I know what worries me most when I look in the mirror and
see the old woman with no waist. It’s not that I’ve lost my beauty—I never had
enough to carry on about. It’s that that woman doesn’t look like me. She isn’t
who I thought I was.
Who I am is certainly part of how I look and vice versa. I
want to know where I begin and end, what size I am, and what suits me... I am
not “in” this body, I am this body. Waist or no waist.
But all the
same, there’s something about me that doesn’t change, hasn’t changed, through
all the remarkable, exciting, alarming, and disappointing transformations my
body has gone through. There is a person there who isn’t only what she looks
like, and to find her and know her I have to look through, look in, look deep.
Not only in space, but in time.
[...]
There’s the
ideal beauty of youth and health, which never really changes, and is always
true. There’s the ideal beauty of movie stars and advertising models, the
beauty-game ideal, which changes its rules all the time and from place to place,
and is never entirely true. And there’s an ideal beauty that is harder to define
or understand, because it occurs not just in the body but where the body and the
spirit meet and define each other.
My mother died at eighty-three, of cancer, in pain, her
spleen enlarged so that her body was misshapen. Is that the person I see when I
think of her? Sometimes. I wish it were not. It is a true image, yet it blurs,
it clouds, a truer image. It is one memory among fifty years of memories of my
mother. It is the last in time. Beneath it, behind it is a deeper, complex,
ever-changing image, made from imagination, hearsay, photographs, memories. I
see a little red-haired child in the mountains of Colorado, a sad-faced,
delicate college girl, a kind, smiling young mother, a brilliantly intellectual
woman, a peerless flirt, a serious artist, a splendid cook—I see her rocking,
weeding, writing, laughing – I see the turquoise bracelets on her delicate,
freckled arm – I see, for a moment, all that at once, I glimpse what no mirror
can reflect, the spirit flashing out across the years, beautiful.
That must be
what the great artists see and paint. That must be why the tired, aged faces in
Rembrandt’s portraits give us such delight: they show us beauty not skin-deep
but life-deep
