12:37.
Flower Face - Angela 🎶
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| Oliver says it all. Scene from Little Miss Sunshine |
Do not read this italicized paragraph, it’s depressing.
Jumpstart to 'Beauty and Bad faith' and please read till the end, otherwise just stop.
Although Mbti tested me assertive, but I’ve been so turbulent lately that indecisiveness has become a game of odds to me. The saga of my life has reached the crescendo of its künstlerroman story-line. Perhaps this is the phase where I come to grips with the sham notions of innocence and innateness. However, how do I redeem my happy-pig state? it’s a question I need not to answer but rather rethink and transcend.
Beauty and Bad faith.
Let me briefly start this off, with the Sartrean idea of ‘Bad Faith’ in my attempt to rethink false values that hindered people’s creative potentials during their lifetime. I’ve always liked the collocation of ‘creative potential’ as it sounds inclusive and authentic. Whenever I come across it, I overlook its deeper and actual meaning. This is not to intensify a very random collocation that I have come up with, but it is the central impetus of the third-wave feminist discourse, which celebrates women altogether; be it of brown pigment, lesbian or overweight. Before this inclusion, bad faith as Sartre contends, with its social and cultural edifices distorted the authentic within us. Think of it as a piece of news or more of a gossip in its moroccan framework. When a woman tells another woman tidings, that woman-to-woman chain reaction distorts news and creates a whole different information that people has come to believe; they have faith in it, and BOOOI! it’s bad. Same with beauty, the other day someone in mbti’s group asked for a definition of beauty. Alas! everyone gave what they consider an objective definition of beauty. Little did they know, the moment they claimed its objectivity, neutrality had become neutered (get it! wordplay lol). I had to explain since people there were actually very creative with their questions and views, and I had to contribute with what I envisage to be an introduction to an interesting view of beauty, I wasn’t expecting it to be endorsed but it did and I liked the group even more.
Beauty and Locke’s tabula rasa.
There are two ways in viewing the world; One, believe in values to be innate which leads to believing in intelligent design with an edifice and a set of moral codes. Two, Believing in primal human desires, but not values since they are dynamic and fluid. As a postmodernist, I see the second as close to human understanding. That does not mean that I’m overlooking the first since I’m very agnostic when it comes to logocentric and ultimate reality.
Locke in his empiricist attempt to approach human understanding, comes to a conclusion that human values are not innate, but are acquired with experience and the burgeoning of civilizations. He contends that, humans are contentless in their embryonic stages, or as he puts it, they are a clean slate ‘tabula rasa’ then comes the social values. In similar fashion with Sartre, de Beauvoir and their existential coevals, values are socially and culturally constructed rather than they are of inborn significance. Beauty alike, or Beauty standards in general, are more or less in the same trajectory. A very good example is that of Zania. This character from ‘The Robber Bride’ a novel by Margaret Atwood, represents beauty standards at its best. Atwood for me, is the paragon of feminism that should be looked at to represent women. She does not merely critique men, but also women who corroborate and assimilate notions of agreed-upon-beauty. It genuinely sucks. Same as canonizing literature. One that makes Shakespeare or Wordsworth great not because they are great, but because they are chosen to be so, while there are very talented writers that are eclipsed for reasons that do not represent literature as the cannon requires.
What’s even Beauty at this point?
The reason that motivated me to write this, was a girl on my friend list that praised skinny girls and wrote a whole diatribe on why they are more beautiful than overweight girls. Such a waste of time I had reading a grammatically fucked up essay. The amount of brainwashed claims there was just boundless. What makes a skinny girl better? her arguments were literally against what she stands for, ‘Objectification of Women’s body’. Yet in that piece of junk literature, she built her animadversion on overtly-sexual features. Doesn’t mean I prefer overweight girls, conversely, I found it repulsive from other responses that favored overweight girls with lustful features alike. The way I see it, is like a scene from ‘Patch Adams’, when Patch went to a wack shack and there was this guy who told him how many finger he sees. He said ‘four’ but that patient kept telling him that it’s wrong though he was pointing with four knuckles. What he told him was, that he is focusing on the problem and not the solution. Patch then, started to see ‘eight’ fingers rather than four. This is more or less like our situation here. We see what we have now from culturally inherited values that serve no authentic but false faith.
Stop Chasing.
Beauty as Confucius contemplates, is everywhere, only that not everyone beholds it. We are always chasing this ubiquitous concept that appears to be in no time soon, caught. For me, to catch it is to concede the fact that it has been commodified. There are different Zanias in tv and billboards, women and men see them and unconsciously covet to assimilate their characteristics onto their bodies. If you’re reading this, know that you are fucking beautiful not because someone says so, but because it’s facts. Don’t give in to chasing false liberty, cos’ it’s one way or another driven by lucrative reasons and not genuine ones.
Love, Emad.
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