Hollow, Weaned (Not)

Today most of America celebrates, almost hungrily, what is the day before All Saints Day. When I was a child, a scant decade or so after the greatest and most horrific event in recorded human history, we, i.e. my peers, celebrated Halloween with mellow partying (joyful but not exactly bacchanalian): ducking for apples, jacko'lanterns in our windows, silhouettes cut from black construction paper of witches on brooms and sable cats dangling from mirrors or ceilings, store bought or homemade costumes of skeletons, devils, princesses or clowns and maybe a stocking filled with chalk or flour to pound against the stoop or door of those we "haunted." This last item represented the darkest degree of our spirits when we expressed ourselves with this "trick" if denied any candy or apples. In fact, I never carried this "weapon" or was even aware of its impish practice until my last couple of years of societally sanctioned begging which had commenced at about the age of reason (six or seven) and concluded when I was eleven. And I was never inclined to wish I had such an item. Neighbors were all known to us and were sweet and encouraging, especially dear Mrs. Hupe, the old German-American lady across the street who required that we "sing for our supper" before the treats were distributed. My parents never accompanied me on these doorbell ringing adventures (a testimony to the quality of life in our neighborhood then, rather than a commentary on their confidence in my early strides towards independence). I probably would have ventured out for a "last hurrah" of my pre-pubescence in my twelfth year, but an event known to history as The Cuban Missile Crisis had been freshly minted and seared into all of our hearts and souls (young and old alike) some nine days earlier that particular October and the annual game of playacting at evil lost its charms for me after the ultimate game of Armageddon/Chicken had already been performed with the result of unmatched and genuine apprehension to the extremest degree, making it the all time champ of spookiness. But except for that one year wherein imminent and total annihilation was a taumatizing and all too real possibility, the Halloween seasons of my youth were far different and far less unpleasant than those experienced in the last quarter century or so. I do not believe that this conclusion is a result of yet another reminiscence by a grouchy, soon-to-be senior citizen, lamenting the good old days and railing against benighted youngsters and hopeless outsiders who don't understand the true meaning of Halloween.

Well, for starters, the true meaning of this holiday (which still, mercifully, is not a legally sanctioned one) cannot casually be articulated nor should anyone claim one's necessarily sentimental and naturally colored personal memories as the historical "last word" about the long and evolving (or devolving) tradition. Scholars, far more knowledgeable than myself could illuminate us, no doubt, about the ancient pagan and early Christian roots of the day and I'm sure that one might be pleasantly surprised as well as repelled by long forgotten practices, mindsets and motivations. The changes that I'd like to focus on though: those in my lifetime (plus a curious variant of the observance of the occasion, regionally based perhaps and generally before the second world war, reported by my parents and their contemporaries) are significant and most interesting and they seem to reflect, like more and more things, the growing cultural clashes in this country since the mid-1960s.

Aside from my admittedly "warm and fuzzy" take on the season and despite truly scary news items in the past (nearly as far back as my days of scurrying around the neighborhood) such as the reports of razor blades inserted into apples and other tampered treats, the Halloween festivities of then were simpler and less complicated. Today they're far more purposeful, concentrated, and organized events, primarily geared for adults. There seems to be, more and more, a serious tone to the day's affairs. Choosing a costume and preparing one's social itinerary appears to consume more time than in the past and expressing one's self strikes me as paramount and a detriment to the fun of being with friends and family. The season is remarkably longer than it was even 15 or so years ago. I recall several years ago seeing homes decorated for the mid-autumn holiday during sweltering days in mid-September and the enormous energy devoted to the day (and especially the night) in the gay and lesbian communities is quite well known and increasingly ballyhooed through gatherings like the parade in New York's Greenwich Village. That the N.Y.C. Transit Authority this year made plans to suspend all bus service in the event of organized rowdiness on Halloween, gives great pause and reminds me of the regrettable "tradition" of only a very few years back in Detroit in which the torching of buildings was deemed indispensable by some to the proper celebrating of the night.

