From: Nietzschean Naima, To: Gira-Gira
Dear Gira Gira chan,
I read the poem you sent me, and I find it nice:
This me, a me of whom I cannot accept to be me.
I am ugliness itself, this scar so repugnant,
yet, fake it till you make it, I half-embrace it all
and try to view this scar as uniqueness, as beauty.
Ugliness isolates me in non-lovingness,
I feel I am so wrong, so wrong that
reality, the right and true, isn't me.
Still, I plead for love, it can still bloom.
Still, blazingly, I shine out of hope,
not mainly, but more out of inner found
passion for love itself, it is so beautiful
... tap tap on, tap on...
This inspired me to offer my words, and hope that you find them empowering.
§1. Gira Gira, you have gone through a symptom of society’s commodification of the body. The body is treated as an object, tool, as a means towards an end. The body should not be equated with the body-image. In contemporary society, body-image is like an ad, as something through which one gains value. After all, this is capital: money is value. An ad is a frame, an illusion, a fiction. Often today, to fit in this fiction, we discipline our body and mind.
§2. You were treated unfairly. There are many people finding you beautiful, really. Check #AdoArt to see it.
§3. For me, your scar is a reminder, it's the embodiment of an entire spectrum of traumatic feelings sprung from being rejected by others. Trauma impacts one deeply, thus, it shapes one’s entire life one way or another. To heal after trauma requires psychological alchemy, so to call, therapy. Therapy is mainly with a psychologist, but its essence is self-awareness, acceptance, and acting differently. Thus, besides sessions, therapy takes place every time one has an occasion for transformation, including talks with friends, strangers, and empowering experiences. If one cannot go to a therapist, then one can take reality as the therapist and engage in awareness as mindfully noticing without labeling/judging what takes place, i.e., mindfulness. This is my take on this, I am not a psychologist, am a philosopher, but life led me to meet several psychologists.
§4. Gira Gira’s scar is inherently beautiful through its imperfection. There is a Japanese aesthetic artform incorporating imperfection as its constitution: wabisabi (侘寂). Wabisabi emphasizes the incompleteness and impermanence of things. There are different takes on beauty, cultural frameworks to define it, and purely subjective preferences. One might find objective universal properties of beauty, but I doubt it. One can define beauty as the property of an object to be nice, pleasant, due to its very perception. Something can be pleasant without itself being beautiful: it causes pleasure but does not contain pleasure in it of itself. Beauty is often viewed in terms of the harmony/symmetry between its parts. I think that at the existential level there is a sense in which beauty is the world itself, things are beautiful simply by being. An ugly deformed object is beautiful not in the sense that the object itself is pleasant, but that underneath the repulsion and ugliness, there is a subtle fascination, a curiosity, an openness towards the world, and this takes place no matter the subject. This beauty has something in common with the ancient Greek word for wonder, thauma, but is not mere amazement since it includes an incitement to discover. In other words, I find there is potential curiosity in each moment of anything. There is an openness towards things, and a professor I had, William Desmond, articulated this through the term Porosity in books such as Art, Origin, Otherness (the article on Plato’s Symposium) and The Gift of Beauty, and the Passion of Being (in the introduction, first section “primal porosity of being”).
§5. Thus, in a sense, anything is an innate pleasantness, an innate passion inciting us to discover. Often, due to a habit of being overinvolved with a particular something, we miss what is in front of us. There are moments of curiosity, we all have them. My speculative claim is that if we open up to the world, we find that there has always been this implicit curiosity. We simply covered it up. If one emphasizes the beauty, the curiosity, then one chooses to view the world as beautiful. In this sense, beauty is a choice. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then depending on the lenses one choses to wear, something is experienced as beautiful or not. You have chosen to “shine on”, to view yourself as beautiful. It is an existential choice, an act of self-affirmation against the status quo.
