The changing face of beauty .
In a waiting room I picked up a plastic surgery magazine. The fact that plastic surgery is being promoted as a fashionable commodity is alarming. And we should be alarmed by the cultural movement towards the attainment of perfection – and the abundance of sexed up chicks and soft porn images that surround us – and our kids. And it’s not only women who are suffering from the promotion of an unattainable ideal. It’s men and kids too. Talk to young people and most of them don’t like what they look like. It causes them great agony – and it’s stopping them in their tracks. So let’s just keep questioning the ‘ideal’ being promoted on telly, internet, social media, in magazines, on catwalks, movies and stages – in doctors surgery waiting rooms.
Write On .
I flunked English (and art) and dropped out of school. But I’ve since found reading, writing and drawing provides an essential power source. So even if you struggle with reading, writing, spelling, or your writing’s messy, you can’t draw – keep your mind open to these mediums. And wouldn’t we all have a stronger sense of identity and place if they made studying your ‘Self’ as important a topic as English and Maths at school? And music, art, poetry and film were on the book-list for this subject. But it’s never too late to make your ‘self’ a topic to study – to seek a greater knowledge and understanding of who we are and explore the possibilities of who we can become. And if through this more people felt more comfortable and at peace with themselves (and difference), and more solid in their sense of place in the world – wouldn’t society (the world) stand to gain from this collective of more educated and contented selves?
(Art by Stormie Mills, original in colour).
From Virginia Woolf’s biography ….
“Virginia was a sane woman who had an illness. She was often a patient, but she was not a victim. She was not weak, or hysterical, or self-deluding, or guilty, or oppressed. On the contrary, she was a person of exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism, who made the best use she could, and came to the deepest understanding possible to her, of her own condition. She endured, periodically, great agony of mind and severe physical pain, with remarkably little self-pity.
She frequently uses the word ‘apprehensive’ to describe her states of mind. The word is a crucial one: the awful fear which accompanied her breakdowns and the possibility of their recurrence can never be underestimated.
What is certain is her closeness, all her life, to a terrifying edge, and her creation of a language which faces it and makes something of it. This is a life of heroism, not of oppression, a life of writing wrestled from illness, fear and pain.”
Excerpt from biography ‘Virginia Woolf’ by Hermione Lee.
Rose never feared a broken heart – she’d set herself up nicely in the mending business.
Rose lives a relatively trouble free life due to her ability to make sound decisions about relationships and all matters of the emotional kind. Rose appears unphased by the outcome of hurt because she is well practiced in the task of pain management. She takes firm and full responsibility for herself, leaving the actions and reactions of others where they rightly belong – along with their wrongs.
Her handiness in the mending department ensures she is always fully engrossed in lap and mind, far beyond all sense of conventional time – and the complication of others. Long Live Rose.
(Reposted from 2019. Find Rose in her own pocket book and in Clunk & Jam book 2019.)
Reading …. ‘Intimacy’ by Ziyad Marar. Art by Edward Hopper titled, ‘Room in New York’ (1932).
“Contemporary society discourages intimacy. We live in a self-regarding culture, soaked through with the impersonal need for instant gratification. Our goal is to get intimate with ourselves rather than others, to identify and indulge in our own desires and fantasies (where do you want to go today?) and to satisfy them by consuming the right products. Success and the pursuit of status are trumpeted at the expense of human connection. Alongside the rise and rise of consumer culture we’ve experienced a technological revolution that replaces intimacy with simulation. The age of the internet has made us all feel more connected and yet, paradoxically, more distant. With so many relationships now mediated through screens we are beginning to appreciate the limitations of digital interactions as well as the virtues. As with our attitudes to that vanishing commodity, the physical book, we are treasuring those moments of face-to-face interaction with real people in actual rather than virtual environments.”
Her heart leapt so impossibly loud it stole her every sense .
But it was always the book, held preciously close to chest, that caught and consoled her misbehaving mind.
(Clunk & Jam book).
