A recent much advertized experiment answered the ancient question, “What is beautiful”? A statistically significant number of women’s faces were superimposed, thanks to the cleverness of computer graphics, and mathematically averaged to a single image. The result? The image was identical to the ideal female face. Human brains naturally and subliminally average the many perceptions of real women into the goddess-like proportions of the feminine ideal. Lots of luck gals. None of us will ever satisfy that delusional lust for perfection. We are our own unique separate selves__nobody’s ideal.
If our brains are so adept at averaging concepts of visual beauty, why should we not take on other even more complex algorithms? I assert that we do. We are purposefully acculturated from our first breath to become the average ideal. We are compared to long dead progenitors, to high-performing or misbehaving parents, to every which-way acting-out siblings, to Hollywood Stars, to comic-book heroes, to saints, to villains, even to the Devil Incarnate. In between being told that “our tongue will stick to it” and that “our eyes will freeze that way”, we are evaluated vis-à-vis all manner of others, with the intent of titrating our expression of humanness toward an innocuous golden
mean.
But, most of us are imperfect. We are the offspring of imperfect parents and parenting. Some of us suffer a growing up in the south, where fodder for anguished prosody hangs dripping from the trees.
Only a favored few grow up whole and hearty, with nothing to prove to self or others, no chip firmly attached to shoulder already twisted to the weighted shape of culture gone a-skew, no guilt gripped gonads clutched in incestuous embrace, no memories of Medusa mothering, snakes coiled and crazed with
(Head by rickveitch.com)
fright, too horrified to petrify as stone. Ever compliant, we comply. We would do anything to be loved by the mother who bore us, by the father who inspired us to Self. We become what we must, given what we see in others comparing and accusing eyes.
And what of the rest of us who do achieve average perfection? Boring average eyes set in the skulls of boring average parents, see some of us as average, well-balanced, boring children. We become average, steadfast, and predictable. How could we be driven to the passion necessary to produce art? Where would we mine the rage, disembowel the lust? What merely intelligent words could soar to poetic heights without riding the wide wings of feeling?
We imperfect persons know our betters. We do our best to get along. We limp. We overachieve. We embellish our triumphs just trying to keep up. So far from being perfect, being average is an impossible ambition. No-drama Obama has made a name for himself as devoid of emotion. A lie.
The rage of passion’s embers smolders in his gut. It must. A displaced person, exceptional, neither black nor white, he loved and lived with a mother dying of cancer, knowing that a more compassionate system would have saved her. His tormented genius father walked away, leaving a heritage of not good enough for a son to internalize and embody. A more prosaic childhood would have made a different child, more smug, more perfect, and to be sure, more average.
As living beings of the human variety, I suggest we would do well to circumvent statistical concepts when trying to embody the who we are and the whom we may become. If we are to fully inhabit our divine potential, we must feel what we feel, hate what we hate, and love what we love. That’s a recipe for a lived life and fodder for true expression of art and of joy.
morethanenoughtruth 