I don't know the figures, but I do know that the enormous increase in sales of Halloween related items now surpasses those of any other holiday except Christmas, but that that gap is rapidly closing. Why this attraction, if not obsession, with a holiday that lionizes not the Prince of Peace but the darker side of the human heart? A healthy playfulness that includes psychic "rough housing" if you will, is not to be condemned. "Letting off steam" and all the other phrases that describe a tolerance for human frailty and the need to permit creativity and all its concomitant messiness, are understood and Halloween will or should always embody this spirit. But the avenues of pursuit that I observe in many of the newer celebrations include a greater and greater attraction for the occult and the glorifying of self over community. Individualism is at least as American as apple pie, but the trends are, it seems, more and more about how much one can call attention to one's self via more and more peacock-like regalia in the manner of a Lady Gaga or a Liberace. The entertainment value is significant and the spectacles can enrich us as theatrical events. But the need to parade is suspect. Yes, we don't want a humorless, puritanical society that is unable to appreciate or even countenance the existence of Halloween. There is no danger of that. But the pendulum may have long since begun to swing in the other direction: toward a place of emptiness, yes hollowness, that clubbing, partying, relentless "hooking up", friending a la Facebook, etc., and self-exaltation (and exultation) can only hide from view for a time. We all escape and we all need to from time to time. But the self-deluding, whether through alcohol, drugs, sexual addiction, food, gambling or even sometimes pontificating blogs (I'd best get a grip and take heed, just like anyone else!) imperils the innocuous fun of the holiday. If we take the time to reflect, more than just occasionally, take ourselves less seriously and try to remember that we are not constantly compelled by anyone or anything, to "go solo" like Lindbergh flying the Atlantic for the first time or Hillary climbing Mt. Everest. When having a good time increasingly seems to resemble hard work, take a pause.

You can disabuse yourself of (yes, wean yourself away from) the pressures of this world to compete, to strain, and the compulsion to fight against (as in the boastful "I play hard!") the peace and tranquility that is always beckoning if we'll just listen to that small but indomitable voice which is our own.

Post Script: The variant on the Halloween tradition of Trick or Treating (or Guising, in parts of Scotland and Ireland) that I referred to above, was the custom of dressing in costumes and begging on Thanksgiving morning rather than on Halloween. The usual cry was simply "Anything for Thanksgiving?" There is anecdotal evidence of this on the internet and my aunt, an octogenarian, corroborated recently what my older parents also confirmed, that this practice seems to have died out shortly after the war. More about this anon.

How Coarse Can The Fabric Get?

I watched, like anyone else who regularly views news coverage on television these days, the photographs and footage of the last moments of Col. al-Qaddafi's life. How inured to graphic scenes of inhuman behavior have we become that many of us don't seem to recoil from such violent images? Sure, we've been viewing guys in those black hats, if we're baby boomers or older, being dispatched by the white hatted guys for more than sixty years on t.v., and in the movies for nearly a century, if we're nonagenarians and even older still. As a society we have lived through or learned of two world wars and countless others, read of these or similarly described sanguinary tales as well as the non-fictional ones in newspapers, periodicals, etc. and have seen or heard of protests, crimes, car accidents, plane crashes and all kinds of natural and unnatural disasters. This is simply life. Fact is though, we've soaked in enough images of brutality into our collective spongy gray matter to theoretically shatter the inner St. Francis of nearly all of us. Of course, we compartmentalize, intellectualize, rationalize and therefore are usually not traumatized by these indirect encounters with the deeply spiritually ugly, particularly with t.v. images of yore and their consistently sanitized depictions, and with atrocities journalistically presented in a similarly non-explicit manner until about the mid 1960s. Lucky thing that. Yet now (since, let's say, a convenient-to-designate-as-watershed film such as "Bonnie and Clyde" in 1967) we seem to have become, with increasing regularity, unaffected by such scenes of unspeakable carnage. I believe this kind of numbness may be worse than having one's psyche reduced to a kind of quivering jelly by one's first experience of a shocking event after being societally sheltered in a gentler time.

