 |
| Aged twenty, in North Wales, very much a posed pic. Forget RR, forget Tone Deaf, forget all the confessions and assertions I've made. What would you conclude? If you're good I'll make my own conclusions |
Looking objectively at your mirror reflection can be revelatory. Barring relations, friends and acquaintances, this is how the world sees you. Your thoughts, opinions, good and bad deeds go for nothing. You are your appearance.
Things may be inferred. That you are young or old, short-sighted (if you wear glasses), perhaps predisposed to laughter, careless about yourself (viz: a burger crumb on your lip). Handsome or ugly depending on who’s looking. But the larger elements of your character (kind/cruel, clever/slow, charitable/mean-spirited, capable/clumsy) are hidden from most onlookers.
George Orwell went further, saying, at age fifty, we all have the face we deserve. But I can’t help feeling he had one or two people in mind and didn’t like them.
My appearance recently changed and – briefly - I was vain enough to welcome this. Hist! This is no boast. You could say (metaphorically) I ended up with egg on my face. Ha, bloody ha.
Post op, mid-December, I couldn’t be bothered to get my hair cut. By yesterday it was longer than at any time in my life. My hair is white, thick, showing no signs of retreat. Detectable at a hundred yards.
More, my quiff (the bit hanging over my forehead) now incorporated a delicious wave whose potential I never knew existed. How pretty.
Simultaneously traditional hay-fever set in. Streaming eyes, sneezing, mild feverishness. I took anti-histamines with varying results. Eyes bogged as I awoke. These symptoms became unbearable.
Light-bulb moment! I dredged up my Seattle Mariners baseball cap and wore it back-to-front, keeping the hair out of my eyes. IMMEDIATE cessation of hay-fever symptoms. Hair now cut.
Alas, I did no forensics. Took no photo. Asked no comparisons. But it’s possible I may have seemed prettier. Where’s the disinterested pedestrian when you need one?
IS THIS AN ORIGINAL SUGGESTION?
Let’s simplify what I’ve said above. We check our face in the mirror and we go
out into the world. Most people we then encounter know nothing about who we
are. Yet they make judgments – brief or lengthy – on us as they pass. The only truly
distinctive feature about us is our face. What sort of judgment does our face
encourage? By extension, how do we judge our own face?
The prospect may terrify some, fascinate others. Some (often
for dubious motives) may regard such self-scrutiny as unhealthy. To those I say,
bollocks. It’s a legitimate subject; give it a whirl. Try to be honest and - yes - it's going to be hard; lies
are, however, acceptable provided they’re amusing. Outright self-aggrandisement
is boring.
As a relation, as you rule, I would no bet qualified to give an opinion even if you had shown us the evidence. As for the baseball cap versus the haircut it is a toss-up as to which qualifies for Occam's Razor but I think the latter has it.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: Three misconceptions in a mere handful of words. Is it really that hard to grasp or are you - yet again! - in pursuit of one of those non-existent hidden meanings that you believe lie at the heart of my posts.
DeleteTwo possible aids: "Infer" and "imply" have different meanings; "disinterested" does not mean "un-interested".
Avus (see below) seems to have had no problems.
At first glance I thought the photo was of a Nazi Alpine Trooper!
ReplyDeleteAvus: That first glance could be nearer the truth than you might have imagined. The peaked cap was bought in Germany when I stayed - on exchange - with a German family. You might also have added "a defeated Nazi Alpine trooper". Even now I cannot explain the surly look. I was at the time on my first leave from National Service.
DeleteI was aware of the main point you were making and the invitation offered but decided not to rise to that. Rather, I picked up on the secondary part of your post which majored on the solution of a problem. I saw no hidden meaning. The possibility of a disinterested person had no bearing on my comment.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: The subject is: to most people we are only as we appear. Briefly my appearance changed. Everything is interdependent, with quite a bit of self-deprecation thrown into the pot. But, never mind.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: The cap was not an option to the haircut, it was a necessary prelude. And the idea that I'd mysteriously imposed rules suggested you'd missed the point entirely. Yet again: never mind. Qui s'excuse, s'accuse.
ReplyDeleteIt’s a serious look but I wouldn’t call it surly. Bored? Impatient perhaps, maybe a consciously “rugged” look. The word that first entered my mind: Tyrolean. Second was “military”, but I know a bit of your service history and the climbing gear didn’t jibe.
ReplyDeleteMikeM: You're right about the "consciously 'rugged' look". I was on leave from what Americans call Boot Camp, the first six or seven weeks of National Service - communal life, shouted at, reduced to a cypher, injected with obedience. Back in the mountains I was seeking to retrieve some of the "real" me even if it was a phony concept (I was a lousy climber).
DeleteYou and I have a problem with "gibe". Apart from its marine meaning, where it's spelt with a y, it has exactly opposite definitions on either side of the Atlantic. To me it means "resist", to you it means "fit in". One has to be careful.
I still have the boots, by the way. I could no more throw them away than discard my left leg.
I became uncomfortably familiar with how I look to others when I was tasked to draw a self-portrait in art class when I was 16. It took a while, and it was a pretty good likeness. But I have never felt comfortable with my nose since. And my eyes are too small. Actually, I exaggerate my looks in my mind. To me, I am a caricature, a cartoon. I draw pictures of Grandma and Grandpa for my grandchildren, and I don't hold back. Round face, big nose, small eyes and mouth, and crazy hair. They laugh, I laugh, and it's all good. They are introduced to exaggeration and farce, a legitimate kind of humor. It takes nothing away from me.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, I don't think people who don't know me even notice me if I walk by. Now I wonder. At this point in my life they probably think, that little old woman sure walks fast. I wonder why she doesn't cut her hair?
Colette: You've been incredibly honest about yourself, both in the way you look inwards and - much harder - how you imagine others see you. I think most of us exaggerate our physical failings, perhaps to be on what we think is the "the safe side", ie, not to be seen boasting about our looks. I commend you for this.
DeleteAdolescence was an agony for me (but then I'm not alone there). Each day I became more and convinced that women of my age found me repellent. This was particularly manifest when - living in Bradford, 200 miles away - I took solitary holidays in London and walked the streets, staring in wonder at the avalanche of beautiful women, all of them ignoring me, their minds on other things. Later, when I worked in London, I was of course to learn that this is typical of London behaviour, both men and women
Ironically, given your confession, I told myself that my nose was my only decent feature. That it was straight and "Roman". But for some reaon this didn't compensate for being "too thin".
Journalism forced me to present myself more aggressively. In interviewing people one has to adopt the upper hand. Many years later, post USA and now a reasonably well-known magazine editor, I was met at a railway station by a woman in her twenties who was to drive me to an appointment. She was in PR, a very vague profession, and in a gush of frankness which she probably lived to regret, she said she'd known of me beforehand, that I had "this reputation" (for outpokenness in public), and that she'd been "terrified" at the prospect of acting as my chauffeur.
Again I was struck by irony. How different things were compared with my tortured youth. How I'd built up an adult carapace which seemed to protect from embarrassment, even inflicted embarrassment on others. Also that the carapace had, as it were, "become me".
Ans here's another irony which bears on you. During my adolecescence I found myself drawn to women who were gentle, modest about themselves, who didn't take the initiative in conversation. Also older women. Not that it did me any good. It would have have taken a sci-fi time warp to have arranged this but had the adolescent me encountered your "little old woman" scuttling round the corner, those could well have been the qualities I deemed attractive. From my side of the fence it's not the brassy, outspoken women who always win.
Thanks for taking up the theme.