Scales

“And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose…”

I saw beauty in a fat body for the first time in a Costco sometime between 2000 and 2004. I was standing in line with my mother, and the checker was wearing sweatpants and no makeup and a blond ponytail, and she wasn’t actually beautiful, perhaps, but it was not unpleasant to look at her hips as she moved comfortably to maneuver each item steadily across the code reader. And I’d never found such a sight “not unpleasant” before. Seeing my own loathed fat in every fat body, up till that point I had always recoiled from bodies that reminded me of my own, with which I nevertheless felt some sort of fat kinship.
 
A Costco line moves slowly, big parade floats of food-laden carts arranged in ungainly lines waiting to pass through their designated checkpoint. I had a bit of time to adjust, to experience some wonder. The checker wasn’t huge or elephantine, merely large and rounded. And yet hers was a body which, when put through the automatic sorting process of all bodies into categories of “acceptable” (meaning thin) and “unacceptable” (meaning fat), would have been easily classified as the latter.
 
The moment was a strange one; it estranged me from my own perception. I was simply and suddenly aware of an absence, of an expected response which failed to materialize. I gazed at this stranger’s body and felt no repulsion, no disgust; I was able to see the beauty in it. Scales fell off of my eyes; I could see something in a new way, and it was bizarre and miraculous. I hadn’t been thinking particularly about bodies and beauty at the time, certainly not any more than the usual constant drone of worry cycling with self-righteousness and self-reassurance. This sudden sight came out of the blue.
 
I wondered if the blonde woman was the only object to which this new vision applied, and almost reluctantly removed my gaze from her to cast it about for other bodies. I saw an older Mexican lady, her short three-rolled torso wrapped in a red suit — and my new vision held true. Her body caused me no disgust, no revulsion, no immediate “no!” shouted silently at the unacceptable body. 
 
This alteration of vision has persisted. I don’t see all bodies as beautiful in their entirety; I’m not some fucking PollyAnna of bodily aesthetics. But that automatic, binary sorting process has been quieted. All bodies are not required to be either affirmed or denied. I can see beauty and grotesquerie living side by side in the forms that present themselves to me.
 
But at the same time, the way that this visual capacity descended upon me was so particular, so unexpected, that I cannot expect the same experience to have occurred to everyone. In a brief correspondence earlier this month, anxieties about attraction were summed up as “feelings of inadequacy.” But I don’t feel inadequate at all. I feel entirely adequate. What troubles me are are feelings of unintellgibility. The response to fat bodies are so polarized, so charged with all of these bloodygodawful freighted Kantian legacies. I don’t fear having my advances simply and kindly declined — I fear being flung across the room in a spasm of recoil and disgust, as if I encroached like overconfident vermin in search of warmth.

I fear that I cannot be seen, cannot be read, because for years I simply could not see beauty in a place where it clearly had a foothold — my own body, the bodies of others like me.

You will do harm

There is a combat veteran in my Freud class. He fascinates me. I am deeply affected by damaged men; I suppose this is a fair point to acknowledge. Usually I am drawn to men damaged by love or depression, the high drama of the everyday. I suppose if we incorporate an Oedipal element, we may assume that the figure of my father hovers about here somewhere; perhaps I should not be surprised that my fellow student draws my attention in such a complex way. My father never saw combat, but his time in the Marines was the great psyche-shattering episode in his life. The shame and anger, the fear and hurt of being trained to kill and being profoundly ill-suited to the task has not, I think, ever left him.

The man with whom I am fascinated describes Afghanistan and Iraq, and life in war itself, as simultaneously mundane and in-credible. This is the puzzle implicit in his descriptions and accounts, a trying-to-make-sense to every verbal gesture he makes. These are the things I did. These are the things I had to do and the things I had to see. This is what every day was like. And yet now I am sitting here with you — how can this be?

Cognitive dissonance — the discomfort of holding two contradictory ideas simultaneously. My father could not, would not be turned into a killer. He escaped in drugs and ran away in physical space, until “the service” finally let him go. And yet he was ashamed of his escape, ashamed if its terms, felt somehow a failure in his great relief. The combat veteran, in contrast, went where he was told to go, and did what he was told to do. He killed, under the premise (promise?) that this action was righteous, was called for. In war, the story goes, killers are not murderers. I do not know, but I suspect that he cannot quite believe that the state of exception applies to what he has done. He is waiting for punishment, wonders if the punishment is constituted by the torment of memories and uncertainty.

