Lovely essay, K.! There's the true beauty not even twenty barrels of Botox could provide. Death holds us all in her sweet grip, though we sing in our chains like the sea as Dylan Thomas said. Me, I'm looking at ear iobe reduction-. I'm tired of looking like one of those stupid Hotei buddhas! Maybe a tummy tuck too. The grotesque search and imitation of youth; it's anti-life actually.
It's liberating to know one is a citizen of Deep Time, that all ones fears and concerns, searches for lost youth, for social justice- all will "go a glimmering."
That oneself and all the species will be lost in deep time and it will be as if we all never existed even the memories long lost. That's liberating, joyful, life-affirming actually!
Exquisite as always, Kathleen (I felt like calling you Kitty there because the girl is still alive and well IN YOU!). Thank you! I’m so glad you included my favorite Renaissance sculpture: the Pieta, for we enter Holy Week today. Although we will raise palms and sing “Hosanna”, this is also Passion Sunday. You give me so much to think about! I share this piece from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel “The Painted Drum:”
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”*
Let’s eat apples together, Dear Friend, and share wrinkle stories and passion to save this planet for future humans!❤️
*Originally posted by Maria Popova in her Marginalian.
Kathleen, I'd love to see a pic of you with your new "androgynous" haircut. And thank you, as always, for your words that regenerate me and others. Here's to croning! It's time. -- Rita in Waldoboro, Maine.
I try to think of wrinkles and saggings as war wounds. Badges of struggles fought, sometimes won, sometimes lost, but testament to times when we had to muster on bravely.
I remember vaguely an exchange between Clint Eastwood and some reporter a few decades back, when he was asked if he planned to get a facelift. He quipped something like, "What? And get all of all these great wrinkles?"
Wrinkles are earned. They're medals.
I had an exchange with a cousin a few years back. She said, "I want to age like Jane Fonda." I replied, "I want to age like Jane Goodall." Since then she's gotten Botox. She looks great in photos. She lives a distance away so when I finally saw her I was shocked to see that the Botox has given her face a plastic artificiality that I find a little creepy. But still, she looks a lot better in photos than I do.
My hairdresser, who has been a friend for something like 30 years, had a similar exchange with me. When I stopped dyeing my hair, I explained how my mother had had a skunk stripe of grey roots around the dye and I had that same skunk stripe, and I wanted to "age gracefully." She said, "Oh no, I want to look as fake as possible as I age." She also has done the Botox, and looks like a million bucks on camera. She also has that unnerving plasticity when you see her in real life.
We don't live our life on camera. I recognize that Clint Eastwood, when he glorified his wrinkles, came from the vantage point of the Respected Elder Man, who has no female equivalent in our culture. Our archetypes are the Wicked Witch and the Woolly-Brained Sweet Grandmother. We have no positive archetypes for intelligent ageing women. We hate them, and have hated intelligent women all their lives, why should we stop now.
I am reminded of the mortifying practice of painting (or drawing) a realistic self-portrait. It is an exercise in deep and sustained looking and reportage of what you actually see. When you're young, you see all the ways that the outer you does not match the inner you, you see all the shortcomings, all the ways you miss the Standards of Beauty even though you fall within the Perfect Age Group. When you're older, you see all the ways your current face and body fail the Fuckability Test, which is the one and only test that is applied by everyone in our culture as to the worth of a woman. You observe that you're a hag, you know that within this culture that means you are of no account, and you gather your forces and push on, through the negativity of the societal contempt you have internalized, you say heroically it shall not stop me, I will not look away, I will accurately continue to render what I see before me, and damn the torpedoes you will look at it because it will be a well-painted painting or a well-drawn drawing. And of course no one cares that you have just crossed your own Rubicon, this is your own private heroism, and you probably squeezed out a few more wrinkles as reward for the effort.
Lovely essay, K.! There's the true beauty not even twenty barrels of Botox could provide. Death holds us all in her sweet grip, though we sing in our chains like the sea as Dylan Thomas said. Me, I'm looking at ear iobe reduction-. I'm tired of looking like one of those stupid Hotei buddhas! Maybe a tummy tuck too. The grotesque search and imitation of youth; it's anti-life actually.
It's liberating to know one is a citizen of Deep Time, that all ones fears and concerns, searches for lost youth, for social justice- all will "go a glimmering."
That oneself and all the species will be lost in deep time and it will be as if we all never existed even the memories long lost. That's liberating, joyful, life-affirming actually!
Exquisite as always, Kathleen (I felt like calling you Kitty there because the girl is still alive and well IN YOU!). Thank you! I’m so glad you included my favorite Renaissance sculpture: the Pieta, for we enter Holy Week today. Although we will raise palms and sing “Hosanna”, this is also Passion Sunday. You give me so much to think about! I share this piece from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel “The Painted Drum:”
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”*
Let’s eat apples together, Dear Friend, and share wrinkle stories and passion to save this planet for future humans!❤️
*Originally posted by Maria Popova in her Marginalian.
Kathleen, I'd love to see a pic of you with your new "androgynous" haircut. And thank you, as always, for your words that regenerate me and others. Here's to croning! It's time. -- Rita in Waldoboro, Maine.
I try to think of wrinkles and saggings as war wounds. Badges of struggles fought, sometimes won, sometimes lost, but testament to times when we had to muster on bravely.
I remember vaguely an exchange between Clint Eastwood and some reporter a few decades back, when he was asked if he planned to get a facelift. He quipped something like, "What? And get all of all these great wrinkles?"
Wrinkles are earned. They're medals.
I had an exchange with a cousin a few years back. She said, "I want to age like Jane Fonda." I replied, "I want to age like Jane Goodall." Since then she's gotten Botox. She looks great in photos. She lives a distance away so when I finally saw her I was shocked to see that the Botox has given her face a plastic artificiality that I find a little creepy. But still, she looks a lot better in photos than I do.
My hairdresser, who has been a friend for something like 30 years, had a similar exchange with me. When I stopped dyeing my hair, I explained how my mother had had a skunk stripe of grey roots around the dye and I had that same skunk stripe, and I wanted to "age gracefully." She said, "Oh no, I want to look as fake as possible as I age." She also has done the Botox, and looks like a million bucks on camera. She also has that unnerving plasticity when you see her in real life.
We don't live our life on camera. I recognize that Clint Eastwood, when he glorified his wrinkles, came from the vantage point of the Respected Elder Man, who has no female equivalent in our culture. Our archetypes are the Wicked Witch and the Woolly-Brained Sweet Grandmother. We have no positive archetypes for intelligent ageing women. We hate them, and have hated intelligent women all their lives, why should we stop now.
I am reminded of the mortifying practice of painting (or drawing) a realistic self-portrait. It is an exercise in deep and sustained looking and reportage of what you actually see. When you're young, you see all the ways that the outer you does not match the inner you, you see all the shortcomings, all the ways you miss the Standards of Beauty even though you fall within the Perfect Age Group. When you're older, you see all the ways your current face and body fail the Fuckability Test, which is the one and only test that is applied by everyone in our culture as to the worth of a woman. You observe that you're a hag, you know that within this culture that means you are of no account, and you gather your forces and push on, through the negativity of the societal contempt you have internalized, you say heroically it shall not stop me, I will not look away, I will accurately continue to render what I see before me, and damn the torpedoes you will look at it because it will be a well-painted painting or a well-drawn drawing. And of course no one cares that you have just crossed your own Rubicon, this is your own private heroism, and you probably squeezed out a few more wrinkles as reward for the effort.
Good for you.
Sad but true
Dear Katherine
Thank you for coming out into the day with your brave face facing forward and your heart in full blaze.