I recall, it must have been about 1974, that while visiting the apartment of a friend from my then relatively recent high school days, his younger brother, perhaps in his early teens or even younger, entered the room we were in, energetically moving about the premises while clutching what appeared to be a small flesh colored rubber doll. He was a bit manic in his mannerisms and speech, but the gist of his pronouncements was this: "I'm holding a human fetus. Someone I know who works in a nearby hospital obtained it for me and I'm going to keep it!" To this day I don't I know if he was speaking the truth or not. I had never before (or since) seen such an alleged object. Was it just an imitation of the real thing, in fact made of rubber, or was it the actual remains of a person (or just a potential person, as some imprudently assert) that had been preserved in formaldehyde? Guess I'll never know. Whether this little snot nose was a con-man-in-training or not, the point of his exhibition was equally profoundly crude and disturbing wherever the truth lay. The zeitgeist of that period was (and I'm afraid, is) for me, encapsulated in that display that proclaimed "I can do or say or behave in any way that pleases me and I shall view anything or anyone I wish and rip any curtain aside because my will is the only thing I consider 'sacred.' Otherwise, that word is meaningless to me!"

Please do not misunderstand. The Qaddafis, the Saddam Husseins, the Bin Ladens, the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Pol Pots, the Mussolinis, etc., etc., all got (or failed to get in Stalin's and Pol Pot's cases) their just deserts. And I'm no foe of the death penalty nor do I subscribe to the old pacifist caution that violence only begets more violence. What I am saying is this: when there is no perceived horror in the world, how can there be any beauty and goodness in it? The avoidance of the mere squeamishness experienced by still a few of us, by not showing these images, is not what I am urging. There is no moral component necessarily in sparing one of this or in the physiological reaction itself, that it primarily is. After all, Himmler was reportedly often seen with his eyelids violently twitching along with other facial tics as he viewed the slaughter of Jews and others in the concentration camps.

I read daily a newspaper to my mother whose vision is quite limited. She's very fond of the gossip columns and with each passing month I've noticed the uptick (perhaps I should keep a log of the instances) in blasphemies and Anglo-Saxon words referencing sex acts and intimate body parts that are printed in these pathetic examples of reportage descended from the yellow journalism mindset of an earlier time. With the scantest amount of self-censorship, as in "f--k" and the like, they pollute further, what for decades now has been a world of print devoid of real reflection and serious human thought. Except for some incisive and insightful columns about the national and geopolitical scenes, there is precious little to recommend American journalism in the 21st century. With these particular words it seems increasingly merely a superannuated and endangered formality to delete a few letters of such when printing them, not dissimilar to "deleting" as it were, through the non-total nudity of pasties and g-string on a stripper at an establishment that, legally or not, authorizes its female performers/employees to nightly dispense at some dramatic moment with these vestigial articles of minimalist modesty. One expects "mainstream" newspapers like the one I read to very soon graduate to their version of final "denuding" via the end of deletions and other instances of journalistic forbearance.

How about the prospect of literature (and assumedly instruction) distributed to grade school children in N.Y.C. public schools that expounds on various aspects of sexuality, both heterosexual and homosexual practices and their acts with specific, explicit and detailed explanations of the same? Is this not a coarsening of our social fabric also? I'd say it's the secular version of the early Christian hair shirt in terms of discomfort though it's light years from the concept of self-mortification. A garment of steel wool and fiberglass with an overcoat of top quality sandpaper (coarsest grade, naturally) is what the well dressed nihilist is wearing this season.

