Come take a walk over to my other blogspot for today’s post about “the eyes have it.”
Packing My Bags
Today’s Post on Journey News Blog
Come take a walk across my sites and visit today’s Journey News Blog post for a trip into a beginner’s journey into entrepreneurship. And tell a friend!
Peace and Love,
Gaze.
We Witness (for the Poetry Patroness)
Insurmountable: to palm someone’s blinding grief in your hands
to show her–the griever–
the terrifying, sublimity in bottomless agony.
You can’t help her picture that pure, petrified stance on the bridge
mid-way between his suffering and her own, textured so distinctly,
galaxies apart in their partnered struggle,
his fraught with the tortured, focused fight against pain, and hers,
witness, empath, limb, mother, wife, married to his suffering.
Her body pours static breath into his mad-gnashing vortex.
Where does one end and the other begin?
At the point of internal harrowing, razing cells that scream
in hysterical, frenzied death and reproduction,
death and reproduction,
with no end in sight, for these crazed, cracked-out enucleate disks don’t quit,
bear no mind but to destroy in their very giving–as if human.
I’ll show you the petals of the wide-blooming, morning rose,
heady as your bejeweled wedding day,
the dewy, pale, opalescent-translucence of redolent, velvety dalliance,
stained rust-dry at the edges–
a picture of blossoming, ordered DNA
perfectly-formed, fragile as your first-born’s, infant fingernail–
carrying its own prescient death at the borders.
She’s beautiful,
not as a symbol, not as obedient structure,
but as herself, fragrant joy bleeding.
I’ll cup her in my gardening hands to grow a path between us–
sorely aggrieved and floundering shadow,
clumsily consoling your fear and mine,
both corraling an other’s-brother’s-father’s-husband’s-son’s fluxing end.
Could you crawl outside a minute to see?
H.D.
Debating whether to post a clunky rhyming poem (I’m no good with rhymes) I churned out last night for today’s post, I came across this poem on my daily feed from poets.org.
I first read H.D.’s poetry in a University of Calilfornia, Riverside, graduate school course on confessional poets in 2004 or 5. I fell instantly in painfully beautiful love. The incisive, careful cut of an exquisite mosaic or tapestry suggestive of eternity in the local is how I describe her poetry. You can see the source of the delicate angles of her words reflected in her face: the keen eye, angular nose and chin, all projecting intense insight.
If memory serves, Ezra Pound discovered or fostered her. I’m glad someone did, so that I could find her centuries later. Hope you enjoy.
Born in 1886, Hilda Doolittle was one of the leaders of the Imagist movement.
Sitalkas
H. D., 1886 – 1961
Thou art come at length
More beautiful
Than any cool god
In a chamber under
Lycia’s far coast,
Than any high god
Who touches us not
Here in the seeded grass.
Aye, than Argestes
Scattering the broken leaves.
Call Me Beautiful
Call me beautiful.
I don’t care for the truth.
What pleases an eye
derives within and through
adoration, love, fondness and
gratitude painting its source
winsome hominey hues.
Aesthetically speaking,
beauty lives outside,
objectified cultural cues,
like Adonis or Loren,
Farung, Omar or Denzell,
and, of course, Marilyn,
but whose standards sway?
No matter the cause, we
seek her, the alluring sashay
across our sensual, our pang
to be her, stare-slaught subject,
all gazed heat into the kiln
of beauty’s claim–fleeting
hypnotic charm–elite, select.
Common, I carry no beau bearing,
not even in my own way; yes
your hunger draws me sublime–
bony feast: scent, moan and caress.
Barbie Nervosa
Every day.
She has to check daily.
Call me on the land line.
See if her world has changed.
“Are the flavors the same today?”
(All of my safe favorites still there?)
I nervously reply raspberry is now coffee.
The tiniest quake shivers her cheerful ‘ok’.
When she arrives in wide white tooth smile,
starlets gleaming in sky tan framed platinum,
a quiver tremulates pout-lush berry fleshy lips.
She forms turrets rather than swirls circles;
soft, firm, frozen layers sweet comfort most,
aligned to spun circadian rhythm, but not hers.
She builds towers tall enough to see over the walls
she maintains securely protecting hers and her own.
All colors should reach beyond the brim, peak and peer
over the fortress, showy containment, before consumption,
her life’s patch-quilt texture sewn so tightly no thread strays,
not an inch, and the pared tan arms and legs, plumped bone, lay
testament to the sacrifices she makes to keep a world’s seams intact.
The Beauty Myth–Think About it.
While I’m in favor of encouraging women to feel confident and happy, I worry that today’s body positivity focuses too much on affirming beauty and not enough on deconstructing its necessity. Spreading a message that everyone is beautiful reinforces the underlying assumption that beauty matters.
So writes Lindsay King Miller in Taking Beauty Out of Body Positivity. While she lauds the ever inclusive embracing of all female body types, she believes that reinforcing beauty as a value criterion is detrimental. She discusses what “body positivists,” those trying to change the accepted notions of beauty, are currently doing to change current conceptions but cites the dichotomy of beautiful versus ugly as problematic to such a cause, how beauty always implicates ugly. Ultimately, however, she finds the expansion of beauty beyond Victoria’s Secrets models refreshing, and as a mother of two teenage daughters, so do I.
Raising girls in 21st Century America is complicated. Raising girls probably has always been complicated, but in this world of consciously and commercially reinforced stereotypes about body imagery, where young girls are vulnerable to the obsessive compulsion to conform to culturally dictated beauty standards, it is particularly troublesome.