This is one of the untenable choices we offer men — be a killer, or be a coward. Be a brute, or be a failure.
All men are told: “You will do harm.
One way, or the other.
Either you will disappoint us with your lack of resolve,
Or you will disappoint us with your brutality.
There is no exit.”

I want to be present in my slow sadness.

If I don’t resist, if I’m not afraid, if I let it come
                   it will soon go.
The misery and I will have our brief intercourse,
and then disentangle smoothly,
and continue on our trajectories –
which, if we are honest,
are not parallel most of the time.

Elaborate Defensive Array (EDA)

The Elaborate Defensive Array (EDA):

1. Avoid eye contact with people you find attractive, until you are introduced.
2. A subsidiary rule: don’t look around for people who might be attractive, lest you make eye contact with them.
3. When introduced to someone you find attractive, make strong eye contact, alongside a firm handshake to subtly indicate that you are a serious person to be taken seriously, and quite possibly have no genitals at all.
4. When in public and alone, adopt an expression somewhere on the continuum between “businesslike and preoccupied” and “slightly pissed off.”
5. When in public with friends, focus attention so completely on those friends as to suggest a complete lack of interest in any other human beings.
6. When in groups which include attractive strangers or acquaintances, ignore these individuals entirely (noncommittal smiles are acceptable) unless they either address you directly, or say something intellectually provocative so that you may attack them; see 9 and 10 below.
7. Never tell someone that you are interested in them.
8. Actively work to mask the appearance of your interest when its object is present.
9. Make all outward indications of your interest so overdetermined, such open signifiers, that your actual intentions are impossible to pinpoint, thus making all choices and risks the responsibility of the other party.
10. Intellectually challenge people you find attractive in order to: (a) create a plausible reason for your intense gazing (b) experience some semblance of emotional intensity with that person that can be immediately explained away as purely intellectual (c) further confuse the outward indications of your interest in that person (d) further confuse, for yourself, the nature of that person’s possible interest in you.
11. As in 10d above, assume and operate as if the interest expressed in you by individuals to whom you are attracted is purely intellectual, or is otherwise an emotional resonance that does not extend to genitals.
12. Microanalyze all interactions with persons to whom you are attracted, to determine (a) how successfully you have camouflaged your interest, and (b) possible indications of their interest in you, and its nature, so that camouflaging practices can be minutely recalibrated.

You smacked me on the ass,
and then looked nervous — tho the emotion was nearly imperceptible.
The smack, for me, barely registered
It took several beats for me to even consider
                                        “ oh
                                         perhaps that –
                                         huh ”

Because I don’t really care.
Didn’t flatter, didn’t threaten, just sort of…rolled on by.

Really, boys
I don’t have a           goddamned           thing
to prove.

Ingenue

The thing you have to understand about her is that everything is simultaneously sincere and calculated. We’ve been told that this is impossible, we’ve been indoctrinated with the opposition of sincerity and calculation. But I suspect this is merely another inheritance, an arbitrary and problematic philosophical monstrosity.

Here is a little story, so that you can understand her:

300 years ago, there was a girl living in a village in northwestern Europe. She found her power in the toss of the hair, in the little smile and the flashing eyes. In back rooms and the village haylofts she bedded farmhands and tinkers and soldiers and bandits. Only the bandits understood her. When she became pregnant she picked for herself from among her lovers a sweet, hardworking farm holder and told him he was the father. And they were married for thirty-two years, until he died in his farthest field. She was a good wife, a loving wife. But the farmer was always mildly plagued with guilt for, he thought, stealing her youth and innocence. She understood this guilt, kept it alive, tended to it delicately as if it were an orchid, because she enjoyed the tenderness that it caused him to show her.

(from Wikipedia, “Typically, the Ingenue is beautiful, gentle, sweet, virginal, and often naïve, in mental or emotional danger, or even physical danger, usually a target of The Cad; whom she may have mistaken for The Hero…The Vamp is often a foil for the ingenue…”)

Naked Pictures

All of the women you want to gaze at are swanlike, with their long muscular necks and their winglike clavicles, and their lean, nipped waists and sides.
They are so disciplined.
You aren’t looking at the unruly flesh that I think you ought to.
You aren’t looking for grotesquerie, or for French peasant wives with broad backs and fleshy arms.
I think you’re missing something –
how satisfying it can be to feel beauty falling apart, slipping into the void,
disintegrating.
The faraway thing you are looking for explodes, diffuses,
and you find it in everything, and nearby.