The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (23 page)

Certainly both men and women may find cruelty and suffering erotic. One person hurts the other so that one or both can feel a sexual thrill that they wouldn’t feel if neither was frightened or in pain. As in having a child’s foot broken and bound into a rotting lump and then getting an erection from fondling the rotting lump. Sadism and masochism: a sexuality dependent on pain and cruelty.

To let sexual feeling be aroused by pain and cruelty may be better—we are often told it is better—than not having any sexual feeling at all. I’m not sure. For whom is it better?

I’d like to think Chinese women looked with pity, with terror, at one another’s Lotus Feet, that they flinched and cringed when they smelled the smell of the bindings, that children burst into tears when they saw their mother’s Lotus Feet. Girl children, boy children. But what do I know?

I can understand why a mother would “give” her daughter Lotus Feet, would break the bones and knot the bindings; it’s not hard at all to understand, to imagine the circumstances that would lead a mother to make her daughter “marriageable,” that is, saleable, acceptable to her society, by torturing and deforming her.

Love and compassion, deformed, act with immense cruelty. How often have Christians and Buddhists thus deformed a teaching of compassion?

And fashion is a great power, a great social force, to which men may be even more enslaved than the women who try to please them by obeying it. I have worn some really stupid shoes myself in the attempt to be desirable, the attempt to be conventional, the attempt to follow fashion.

But that another woman would desire her friend’s Lotus Feet, find
them erotic, can I imagine that? Yes, I can; but I learn nothing from it. The erotic is not the sum of our being. There is pity, there is terror.

I look at the ballroom dancer’s rigid glittering shoes with dagger heels that will leave her lame at fifty, and find them troubling and fascinating. Her partner’s flat shiny shoes are boring. His dancing may be thrilling, but his feet aren’t. And male ballet dancers’ feet certainly aren’t attractive, bundled into those soft shoes like big hotdog buns. The uncomfortable fascination comes only when the women get up on their pointes with their whole body weight on the tips of their toes, or prance in their dagger heels, and suffer.

Of course this is a sexual fascination, eroticism explains everything. . . . Well, does it?

Bare feet are what I find sexy—the supple, powerful arch, the complex curves and recurves of the dancer’s naked foot. Male or female.

I don’t find shod feet erotic. Or shoes, either. Not my fetish, thanks. It’s the sense of what dancers’ shoes are doing to the dancer’s feet that fascinates me. The fascination is not erotic, but it is physical. It is bodily, it is social, ethical. It is painful. It troubles me.

And I can’t get rid of the trouble, because my society denies that it is troubling. My society says it’s all right, nothing is wrong, women’s feet are there to be tortured and deformed for the sake of fashion and convention, for the sake of eroticism, for the sake of marriageability, for the sake of money. And we all say yes, certainly, all right, that is all right. Only something in me, some little nerves down in my toes that got bent awry by the stupid shoes I wore when I was young, some muscles in my instep, some tendon in my heel, all those bits of my body say No no no no. It isn’t all right. It’s all wrong.

And because my own nerves and muscles and tendons respond, I can’t look away from the dancer’s dagger heels. They pierce me.

Our mind, denying our cruelty, is trapped in it. It is in our body that we know it, and so perhaps may see how there might be an end to it. An end to fascination, an end to obedience, a beginning of freedom. One step towards it. Barefoot?

DOGS, CATS, AND DANCERS

T
HOUGHTS
ABOUT
B
EAUTY

An earlier version of this piece was published in 1992 in the “Reflections” section of Allure magazine, where it was retitled “The Stranger Within.” I have fiddled around with it a good bit since then.

Dogs don’t know what they look like. Dogs don’t even know what size they are. No doubt it’s our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother’s dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused—“Should I eat it? Will it eat me? I
am
bigger than it, aren’t I?” But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo.

My children used to run at sight of a nice deerhound named Teddy, because Teddy was so glad to see them that he wagged his whiplash tail so hard that he knocked them over. Dogs don’t notice when they put their paws in the quiche. Dogs don’t know where they begin and end.

Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship.

Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat
meets a threatening dog and can’t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it’ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again—“I thought that was a cat. Aren’t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?”

Once I met a huge, black, balloonlike object levitating along the sidewalk making a horrible moaning growl. It pursued me across the street. I was afraid it might eat me. When we got to our front steps it began to shrink, and leaned on my leg, and I recognised my cat, Leonard; he had been alarmed by something across the street.

Cats have a sense of appearance. Even when they’re sitting doing the wash in that silly position with one leg behind the other ear, they know what you’re sniggering at. They simply choose not to notice. I knew a pair of Persian cats once; the black one always reclined on a white cushion on the couch, and the white one on the black cushion next to it. It wasn’t just that they wanted to leave cat hair where it showed up best, though cats are always thoughtful about that. They knew where they looked best. The lady who provided their pillows called them her Decorator Cats.