§6. Also, the body-self-mind relationship you described to me, how you are marked, impacted, by the spangles scar, is one of viewing yourself as ugly, yet you still refer to this experience as one defined by your scar. You and your scar are not separate, in an embodied phenomenological sense. Embodiment means that one inhabits a body, that the body is an integral part of who one is. Merleau-Ponty articulated, in Phenomenology of Perception, that consciousness is the body, not in the sense that consciousness is identical with nervous process in the brain, but in the sense that the body itself, as in its own suchness, is in-between physical and mental. There exists pro and cons towards this claim. I use it here to tell you that healing from a trauma of despising the body, one needs to learn to reaccept the body, to view oneself not only as mind, but also as body. I really think, when looking at my daily experience, that Merleau-Ponty is right.
§7. Your experience has inspired me to reflect on an existential aesthetics: beauty is the world, the phenomenon, the sensations, experience, emotions. In so far as all conscious life is a life of impressions, of phenomena, all that there is for us is a phenomena, including thought. Thus, there is a phenomenal, sensational, impressionable, aspect in thinking itself. These sensations direct the course of our life, they open up a horizon of curiosity. In this sense, phenomena itself is aesthetics, is beautiful, to refer back to Desmond’s porosity. How to understand this in relation to the everyday usage of beautiful and ugly? The blind one divides the world into beautiful and ugly. The one with glasses grasps that there is a suchness, a beauty not divisible into the beautiful versus the ugly. The true seer, the one without glasses, perceives neither indivisible beauty, nor a war between beauty and its negation. This Buddhist middle way is wabisabi. The unbearable is the unbearable, and so be it. But all that one can do is to bear alongside this unbearable. There is imperfection and all that one can do is to imperfectly perfect, swim, dance, fly, in this unfinishable world. The idea is not to march towards an ideal, a frame, a perfection, but to live, to flow with the river.
§8. Aesthetics is sensation, is that which is in its immediateness, in the nakedness of our encounter with things, is that which leaves a mark on us. Thought is also aesthetical, it is an organ of passion, a mouth through which emotions articulate themselves. Emotions, passions, also embody rationality in their own manner. The world also has its innate rationality, not in the sense that there is, necessarily, a divine reason, etc., but in the sense that there is a coherence in the world. Until this point, it seems as if the world is both reason and emotion. However, the world is neither reason nor emotion, neither sensation nor coherence, the world is not an object, has no determinate shape and location, since existence as such simply is. Shape, location, and other properties are a mix between Being and language since properties are descriptions, i.e., interpretations, of Being. Being is not a property. In other words, x is but for one to grasp x as an x, one has to interpret, to use language. The statements ‘the world it is emotion’ or ‘the world is reason’ are interpretations, not the thing itself. Thus, the world carries a) coherence, rationality, b) not-coherence, but emotional, impression, sensational, c) both coherence and impression, d) neither coherence nor impression. Indeed, I stated above that from different angles, in different regards, the world has different attributes, but the fact that there can be different angles shows that there is a plurality involved, that there is no one model dominating the rest.
§9. To understand the aesthetic, the intimate impact of the world upon oneself, porosity, one has to go out of the singular standpoint of the aesthetic, and to see that no standpoint can replace experience/reality itself. A standpoint on an issue is reached through an interpretation, though the encapsulation of the world into specific concepts. This is my final take on aesthetics, on beauty, the immediate this! Simply this. Simply it is. Look, participate, think, feel without imposing a model. Models come and go, they help, but do not anchor in them.
§10. Thus, Gira Gira, your beauty, suchness, self-affirmation are not pre-defined, but are experiences, experiments. It is an adventure.
P.S. I saw you, Gira Gira, leaving the salon yesterday. Your hair looked nice, and the scar was also part of the appeal. @patrick99#6775 took a picture of you with some dwarfs.
Take care,
Yours, sincerely, Nietzschean Naima.
References:
In the text the Catuṣkoṭi is used, a Buddhist paradoxical manner of reasoning.
Patrick’s Ado fanart videos (1) {2}
