i know it's just the war
Apr. 23rd, 2005 05:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rmI'm walking home with a sack of groceries, and as I pass down a block I pass down several times a day every day a man from a group of people hanging out there takes a handful of change out of his pocket, shakes it like dice and then pours it out on the ground. $1.37, but reading the results he informs me, "The signs say you will always have that ugly, retarded face and there is nothing you can do about it." The people he is with, of mixed gender and race, and all between the ages of about 20 and 35, laugh. I ignore it, and try tell myself it's just the war, not the one in Iraq, but the one that happens every day in New York about gentrification, race and money. I know half my neighborhood hates the other half and vice versa, but mostly, we all keep it to ourselves, except when things get out of hand like in the blackout or when the buildings come down.
It's hard for me to be surprised by these things. It's a rare day when someone doesn't call me ugly. Isn't that strange? It may be a rare day when someone doesn't call you ugly too, you just might not be as tuned in on the streets. Or maybe I'm just lucky.
Sometimes, I think it's because I don't have a modern face. It's such a throwback, the issue isn't that I'm not an MTV hottie, but that I look like someone who should have died decades or centuries ago. Maybe people see me and recognize the dead, and in their fear of mortality declare my features sin.
I wonder about things like that all the time. Strange mystical reimaginings of the casually cruel world. I also wonder sometimes if we hate the Arab world because they gave us the zero. Perhaps we do not see a revolution in math, an efficiency in accounting but an entire people that innovated the language of numbers solely so that we would at long last be able to name our worthlessness.
All of this though just underlines the reasons I don't do so well in the world. I think there's some sort of sublime artfulness under all the random hate and it makes me oblivious, both to the sheer bludgeoning stupidity of it all and of course the fact that I may indeed be ugly.
It's hard for me to be surprised by these things. It's a rare day when someone doesn't call me ugly. Isn't that strange? It may be a rare day when someone doesn't call you ugly too, you just might not be as tuned in on the streets. Or maybe I'm just lucky.
Sometimes, I think it's because I don't have a modern face. It's such a throwback, the issue isn't that I'm not an MTV hottie, but that I look like someone who should have died decades or centuries ago. Maybe people see me and recognize the dead, and in their fear of mortality declare my features sin.
I wonder about things like that all the time. Strange mystical reimaginings of the casually cruel world. I also wonder sometimes if we hate the Arab world because they gave us the zero. Perhaps we do not see a revolution in math, an efficiency in accounting but an entire people that innovated the language of numbers solely so that we would at long last be able to name our worthlessness.
All of this though just underlines the reasons I don't do so well in the world. I think there's some sort of sublime artfulness under all the random hate and it makes me oblivious, both to the sheer bludgeoning stupidity of it all and of course the fact that I may indeed be ugly.
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no subject
Date: 2005-04-23 11:40 pm (UTC)Bah! Bah! I say!
So many of the people I see on TV - these MTV and tabloid caricatures, these icons born out of some porn flick pastiche - are horrendously, commonly ugly. Or, perhaps merely brazenly unattractive.
What does a face suggest? I look at the goddesses of celebrity held aloft, and most of the time, their faces suggest nothing more to me than an upscale porn star. Most of the time, they suggest nothing more than merely sex - and bad cliched trashy sex at that. Their faces are perfectly suited to suggesting nothing more than what any one could contemplate.
I liked the poetry, as it were, in your words above, though, and I think in some ways you're close to what the problem is for these people. Your face suggests more than merely a body. Your face suggests stories and ideas and places and feelings that they'd actually have to think about and become a part of to understand in any real way. The random MTV visage doesn't stir that in them: they're just pretty empty faces or trigger some snarled thought that amounts to "I'd hit it." They don't have to engage these other faces on anything more than a hormonal or reptilian level.
But, anyway, bah! I'd rather, if you'll pardon my sentiment here, gaze upon your features and ponder the meanings and potential narratives and histories and the rare beauty found within than to spend half a minute trying to figure out why Britney Spears' face makes me worry something may crawl out of it and attack me.