I would like you to meet Oliver. He
is a benevolent bear: benevolent meaning humane, compassionate, kind-hearted
and tender. Obviously the idea of making a ‘good’ bear had not left me after
the completion of the terrible Theobold (see my post He is Not a Tame Bear for further details). But I have to say that
the true idea behind his creation was sparked by a book Gary
I have decided I will share the book and series
with you in a more in-depth way in my *Recommends* blog in the future. The book
contains seven essays and for now, I would like to discuss the impact that one of
the seven essays had on me. When I read back over the essay now it is not even
the main theme of the piece that really sparked something in me; it was a point
that the author made about glamour that really stuck in my head and changed the
way I see things.
The essay I am writing about is about many
things but publicity is at the heart of it with themes of modern technological
advances, oil painting and the impact that ideological images have on us as
they surround us and saturate our environments. It speaks about how the
publicity machines sell us not products, but the dream of a future happier self
with all the money, possessions and companionship that a person could want or
need.
“Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us
people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The
state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process
of manufacturing glamour.”
The glamorising of this future self leaves us
feeling dissatisfied with our present selves and so, we must start striving to
buy and acquire all the products that the dream machine sell to us as the cure
to our present dissatisfied and unsatisfactory state.
Berger also shares his belief that publicity
preys on our fears and targets our anxieties, making its presence in our lives
not a benign force but something that actively plays a role in our decision
making and the development of our culture. This is quite a crude outline of all
that is contained in the essay, the writing itself is beautifully interwoven
with art history, political implications and thought provoking imagery. I highly
recommend you check it out for yourself.
“Glamour cannot exist without personal social envy being a common
and widespread emotion. The industrial society which has moved towards
democracy and then stopped half way is the ideal society for generating such an
emotion. The pursuit of individual happiness has been acknowledged as a
universal right. Yet the existing social conditions make the individual feel
powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would
like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its
causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails,
amongst other thing, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually
subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves
into recurrent day-dreams.”
There is one main paragraph in the essay that really influenced a
thought pattern in my mind and which then led me to make this bear. Let me
share it with you.
“Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends
precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are
observed with interest but you do not observe with interest - if you do, you
will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the
more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for
others) of their power. The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed
happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority. It is this
which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. They look
out over the looks of envy which sustain them.”
When I read this small grouping of words it seemed to me that they were
lit up on the page, highlighting its message and it called out like an invitation
to a new world. It said to me, in such a clear and straight forward manner, a
truth that I felt in my guts.
As I read the paragraph for the third time I replaced the word
‘glamour’ with the word ‘cool’. I felt from my own life experience the absence
of being the ‘cool kid’. Art College was an amazing experience for me but there
is an aspect of it that I never really participated in. I feel I struggled in a
social sense, I never felt like I had the coolest clothes, the best taste in
music or that I had any edge. I have never been a drinker or a drug taker and I
have found it hard to go with the flow. I was a hard worker, an enthusiastic
learner and I also had high and low moods that needed constant attendance. I
have always been a person of extremes but I think my extremes are definitely of
the un-cool variety, there is very little glamour with them.
The idea this paragraph presented to me was that ‘glamour’ or ‘cool’
was something that was constructed to aid a very specific goal that actually bore
no relation to my well being and more than likely would be unable to deliver on
any of its thin promises.
It said to me that being ‘cool’ or ‘glamorous’ was a tactic created to
bring power and control to a certain group of people and if you were willing to
learn the ways of it and take action, you too could have the power of cool and
glamour on your side. It is not something you are born with, it is not
something special about you, it is just the manipulation of factors with a more
or less guaranteed outcome that has been observed and harnessed for the
purposes of selling perfume, lipstick and really expensive cars.
I felt the actions I would need
to take in order to obtain this kind of glamour were the opposite of most of
the things I was striving for in my life. The line “You are observed with interest but you do
not observe with interest” jumped off the page. I thought how sad it would be to appear
disinterested in everyone and everything in order to maintain a façade of
superiority. You could not let anyone get to know you because if they begin to
relate to you, you become less fictionalised and therefore more real, with
problems, imperfect skin and ailing relations like everybody else. The glamour
story sells us about a world where none of those things occur anymore. Super
models don’t have split ends and aunts with breast cancer. They wear bikinis
all year round and their only care is where the next martini is coming from,
they don’t have emotional needs and they definitely don’t nag.
I feel I have been striving for
perfection my whole life. I have a long held belief that I am unsatisfactory. I
do believe the constant stream of overtly sexualised images of women, long
shimmering legs, flat stomachs and prancing smiling girls has impacted on this
expectation of myself. You don’t have to agree with me, it is my belief. I
think women are constantly sold the idea of physical happiness through a
specific body type that will equal life happiness and life fulfilment. I
believed for a long time in my teens and early twenties that being thin would
solve all my problems. I swallowed the lie and chased the dream.
After a lot of work on myself I
have come to realise that that old story is just that, a story and that dream
will never be fulfilled. Not that I can’t lose weight, no, that the losing of
weight will answer the question of life happiness. It is a hard dream to let go
of, it is all encompassing and simple. One answer to a million questions;
Brilliant! But I have known too many beautiful, kind and intelligent women who
have suffered with eating disorders and have been distressed by image problems
to have much faith in that dream any more.
So let me come to Oliver. Oliver has a loving, warm smile on his face.
On his t-shirt I have embroidered the slogan “Too Warm to be Cool”. This just
about sums me up. I have tried to be kind, understanding and compassionate for
most of my life. I have great interests in many things and I love sharing these
interests with other people. My enthusiasm bubbles over when I see a good film
or I read an excellent book. The thought of having to keep that to myself, to
hide my excitement about life when I find it, to have to “…look out over the looks of envy which
sustain them” in
order to be thought to be ‘cool’ or ‘glamorous’ is just not worth it to me.
The day I read that essay is the day I let go of chasing the idea of
COOL. Now that really is Brilliant! I don’t mean to imply that now I am
magically fixed so that I don’t care how I look or how I am perceived. I think
I have just let go of the one big answer and have started to pursue the
millions of individual answers to life’s questions. What makes me happy? How do
I accept myself as I am? What will I make? What do I want to say? The list goes
on and on as does the work to answer these questions. I do know that I have
warm blushed cheeks, a warm heart and warm ideas. I have set coolness and its
cold ways aside. I could learn to be cool and it might come in handy along the
way. But for today I will bask in the warmth of a perfectly imperfect self.
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