There are so many other examples, too numerous to recount all of them here, in hundreds of other spheres of our fragile social structure that reinforce the conclusion I am forced to draw about these repulsive but ineluctable facts. Western civilization is on the decline. Big time. Our Judeo-Christian world and the Hellenic traditions of Reason and democratic principles that were strengthened immeasurably by Anglo-American philosophies of self-government, have been under siege for a long time and is now worse than "on the ropes." Whether it's elements of a corrupt police organization defending ticket fixing, officers on duty making lewd gestures during an ethnic festival, gun and drug smuggling by some of these same professionals sworn to enforce and uphold the law, pension fraudsters, Wall Street double dealers ("Greed Is Good"), Occupiers singing the old tune of the fabled grasshopper: "The World Owes Me A Living", clergymen "Gone Wild", school teachers corrupting their students with sexual liaisons or even political diatribes masquerading as detached, objective presentations of facts, or an unending parade of politicians guzzling with abandon at the public trough together with public sector unions aided and abetted by a quasi-socialist administration in Washington, the truth is this: the guys in the black hats have returned from their graves and seem now impervious to our bullets of righteous indignation.

What to do? Keep our powder dry anew and for a while longer. Watch and wait and seek good counsel. There are men and women of good will still among us. The selfishness needs to end however. We needn't devolve into "useful idiots" as Marxism 101 teaches or to become an actual card carrying Commie bastard to arrive at a less unjust world. No, we need to re-learn the old verities and treat one's neighbor the same way that we wish to be treated. Our individuality and our privacy both need preserving also and we can defeat our sworn enemies, and more importantly, direct our wrath against their transgressions without forgetting that greatest love: agape. Even a Qaddafi was once "somebody's darling, some mother's son." Once we can cease to allow ourselves to exult over the license we gift ourselves with: that of dehumanizing our adversaries or "cockroachizing" them to unleash the vermin within ourselves, then we may start to become more human again and eventually fully so (no demonizing at all, grimly or exuberantly) with continued great effort, contemplation and prayer.

Mighty Fine News: The Yankees Lose!

The big boned, moody mulatto, erstwhile paramour of the sociopathic Madonna swung uselessly at the pitch. It was the third strike, last out of the bottom of the ninth inning and it spelled, joyfully, for: defenders of the downtrodden, National League Metro New York fans, plain ol' Mets fans, ancient Senators/Nats fans ("Damn Yankees!"), septuagenarians and older from Brooklyn and other parts of Queens and N.Y.C., most any sentient being in New England (and the dead ones as well, especially those who bought the farm before 2004), most folks in the lower 48 and Hawaii and Alaska as well..you betcha, and all men of good will….drum roll please…. THE DEATH KNELL OF THE 2011 SEASON FOR THE NEW YORK YANKEES, symbols of arrogance, overweening pride and the objects of misplaced affection/addiction of sycophants, fair weather rooters and boot lickers of a seeming American success story. "Rooting for the New York Yankees", an old beloved and departed friend once told me "is like rooting for Rockefeller to make a million dollars." He was so right.

It's a free country (wait, let me check my watch and what's the latest emanating from D.C.). O.K., so yeah, let the pea brained idolaters of the automatons in pinstripes watch the reruns of past glories on the Yes (Yankees) cable channel and let 'em hope and plot for 2012. But mostly, let 'em learn, with each disappointment, some of the character building that may, I repeat, may come with more regularized losing and second best status. It's a long winter: let 'em ponder "what might have been" and maybe with enough richly deserved comeuppances like this sweet Tigers victory, they'll bother to at least take a peak in a Webster's at the meaning of the words "suffering" and "compassion." Oh, are you thinking dear reader, that I am supposed to bestow some of this rare commodity of saintliness connoted by the latter word upon these obnoxious folks to help "loin 'em" as they say in "Greenpernt?" "Where were they, in this regard, for all these many long years?", say we Cubs, Red Sox, Mets, Dodgers, Giants fans. (though '10's afterglow may have not yet worn off on Jints folks and hence no fresh gall for them). Devotees of all these teams though, have long since earned their doctorates in Crucifixion-By-Loyalty, an interesting field of study of the modern masochist's yearning for love and salvation. And we needed no patronizing and phony condolences from the Yanks and their minions. Come to think of it, that's one of the very few virtues of a Yankees disciple, they give you no quarter (in more ways than one: notoriously chintzy are they…why be surprised?…ask any waiter or bellhop who had to deal with the patron saint of Yankeeism, Joltin' Joe The Vainest Schmo). Let the Cranky Yankees fans go to school and hit the books, long and hard.