A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don’t know what size we are, how we’re shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people who have the most accurate, vivid sense of their own appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do.

I suppose this is also true of fashion models, but in such a limited way—in modeling, what you look like
to a camera
is all that matters. That’s very different from really living in your body the way a dancer does. Actors must have a keen self-awareness and learn to know what their body and face are doing and expressing, but actors use words in their art, and words are great illusion makers. A dancer can’t weave that word screen around herself. All a dancer has to make her art from is her appearance, position, and motion.

The dancers I’ve known have no illusions or confusions about what space they occupy. They hurt themselves a lot—dancing is murder on feet and pretty tough on joints—but they never, ever step in the quiche. At a rehearsal I saw a young man of the troupe lean over like a tall willow to examine his ankle. “Oh,” he said, “I have an owie on my almost perfect body!” It was endearingly funny, but it was also simply true: his body is almost perfect. He knows it is, and knows where it isn’t. He keeps it as nearly perfect as he can, because his body is his instrument, his medium, how he makes a living, and what he makes art with. He inhabits his body as fully as a child does, but much more knowingly. And he’s happy about it.

I like that about dancers. They’re so much happier than dieters and exercisers. Guys go jogging up my street, thump thump thump, grim faces, glazed eyes seeing nothing, ears plugged by earphones—if there was a quiche on the sidewalk, their weird gaudy running shoes would squish right through it. Women talk endlessly about how many pounds last week, how many pounds to go. If they saw a quiche they’d scream. If your body isn’t perfect, punish it. No pain no gain, all that stuff. Perfection is “lean” and “taut” and “hard”—like a boy athlete of twenty, a girl gymnast of twelve. What kind of body is that for a man of fifty or a woman of any age? “Perfect”? What’s perfect? A black cat on a white cushion, a white cat on a black one . . . A soft brown woman in a flowery dress . . . There are a whole lot of ways to be perfect, and not one of them is attained through punishment.

Every culture has its ideal of human beauty, and especially of female beauty. It’s amazing how harsh some of these ideals are. An anthropologist told me that among the Inuit people he’d been with, if you could lay a ruler across a woman’s cheekbones and it didn’t touch her nose, she was a knockout. In this case, beauty is very high cheekbones and a very flat nose. The most horrible criterion of beauty I’ve yet met
is the Chinese bound foot: feet dwarfed and crippled to be three inches long increased a girl’s attractiveness, therefore her money value. Now that’s serious no pain no gain.

But it’s all serious. Ask anybody who ever worked eight hours a day in three-inch heels. Or I think of when I was in high school in the 1940s: the white girls got their hair crinkled up by chemicals and heat so it would curl, and the black girls got their hair mashed flat by chemicals and heat so it wouldn’t curl. Home perms hadn’t been invented yet, and a lot of kids couldn’t afford these expensive treatments, so they were wretched because they couldn’t follow the rules, the rules of beauty.

Beauty always has rules. It’s a game. I resent the beauty game when I see it controlled by people who grab fortunes from it and don’t care who they hurt. I hate it when I see it making people so self-dissatisfied that they starve and deform and poison themselves. Most of the time I just play the game myself in a very small way, buying a new lipstick, feeling happy about a pretty new silk shirt. It’s not going to make me beautiful, but it’s beautiful itself, and I like wearing it.

People have decorated themselves as long as they’ve been people. Flowers in the hair, tattoo lines on the face, kohl on the eyelids, pretty silk shirts—things that make you feel good. Things that suit you. Like a white pillow suits a lazy black cat. . . . That’s the fun part of the game.

One rule of the game, in most times and places, is that it’s the young who are beautiful. The beauty ideal is always a youthful one. This is partly simple realism. The young
are
beautiful. The whole lot of ’em. The older I get, the more clearly I see that and enjoy it.

But it gets harder and harder to enjoy facing the mirror. Who is that old lady? Where is her
waist?
I got resigned, sort of, to losing my dark hair and getting all this limp grey stuff instead, but now am I going to lose even that and end up all pink scalp? I mean, enough already. Is that another mole or am I turning into an Appaloosa? How large can a knuckle get before it becomes a kneejoint? I don’t want to see, I don’t want to know.

And yet I look at men and women my age and older, and their scalps and knuckles and spots and bulges, though various and interesting, don’t affect what I think of them. Some of these people I consider to be very beautiful, and others I don’t. For old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.

I know what worries me most when I look in the mirror and see the old woman with no waist. It’s not that I’ve lost my beauty—I never had enough to carry on about. It’s that that woman doesn’t look like me. She isn’t who I thought I was.