Beholder

Last summer I was enjoying a sunny afternoon on the rocky banks of West Vancouver’s Lighthouse Park. The sun poured down on the water at the mouth of the Burrard Inlet and ran across the lilting waves like a finger drawn across piano keys. I was hiking with a buddy and his parents who were in town for a visit, and quickly becoming addicted, as many of us have, to an intoxicating Vancouver in its habit-forming summer splendor. Things were fine lounging on that rock, a regal kind of fine, but they were about to get finer.

I noticed a young woman in a bikini below us, on a rock closer to the water that licked up at her feet. She stood at that distance just beyond detail, where the knowledge of a bikini conjures beauty in detail’s place. She was at that distance that an angel or a mermaid always seems to stand in your dreams, just past acknowledgement.

Does anyone else dream about mermaids, by the way?

She was standing and posing in a way that didn’t seem to invite the necessary sun to tan and didn’t seem overly natural, so I leaned forward to see what was making her assume an arched and tiptoed stance. About ten feet in front of her stood a man holding a huge light with a white umbrella surrounding it and a guy on one knee directing her holding a camera and an enthusiastic grin. Wait, lights… camera… hold everything, we have a model sighting!

Upon the awareness of said shutterbug, the bikini in front of me went from out of focus angel to an all-together new form of celestial entity. She was destined for the immortality of swimsuit calendars and workshop walls. I was mesmerized, until I realized the distasteful truth of my infatuation. She was just a bikini until I saw that photographer. Does that make me more interested in his and his camera’s presence than hers?

The fact that I knew that this girl was likely to be the subject of adoration for many made her instantly more adorable and admirable to me.

Can’t I pick my own angels any more?

Wasn’t it beauty I saw in the first place? Why did it take a camera and a man for me to behold it? Why did this new definition of the figure in front of me form a new image in my eyes? The level of her beauty was decided by this external force, what does that say about my ability to behold beauty?

Beauty was once in the eye of the beholder, now the beholder holds none of the cards. We are fed beauty in large, overly sugared, or should I say Nutra-Sweetened doses. Beauty and all its counterparts, style, expression, and class, have been labeled, packaged and mass-produced. Beauty is no longer the subject of poetry, but the air brushed product at the end of an assembly line.

Why is it that something isn’t beautiful until it’s beautiful to someone else?

Individualism, is this the problem? It seems that from the very moment we as a race acquired the gift of self-awareness we starting seeking someone to emulate. We ceased being apes but clung to ‘monkey see monkey do’ like a chimp in a tree. We’ve been falling in line, constructing our dogma, and seeking a supreme version of ourselves for the throne from the moment we had a voice with which to voice our conformity. Individualism isn’t the reason that model became an idol. I’m a product of the twentieth century; I’m not an individual even when I’m standing by myself.

I tend then to put the experience in that box of inherent human curiosity. You know that brightly colored box adorned with sparkling stars dangled before you by Monty Hall and certain to hold untold riches and even perhaps the key to Heaven itself? We all know that box; we know how things seem to get interesting to us when mystery and unattainability are introduced. Girls are more delectable when they give chase, chase is a gift they give the courtship. Candy is sweeter when stolen, but never even desired until desired by your little brother. We are compelled to forage when the answer to our curiosity isn’t readily provided.

Curiosity can’t be blamed for killing anything in this case, but it is our collective curiosity, and our individual need for conformity, that has killed the image of beauty, our sense of evolving style, and the power of the beholder by classifying every nuance of earth, sky and the air around us until mystery itself is rendered a mystery.

Beauty was once the muse, the divine intoxicant; it gave men that fun little step beyond sanity and woman the power to shatter that sanity. Now instead of a muse, we have a magazine cover and a strict set of guidelines. We have a fashion dictatorship that governs over more than a spring line, but indirectly over expression itself.

What is it exactly that’s inspirational about the blank expression staring at me with painted eyes from the cover of Cosmallurie Clairogue Fair? The only emotion that this literature inspires is a fear for those who once held the beholders. The fashion culture, the keepers of ‘popular beauty’, leave us with an increasingly stricter frame for the grandest gift the eyes can be given or behold. I’m convinced, and I’m not exactly expounding a theory about the speed of light here, that these periodicals are designed to train, pacify, and sort of enslave woman into subscribing to this believe of one kind of beauty. They force-feed, a ‘model’ for woman everywhere to fantasize about conforming to, and sell them makeup while doing so. I’m actually uncertain at this point if the ultimate ulterior motive of this fashion propaganda is to propagate an impossible image or just sell handbags. Both are clearly evil endeavors. Even sadder still is that most women know this, but are continually pushed, most often by each other, to praise these tomes of false imagery. Have you seen these things? I mean seriously, it’s a glossy, monthly Encyclopedia Britannica, filled with people who really truly do not at all look like the depictions presented. The actual models can’t even achieve these standards.