Full disclosure: in 1955, with about three weeks of kindergarten experience under my belt (or beneath my metal snap-on suspenders) I watched as my Aunt Pauline thrilled to Johnny Podres' shutout and only World Series Championship clinching for his Brooklyn Dodgers. My Mom had traditionally turned on our old Dumont t.v. every October since '51 and she and my aunt both wearied of the predictable outcome nearly each year: "Yankees win." I knew I was a Dodgers fan on that long ago afternoon when they and my Dad caught the spirit (who can forget the Daily News' headline the next morning "WHO'S A BUM!" with the full page cartoon of Leo O'Mealia's beloved hobo) that ignited as much heavenly delirium in Flatbush and beyond as did V-J Day.

What made tonight's final curtain so particularly lovely was the memory tripped off by the uniform of the potbellied hurler with the eccentric body language on the mound against the final Yankee batter. In May 1959 I had fully discovered the happy mania of the game and all heroics of a non-Yankee nature. That particular season did not disappoint. Except for 1954, it was the only one of the decade of the '50s in which the Yankees failed to win the American league pennant (in fact they would win all five pennants of the first half of the '60s). Part of their frustrations (and one of the reasons for their third place finish that season) were the result of the exciting play of the Detroit Tigers with ace Frank Lary, "The Yankee Killer" and Charlie "Sunday Charlie" Maxwell, home run hitter par excellence. That Sunday in May, when Charlie slugged four homers consecutively against the despised Bombers in a doubleheader, was the occasion for an explosion of delight for a little rabid partisan like me. The twinge of disappointment four months later when the Go-Go Chicago White Sox captured their first pennant in forty years, nudging out the Tigers, was more than ameliorated by my beloved Bums' ascension to the top of the National league heap that year. Their conquest (as the L.A. Dodgers) of the Sox in the World Series was a happy reprise of '55 and a most delicious icing on the cake.

The zenith of exultation though, the very summit of King Of The Hill-ism, was the 1963 World Series in which the Dodgers came face to face against the Yanks for the first time since '56 (that terrible series in which Don Larsen's perfect game and a general collapse of Brooklyn's offense led to the Bombers' speedy revenge for '55's brief moment of paradise). In '63, there were no booming Brooklyn bats of the recent past to suddenly go cold (Snider, Campy, Furillo and Hodges) but these west coast Dodgers now had the fully developed talents of the matchless southpaw Sandy Koufax, the nearly equally awesome Don Drysdale and though relatively punchless, the remarkable speed of a resourceful team led by the ultimate master of mercurial locomotion: Maury Wills. The outcome? The Dodgers: World Champions in four straight games, Yankee bats muted along with their fans' flapping jaws and Nirvana for the Forces of Light. The Horace Clarke era of sustained Yankee mediocrity was only several years away (a truly wonderful period, much like the smashed landscape after the collapse of Rome, but without the barbarians holding sway). For the moment though, before the horror of Dallas one month later, Vietnam and all the other upheavals and assassinations of the next dozen years or so, there was that incomparable moment, at least in the world of baseball, when Goliath lay sprawled out flat on his back with David's rock lodged in the tyrannical ogre's skull and the underdog as gleeful overdog! Go Bums, go Sawx, go all liberators and liberated from Pinheaded Pinstripers (with apologies to Mr. Bill O'Reilly….unless he's a Yankees fan).

A Lovely Face, How So?

