On beauty: mothers and daughters

This past week was my mother’s birthday. I called to wish her in the morning and then headed to work.

On the way to the tube stop, a strange thing happened: I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window and was startled enough to stop and stare at the reflection. Somehow, for the first time in my life, I reminded myself of my mother. Not resembled her, but somehow echoed her. And that was bizarre enough.

When I was a child, I was fascinated by my mother: she was beautiful and glamorous in that old-style movie star way. People would stare at her but rarely approached her, not only because we lived in a conservative society where she was a scion of a well-known family in the region, but also because there was something intimidating about her beauty. Even in kindergarten, friends would sigh every time she appeared at the school gates – all silks and chiffons and warm perfumed cuddles. “Your mother is soooooooo beautiful,” they would whisper in awe.

Early in my childhood, I realised that my mother’s kind of beauty was not only extraordinarily rare but also beyond my reach. In any case, everyone said that I resembled my father, and while he is handsome, it isn’t much help being a little girl and being told that one looks like a man!

So early on I rebelled: not in any overt way, but by simply refusing to take on the trappings of femininity and beauty. And quite early on, and thanks to my mother who was unfailingly proud of me, I realised that I had something extraordinary too: a brain that worked in ways that were unusual and powerful. As early as elementary school, I had decided that instead of the beauty of the family, I would be the brains. At least that I could achieve on my own steam.

At sixteen, someone took a photograph of me at a party and my mother was genuinely thrilled: “I have a beautiful daughter,” she exclaimed over and over again, putting that photograph in a frame. I didn’t believe her then. Tomboyish and bookish by turns, beauty was just as unattainable in my teens as when I was a child.

Then in my early twenties, I fell in love a man who I believed was a connoisseur of feminine beauty. Perhaps he was poor at communication or just deeply insecure, but during one alcohol-laced conversation, he told me that while I was “extremely attractive,” I would never count as “beautiful.” It was an affirmation of what I had always believed, and yet it hurt. Nothing he ever said afterwards to explain or make up, could undo that initial hurt.

In the years that followed, I single-mindedly pursued the goal of becoming the “brain,” eventually with a degree of success. And then, increasingly, I found that people were intimidated by the knowledge I had steadily and painstakingly acquired, by my ability to out-reason them.

And after the first flush of power that ability to intimidate gave me, I started to question it. I remembered the remote glamour that accompanies beauty and didn’t want the same reaction for my brain. Instead I began to search ways to inspire not intimidate. Over time, it is a skill I have acquired to some proficiency, and in the past few years, I have slowly gotten better at it: I can see that in my daily life.

Over the same period, my hankering for beauty has also fallen by the wayside. Perhaps that is only a natural corollary of deliberately trying to shed an ego that prides itself on intelligence and knowledge and on deliberate and consistent attempts at superiority, and instead focussing on excellence.

This is why I was stunned to see the reflection in the shop window. The woman who looked back at me was frighteningly good looking. Perhaps she was not glamorous in that movie star way like my mother, but still shockingly arresting, perhaps even intimidating, in her looks. Since then I have started noticing the way people “check” me out on the street, in cafes and pubs, in shops. They often wear the same arrested expression that I remember from my childhood, the one that my mother evoked. And sometimes, they approach me (no protective social barriers for me!) with curiosity and yet hesitation, as if expecting to be rebuffed.

My women friends (including my sister) laugh at me when I tell them of this strange new phenomenon. “You’re the only one who doesn’t notice she is beautiful,” my sister tells. “You’re crazy,” one of my oldest and closest friends exclaimed the other day, telling me (for the first time) that even that hyper-critical lover from my twenties couldn’t keep his eyes off me when I entered a room; this time I believe her.

My mother would also laugh when she reads this. She will call me to point out all the beautiful women in the family and wonder why I should expect to be different (she has done that before). For the first time, I remember that I also look like my paternal grandmother, and she was an accredited beauty of her times.

Sometimes I wish I hadn’t doubted myself for so long. But then perhaps that is good: convinced for years that I could not be beautiful, I have nurtured my brain; wracked by insecurity since my childhood, I have learned to identify with the underdog and have (hopefully) escaped the horrors of hubris. Those are not mean achievements for half a human life!

I also think I understand why I begin to look like my mother: some how, without trying, I have found the same confidence that my mother has always radiated, full of warmth and happiness, and a bubbling enthusiasm for life.

And that is a gift from her that is impossible to match, no matter how hard I try. Even for the rest of my life.

Happy birthday, mum!

On Pity: Thoughts on the Past Week

For the first time in my life, this past week I felt pity. It may sound strange as the word is so commonplace and yet it was profound experience.

