You know, dude, said a freshly showered naked man in his mid-70s to his altered ago as he put on his tri-focals and leaned forward to peer into the wide mirror backing the sinks in his
bathroom, every time I do this I think Look away, you're hideous. From forehead to ankle, in various places to varying degrees, the exitless maze of my Byzantine skin is puckered, seersuckered, scored, chevroned, tilded, trenched, crinkled,
parenthesized, hashtagged, rippled like lake water agitated by the drippings from a rower's oar, fanned out in creases like stylized sun rays, ringed like the winner in a carnival toss-game, pebbled and sunken like a deflated leather basketball, tesselated
like a gator, or corrugated like ET. Ouch. Its elastic gone, it folds, it droops, it jiggles. It's dreggy, it's drecky, it's de trop. Yo mama.
Venerable one, replied his altered ego, you are blinded by your sight. You hold the mirror up to nature, but you don't see reality. What you see is what you don't get. Slip through that looking glass. Go East, old man, to the
land of wabi-sabi. Unclench. Cling not to anger, disgust, remorse, sadness. Let go of your pinched Western esthetic. As you gaze at yourself, find the beauty in decay. The patina of age is lovelier than the bloom of youth,
a dessicated raisin more profoundly pleasing than a plump grape. The warping of time gives birth to the sublime. The symmetric, the pneumatic, the smooth, the firm are far too easy to love, like snow-capped mountains, moonlit lakes, Neil Diamond
songs. Don't mourn lost September morns; rejoice in the continually metamorphosing embers of November. The metastisizing of flaws is fascinating. Impermanence and entropy are liberating. The tarnished, the hoarfrosted,
the withered, the scarred, the nicked--the soul trembles before the austere, impersonal glory of the authentic. Keats was half right: truth is beauty. The imperfect is the tense of life. The rough is itself the diamond. To a fully opened
eye, the tangled spaghetti of Maggie Smith's facial wrinkles rocks; Clint Eastwood's crags make the day.
Dude, I'd like to believe you, I really would. You mean well.
You're a loyal altered ego carrying out your dream job--that is to say, your job of dreaming. It's why you exist. I eye the glass, you offer the reconciling gloss. You speak of the union of soul and oversoul, of atonement with nature, of
transcendence. But I call that wobbly-sobby. Your view is refracted through a rosy prism of spiritualism, whereas I can only see through the glass darkly. My view is superficial, my interpretation literal. There is no hidden meaning.
The attempt to expand consciousness by whatever means--meditation or psychotropical drugs or speaking in tongues--and the Platonic quest to find the ideal, which is the real, behind the real, which apparently is not, are equally vainglorious. Appearance
is reality. We are animated matter. We age. We begin to disintegrate. We lose whatever beauty we had and with it our vigor and power and control over ourselves and our environment. An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered
coat upon a stick, and no matter what the poet's name, there's no yeast to leaven our decline. We become irrelevant. We die. We fully disintegrate.
Executive
ego of mine, even if we stipulate (as we certainly should) that our flesh has an Ozymandate to die, and even if we grant (as I'm arguing we probably should not, because hiding in the hideous I perceive an awestruck "o" and a reverential "deus") that seeing
is believing, that there is no ideal behind the real, the continuous kaleidoscoping of the epidermis on its journey from birth to earth is wonderful in the most literal sense. Become your own seeing master and teach yourself to behold the marvels of
the journey. It's not a matter of ratiocination or drugs or ecstatic frenzies. It's a matter of attention, repetition. It's a matter of classical conditioning. As a cheese eater, you progressed from flavorless slices of Kraft American
to nutty emmentaler to peppery pecorino to the lushly rotting blue veins of Gorgonzola. With painting, you gradually discovered many varieties to savor, from the picturesque to the poignant to the painful to the pathological. Botticelli's "The
Birth of Venus" and Monet's "Water Lilies" are gorgeous, but you also found provocative rewards in Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights," Dali's "The Persistence of Memory," and Picasso's "Guernica," not to mention the geometric distortions of "Les Demoiselles
d'Avignon" and his other Cubist works. You've investigated the Ashcan School's exploration of life's seamy side and have looked at the dirty, brutish, raw "Outsider Art" in vogue today. You've learned that grotesque and gruesome are not in themselves
ugly. You've seen that grotesque and gruesome can grow on you.
I certainly have. That's the problem that I've been at pains to point out.
Yes, they have become you--but with practice you will see that they also become you. Google facial closeups of such momentary monuments of magnificence as Charlize Theron, Mila Kunis, Gisele Bundschen, Sofia Vergara,
James Dean, Brad Pitt, Channing Tatum, Bradley Cooper. Study them daily. Sooner than you might expect, their monotonous callow blandness will come to seem chilly, not cool. Google facial closeups of molderers who have eschewed Botox and silicone,
like Maggie and Clint, Dame Judy Dench, golf commentator Judy Rankin, Willem Defoe, Nick Nolte. Become one with them. Let the Stockholm syndrome take effect. Sooner than you might expect, you will warm to their textured, tortured tissue.
Use Netflix to look back at Miss Jean Brodie in her so-called prime, her vapid face like plain tofu, and contrast its insipidity with the mien of the Dowager Countess. Then return to your bathroom mirror and give yourself a chance to rejoice in
reality. Everyone, including yourself, deserves a fair seeing.
You know, dude, that just might work. Maybe what you're saying isn't so wobbly-sobby. I think
I'll give your aversion-immersion therapy a try. How I'd love to be able to fall into a deep pool of narcissism again!