Saturday, August 11, 2007
One of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons is "Jane & The Dragon". I get it on NBC. The characters and stories are ok, no violence. What fascinates me are the technical aspects.
I love the way everything but the faces look like they were colored (expertly, and beautifully) with crayons. The bodies move so naturally they look like they could be "shopped" humans in costumes, but I'm pretty certain they're not. Like, when a character is just standing with his arms hanging, an arm will sway slightly, just like a real arm will. The faces show the tiniest nuances of emotion. (But the bodies are definitely cartoon bodies, with impossible proportions and so on.)
It's well and beautifully done, and that's what I love to watch. I watch it because I admire it.
That got me thinking about how visually oriented I am. Everyone likes to look at beautiful things of course, but I often see beauty where others don't. A pattern in the gravel on a path. A cow's eyelashes. That soft spot behind Jay's left ear. I'm not talking about the "oh, that's pretty" stuff. I'm talking about stuff that stops me, that makes me focus to the exclusion of my surroundings. Don't try to talk to me when I'm looking at a cow's eyes. The simplest things will stop me in my tracks. Like that moment in the evening, some evenings, when the sun is dropping and the very air turns golden, and the light seems to shine from under the leaves. If I'm driving, I have to pull over until it ends, because it overwhelms me.
My furniture is mostly Victorian, and my decor tends to the Victorian, too. Visually cluttered. I don't see how anyone can live in those sterile white straight-surfaced spaces shown in the magazines. I want my home to be such that no matter where my eye alights, it finds something beautiful, something visually interesting.
My greatest health fear is blindness. I've known several blind people, and they lived full lives, but still, for me, a diagnosis of impending blindness would frighten me more than an inoperable cancer. Cancer might take my life, but blindness would leave me alive with no life.
Jay was blind the last six months before he died. He didn't fully understand that he was blind, though, because his brain was still generating visual signals. He very clearly saw things, and I'd have to explain to him that what he saw was not there. He couldn't feed himself, because although I'd take his hand, "The juice is here, and the cookies are here...", what he "saw" and believed was different. The hardest was when he saw people standing next to his bed, and wanted to know who they were. He could describe them down to the tiniest detail. It was very confusing to him when I'd tell him it was all hallucination. I felt so sorry for him. Blackness would have been a blessing.
.
Showing posts with label beauty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beauty. Show all posts
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
1185 Sleeping Beauty
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
I have been badly used by many men. I have been well and truly loved by a few. Well, maybe even several. I've been lucky.
Of those men who loved me, whom I could believe, none ever told me I was beautiful. Obie said I had beautiful eyes. Guy told me I had a beautiful mind. Jay said I had a beautiful soul. I took it all with a grain of salt because they loved me, and their feelings had little to do with beauty. There were others who loved me, but never mentioned beauty of any kind. They didn't have to.
In my youth I had a fantastic body, if you could overlook the powerful legs, but I dressed in clothes that were too big for me, because the body brought me nothing but grief. As far as my face went, I would allow myself "cute", but I never went even so far as "pretty". My nose was too big, my teeth too yellow and crooked, and my skin too marred and scarred for beauty. Not to mention the thick glasses. I came nowhere near the accepted pattern. These days I still don't think of myself as pretty, but I do think I look pretty darn good for my age.
At the reception Sunday evening, The Rabbi, on his visiting rounds through the tables, crouched next to my chair and said, "You've changed, but you're still beautiful."
In college we were just pinochle buddies and friends. There was no boy-girl relationship. I respected his faith and general good-person-ness, and he respected my mind, but when I wrote my autobiography for Daughter, in the college section, I never mentioned him, because there was nothing that stood out as "a story". BUT, he is the only guy to ever tell me that I was beautiful, in a "this is a fact" way. It was just an offhand comment one day, but I remember it, because no one had ever before said it and meant it. Or since. Not anyone I could believe, anyway. It's unlikely he remembers. (By then, my mother had convinced me I looked like "something the cat dragged in", and I had no reason to doubt her.)
When he crouched next to my chair on Sunday and said I was still beautiful, I responded that the first step in looking beautiful is to believe you're beautiful. He thought about it a minute, and agreed.
