Beauty marks
fiction
From the files of LAK on behalf of the imaginary island of New Bretten
So there you have it
This article was originally sent to LAK at ‘Reports from New Bretten’. LAK sent a note back to the author pointing out that he had circulated the article among several of his New Bretten colleagues and one of them was offended by the tone and implications of ‘Beauty Marks’. Some of the content seemed to be racist and touched on a theme that was a sensitive part of the history of the islanders (i.e., their grandparents had escaped annihilation by immigrating to the only place left on earth, Japanese occupied Shanghai, China. Maybe the reader misunderstood the meaning of the article but maybe not.
Do good looking kids survive and flourish better than the ugly ducklings and if so does data support that notion? How deadly is ugliness? Is it true that pretty gals get their pick of the male litter and do they produce babies that are bouncy and more fun (maybe)? Moving along the same crooked path, …..do teachers see good looking kids as smarter and are they less likely to blame them when the class misbehaves? Is this about myth building and folklore and where does our sense of beauty come from? Is it wired into our nervous system?
Many stories can be written about the lives and appearances of insects and their survival value? I look at that literature and come up with questions that some think are silly like whether a pretty butterfly is more likely to be a tidbit for a swooping magpie than an ugly winged insect or are ladybugs more delicious than stinkbugs? In my mind the esthetics of buggery is complex. I think cute bugs should have the right name and look right in my eyes and perhaps also in yours. I cringe at the sight of a large flat dark bug with a big head, beady eyes, and a real or imagined pincer ready to bite me in the back, the ones with antennae hairs waving about all set to find me in the dark or maybe one with a name like striated dung beetle (sounds a bit like a Kafka bug) and of course this type of bug is unacceptable. A beetle that is fine in the underbrush of a warm wet rain forest is not ok where I live in Rockville Maryland? If I see a huge ugly loot spinner on my kitchen floor I will surely step on it and squash it flat. I would then take lots of paper towels to lift everything that it was made off the kitchen floor and drop it in the garbage. I have no plans to rescue a striated ugly big dung beetle, or slinking dark bound darters, glitt suckers, the brown kind with the hairy legs and spiked headpiece.
People, like bugs, and butts, come in all kinds of flavors, wrapping papers, noses, mouths, hairy or bald ears, round heads or oval and box-like eye shapes, with close up bright looks or with dull far away stares. Some are surrounded by sweet or flowery, or woodsy scents, the kind that can be trusted, while others make our nose scrunch. We have our personalized esthetics standards committee that automatically tells us what is cute and what isn’t. Of course it is all in our head but how did it get there. We know what we like and what we don’t but not why, or where our tastes came from except to say we can make some post hoc statements that account for little to nothing. Was Mona denied tenure because she had bad breath and short stubby legs, and ears and a nose that didn’t fit the rest of her face and was that decision unfair?
What should someone that is needy or desperate look like? The beggar must look right; look the part in our eyes for us to say, ‘sure I will help you’ and of course we expect the right reaction to having been helped one that meets our esthetic standards perhaps shaped by some old Depression era movies. Let’s not forget the patient we visit in the hospital, who also must look and act the part, (little helpless, gentle smile, sprinkling of thank yous, and it is important to not overdo moaning).
Looking right matters. The empathy primer, the trigger for reaching out, might be the soulful warm soft sad eyes on the face of a pouch that needs rescuing. Deer may eat your bushes but look at their sweet innocent faces. What about AIDS victims in Africa who don’t look like or live like us? Does the nature of their appearance decide whether they are worthy of our rescue or do we decide to invent stories of why this affliction was brought on because, well they are different, and their corrupt political system brought on their pestilence, and anyway they are used to being sick and hungry, destitute dying and they don’t experience death and dying the way we do. Do we make up another kind of story about homebred AIDS patients, whose odd lifestyle makes them strangers to us and so we walk on, and of course we are sorry but we don’t cradle their dying heads in our hands and if we touch them then maybe…..What if the Jews in 1930’s Germany had not been depicted as vermin, rats crawling about spreading disease? Should the Jews have been prettier and scrubbed their history and should they have had short haircuts and long braids. But if they looked more appetizing would they have been harder to kill?
The hurricane victims in Florida, looking skyward, then down to the ground with a stunned ‘oh my god’ look, while standing in front of their destroyed home they are a different breed of victims. They are depicted as looking just like us and so they are the ones that deserve our hugs as they fit our image of what devastated faces should look like to make them cuddly in their grief. We want our play to include characters running around pleading and then help comes and everyone hugs each other and gets teary. Those films are not cast with victims that are made of soft fat, or pimpled, folks with lousy teeth, faces twisted into grimaces or the wrong skin color the ones that don’t make it into our head films. The set and character in the New Orleans hurricane needed a remake for help to have come earlier and with more punch. Too bad.
In part what looks good or ugly is based on familiarity and that is played out not just by what happens between our ears but at the level of the most basic units of our being, our cells, our genes, our immune system, all the tissues that make us what we are as humans. Our heads work just like every cell in our body. What does our body know and what does it do at the elementary level of analysis? Attack what is strange, artificial; be that heart valves, kidneys, implants here and there. We survive by killing off strangers or ugly unfamiliar bugs that have come through our back door. We are on the alert ready to attack, kill, whether that is our immune system mobilized and knowledgeable, knowing how to recognize and squash the stranger or the curious outsider at our door. So too, our genetic library, requires lots of sweepers, gate keepers to turn back gate crashers. When the sweeper genes fail we are in real trouble.
A gate unguarded spells danger onto death. Maybe it just has to be that way, strange mutated genes, funny bugs inside us, suspicious looking organs that have replaced the ones we were born with, the unfamiliar art, music, smells, implants and refugees. We need a good just and aesthetically pleasing worldview to live by to protect us forever.