This quest has now reached absurd lengths with the popularization of surgical enhancement. What if I told you ten years ago that there would one day be a ‘reality’ show, where people would undergo surgery to look more like… whom or whatever? Plastic surgery does have its place, but… I can’t believe I have to say it… it is not on television. This subject is an essay unto itself, so without further digression…

Secondary to image itself in constructing the demolition of beauty is the revolving nature of trends. We live in an age where every combination of clothing, accessory, attitude and social standing has been labeled, and fluxes through a constantly changing ranking. The only constant in this ranking is that nothing remains. There was a time when a trend fit an age and a collective sense of belonging. In the early 60s the first lady showed women how to be conservatively stylish, and by the latter half of the decade Jim Morrison showed men how to be wild, yet thoughtful and brooding. It was simple, no one asked questions or sought a pigeonhole. By the mid 80s, the phenomenon of retro-style had begun. By the late 90s, the retro-flip had flopped over on itself. Trends were left with nothing but retrospective references to guide them.

Think about it for a moment. When you think of the 70s, what do you picture? Deborah Harry and Barry Gibb. When you think of the 80s its Don Johnson and a suit that burns your retinas. How about the late 90s and today? You’re back to the 60s and 70s all mish-mashed together, aren’t you? Trends, as a style based on originality is now as dead as we once thought Disco was. We are left with no creation, merely labeled boxes that everything must be filed into. The sad thing about setting a trend in our world today is that a trend isn’t a trend and originality isn’t original until acknowledged and copied by a second or second-hundredth person.

If a trend forms and no one is there to rank it, does it make a sound?

What would it take for the collective acknowledgement of our society that beauty is not contained within the impulse racks at the supermarket’s check out lines? How can we as a people take the property of beauty out of the hands of the label-makers and put it back into The Eye of the Beholder?

We have to abandon the labels, or to at least stand outside of these labels every now and then. We have to change the way we consider that which we admire. Don’t describe anything in the realm of creativity by comparing it to something that came before it. Don’t describe what you’re creating with a pop-culture reference or the closest comparison; explain the process that brought you there. Though this may seem an unsexy strategy, it will unravel the fabric holding the labels over that which once inspired us.

Imagine if once a week each one of us consciously did something completely out of the box of fashion and cliché. I mean something totally sideways, something like tying a shoe to your belt or wearing six belts. I mean replacing the word ‘please’ with ‘tickle’. I mean recognizing real beauty, by complementing someone who isn’t ready for it. If enough people were redefining beauty and creativity, the permutations would be too numerous to categorize. We could reinvent originality and rediscover what we each find beautiful.

Be Beautiful: People are ALWAYS at their best when they are cultivating their finer qualities. If you are weird, be weird; if you are boring, be boring; if you are fat, be fat, just be really good at it. If you happen to be one of those cover model types, be that kind of beautiful and revel in it.

Create Beauty: If you have a secret passion or outlet, don’t let secrecy, the clock or the deadline get in the way of it. Whether it’s playing piano, cooking, or burping the alphabet backwards, don’t let a day pass without some time spent exploring that outlet. Even paper airplane building needs a Mozart.

Think Beautiful: Far too many of us resist speaking our minds. I’m a believer in tact, at least a measure of it, but I’m also a believer in expression. Too many of us are concerned with being charming, and deal out a joke rather than sharing something meaningful. Don’t let the chance to have beautiful disagreement pass you by.

Say Beautiful: Beauty goes far too often unacknowledged. It remains unjustly just beyond detail. Maybe that’s why it has come the caged animal that once ran free, because it wasn’t chased. A sunset, a vintage car, or a stranger on the street, if you see beauty, acknowledge it. You can become the beholder again.

Beauty should not be the mold we fit into, but that which sets us apart. I for one would like to behold real beauty again. I would like to be bowled over by beauty rather than merely bombarded with the plastic version of it. There are perhaps greater causes to put the remnant strength of our individual opinion behind, but if you really think about it, what’s the point of any of it if we have to live in a world without beauty? I think remaining on a path where nothing is new and everything has been marketed; Beauty will slowly be relegated to the Memory of the Beholder.

The more I reflect on my experience with that angelic mermaid bikini, the more I wish two things: First, I wish I saw the cameraman first. Perhaps if my knowledge began with him, my image of her wouldn’t have bended into the label of bikini-model. I wouldn’t then have a memory that starts on something real and ends on a magazine cover. Second, I wish our two rocks were a little bit closer. If I could have been within that distance to appreciate her at the level of personal acknowledgement, perhaps then I wouldn’t have stamped on her that label that devalued her beauty, and perhaps then she could have acknowledged me right back.

This actually leads me to my third wish…


Hughes.