I think I am more affected by physical human beauty than most people because of my obsessive desire for wholeness, perfection, purity, symmetry, cleanliness. I feel really unsettled when things look ugly, messy, or dirty. Alternately, I feel a palpable joy when I lay my eyes upon natural, unsullied beauty, be it perfect porcelain skin or the unblemished whites of eyeballs or silky, thick, lustrous hair. I like to be surrounded by only beautiful things and people - they make the world seem right. On days when the world seems to be falling apart and my life doomed, I take comfort in my own physical beauty. I list and count the things I like about my physical self. My dreams betray this obsession with remaining pure and beautiful - one of my recurring dreams involves all of my teeth spontaneously falling out and my gums twisting hideously so that my mouth resembles a stalactite-filled cave. I wake up always rushing to the mirror to see if the dream has come true.
From "The Bluest Eye":
Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another - physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way.
She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen. There at last were the darkened woods, the lonely roads, the river banks, the gentle knowing eyes. There the flawed became whole, the blind sighted, and the lame and halt threw away their crutches. There death was dead, and people made every gesture in a cloud of music. There the black-and-white images came together, making a magnificent whole - all projected through the ray of light from above and behind.
It was really a simple pleasure, but she learned all there was to love and all there was to hate.
Monday, April 05, 2010
On crying
Today I subbed in a high school chemistry class. Going on 3 hours sleep and stuck in that overly air-conditioned room I was shivering and half asleep the whole time. But I tried to keep myself occupied as the kids watched a video on dinosaurs by continuing my read of Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye". As soon as I stepped outside the building at the end of the workday I was shocked by the sun's warm embrace, that moment bearing witness to the foolishness of civilized life.
On my drive home, for no particular reason - not for loneliness, sadness, or remembrance of trauma - I cried like I haven't been able to since last summer in between two portentous phone calls from the guy I was dating. It was that deeply satisfying cry that leaves your mouth hanging open gasping for air and your cheekbones so tense from the continual bursts of tears it feels like they are crouching, poised ready to leap off your face. He first called to say we should break up. I coldly and calmly accepted it and agreed to part ways. I did not love him, nor was I especially committed to continuing to see him, but when we hung up the phone I was overcome by a feeling of utter loneliness in that dark apartment alone having to instantly revise my vision of my future, to edit out from it this person who had volunteered reckless but confident promises to remain in my life indefinitely. By the time he called back half an hour later to take it back - to tell me what a silly thing to do that was, how he had made a huge mistake, and how sorry he was for scaring me - I could barely speak. The crying had started involuntarily and would not stop.
Growing up, crying was so frequent it was almost a hobby of mine, and so it composes the most salient of my childhood and adolescent memories. There was that one time when at 8 years old I was left basically alone in our apartment. My mother and sisters went to the laundromat but I wanted to stay home, imagining all the undisturbed fun that could be had. Actually, I wasn't alone at all, but it felt like I was - my father had fallen into a deep sleep on the couch. When my mother and sisters left, I decided to take out a board game and play by myself. But after a few minutes of sitting there pretending to be two different players and listening to the eerie silence of solitude, interrupted only by my father's soft snoring, I felt a wave of vast and unrelenting emptiness wash over me. I burst into tears, quite literally and audibly, and my father awoke to witness my tears but quickly went back to sleep. This was my first memory of that terrifyingly lonely feeling that was to become all too familiar to me.
It seems like I cried every night for almost a decade, from late childhood to the early college years. Sometimes I cried out of loneliness, like that time in the apartment, and sometimes out of fear. Irrational fears plagued me throughout the day, but at night is when they threatened to swallow me up. I had fears of my grandmother dying before her time, of my parents getting held up at their liquor store, of our house being broken into by dangerous men, of a gas leak exploding the house, of my older sister committing suicide and me finding her hanging in her closet. At the risk of stating the obvious, I was a morbid and excessively fearful child. Maybe I thought the tears would prevent my fears from coming true. I believed in a God then, and I thought surely He wouldn't let me cry myself to sleep in fear every night, only to have my fears come true. Surely He's not that unfair. I was wrong, of course.
On my drive home, for no particular reason - not for loneliness, sadness, or remembrance of trauma - I cried like I haven't been able to since last summer in between two portentous phone calls from the guy I was dating. It was that deeply satisfying cry that leaves your mouth hanging open gasping for air and your cheekbones so tense from the continual bursts of tears it feels like they are crouching, poised ready to leap off your face. He first called to say we should break up. I coldly and calmly accepted it and agreed to part ways. I did not love him, nor was I especially committed to continuing to see him, but when we hung up the phone I was overcome by a feeling of utter loneliness in that dark apartment alone having to instantly revise my vision of my future, to edit out from it this person who had volunteered reckless but confident promises to remain in my life indefinitely. By the time he called back half an hour later to take it back - to tell me what a silly thing to do that was, how he had made a huge mistake, and how sorry he was for scaring me - I could barely speak. The crying had started involuntarily and would not stop.
Growing up, crying was so frequent it was almost a hobby of mine, and so it composes the most salient of my childhood and adolescent memories. There was that one time when at 8 years old I was left basically alone in our apartment. My mother and sisters went to the laundromat but I wanted to stay home, imagining all the undisturbed fun that could be had. Actually, I wasn't alone at all, but it felt like I was - my father had fallen into a deep sleep on the couch. When my mother and sisters left, I decided to take out a board game and play by myself. But after a few minutes of sitting there pretending to be two different players and listening to the eerie silence of solitude, interrupted only by my father's soft snoring, I felt a wave of vast and unrelenting emptiness wash over me. I burst into tears, quite literally and audibly, and my father awoke to witness my tears but quickly went back to sleep. This was my first memory of that terrifyingly lonely feeling that was to become all too familiar to me.
It seems like I cried every night for almost a decade, from late childhood to the early college years. Sometimes I cried out of loneliness, like that time in the apartment, and sometimes out of fear. Irrational fears plagued me throughout the day, but at night is when they threatened to swallow me up. I had fears of my grandmother dying before her time, of my parents getting held up at their liquor store, of our house being broken into by dangerous men, of a gas leak exploding the house, of my older sister committing suicide and me finding her hanging in her closet. At the risk of stating the obvious, I was a morbid and excessively fearful child. Maybe I thought the tears would prevent my fears from coming true. I believed in a God then, and I thought surely He wouldn't let me cry myself to sleep in fear every night, only to have my fears come true. Surely He's not that unfair. I was wrong, of course.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)