Language is so often relied upon. This is especially so when the would-be communicator is me. I struggle for the right written words, and after so many years (the entire second half of the 20th century plus the "decade'n change" of this one) of being among the quick, if not the swift, I realize that my efforts, though bearing some stressed fruit, remain products of a mind of some genetic gifts, but untrained and to date, hardly prolific. Am also aware of the overwritten quality of most of my offerings, a hangover that seems to keep hanging on, from my days as a 38 year old undergraduate, returned to his studies after almost 16 years. I was trying, and continue so, to compensate for a perceived inadequacy, both quantitatively and qualitatively, as a creative writer. This blog offers the opportunity to make literary "omelets" with little or no dire consequences for breaking innumerable "eggs." So here I go again, prolixity via convoluted sentences and parenthetical concoctions like twining morning glories clogging the path to my point that my patient reader (hopefully) searches for and finds, leading to the threshold of, dare I be so pompous: some enlightenment?

Well, I'll try to disabuse myself of these verbosities eventually. In the meantime, the subject of beauty, human female beauty that is, concerns me here today (yes, okay, just about any day). On first blush (and this can literally still happen to some of us, regardless of age, who see and become aware of being seen by a most comely person of the opposite sex) it seems one of the least likely topics to prove a good training ground for developing writers like myself and for encouraging them to work on their tasks of "simplifying." Yes, there are unparalleled poets who, with concision and divine aid can somehow express and recreate the reality of the precise beauty that their eyes and hearts see, and there are others, sculptors and orators, who can also come close to this acme of literary delight through the particular medium of their true art. But most of us, committed to prose and likely to remain "not pros" must build a tedious and complex house of cards with our words, and are held hostage to this task of constructing a dubious palace of verbiage to shelter the queens in our midst. We cannot put our faith in the old dictum "less is more" or expect that our appreciation of this pulchritude will be understood with a Jimmy Stewart-like taciturnity or an almost inscrutable nod that says "Brava!" by an Eastwood or a McQueen. These icons and their living spiritual descendants, men with their own "beauty", i.e. handsomeness, can well afford to understand and be understood with their particular methods. They, after all, are gods to these goddesses and such unfiltered sexuality needs little or no flowery wordsmithing. We pencil pushers, men of mentation, as libidinally revved up as any "stud" in Hollywood or on the mythical range, but unlike the strong silent types, are charged with describing and circumscribing, painting an image and somehow animating this mimicking visage so that the flutter in our own hearts is reborn a thousandfold in the tickers of readers that thump in solidarity with ours because of our hopefully articulate cry to the heavens of what is incomparable beauty.

We shall fail every time. Our efforts may be praised after death (physically or psychically) which promotes us to that status which non-existence somehow always bestows: an end to rancor and exemption from life's critiques and other barbs. A certain gentleness is finally extended when it is no longer needed and hurting or being hurt are irrelevancies. And there is always a kind of eulogy that remarks that we were at least sincere and had striven mightily. But utterly insurmountable is the mountaintop of the Idea of the Fairer Sex and the flawlessness and exquisiteness of its members whether we beholders of beauty be dead or alive. It is not so much that words fail as that the mind and the body cannot remain too long unconnected, particularly when trying to inscribe or carve a recording of what is so intensely and essentially captivating but can only remain in the end, uncaptured by mere verbiage. Might as well try to grab some stardust and paint a smile on the ether that warms as hopefully (and hopelessly) as the "real live girl" of ancient song. Yes, Da Vinci climbed to this summit but it is so rare a thing and perhaps only his Mona Lisa, certainly not all or even most of his creations, were possessed of this near immortality. What of our Mona Lisas? Are they able to come into this world? Are they attainable? Can they be clasped to our longing bosoms when our artistry is less than god-like, or even when it's the best that is humanly possible? What is the goal, truly? Is it to love the object of beauty and delight, or is it to enfold it with our literary powers, whatever their strengths or weaknesses?

