication of supposedly intimate details about celebrities’ lives, and the embodiment of greatness or talent in the celebrity body–nothing new. And all of it historically as now accompanied by–dependent upon?–frequent disinterest in and even ignorance of the artistic, intellectual, or other skills and talents that supposedly generated the “greatness” of the celebrity; and, more in line with the celebrity as star, skills and talents that presumably generated the celebrity’s brilliant luminosity.
At its absolute height, the star’s brightness is incandescence.
INCANDESCENCE. It describes Rita Hayworth in Gilda, which I watched again a couple weeks ago. Gilda is one of my favorite movies, and I can count them on one hand.
As a star and as an actress, Hayworth got Hollywood-ized up the wazoo. But it isn’t that she’s hot, it isn’t that she’s gorgeous. Here’s what she IS in Gilda: transporting. She transports me–deep within myself. There, and only there, I might learn to flame, glow, and sparkle mightily. She is an impetus towards radiance, and I am grateful to her self-creation in the midst of the film industry’s artifice.
Incandescence is a noun, so may seem static, but Hayworth’s incandescence within me operates as a verb. Incandescence is an idea about radiance, which is always in the making.
- November 18, 2009
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind, Bookshelf, art, and media, Pleasure
- Comments 3
Golden skin
Line 8 of Sexual Advances reads:
I’m thinking of your goldenness
The first time I saw my lover naked, the color of his skin surprised me because it was so purely and creamily golden. Maybe the light, which was shining softly into his bedroom, warmed his skin tone. Maybe I’m still enwrapped–enrapt and wrapped up in–the romantic radiance of our initial lovemaking, and maybe that radiance colors my memories and present observations of him.
Of course, he is golden to me–his heart feels rich and enriches mine–as everyone we love is golden when we spontaneously fill the connection between that person and ourselves, and life in the process, with generosity and with first sight, which allows us to see what is truly in front of us. In Sexual Advances I see with first sight every time, in each of the 1,000 lines, and that liberates my vision from looking for what my lover should be in the future or wasn’t in the past, from problems that fear, running rampant, or just walking along at a steady pace, creates out of speculation, obsession, and impatience. Fear turns gold to mud.
- November 2, 2009
- Filed under: Beauty, Love, Men and women, Pleasure
- Comments 1
Women staring at women
If you’re a woman you’re probably aware of another woman having stared at you. In fact, at a very particular part of you, like your clothed belly or naked thigh or upper lip. What is she looking for, anyway?
I think that she’s looking for similarity or difference in order to determine, perhaps unknowingly, an equivalence or a discrepancy that makes you or her the “better” woman. In other words, the staring reflects a competitive “achievement” of femininity or beauty. Whose abs are firmer? Whose thigh is more slender? On whose upper lip is the hair invisible?
Last week I walked into a jewelry store, in Tucson, known for its unique and elegant designs, intending to purchase a silver chain, which I did. My feet drew a stare from the woman who helped me–I was wearing red sandals with black socks–and later she stared at one of my cheeks–a swift scrutiny of faded, teenage acne scars? She was kind, helpful, and respectful, as a customer would expect in such a shop, yet I felt strange, even when we mentioned our short fingernails and she looked at hers and then mine. She was gathering evidence–for or against me, I’m not sure.
- October 19, 2009
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind, Men and women, Pleasure
- Comments 9
Aphrodite
In case anyone thinks that I’m a devotee of the deity Aphrodite, with pictures or statues of her around my house–uh uh. Although I chose aphrodite as my website email name, dedicated my book Monster/Beauty to that loving and lovely goddess, and collaborated with Russell Dudley on photos of myself after Greek sculptures of her, she is a symbol for me, not anything to which I pray. A figure of beauty, love, creativity, sensuality, and laughter–as she was for the ancient Greek culture which gave birth to her in literature and art.
As such, Aphrodite inspires me, and I celebrate myself by taking her name, as a bride might take the name of her beloved.
