moisturizer and diamond rings: attempts to freeze time
In talking with the Inimitable Arne today, I had an insight about the beauty industry and the wedding-industrial complex. Both prey upon our desire to stop the progress of time.
Billions of dollars in skincare advertising persuade us that if we just spend enough money we can stay young, can stave off the inevitable and hold on to the precious glow of the early twenties (that period during which most of us are such walloping idiots that I'm surprised we don't find a youthful appearance a triggering reminder of stupidity so powerful that we rush to embrace wrinkles and gray hairs).
Weddings are similarly presented as an opportunity to stop the progress of time. "Forever", crow advertisements. "Eternity". We can seize the moment and preserve it under glass, and live always in that hazy pink cocoon of oxytocin high, that world in miniature where only we and the Beloved exist. Everything will remain just like it is this moment, only better. I love you forever. We will be together until the end of time. I don't ever want to stop feeling the way I feel right now.
And a $250 jar of La Mer face cream* will keep me looking twenty-one forever.
Yeah, pull the other one.
According to our cultural narrative of addiction, a drug addict stops their emotional development when they enter the haze of addiction. A thirty-year-old who has been drinking since fifteen is assumed to be still, in some sense, fifteen. Well, why should oxytocin addiction be any different? We can marry and stop growing. Growth is painful, messy stuff, and should not be allowed to intrude on our perfect little world, our pressure-canned jar of folie à deux preserves with rose petals and sugar.
From a Jungian perspective marriage should be, or at least could be, the vessel in which the process of individuation is accelerated, the crucible wherein the soul is refined, the process by which we let go of the irrelevant and build on what we learn to be truly important. It grinds down our sharp edges and then shows us what was under that obsidian accretion. It can both grow us up and grow us deeper.
From a pagan Greek perspective, love is a divine madness that drives us out of ourselves, ruptures the boundaries of self and society, breaks hearts and laws with its holy fire and leaves everything it touches irrevocably changed.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
Here is some pearly wire and a pair of pink-handled clippers. We can make a pair of bonsai souls, small enough to fit under this pretty glass cloche etched with roses. We can stop growing, by sliding under the surface of the honey sea if possible and by cutting off the inconvenient parts of ourselves if necessary.
And every longing for marriage I have ever felt, while I would have claimed that its origin was in the fire of the Gods and its path led to the heights and depths of growth, was in fact an ice cream craving for cryogenic stasis. Let me stay here forever where the sweetness lies. May it never change.
This is the Way of the Crazy Cat Ladies. We saw the poisonous pink candy on the one side, and the long very difficult road on the other, and we looked at our own limitations and said No, fuck you very much, and chose a different path entirely. Not Miss Havisham but misdemeanor and misrule, spinster spiders making Hecate's web of death and decay and rebirth. Living in the cracks, the crazed places, crooked women in crooked houses. We make our own goddamn moisturizer out of herbs and oils, and it doesn't make us look any younger, it just keeps our scaly skin from flaking so we can shed it whole when we get too big for it and then make it into cushions for our obstreperous cats to sit on.
If I ever get married I am going to be so chagrined about leaving the Crazy Cat Lady sisterhood. Also my cat will be pissed about it. Until she figures out that she has twice as many food monkeys.
*I am not fucking kidding. Two ounces of Crème de la Mer goes for $250. What do they put in this shit? Unicorn tears? The average American wedding is reputed to cost $27,000. For that you could buy thirteen and a half pounds of Crème de la Mer. Neither one sounds like a good deal to me.
Billions of dollars in skincare advertising persuade us that if we just spend enough money we can stay young, can stave off the inevitable and hold on to the precious glow of the early twenties (that period during which most of us are such walloping idiots that I'm surprised we don't find a youthful appearance a triggering reminder of stupidity so powerful that we rush to embrace wrinkles and gray hairs).
Weddings are similarly presented as an opportunity to stop the progress of time. "Forever", crow advertisements. "Eternity". We can seize the moment and preserve it under glass, and live always in that hazy pink cocoon of oxytocin high, that world in miniature where only we and the Beloved exist. Everything will remain just like it is this moment, only better. I love you forever. We will be together until the end of time. I don't ever want to stop feeling the way I feel right now.
And a $250 jar of La Mer face cream* will keep me looking twenty-one forever.
Yeah, pull the other one.
According to our cultural narrative of addiction, a drug addict stops their emotional development when they enter the haze of addiction. A thirty-year-old who has been drinking since fifteen is assumed to be still, in some sense, fifteen. Well, why should oxytocin addiction be any different? We can marry and stop growing. Growth is painful, messy stuff, and should not be allowed to intrude on our perfect little world, our pressure-canned jar of folie à deux preserves with rose petals and sugar.
From a Jungian perspective marriage should be, or at least could be, the vessel in which the process of individuation is accelerated, the crucible wherein the soul is refined, the process by which we let go of the irrelevant and build on what we learn to be truly important. It grinds down our sharp edges and then shows us what was under that obsidian accretion. It can both grow us up and grow us deeper.
From a pagan Greek perspective, love is a divine madness that drives us out of ourselves, ruptures the boundaries of self and society, breaks hearts and laws with its holy fire and leaves everything it touches irrevocably changed.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
Here is some pearly wire and a pair of pink-handled clippers. We can make a pair of bonsai souls, small enough to fit under this pretty glass cloche etched with roses. We can stop growing, by sliding under the surface of the honey sea if possible and by cutting off the inconvenient parts of ourselves if necessary.
And every longing for marriage I have ever felt, while I would have claimed that its origin was in the fire of the Gods and its path led to the heights and depths of growth, was in fact an ice cream craving for cryogenic stasis. Let me stay here forever where the sweetness lies. May it never change.
This is the Way of the Crazy Cat Ladies. We saw the poisonous pink candy on the one side, and the long very difficult road on the other, and we looked at our own limitations and said No, fuck you very much, and chose a different path entirely. Not Miss Havisham but misdemeanor and misrule, spinster spiders making Hecate's web of death and decay and rebirth. Living in the cracks, the crazed places, crooked women in crooked houses. We make our own goddamn moisturizer out of herbs and oils, and it doesn't make us look any younger, it just keeps our scaly skin from flaking so we can shed it whole when we get too big for it and then make it into cushions for our obstreperous cats to sit on.
If I ever get married I am going to be so chagrined about leaving the Crazy Cat Lady sisterhood. Also my cat will be pissed about it. Until she figures out that she has twice as many food monkeys.
*I am not fucking kidding. Two ounces of Crème de la Mer goes for $250. What do they put in this shit? Unicorn tears? The average American wedding is reputed to cost $27,000. For that you could buy thirteen and a half pounds of Crème de la Mer. Neither one sounds like a good deal to me.