Finally I have stepped off the sliding scale of beauty. For so long I have been trapped in notions that I’m better than someone, not as attractive/hot as someone else. That I’m in between, not as anal and controlling as some, not as open and bubbly as some. And suddenly its like the thrall (a slave in the Viking era) has lifted. I stepped off the sliding scale, somewhere off..maybe a lot. By the time Sunflower (Van Gogh style) revisited my life, and slides up the scale finding her own wholeness, I’ve stepped off and become different things. Maybe sometimes Wolverine – fragmented, fraught with amnesia and constantly struggling with his strenght and anxiety, no longer looking for completion or history (and a completely different genre - as unreal as a comic book character). I’ve slipped between the cracks, no longer the doppelganger or always the double of the other woman. There’s a peculiar loss of a story somewhere, but its also a strange new freedom to find, suddenly, as you live it.
I’m also beginning to realize that its entirely possible to start feeling pukey after too much theory - a diet of words like framing event, heteronormativity, bodies in terror, radical discontinuities, exceeds, the uncapturable uncanny .. and those are the more benign phrases. We're not even venturing into the terrain of the oxymoronic phrases that are supposed to titillate your masturbatory theory vein that’s pulsing in your forehead.
A week of being immersed in this language and I’m feeling sick, or imagining a possible short film entirely based on the character of poor Kate in Howard’s class in On beauty (Zadie Smith). The guy next to me has come all over his hands and is also wiping his fevered forehead and the girl behind me is definitely a body in terror for what all this vast terrain of knowledge to be conquered and absorbed means for her foreign admissions. And the girl opposite has the sick superior look of 'I do this for my boss/teacher/boyfriend (or all three in one like some magnificent discount deal she got in the supermarket of life) who too is immersed self-importantly in theory.. we are a team' (groan! that one is the worst).
1 comment:
"Finally I have stepped off the sliding scale of beauty." Really?- your narcissism requires a constant comparison with not just one sunflower, but the entire meat market now outside cold storage. She, poor thing, might not doppelgang you anymore. But everybody else does, until of course they too become poor things.
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