Long ramblywhiny narcisse OR "I sing the body neurotic" OR this is the good stuff
Let me start out by saying that I am, for the most part, so happy lately. Because what follows may turn into a litany of complaints, hence the caveat in the title.
When I was working at B Dalton when I was 20, I took a remaindered book. That is, we tore off the cover and sent it to the distributor, saying the book had been destroyed, and I took the little coverless paperback home. How quaint. Such things always look illicit, shameful, and this time it was. It was Elsa Klensch's Style. She said you had to make friends with the mirror. It had always been a fear of mine. Photos, mirrors. The unkind camera eye. Elsa counseled me. That will pass.
I may be able to source my cultivated narcissism a bit farther back. I was reading Leonard Cohen's second novel, Beautiful Losers. The effete intellectual narrator is mining his wife, who has just cheated with his Atlas-ian best friend, for complements about his body. "You have an arrogant body," she replies. To me, it means that his mind has asserted its superiority over the body my neglecting it. When I read Cohen's book, I had an arrogant body. I started working out.
Fast forward 14 years and I have this body and this relationship to mirrors. I am someone who would never have befriended them had Elsa and Leonard not intervened. And perhaps I never should. But recently, I hung a new full length mirror in my house, having purchased it in the waning months of my relationship with A, in part to get her to see how she actually looked before goingg out. You see, I mistakenly guessed that her lack of realstic perspective about how she looked came from the same place as my 20 year old arrogance. And I knew that my own arrogance had made a kind of return. So I decided we must both face the facts. The first few attempts to hang the mirror didn't work. At last, three months out of the relationship, the mirror is up.
When I look at myself in the mirror, a few things strike me. If I'm dressed, I feel like my body is discontinuous, improperly articulated. The joints seem akimbo. The clothing seems to drape across disorganized lumps of tissue that do not cohere into a reasonable whole. Is this in my mind, or am I the most awkward person who has ever lived? Perhaps somewhere between the two. At 34, with a belly at last on the rise, some smoothing of this effect is evident.
more to come ...
gotta go meet my friend from the CVT
When I was working at B Dalton when I was 20, I took a remaindered book. That is, we tore off the cover and sent it to the distributor, saying the book had been destroyed, and I took the little coverless paperback home. How quaint. Such things always look illicit, shameful, and this time it was. It was Elsa Klensch's Style. She said you had to make friends with the mirror. It had always been a fear of mine. Photos, mirrors. The unkind camera eye. Elsa counseled me. That will pass.
I may be able to source my cultivated narcissism a bit farther back. I was reading Leonard Cohen's second novel, Beautiful Losers. The effete intellectual narrator is mining his wife, who has just cheated with his Atlas-ian best friend, for complements about his body. "You have an arrogant body," she replies. To me, it means that his mind has asserted its superiority over the body my neglecting it. When I read Cohen's book, I had an arrogant body. I started working out.
Fast forward 14 years and I have this body and this relationship to mirrors. I am someone who would never have befriended them had Elsa and Leonard not intervened. And perhaps I never should. But recently, I hung a new full length mirror in my house, having purchased it in the waning months of my relationship with A, in part to get her to see how she actually looked before goingg out. You see, I mistakenly guessed that her lack of realstic perspective about how she looked came from the same place as my 20 year old arrogance. And I knew that my own arrogance had made a kind of return. So I decided we must both face the facts. The first few attempts to hang the mirror didn't work. At last, three months out of the relationship, the mirror is up.
When I look at myself in the mirror, a few things strike me. If I'm dressed, I feel like my body is discontinuous, improperly articulated. The joints seem akimbo. The clothing seems to drape across disorganized lumps of tissue that do not cohere into a reasonable whole. Is this in my mind, or am I the most awkward person who has ever lived? Perhaps somewhere between the two. At 34, with a belly at last on the rise, some smoothing of this effect is evident.
more to come ...
gotta go meet my friend from the CVT