The body-soul question is one of the oldest ones we humans ponder.
In the present day, it takes on more urgency, as we are able, as no other people could in the past, to examine, study and see our own physical selves through mirrors, photographs and videos. We can contemplate our physical appearance and are encouraged to preserve images of that physical self and even share them with the world.
It also takes on more urgency as the spirit is severed from the transcendent.
And so we anxiously paint and sculpt ourselves – and more of us have the resources to do so than any other group of humans in history – and we present and perform and the anxiety is profound.
It’s good – they say – to spend time matching up your appearance to how you think of yourself.
Spoken, truly, as a only young-to early-middle-aged person (with time and money to spend) could.
Of course (of course) this is playing out in terms of sexuality and gender. It’s a driving force – what do you feel like? Do you not feel the way society tells you a woman or girl should feel? Well, you must be a guy, then! Get a masectomy and start the testosterone, and if you want, you can find a doctor who will flay some skin off your upper arm or thigh and tack it between your legs, too!
And here’s another nugget. From a New York Magazine on artist Alice Neel, whose is the subject of a new exhibit at the Met.
(Warning – images that might offend some at the link)
I wasn’t as taken with Neel’s art, as a whole, as critic Jerry Saltz is, but her paintings of pregnant women and children (like her Two Girls in Spanish Harlem, above) are marvelous, real and evocative.
As is her portrait of Andy Warhol (left), which Saltz describes as the best portrait of Warhol ever made. I’m not an expert, but it does capture something quite powerful, something far beyond Warhol’s self-presentation, while making absolutely clear that this is Warhol.
So what brought today’s thoughts on is a quote from Neel herself related to a self-portrait of her aging self.
“I hate the way I looked … I don’t like my type … my spirit looked nothing like my body.”
Full passage:
Neel’s nude self-portrait (-at age 80-) stands with Picasso’s 1905–6 portrait of Gertrude Stein. In each we see a Gibraltar-like woman — monumental, aware, in thought, and with power. Neel said “I hate the way I looked … I don’t like my type … my spirit looked nothing like my body.” She still revealed it all, picturing herself naked and old in her living room, a human animal with a prehensile toe, breasts resting on stomach, “flesh dropping off my bones,” holding a paintbrush (“I live for this little thing in my hand”). Picasso’s Stein may be Mesopotamian mountain; Neel is the allness of a knowing Buddha, a portrait of spirit and body as cosmos. This painting is hung near the end of the Met show: By the time you see it, you know that Neel used that “little thing” in her hand as a stick of dynamite.
My spirit looks nothing like my body…
Well, proclaims the modern age, fix it up! Become the self you know you are inside! Lift, tuck, go to the dermatologist and the surgeon, get a makeup and hair consult, and let me tell you about the best filters!
Or…just accept? Accept not only the reality of who we are and our physical state, but accept the dissonance we live with in these bodies, on this earth, in this life.
Sorry, it’s not going to “match.” Ever. It’s just going to be. That’s the curse, that’s the gift.
A few weeks ago, on our way back from Spain, I spent time with my friend Ann Englehart, who also turned 59 this summer. Over great Greek food in Astoria, I looked at her and asked the question that had been weighing on me:
“Do you feel fifty-freaking-nine years old?”
“NO!” she exclaimed, clearly relieved to hear someone else say it.
What does it even mean? we wondered, articulating the same thoughts aloud. What does it mean to be “almost sixty” – but to feel no older than, say forty, and to wonder – was I ever even 45 or 52? I just seem to have leapt from still almost youngish adulthood to AARP discounts without blinking. My appearance is changing, and I look at women two decades older than I and I know – God willing I make it that far – that there will be a day when I, too, will be unrecognizable to my younger self.
It’s very, very weird. It’s challenging. I completely understand why people – especially those in the public eye – get work done to stave off the sagging and the wrinkles. It’s so strange when what you look like on the outside doesn’t match what you feel on the inside. It’s disorienting. You might even say it’s dysphoric. Centered in those feelings, living as though this were the only reality and all that matters, the temptation to use all the technology at one’s disposal to fix it – to make it all match up – might be very strong.
But understanding that disassociation and sense of dislocation in another way, as an invitation. An invitation, a hint to listen to the heart that seeks and yearns for wholeness and unity, to understand that while it’s not perfectly possible on this earth, the yearning for it is a hint that somewhere, it does exist – that wholeness, that perfect unity of self – and it waits – and the hard, puzzling journey we’re on does not, in fact end where the world tells us.
For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one that is to come.
Charlotte was Both 