Verve for Curves

Researching this article, I came across a subsection of the Cosmopolitan website devoted to Diet, with the disclaimer “because we all want to release our inner skinny girl.” Undoubtedly, any idiot flipping through any given glossy mag would realise that the fashion world has a penchant for the skinny girls, with their protruding ribcages and hip-bones poking out everywhere. What is worrying, however, is that the fashion world’s fetish extends even to unhealthily skinny girls. Where do we draw the line? Thinness? Emaciation? Death?

Just ask Ana Carolina Reston, the 21-year old Brazilian model who died of heart failure caused by Anorexia recently. The 5’8” model was under pressure by her agency to lose weight, and used the eating disorder as a crash-diet. She weighed 39kgs when she died.
So my question is, is it true that all women want to be skinny?

No. Definitely not all women because you can count me out. I don’t want to be skinny, nor do I want to be obese. I want to be healthy: the sexiest body is the body which comes when you lead a healthy lifestyle. That is what glossies should be promoting: healthy eating, regular get-the-heck-off-your-butt-and-exercise,

and most importantly body love. (All you perverts who thought that was a euphemism, out! Now!) Body love is learning to accept the way you look and feeling comfortable in your own skin.

Having said that, a niggling voice at the back of my mind keeps reminding me of another point I want to bring up: people who study art (especially people who went to the same tutor as I did) know that ‘a curve is a sign of beauty’. Why? Because essentially, the straight line represents the male, while the curve represents the female. Curves are attributed to fertility, hence ‘Il-Mara il-Hoxna’ being the goddess of fertility (I can hear your minds clicking even now). Besides, women are meant to have bellies- they are there to provide padding for the uterus. Betcha didn’t know that!

Throughout the history of art, curvy women have been celebrated. Just picture Botticelli’s Birth of Venus- the goddess of Beauty. Take a look at Rubens’s Women, all lush and soft; Tamara deLempicka’s women, all curves; statues of Grecian goddesses, with their almost semi-circular hips. I could go on forever. What went wrong? Well, my guess is that with the fertility problem out the window (thank you, in-vitro), we have begun to experiment with alternative forms of beauty- androgyny, distortion. That’s great, in my opinion, but not when you lose your original idea of beauty and Beauty stops being subjective. Who are we, Plato in his imaginary world of Forms? If everything else in the world can be subjective, why can’t Beauty, of all things, be too?

Magdalene

From the tips
Of the JUDAS tree
Her love bleeds

Je ne vais pas
mourir
Her eyes are wide with fear

I'm coming down
Out of your skin
I feel it now
And my senses are reeling

She feels old
And her hands are cold
Her heart is dry

She falls
She rises
She circles again

I'm coming down
Out of your skin
I feel it now
And my senses are reeling.

We Are One

Yesterday we danced with the Universe;
Sacred like your Deep Sex.
Woman, speak not of Ghosts!
Translucent is my Liquid Sky;
Warm Poison on your Lips.

Datura

Datura, Datura,
Your name is uttered by demons.

Let your star shine now, Datura,
Let your love kill the wise fools.
When will you claim me again, Datura,
When?

Remember me, my Datura, my love,
Because my eyes are shut now.

Woman

Mountain of a Woman,
Fertile as Earth;
Child emerges born
as the quiet dreamers of Eden
Breathe in wonder.

Bluff

I wanted to be a pilgrim.
My road would intertwine with yours
like our hair, that day.
I remember you moving to the window,
the cloud that looked like
your eyelashes as you butterflied them over my cheek.
Now the butterfly steps
are deep ruts on my barren face;
arid, dead.
Your voice, like honey
now depresses my shoulders with its
thick. treacle. texture.
I fold, darling.
The Bluff is too convoluted
and I can't remember what I'd bet.

Silence

She opened her eyes. The darkness hadn't
stopped but she had let Silence
immerse,
surround,
engulf,
enshroud.
Silence had told her of eternities of delirious
music. The courtiers danced at
their masquerades-
the Princess and the
Shoemaker;
the Peasant and the
Chambermaid.
The black-clothed figure asked each,
in turn,
if she could have this
dance.
Together they waltzed
into Silence. "Don't be afraid,"
she said, "I promise that you will
awake tomorrow, somewhere."


What makes the music? The sound?
The Silence? The rush of semi-quavers
blackly upanddowning horizontally,
left to right? Or the
space
within which they
d
a
n
c
e
?

Somewhere Off The Sixty-Four

They say ideas come to you when you least expect them. At the place of least-expectation, I begin to wonder who ‘They’ are because ‘They’ are right. Ideas seem to enjoy my mind mostly when I’m making my way home on the bus. Of all places, the bus: the routine, the mundane, the dull. They present themselves to me in a language, not of letters and phonemes, but of spheres of emotions. With ease, I welcome them in, quickly translating them into our conventional ordering of sounds, then morphemes, sentences because otherwise, just as promptly as they come, they are gone and lost forever in a void of tissue and neurons; they die, or rather fade, much like a dream upon waking; much like a September breeze on the sun-kissed faces of sandcastle-building children: appreciated, but ignored. This habit of being so receptive to ideas on buses has become so significant to me that I now tend to measure my development and maturity through specifically that: I have come to think of my life as a long series of bus rides. Somehow, on that window seat plugged into my headphones which are playing the carefully selected music on my music player, I have no name, no gender, no past and no future. I am an energy; a presence. I am simply a carnal vessel for ectoplasmic, shapeless yet undeniably shaped concepts. And hence, the bus ride home becomes not a chore but an energizing, fulfilling experience; a connection with the intellect and beyond. I don’t have to close my eyes. On the contrary, it helps if I don’t. Watching people outside on the street connects me to an intuitive sense of collective unconscious. Like Midnight’s child I tumble forth into the world, not of smell, touch, sound, sight, taste as separate entities, but into the world of the senses heightened and combined.