beauty

ALL RED FEATHER MATERIALS ARE ALWAYS FREE TO STUDENTS AND TO THOSE WHO TEACH THEM....T R Young

058 Readings in Charm and Beauty


comte.gif (33016 bytes) marx.gif (34874 bytes) weber.gif (37412 bytes) luxemburg.gif (13458 bytes) pareto.gif (31419 bytes) veblen.gif (28214 bytes)


praxislittle.gif (3362 bytes)

SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES


T. R. Young
The Red Feather Institute

Aug, 1998


I have know a great many people over the years whom I
regard as charming, beautiful and engaging to be with.

Yet physical beauty in the conventional, Ms America sense
does not seem to be very much a part of that response.

This past week, I have commented to others that the woman
who plays the lead in the new version of Zorro, Zeta-Jones,
is one of the most beautiful women I've seen since Hedy Lamarr.

At the same time, some of the most charming people I have
known, both men and women would be, in conventional terms
not at all attractive or handsome. 

Now I know full well that beauty is a cultural phenomenon;
that what passes for beauty in Japan, Africa, Sweden and
among the Yanomamo is very, very different.

My thesis is that what they have in common is a very expressive
facial and body linguistic ability...that it is the way the
face and body moves that is central to a theory of beauty.

Beauty and Charm emerge in the reading of body talk;
not in the looking at body.

There was a video clip promoting Zorro on one of the dish
channels the other day. I taped it; taped the face of the
woman I thought so beautiful and studied the still...in
stop motion, there was nothing...yet when I pushed the
play button, the beauty returned...

It was the mobility; that felicity, that expressive
facial language which, I think, engaged my sense of beauty...

Then too, there are two television programs I make every
effort to watch and tape...Northern Exposure has a great many
features which make it of interest to the postmodern theorist.

Apart from its easy effort in shattering every pre-conception
we have about Inuit/Indian culture and its easy integration
of some of the most profound Western philosophy with Eastern
and American Indian philosophy, the producers, directors and
actors in Northern Exposure are permitted to have their own
faces and bodies.

Marilyn, the Indian woman who is secretary to Joel, faithfully
reproduces the expressive mystery of Mona Lisa...Joel, the
New York Jewish commie symp is never better, never more engaging
than when he is unable to communicate with Maggie, the self-
contained bush-pilot who murders every lover metaphorically by
her inability to make a commitment.

It is the on-going inability of Joel and Maggie to create a
shared symbolic life-world which holds viewers entranced week
after week. Shelley is supposed to be beauty Queen in the series
but next to Maggie, she is merely a well-developed lump of
protoplasm...until she and Hollings have a situation in which
they must work out the incompatibilities of people in very
different places in their life cycle; she under 20 and he, over
60...it takes every interactional skill they have to reconcile
those great differences. Chris, the radio guy, has a lovely
voice engaging to the ear...yet his body talk is so limited
that for 95% of the series [I have them all on tape], he is
alone. And then there is his brother...who has absolutely
no physical resemblence to Chris until he talks...then, truly,
they are brothers....and they kiss alike as well.

The same failure to engage a shared realm of meaning exist between
the two central characters in that most charming coming-of-age
series, Dawson's Creek...Joey, the young woman in the story, is
again a 'beautiful' child-woman...while Dawson, the young man
around whom most action centers, would be by most North Americans,
considered 'handsome.' And in live action they are. When I stop
the action...they are not at all beautiful...it is the living
hope, trust and hurt which plays over and around face, hands, body
and body activity which transforms them into utterly charming
young people.

I have attended the Stone Symposium a good many years...when I
look around at the people who are the most engaging, I find
myself drawn to people whom in no wise would be considered exemplar
of beauty...three years ago, in Nottingham...I was greatly taken
with a woman who taught architectural art at Smith College. It
was not that she was physically attractive but that she was, in
terms of symbolic interactional skills, most engaging. I have to,
alas, report that her body talk changed dramatically when, a
year later, I visited her at Smith.

No one would claim Stanford Lyman to be a handsome man; yet
I find him one of the most engaging and charming of men
when he speaks...and I recall a 72 year old woman on a group
tour of Soviet Union who, objectively, could have passed for
sister of Akim Tamiroff; yet I found myself entranced by her
and took every chance to sit next to her on plane, bus and at
dining table...when there were younger, more 'beautiful'
women on the tour.

And if you want to talk of beauty, just listen/watch talk with
Elise Boulding...her husband is much the better known in national
circles I suppose but when the two of them are in the same room,
it is Elise to whom I turn to listen...a wise and good woman.

It may be my age; it may be my peculiar circumstances; it may
be selective perception...it may be all these things yet I do
think that beauty, charm and romance have more to do with
symbolic systems than with objective physical attributes.

                ...and I'm such a fool for beauty,

                                                                all good love, TR