The Beautiful Anthology (17 page)

But if anything must die, let it be the ego. Let it go. What I want: for you to write on my flesh everything you see and hear when you sleep. Wanna believe the pen outlasts the blade. Freedom outlasts the chains.

I wanna shred your self-doubt, refold it into a confident origami. Wanna see you go out into the night, take a deep breath. Sip in stars, planets, moonbeams. Let me visit the solar system in your head. Let me be asteroid, nebula. Let us become the Universe of We.

Don’t wanna be old news, worn-out shoes, poorly played blues. Don’t wanna be a perpetual cruiser up and down the Boulevard of Bad Vibes.

I wanna shake our collective birthright of shame, blame. Want the veins in my hands to be Sanskrit letters spelling out the words: “I will hold you up when you’re down.”

I wanna believe that had we lived in the Warsaw Ghetto, we would’ve been survivors. We would’ve been books for all to read in the secret libraries.

I want our hearts and minds to unite and revolutionize. Don’t want racism’s fist to be super-sized. And finally, I want every sacred word in every language – dead and alive – to be your first and last name. So whenever I call out to you, it feels like I’m praying.

MATTHEW BALDWIN

THE FORM WITHIN THE STONE

I want to be one of the beautiful people. The problem is, I have no real idea what that actually means.

Accurately defining beauty is like trying to lift a bead of mercury with your bare hands. Certain things spring up when the word is tumbled around in my head, images and landscapes and people, but while I can tell you
what
about them I find beautiful, I cannot articulate
why.
Attempting to find a common thread other than my own subjective perception is an exercise in futility.

Being a writer, I retreat to my first refuge when confronted with a word I don’t understand: the dictionary. Except the definition of beauty I find there is a perfect example of my conundrum: “The quality attributed to whatever pleases or satisfies the senses or the mind, as by line, color, form, texture, proportion, rhythmic motion, tone etc. or by behavior, attitude etc.”

I’ll give the dictionary credit for being accurate in its non-specificity, but really, that’s it? Centuries’ worth of effort by artists, poets, and philosophers and “whatever” is the best we can come up with? Is there really no quantifiable means by which beauty can be measured, other than the trite “eye of the beholder” aphorism?

The inclination here is to say, well, yes, of course there is. After all, the concept of a physical standard of beauty that exists as an attainable goal is pervasive in our culture, with entire industries based around it. Infotainment television programs and tabloid periodicals habitually rate the appearances of the current hot celebrities of the moment, dissecting their appearance down to the tiniest blemish. Beauty products are marketed with the underlying message that a woman’s inherent genetic gifts simply aren’t good enough.

A quick survey of the various men’s and women’s magazines commercially available is all it takes to spot the ubiquitous offers of self-improvement techniques they offer, especially since every headline for “Rock-hard abs!” or “Firm, tight buns!” is always coupled with some variant of “How to have your best sex ever!” The trend runs the gamut from
Playboy
to
Cosmopolitan
,
Men’s Health
to
Women’s Fitness
, each of which is gorged with images of nubile young things displaying miles of flawless skin and nonexistent reserves of body fat. They always seem happy! They probably have sex all the time! Who
wouldn’t
want to look like them? And hey, if exercise and diet don’t do the trick, a person can always turn to the array of chemical and surgical methods we’ve devised.

What this particular malformed subsection of our culture is really doing, though, is conflating
beauty
with
attractiveness
, which itself is just a coded term for sexual desirability. The equating of one with the other is, I think, a false and at times dangerous dichotomy. The thousands of eating disorders suffered by (mostly) women in the last few decades didn’t develop spontaneously.

I won’t deny that there’s a relationship between the two, a tidal zone where they overlap and interact, but they are by no means synonymous; one is merely a function of the other. By merit of being a heterosexual male, my perspective of what is beautiful is in part shaped by my attraction to the female form, but it is not dictated by it. I recognize in my platonic female friends those same traits I would name as beautiful in a young woman I pass on the street – a stray tussock of auburn hair, perhaps, or the gentle curve of a calf muscle half hidden under the hem of a skirt – without the stirring of lust the latter provokes in me. And while I might find a piece of architecture or a particular painting beautiful, I don’t want to sleep with it.

Who exactly set this standard, I wonder? Who decided that these body types – the swollen, artificial breasts, the oversized muscles, the hairless genitals and ageless faces – were the unilateral epitome of human beauty? The cynic in me is able to come to only one conclusion: those who stand to profit from selling it to us. They’ve turned a single, monolithic idea of beauty into a commodity, one so mercilessly conformist that Marilyn Monroe, a woman universally regarded as lovely in her day, would be considered chubby if she emerged on the scene now. And the consuming public snaps it up and asks for seconds.

I don’t care much for cosmetic surgery, except in cases of medical necessity or to repair extant injuries; it’s the eye-candy equivalent of high fructose corn syrup. The plasticized, Barbie doll image of the typical
Playboy
Playmate has never struck me as particularly beautiful, their bodies all seemingly pressed from the same mold and subsequently airbrushed to a further degree of artificiality. No, give me instead the face of a sleeping lover in the soft light of the early morning, her features free of makeup and her hair tousled.