Unquestionably, there is too much emphasis on the female body as artifact of beauty and sexuality. It is also undeniable that many walk the earth unconscious of their inherited values and aesthetics, what culture has produced in them: their tastes, predispositions and prejudices. Historically, women have been treated poorly as citizen bodies, practically erased representationally in the arts, for instance (See Syreeta McFadden’s The lack of female genitals on statues seems thoughtless until you see it repeated). So women grow up in a vacuum of realistic body portrayals to challenge social “norms.”
In my early mothering years, I didn’t want to raise two daughters without at least attempting to defy norms. When they were little, I bristled at the pink and purple princess culture vulturing girls on commercial television, so I attempted to shelter them, feeding them a steady diet of commercial-free Public Broadcasting educational television. However, living smack dab in the suburbs of Southern California, I found I could not blind them to imagery that I did not agree with or even downright feared. And though I wanted to run counter culture, I was actually driving home the very ideas I wanted to avoid.
I knew what I vociferously avoided would be the very thing to lure my children. By avoiding princesses, I was drawing the curiosity of princess-dom to two children not living in isolation but among blossoming princesses.
So I decided the best tact was to expose them to all that I believed would indoctrinate them, commercial television and radio, the internet, Justice clothing store ads and other girly-centered media, and then use the exposure as opportunities to discuss options and causes.
I have always spoken to my children with words to make them reach rather than me sink. I would often remark that the store Justice was painted in colors that draw prebuscent girls of their age, pinks, purples and pastels, and then ask them who decided those were girl colors. They may not have understood the questions then, but now as teenagers, they are vocal feminists and advocates for the non-conformists, especially defying normative behaviors expected of them as women. Their dress and actions do not always affirm their words, but there is a consciousness of the conspiracy that captivates their style impulses.
I remember the trickiest issue of parenting two girls was body referencing and diet. To tackle the thorny body image issue, I steered them early from identifying anyone by body type or parts, skin color or size. I modeled pointing someone out by location, i.e., that guy in jeans and a tee shirt next to the cereal boxes–not by body traits–that tall white dude down there, explaining that no one wants to be identified by something that marks them at birth, something they did not choose. I thought it was the clearest path to disassociating their body as their only avenue of identity–at least as a starting point. Of course it was more complicated than that.
Before my children could think and prefer, I had them enrolled in classes: art, dance, gymnastics, soccer, science, theater and whatever else I thought would expose them to opportunities and practice habits and hobbies healthy for them, a path to learning. It was no surprise that two daughters of a soccer playing mom would love soccer.
With soccer they learned about their bodies’ needs, dietary, sleep and exercising. It was a no brainer to let them eat a begged-for donut before a game and then ask them how they felt during the game compared to say a pre-game banana with peanut butter. They figured it out. They also learned about competition and their bodies, fueling for better performance. We never talked about their diet but fueling choices. We talked about what they ate as promoters of good feeling and health, not body shape.
As a result, neither have been overheard to speak of one another’s weight when the taunting insults fly in their daily needling and razz-rationing. I don’t know what they say when I am not around, but I suspect they rarely judge beauty on the basis of weight, at least. I have witnessed their scolding their peers for doing so.
When they were young, my message about body-intensive focus would be lost, I feared, in a society that prizes beauty as exceptional whether the craze is body shape svelte or zoftig, Twiggy or Marilyn Monroe. The tidal wave of social stigma was too forceful, I thought. They would find out winning the lottery of a culture’s beauty award, one has to have the right metabolism and bone structure, the right chromosomal admixture. One has to measure the self against others on arbitrary dice rolls of anatomy. I desperately wanted them to understand that where body beauty is often the goal for young women, intrinsically achievable happiness is sidestepped or forsaken.
I’m troubled with using “beauty” as a synonym for feeling valuable and powerful and magnificent. It’s not far removed from nominally inspiring, but ultimately shallow, slogans like “Confidence is sexy” and “Nothing is more attractive than happiness” that treat emotional well-being as an accessory. I seek happiness because it feels good, not because it makes my hair shinier. Happiness, confidence, self-esteem—these things should be ends, not means.
Yes, and so how do we teach our daughters about the relationship of beauty and happiness, ends and means? How do we keep the word in our vocabulary without having it used as a weapon or a criterion for worth?
It is not enough to say that “everyone is beautiful in their own way,” to quote an insipid, grammatically inferior Ray Stevens’ song lyric. Some “body positivists” would have media drilling the empowerment of all body types into cultural consciousness.To do so, expands the definition beyond meaning, dilutes its aesthetic etymology and weakens it as a tool for evaluation of non-humans. Beauty is not merely in the eyes of the beholder as there are objective criteria for evaluating beautiful art or poetry, for instance.
Miller offers another conception:
Instead of insisting that beauty is necessary for everyone, more body-positive activists are working toward making beauty optional—something we can pursue if it matters to us, but also something we can have full and satisfying lives without. We should affirm our bodies for what they can do, how they can feel, the tribulations they’ve survived, and the amazing minds they carry around, without having to first justify their existence by looking pretty.
This is not merely a manifesto for those perceived as old and ugly to feel better about themselves. It takes a body fullness that does not need outward validation, a self-sufficiency that manifests contentment and dispassionate awareness of cultural tagging. Critical thinking skills help to distinguish self from selling, what is sold to and through women.
Whether or not I have succeeded as a parent in a myriad of ways from teaching them to clean up after themselves to balancing a bank account, I have given it my all to encourage my children–all of them (daughters, nieces, nephews, students)–to think. And why I love my careers as teacher, writer and mother–for the seemingly insignificant but wholly critical contribution I attempt daily at raising awareness, teaching analytical skills by which to destroy the inherited, constructed world. It’s the least this world citizen can do.
In the gaze of the other 