Can one tame a mustang? Ought one to even try? Monroe's Roslyn in "The Misfits" viscerally abhorred the concept and began to crumble into broken bits over the violence she witnessed perpetrated by those around her (all men) for whom the hunt was all, perhaps a hard wired thing deep in the male species. Is a straining writer any different from a cowboy straining to rope, brand and subjugate these horses? There is another facet of the whole question, a very sharp edged one, that I should mention. I do not believe it's an idiosyncrasy of my world view on womankind, but a legitimate issue that all men, and conversely women, deal with in certain cases. There are extremely attractive persons of both sexes, who, because of their remarkable physical attributes incite, intentionally or not, extreme reactions in those for whom their vision serves as very vulnerable portals through which their emotions can be assaulted and easily inflamed by such visual delights. Hostility, animosity, even predation in various forms can be the result, and even the slightest hint of political power or the expression of power through the world of dreams and fantasy (particularly in the field of entertainment) by these persons of beauty, can militarize, as it were, those afflicted by this desire or even lust. These situations are proper occasions for intellectualism (and of course, religion), the former long denigrated in America and the latter only recently so, to come to the fore and encourage, forcefully, the forces of sensationalism and The New Morality (just The Old Immorality) to awaken and search long and earnestly for the personhood of and respect for one and all, even those deemed gods and goddesses for whom the temptation to treat in an ungodly fashion may be severe and which is always wholly unacceptable.

But let's at least try to simplify anyway (novel notion for we inclined towards literary loquaciousness)! What is feminine beauty? Is there a mathematical formula that can explain what delights our senses and moves the mind and body to create, artistically and most profoundly, i.e. divinely through the continuation of our human race? A recent television program explored this science of beauty and attractiveness and seemed to assert that "yes" we have a mechanistic answer to the question: with formulas about the shapes and sizes of human faces and other palpably measurable aspects of the subject. The least strenuous journey to a place where this answer may be found however, includes, I believe, traveling down a road called familiarity: like an old melody that we love and begin to hum in glad comfort when its strains are re-introduced into our brains at a chance meeting say, while strolling past a stranger who is absent-mindedly and not self-consciously doing the same. Similarly, when so-and-so insists he has "the perfect date" for you (and when you wearily read him the subdued but still immutable "riot act" of your personal code of social interactions: "no blind dates"), he softens your hardened heart with a gentle, hope inducing description like "she looks an awful lot like a cross between Jamie Lee Curtis and Mary So-and-so. You remember, that very kind gal with the giggles and freckles? Oh, she's very nice, just like her, extremely friendly and intelligent besides." Something or rather someone, guaranteed to reprise a pleasant spirituality and physicality from the past: is this all one needs for a roadmap to bliss and the essence of beauty? What of gals from Mars (rather, they're from Venus, if anywhere exceedingly exotic, we are told)? Could they be sources providing rapturous and ecstatic experiences for we who seek this paradisiacal conjoining of yin and yang? We mustn't close our minds to the possibility that three heads (attached to one body) may be more beautiful than one. And why mustn't an alabaster bosom have more than two globular glands of pneumatic joyfulness? Well, okay, am guilty if charged for setting up straw men, or lighter-than-feathers women, for the sake of a cheap chuckle. The subject at hand remains, after all, female HUMAN beauty. And, is it not so, that what one loved or gravitated to long ago is what will likeliest, inspire and cheer in the future?

I asked this "beauty" question of a friend very recently (in fact, while preparing this blog). He agreed that there was something inexpressible about the answer to the question, even if understood on a "gut" level. He said that whenever we are listing attributes of a person being focused upon, whether of their physical charms or uniquely loveable character, we are basically declaring that that person is "alive." It seemed facile and not satisfying when he first stated this. But then I thought: "what does it mean to be alive?" Dig slightly deeper below the surface of the usual mundane "take" on such a query and "voila": the undeniable mystery of life itself makes stargazing's cousins: the contemplation of innerspace or the pondering of human existence and how and why an individual is beloved, most profoundly understandable in their inability to be understood, as when the French warm to one of their favorite subjects (or as we tend to stereotype their cultural inclinations): love, and declare that the beloved has that certain "Je ne sais quoi." And to fear not one's perhaps budding francophilia, I hereby declare, relative to that boy-girl thing: "Vive la difference!"