There was a lovely young woman I knew back when I was a student, with whom I used to share a bit of a flirtation though nothing ever came of it, as she only ever had eyes for other men. One night at a house party when we were both a bit drunk, however, she took me aside and showed me her breasts. I saw for the first time a scar on one, thicker than my finger, running a jagged line from areola to sternum, and understood why she never wore tops that showed off her cleavage, despite being amply gifted in that regard. She asked me how hideous I thought it looked, and when I told her it was worth kissing, this woman, who never suffered from a lack of male attention, burst into tears.

Perhaps what is most beautiful to me, then, about the human body is the extreme range of variety provided by such an unremarkable morphology. No horns, no feathers, no striped fur, just a torso, four limbs, and a head, which can still form so many interesting and different combinations that imposing such an arbitrary standard is simply cruel. It’s the imperfections, those deviations from the form that give us our uniqueness.

Those trite aphorisms, damnable though they may be, are correct. Whatever pleases the senses or mind is a matter of subjective individual perception, and perception is adjustable. After all, a competent photographer with the right lenses can turn an unremarkable subject into a wonder to behold. So while I may not be able to concretely define even my own exact perspective on beauty, I can say this much: It should be verbally and vigorously recognized, whatever form it takes.

But where, then, does that leave me and my own body image struggles? Leaving aside the matter of my physical health, what goal am I working toward when I exercise? After all, doubtless there are plenty who would find me beautiful or attractive regardless of the state of my waistline.

Ultimately, I think, it comes down again to subjectivity. About me finding an expression of my physical self that satisfies my mind. I’m not sure when I decided I don’t like my body, or even if I ever consciously did. It wasn’t until I began to lose weight that I realized just how unhappy I’d been with the sight of myself. I was, in fact, rather depressed over the matter, a strange epiphany to come to as I’d never considered myself a person with “body issues.” Other than a mild hatred for my frequently uncooperative hair, my looks were simply my looks, and that was that. To hell with anybody who thought otherwise, I told myself.

Now, three days a week, I rise before dawn and head off to the gym, where I spend thirty-five minutes on a powered elliptical cross-trainer, running through a program designed for maximum calorie burn; afterward, I throw myself at the weight machines, pushing, pulling, or lifting pieces of heavy metal at angles intended to strengthen and sculpt my muscles. By the end of my workout, I’m surfing high on a wave of endorphins even though my body is a sweaty, stinky, and soon-to-be-aching mess. Still, the results are plainly visible: I’ve lost about fifteen pounds in the last month.

I subject myself to this regimen in part out of concern for my physical health. The excess weight I’d been carrying exacerbated a recent joint injury, and according to my doctor dropping pounds will both expedite my recovery and prevent the injury from becoming chronic. But there’s another reason, as well, one that caters to a level of vanity I’m ashamed to admit to.

Turns out that underneath this contrarian ambivalence was unhappiness buried so deep I’d forgotten it was there; it surfaced like an exhumed corpse once the initial results of my workout routine became evident. Discovering how happy I am with the newer version of myself taking shape meant confronting how much I disliked the old model, which I am only now able to confess. I wasn’t simply heavy; I was genuinely overweight, and it was having profoundly negative effects on my physical and mental health, and had been for so long that I’d ceased noticing.

But where to go from here? I don’t want to look like the people in those magazines, my appearance a product of plastic and chemicals. I’ve no desire for the bulgy muscles of a bodybuilder. But my early-morning workouts, at first such a chore to undertake, have become a joy. As I slim down, I sleep better, have more energy, and yes, am even feeling sexier and more attractive. I admit that I like this feeling, superficial though it may be, but not as much as I love the physical sensation of my body as this efficient, organic machine, one growing more and more refined with every stride on the elliptical or lift of the dumbbell. Regardless of what the final destination of my physique may be, I’m enjoying the journey.

In an art class I took in college, there was an anecdote passed around about the Renaissance artist Michelangelo. Michelangelo claimed he had no idea what the end result would be when he was presented with a fresh block of marble. He believed that there was already a work of art formed inside the stone, and it was only a matter of chipping away the excess around the statue until the next
Pietà
or
David
presented itself.

That sounds like a good enough plan to me.

MELISSA FEBOS

CRAZY BEAUTIFUL

Tragic beauty had always been the sort I aspired to. Tough, stumbling, hopeless hotness. I used to watch old Marlon Brando and Paul Newman movies and never quite knew if I wanted to save them, fuck them, or
be
them. That distinction was always a hard one for me. For a long time, it was exactly the sort of ambiguity I hoped to inspire.

In my disastrous, drug-addled late teens and early twenties, my beauty ideal accorded perfectly with my lifestyle. Convenient, though not coincidental. I saw myself as some kind of irresistibly hot, hopeless mess, the sort that promised a really good time for all the trouble.

The hijinks associated with so frequently being wasted I saw as a kind of bravery. I was very hardcore. Key points in my case for being a romantic antihero included the following list of things that happened on my dates:

• Loitering around pay phones for hours in sweltering August heat