To the women and men who glare and react—that I have walked on the scene, a total unknown, and nabbed the finest man in the room. To the men who moon at me and tell me I’m beautiful even when I have dog shit in my hands. To my mother, who equates the failure to shave one’s legs and properly apply make-up with a bout of major depression. To all the men and women who harassed me and belittled me for being a frightened overweight teenager or manipulated me as a dumpy co-ed.
Let me set the record straight here.
Had I not survived some very unattractive school years and strutted the stage as a fabulous showgirl in the same lifetime, I might have never known what it is. What makes one truly attractive—the light that one holds up above age, beauty and all reason to tell the world, "I am my own and it is good". I am still the big-legged, squinty-eyed runtish girl that has no table manners, curses like a sailor, and drinks too much from time to time. It is me and me is beautiful or not depending on whom you ask and when and where. What is ‘Me’ will change tomorrow and will be beautiful or not beautiful as well. Despite what they sell us… beauty is not where it’s at. The pursuit of beauty is a wicked farce—a venomous ghost of a demon out to fuck us all the wrong way. Women mutilating their bodies and painting this and that in hopes of rising a notch on the fantasy bedpost. Men who scramble at fast cars and hair transplants in their 40’s with the vain hopes of ‘trading up’. Lured in by the image of beauty, a mere phantom—a dream at best, over and over… only to be judged and continually rejected when the elusive ideal slips through ones hands or is re-defined once in their very grasp!
Joy, birth, death, orgasm, peace, love, lust, anger… anything can be beautiful when it is whole and of itself. But what is beauty for the sake of itself? A garment to place over something special? A figment to hold up to the light? A breed standard for symmetry and proper shading that is yet unseen in the living mammal, perhaps? Like attracts like; joy begets joy and one pain will usually find it’s increase in another. To be brave enough to be oneself and to love that self unconditionally—that speaks to the heart of others and draws the same from them. That is how to draw the finest people in life to oneself—beauty has nothing to do with it. Reality has everything to do with it.
2 comments:
Interesting post... though I remember you in your youth as a vivacious, pretty girl, not sullen nor runty by any means.
Have you read Salman Rushdie's "The Enchantress of Venice" or Zadie Smith's "On Beauty"? I haven't, but they touch on similar issues in your post, from what I understand (of both them and your post).
I'm reading your blog in order, btw, so I apologize if I'm 4 years too late.
Vivacious and pretty? Wow, was my head a mess. Or perhaps beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Thanks Jonathan. I'm glad to have reconnected with you :-)
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