So, I had diner with Roman this evening. I told him the above, that The Rabbi was the only man to ever tell me I was beautiful, as part of another story, and Roman got agitated. He insisted that he also had told me I was beautiful. I said no, never. In fact, I told him, he once said to me "I think you think you look better than you really do."
He was aghast. He insisted he never said that. That he couldn't have said it because "it's not the kind of thing I would ever say!" But he did, and I told him I remember his exact words, because they hurt so much. He still insisted he never said it, because he does think I'm beautiful. He said he'd always thought I was beautiful.
I didn't know that.
To tell the truth, I'm not sure how to take it, because he really did say the other, an offhand comment in his kitchen one morning. Maybe I took it wrong. Maybe he was referring to something I was wearing, that I didn't look good in it.
On the other hand, sometimes I think he has a split personality or something.
It's obvious I'm going to have to learn to say "What do you mean by that?" around him, because so often what I hear is not what he meant. Like the time he told me my hair looked dry, and I felt bad and started using oil treatments, and it turned out that he meant my hair was always fluffy, never oily or stringy looking, and he liked that.
I'm too quick to hear criticism.
.
I have been badly used by many men. I have been well and truly loved by a few. Well, maybe even several. I've been lucky.
Of those men who loved me, whom I could believe, none ever told me I was beautiful. Obie said I had beautiful eyes. Guy told me I had a beautiful mind. Jay said I had a beautiful soul. I took it all with a grain of salt because they loved me, and their feelings had little to do with beauty. There were others who loved me, but never mentioned beauty of any kind. They didn't have to.
In my youth I had a fantastic body, if you could overlook the powerful legs, but I dressed in clothes that were too big for me, because the body brought me nothing but grief. As far as my face went, I would allow myself "cute", but I never went even so far as "pretty". My nose was too big, my teeth too yellow and crooked, and my skin too marred and scarred for beauty. Not to mention the thick glasses. I came nowhere near the accepted pattern. These days I still don't think of myself as pretty, but I do think I look pretty darn good for my age.
At the reception Sunday evening, The Rabbi, on his visiting rounds through the tables, crouched next to my chair and said, "You've changed, but you're still beautiful."
In college we were just pinochle buddies and friends. There was no boy-girl relationship. I respected his faith and general good-person-ness, and he respected my mind, but when I wrote my autobiography for Daughter, in the college section, I never mentioned him, because there was nothing that stood out as "a story". BUT, he is the only guy to ever tell me that I was beautiful, in a "this is a fact" way. It was just an offhand comment one day, but I remember it, because no one had ever before said it and meant it. Or since. Not anyone I could believe, anyway. It's unlikely he remembers. (By then, my mother had convinced me I looked like "something the cat dragged in", and I had no reason to doubt her.)
When he crouched next to my chair on Sunday and said I was still beautiful, I responded that the first step in looking beautiful is to believe you're beautiful. He thought about it a minute, and agreed.
So, I had diner with Roman this evening. I told him the above, that The Rabbi was the only man to ever tell me I was beautiful, as part of another story, and Roman got agitated. He insisted that he also had told me I was beautiful. I said no, never. In fact, I told him, he once said to me "I think you think you look better than you really do."
He was aghast. He insisted he never said that. That he couldn't have said it because "it's not the kind of thing I would ever say!" But he did, and I told him I remember his exact words, because they hurt so much. He still insisted he never said it, because he does think I'm beautiful. He said he'd always thought I was beautiful.
I didn't know that.
To tell the truth, I'm not sure how to take it, because he really did say the other, an offhand comment in his kitchen one morning. Maybe I took it wrong. Maybe he was referring to something I was wearing, that I didn't look good in it.
On the other hand, sometimes I think he has a split personality or something.
It's obvious I'm going to have to learn to say "What do you mean by that?" around him, because so often what I hear is not what he meant. Like the time he told me my hair looked dry, and I felt bad and started using oil treatments, and it turned out that he meant my hair was always fluffy, never oily or stringy looking, and he liked that.
I'm too quick to hear criticism.
.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)