As a writer, I am fascinated by the near impossible challenge of capturing human experience in words. It is the ultimate paradox: to attempt to capture the subtleties, complexities and vastness of human experience with materials and tools that are inherently inadequate and ill-suited to the job.

This means that I am always astounded when I grasp the meaning of a particular word. That is always an exhilarating moment of epiphany, when a commonly used word or phrase takes on new and powerful emotional resonance and understanding. It is a flash of insight into a word’s original use. Those moments are like an instant journey through human history into the very dawn of time, to that first moment when that emotion was felt and expressed by some anonymous human ancestor.

It is also a strangely mystical experience: as if for that instant I am connected to the entire unfathomable spectrum of humanity, from its very origins to my own. In that instant there is magic: of sudden understanding of how extraordinary the human mind is, and how extraordinary our journey through time and space has been as a species.

And while mysticism and evolution are not two words that normally go together, these moments provide a strangely personal glimpse into evolution: of how we humans are different from other sentient beings; of how extraordinary that very first moment of feeling a particular emotion must have been for that original ancestor; of the power of human emotions and the extraordinary hubris of attempting to articulate it in language.

For the first time in my life, I felt an emotion that I could identify only as pity.More importantly, for the very first time, I had a new understanding of that commonly used term (even more so in modern Britain, where it seems everything from a spilled cup of tea to a car accident is carelessly lumped together as “pity.”)

Yet what I experienced was something quite exceptional: first, of what the word means, rooted as it is in Latin, in pietas, as in duty. That is not duty as in a burden, or insistence on doing something right or anything at all under duress, but rather as duty when something unfortunate must still be done.

On looking up the word I found further explanation in the dictionary: “a feeling of sorrow that inclines one to help or show mercy.”

See what I mean when words are inadequate? To help is quite different from showing mercy. And yet, in its Latin sense, performance of duty would require a sense of mercy rather than helpfulness.

As I pondered the meaning of pity, I was struck by the following image: compassion or sympathy is when upon seeing a wounded, suffering being, one feels compelled to assist and ease its suffering.

Pity is what one feels when that wounded being is beyond all aid and we can do no more but feel a strange mixture of sadness and repulsion at its suffering.

Of course this begs the question: who excites our pity? Why do I not feel pity for those suffering in Gaza or the Congo or Darfur? Why do those weak, suffering, wounded people evoke my sympathy, compassion, sorrow and yet a grudging admiration and solidarity? Perhaps it is because of the sense of resistance and dignity that they bring to their calamitous lives; a sense of self that is asserted by their very determined efforts to survive the quotidian horrors that surround them.

No, they do not deserve pity, because they require no mercy. All by themselves, they exercise a powerful personal and collective agency despite the odds that face them.

Which then brings me back to the object of my pity: Pity diminishes the dignity of the one who receives it. The object of pity requires mercy from the strong because like that wounded animal that is beyond our aid, its pain is its only sense of self; its weakness is its only expression of identity. Even worse, the object of pity can not be saved or helped; the only mercy one can offer is to step gingerly, carefully, to avoid contagion, around and beyond it.

For the first time in my life, I have felt pity and understood the word. It is neither an emotion nor a word that I would ever like to repeat again.

Skeletons in the Closet: How Many More? Update

As if this morning's news were not nauseating enough, apparently Nico Sarkozy - yes, him of the model wife and high heeled shoes fame - found Mitterrand's tell all "autobiographical novel" with lurid details of paying Thai boys for sex and orgasmic descriptions of being turned on by the "slave market" (Mitterrand's terms) not only acceptable but also: "courageous and talented."

Amongst the genius literary gems spouting from Mr. Mitterand's overheated, exploitative, twisted pen is this one:  "All these rituals of the market for youths, the slave market excited me enormously ... the abundance of very attractive and immediately available young boys put me in a state of desire."

So Mr. Mitterand was turned on by a slave market of nubile adolescent Asians presented for his consumption! What precisely is Mr. Sarkozy's personal turn on? Shall that be genocide in Rwanda which he was too late to conduct with his usual over-hyped enthusiasm? Or is it merely hosing down by police of Algerian and Moroccan origin youths?

At one level, I am glad that the Euro-American hypocrisy at various levels is being exposed by the sordid Polanski saga. It is a reminder of that old colonial maxim that far too many of us "empire is long over" types forget: yes the white man teaches morality to all and sundry while making sure the genocides are carried out by the weapons he sells; that modern slave trade continues with his valuable euros/dollars/pounds; that there are two sets of rules - one for the powerful and the other for the exploited.  And all through, there is the usual imperial conceit of being "civilized" - oh the travails of the white man's burden!

Only problem: all trappings of the empire won't change the simple fact: the emperor has no clothes. And regardless of what Carla Bruni fancies, that isn't a pretty sight!