The female model on the billboard promoting cosmetics stares back at me with an emptiness that edges my skin with goose pimples. She is not smiling, but gazing emptily, vaguely, at me – with that hollowness which says she is not staring at me, but at the cold frost of camera lenses taken somewhere else on the globe. She is carefully paletted with lightings, airbrushed effects and the cosmetics her sculpted, blandly “beautiful” face is telling the viewer to buy. So that all may be well with the buyer.
Let us call the anonymous “beauty” Celeste. She still perhaps deserves a name, to signify what is left of her humanness. Let us grant her some humanness, and what that should convey: warmth, kindness, laughter, tears, pain, frustration, loneliness, compassion: the things that make us human. Even though she portrays none of these qualities.
Celeste might as well be dead. Her face is worse than stone. Stone still has a gritty grandeur in its texture; Celeste is utterly expressionless. Her face is even more vacant than rock stars, who, though they traditionally do not smile on albums, still often show a hint of aggression and “bad attitude” to entice their fans into buying the album.
Celeste is telling you what a woman should be all about. What she is telling women, who are too “old” for this, is an interesting subtext. She is doing all this in a deeply empty way, with a vacuum in her face that deepens the cave of her “beauty” facade. Celeste is deeply lonely. This is because, as the camera and billboard interprets her, she does not know what or who she is. How can a face devoid of expression possibly convey Celeste knows who she is?
I ask you, “How are you today?” If you are honest enough you will say, “I am fine, thank you”, or, “things have been shit. I am falling apart. God, I don’t know how I can carry on like this”. Celeste – as re-fashioned on the billboard, is incapable of any answer. Her answer would be the one alienated, depressed patients shivering on the therapist’s chair offer. Celeste would reply to her therapist: “How am I?? I don’t know. How could I possibly know?” After some reflection, the therapist may say, “That is not good, Celeste. If you do not know how you are feeling, then you are not in touch with your feelings. Then, Celeste, you don’t know who you are. Celeste, are you willing to admit that?” After a moment, Celeste may start weeping gently, leaning forward, whimpering, “I am sorry, I am sorry”. The therapist may smile inwardly, or outwardly, in a kindly, loving, Rogerian way. He or she knows she has made a breakthrough with Celeste. Now the real, “inner work” in Celeste’s untilled, unvisited psyche can begin. The real work of being and becoming human. Where Celeste can learn to relate to herself and others, to her Lebenswelt, in an authentic way.
Celeste, and the cold blizzard of billboards and online adverts like hers all around us (and in us), portray and reinforce the lack of humanity that is the legacy of the perception of what is “beautiful” to the world. An eerie, impossible reality few can live up to. But many will still buy the offered product, to ease the worthlessness within. Celeste and her ilk, including countless, deadpan, gorgeous male models, have only a superficial “beauty”.
What is beauty? What is resumed by the term, once we scrape away ideology and specific cultural contexts, if one can do that?
The question of what is aesthetic is asked of many academics in fields as diverse as philosophy, dance movement, literary theory, art theory and theology, and can be asked and answered in perhaps the most important field of all: ethics. Aesthetics enjoins ethics. That is to say, it enjoins and invites authentic expression, not betrayal. Not lies. Aesthetics is a moral issue. This lies at the heart of the debate over Keats’ famous lines, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”.
Celeste continues to stare down at us with emptied-out eyes, eyes caught up, neither self-absorbed nor other-absorbed, in their own airbrushed set of lies. She is the goddess of a more shallow nothingness than what even existentialism offers. She is not even an example of Sartrean bad faith. She is neither with faith nor without faith. She is a newer form of nothing, without the Sartrean upper-case N. Faith requires humanity – and its connotation of confessed frailty, vulnerability – in order for it to emerge and comfort.
Here in Suzhou, China, our huge apartment when we arrived more than three months ago was an empty shell, with blank walls. Their vacancy, the dreadful, boring deadness of the walls reminded me painfully of Celeste; without music or voice or colour. I was then given by one of my schools where I teach a huge pile of children’s paintings (nine and ten year olds’ pictures). They are stunning. The twinkling fingers of children’s spontaneity and naivety is clear in the ripple, thrill and guileless flush of the rainbowed pictures. Perhaps with some measure of synchronicity, given Marion and my “virtual refugee, country-less” status, the pictures are mostly of aliens arriving on earth.
One autumn leaf-stained gem of a painting has the following Mandarin words written on it by the child: 外星人来 地球走可 Literally, “Other star person arrives earth ball visit”. “An alien comes to earth for a visit”. The walls of our huge lounge are no longer blank: we have a kaleidoscope of about fifty children’s paintings splashed across our walls. The delightful energy of the paintings tingle with the beginning of things: the mysterious origins of the universe, which has not (yet) been sapped out of these marvellous Chinese children. To this add with a spray and flourish Marion’s flowers and the various pot plants such as hydrangeas, busy lizzies and peace lilies, which I love, and our home is now warm, arty … and human. The memory of Celeste has faded.
At night we sit at the dinner table in the candle-lit, Peter Pan cave of our lounge. Marion laughs at the antics of the children she taught that day. She is very motherly towards them. I stare in wonder at her. Marion’s mysterious, womanly mouth opens wide as she laughs, head thrown back, her throat equally mysterious, a fountain of humour. Her twinkling eyes. She has been through so much with me in the last eight years: the best of times, the worst of times, going from country to country, now waiting for our permanent residence in New Zealand to come through.
Marion is also healing from huge disappointments: the let-downs of close family members, which have hurt her enormously as a mother. On Marion natters about her teaching day and the cute kids she teaches. “Hey babes!” I exclaim, “You are looking good. You are so happy again.” “Oh I am, I am … ” and off she goes again like a squirrel after a nut: another teaching story, as she sips on a glass of wine.
I stare open-mouthed at the mystery and ripened juice of this woman in front of me. She is in her fifties now, her face lined with the chisels of tears and mirth. Marion is beautiful. Radiantly so. And mine.
This article first appeared on Rod’s “The Mocking Truth” column on NewsTime
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