MFO: July 2008

GIRLS, (PRETTY)
The power of a pretty girl... totally unquantifiable. But this much is certain: there is nothing a beautiful girl in the West cannot have, for a time. And I don't speak from any far off hilltop - I'm as much a sucker as anyone. I've risked everything for a certain look, for tapered fingers or a particular mole. So I hear you when you say it's not what she says, not what she does, that it's on her. It's something she wears and however skin deep it may be on her, it penetrates you right to the marrow. Pretty girls lie at the centre of straight culture, dyke culture, fag culture. They sell everything, they buy everything, they ruin great men and women, and finally they ruin themselves, accidentally, simply by getting old. I think about them. Sometimes I want them and sometimes I worry about them - even though it's not my business to do. I wonder about them. I wonder if you are the pretty girl in question. I wonder what you do with a power which, though potent, makes you vulnerable to every probe, every demand, every infiltration? I wonder what you do with a power that turns you into an open atlas upon which any idiot can map their own route?

-Zadie Smith

One of my occupations involves beauty, and frequently I am in the presence of young beautiful women. Yesterday I worked on 3 young pretty girls, all under the age of 15. They had no idea of the power they were wielding. They were just girls, not yet women, but womanly enough to get the attention of any man or woman who recognizes their as yet unrecognized power. What's interesting about being around the beauty of youth (as opposed to the beauty of other things---of which there are many) is that it tends to intoxicate without warning, pupils dialate and the subject begins to appear brighter than the surroundings... and all of this is projected onto someone who has no idea. I realized as I was staring at them that some part of me had set about wanting...wanting to possess, wanting to be near, wanting to touch. Not sexual, yet not quite unsexual either...in the way food or nature can be. Wanting to devour or be devoured by it. If I were blind would I be able to detect the potency? It's visual for sure, but it's also married to a purity and innocence that permeates a room, delicate as a spider's web and heady as the scent of a tropical flower. When we are young and beautiful we ARE blind to it. It's like inherited money, not earned and so unable to be grasped and appreciated. I definitely was not the master of my atlas back then, and as a result I contain plenty of pages marked with someone elses highlighter. Yep, blew through that inheritance! Now I celebrate the beauty of wisdom and the beauty of compassion. Two hard earned attributes that ensure a much more peaceful and satisfying trip. And, thankfully, just as interesting.

SELF POSSESSION

I cant pretend to know what Jessie Mann was thinking as her mother, Sally Mann, photographed her. But I offer her up as the rare example of self-possession, even as a child. A master of her own atlas.