Exploring beauty

[vaneramos]

Photo: Graffiti at an abandoned Canadian Tire store near Keele and Dundas, Toronto.

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"Women rate kindness, happiness, confidence, dignity and humour as powerful components of beauty, along with the more traditional attributes of physical appearance, body weight and shape."
~Joanne Richard, "The buzz on beauty" from the Toronto Sun on Canoe.com

"If we had only moonlight, shared, to remember, our storehouse would be unusually rich."
~Dorothy Freeman in a letter to her lover, naturalist Rachel Carson, 1961

"And so we come back to the word 'beauty'....Let's cling tenaciously to our conviction that this is the only reality worth our devotion."
~Tennessee Williams

"Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key."
~Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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The Toronto Sun article says women want to change the way beauty is defined, but is that possible? In the end, men tell them what's sexy: what body type, hair, eye and skin colour. Does happiness and humour really come across sexy? Gay men run into the same pressure to conform to a sexual ideal. Our lovers decide what's hot. It comes down to how the average man discriminates when given the choice of a big cock or an honest mind.

As artists we're concerned with the question of beauty. Maybe it's our job to redefine what's beautiful. But in our fascination with the visual, we keep reinforcing that beauty is a surface thing. How do we dig beneath? Literature and poetry go to a different level. Dare I say a more important level?

We live in a visual culture. For months I became absorbed in photography and ignored my writing. It's easier to make a clever image. I'm not saying it's easy to be a good photographer, but even bad images attract more response than good poems.

Nevertheless I'm pleased with the response to my posts lately. Knowing that someone else is reading—along for the ride—makes it possible to keep going, explore new provinces within mind. It's not easy to go alone.

Maybe loneliness is what it's all about. Of course it is. What am I saying? We're islands in a wide sea. We need to bridge the spaces, draw visitors to our lives.

It's one thing to write words that will appeal to people. It's another to write the truth. People rarely have an easy relationship with reality, tend to look the other way when someone tries to picture it.

So are we really concerned with finding beauty? A journalist is more concerned with truth, but the truth is relative, and no one would call the average newspaper story beautiful. Sometimes I have read things in newspapers that genuinely moved me. But those are not the stories that sell copies. It's the ones about who is bombing whom, who's lying and cheating, and which celebrity is sleeping with the other one's lover. Even here we are obsessed with a thin shadow of beauty. These are not beautiful people, and yet we idolize them. All it takes is the right boobs, biceps or chains of diamonds to transform a rogue into a star. Wealth always gets attention, too.

I am consumed with putting a few words together that will change the way people think. It's like exploring between layers of clouds, looking for answers to questions that people have been asking for millennia, but maybe we're asking the wrong questions. It all starts with driving, finding, digging, pursuing, putting your brush or pen to the page and excavating, finding the dull rock. Not a glint in its grain, and yet experience is the ore. We must stay in one place, indwelling, learning to taste and feel the texture of everything about it. We try ideas and see how they shape our lives for a while. Eventually we morph like nymphs, find a shred of truth and follow it to the next chapter, where we start indwelling something else.

We keep coming up against the face of things, but have to look beyond. Sooner or later we find a mirror that gives a fair reflection of ourselves, then we stop and learn everything we can before the surfaces shift and we lose our focus, lose sight of it once more.

Comments

[bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, big cock or ... um ... what was the other thing?

Seriously though. I think there are three related ideas that are generally conflated, but ought to be considered separately, namely, beauty, attractiveness and sexyness.

Beauty in this context I think translates to "closeness to some ideal". Which is the hairnailscar thing. Attractiveness is - does this person intrigue me? Do I want to get to know them? And sexiness of course is, does this person make me horny.

It is entirely possible to have any one without the other two. Even common, I'd say.

[poetbear.livejournal.com]

i'm glad you're posting more(in
words, that is). i love your pictures,
but your words are as important. i'll
admit, i prefer your descriptions of
your life to anything else.~paul

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

So I'll use your terms. The article discussed an international study showing women feel pressured to value themselves in terms of sexiness, when they would rather be valued for a wider range of physical and personal attributes. I suggest the same tension affects gay men.

It comes down to a question of what we consider sexy. Myself I might idealize certain physical attributes in fantasy, but in real life I rarely find a man "sexy" unless he is also "attractive." Your three ideas might be more separate for some people than for others.

When you talk about beauty approximating an ideal, I suppose that can include all different kinds of ideals. An old, withered face can be beautiful in a much different way from a young, smooth one. Thin and fat people can be beautiful in different ways. But culture tends to reinforce certain limited ideals of beauty.

[vaneramos.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Paul. That means a lot, especially coming from you. I didn't post the results of my comment stats publicly, but you are my most generous commenter (217 as of Sept. 13). I really do appreciate having you along for the ride.

[poetbear.livejournal.com]

glad to be there
:o)
~paul