Beyond eighty you don't give a toss how you look. I'm scheduled for a hair appointment with Shara at 12.30 and I'm easily a month late. In fact I'm more concerned at my overgrown eyebrows which madly tickle my eyelids. The great thing about Shara is I may sit down and she needs no instruction; we chat about her daughter and she gets on with the hacking. The fee is so small I am able to tip her munificently and feel great for at least half an hour.
Most of which is a nonsense. A biggish fib. In parts I lie.
Here and there are shards of truth but the over-arching concept - that I am unvain - is simply untrue. Why be only a month late at the salon? Why not half a year? Wasn't I rhapsodising about wearing black earlier this year? I am horribly vain about singing. That my written sentences should parse. That some of my posts should surprise.
That second para is received wisdom. It could pass for truth in cocktail party chat. Received wisdom usually goes unchallenged, often because people don't care. Received wisdom is a shaky wall built from cliché bricks.
My hair is long, true. But it may quickly be made to look unexceptional. It’s long because of my growing reluctance - with age - to phone for an appointment. A strange form of decay. As a journalist I used a phone all the time; now I approach it with timidity. Confessing this makes me mildly uncomfortable. Which is perhaps good for my soul.
Except I'm not in favour of hair-shirtism. And I have powerful doubts about my soul.
See how received wisdom can creep up.
So here's a surprise ...the photo on my university's website was taken so long ago, that even I realized it was unbecoming to have it appear. Even I realized the incoming students wouldn't recognize me. So I asked a graduate student with a Canon camera to take my offical photograph ... we stepped out into the spring weather, blue skies above, dogwood in bloom ...
ReplyDeleteLet's see what results ...
RW (Zs): What is truth? said jesting Pilate. As far as I remember no answer was provided. I've just checked and it seems Pilate didn't wait but slung his hook. Wise man. The only thing we can be certain of is that truth has no absolute meaning.
ReplyDeleteWhich photo of you tells the greater truth? Never mind the answer, it's the question that's wrong. Fogged by relativity considerations. You could say it depends on where you are in space and time. And whether you're in serious or facetious mode. One possible response (not terribly satisfactory, I admit) is: neither or both.
Should you then show both photos, side by side? How does that grab you? All it says is time passes which we sort of know. Parenthetically I am charmed all the way to my belly-button by your use of "unbecoming" - it's probably safe to say that at the time you typed it you were alone in this, certainly in the Midwest, possibly in the whole of the North American landmass. If ever an adjective was tailored to the needs of the English middle-classes (beset by doilies and twinsets) this it.
Give up. Perhaps the dogwood will help.
What are twinsets?
ReplyDelete"The only thing we can be certain of is that truth has no absolute meaning" is one of those statements that seems a snake that eats its own tail. Who says that statement is true, and why? I suppose we could write a book about truth in the age of relativism, but I don't want to do it.
I don't think that I've ever seen a picture of Rouchswalwe, but I don't mind. I have a "picture" of what she is like in various essential ways. Is that truth, and is it more accurate than her photographs?
Marly: A twinset is in a finely-knit cardigan worn over an equally finely-knit pullover, both in the same colour, typically beige. Worn by UK women d'un certain age (ie, neither young nor old) in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties, the mother of 2.3 (3 recurring) children doing well at the upper end of secondary school. She does not go out to work, her archetype appears in detergent commercials and - if we're to believe in this shocking distortion - she visits the hair salon every ten days. Because of my age relative to the evolution of women's fashion it is to this strangely powerful image that I revert when I engage in private contemplation of purely external feminine attractiveness. Please note the key words in this latter sentence: "purely external". This odd fixation may have something to do with the fact that my adolescence extended beyond all conventional boundaries.
ReplyDeleteThe simile you offer is - if I've got things right - a slightly tangential elaboration of the point I was trying to make. Since the concept "absolute meaning" is, philosophically, meaningless you are entitled to suggest (kindly) I am talking bollocks. But we have to start somewhere. The answer to your rhetorical question is, of course, I say it.
Photographs occurred in this exchange because RW (zS) mentioned them. They formed a minor pivot in her relationship with society in general and her alma mater in particular. Just to blur the situation there's more than a hint of etiquette. Since your "picture" of RW (zS) is subjective, accuracy is not really a factor although it might become one if she started to rob banks.
Just in case you are in any doubt I am truly grateful for your response to this highly speculative post about my intellectual dishonesty.
PS: I regret doilies. In this context they are anachronistic.
Ah, yes. I knew that I had heard the term. One of my children went to a speech therapist when little, and she always wore those in taupe or pale sage. So some may work!
DeleteI shall never say you are talking bollocks, and not only because it's not an Americanism (although post-Potter, all sorts of things are said here that never were before.)
Hahaha!
And what about antimaccassars edged with crochet? And did I put enough c's and s's in there? Or are they a subset of doilies?
Marly: Bollocks is coarse but expressive. Even if the word had crossed the Atlantic I'd not expect it of you. Without in any sense being genteel or even prim you get along without such words. I used it knowingly on your behalf - self-sacrificially so that any subsequent obloquy would descend on me not on you. What are friends for?
DeleteDoilies and/or antimacassars (One c too many in your spelling) only survived WW2 in the homes of the elderly. My maternal grannie had antimacassars and they were a great nuisance. The second you sat in a chair thus equipped, the thing started to migrate, causing my grannie to tut. They would not have appeared in the home of the woman I have depicted. She, her traits and her furnishings are to some extent captured in a play called Abigail's Party by the famed Mike Leigh, although wiki says that the ambience is that of the seventies. I tend to confuse UK manners in this period since I lived in Pennsylvania between 1966 and 1972. That said, I turned the TV off after a few minutes of Abigail, finding it excruciatingly apt; years later, and for the same reason, I reacted similarly to Ricky Gervais in The Office.