The Face You Deserve
The Poet W.H. Auden in later years.
He said of his own face: “It looks like a wedding cake left out in the rain.”
Auden grew into this face. He started out pretty and aged badly.
He ended up with a bowery drunk’s face. The kind that don’t give a fuck what they look like.
I’m sure Auden cared what he looked like; he was a Poet, a sensitive dude. Plus, he was Gay–not that there’s anything wrong with that! It’s just that…Gay dudes are meticulous about their appearance. oh, hell, forget I said that. I don’t mean to disparage the LGBT community. Plenty of slovenly pigs are Homosexual. I’m thinking Auden didn’t care all that much how he looked, that’s all I’m saying. He was not a clean or neat person. He didn’t have time to be clean and neat. He was busy all day writing Poetry.
The man was committed to his craft, god damnit!
I gotta tell you, in spite of the gawd awfulness of his face, it grows on you, like a bulldog does if you like bulldogs. As the face sinks into your mind, you start thinking, he’s actually good looking. Even kind of pretty…
I spent some time staring at him. Here he is, spruced up.
I like his face so much I read one of his poems.
Dance, dance for the figure is easy,
last verse of Death’s Echo
The tune is catching and will not stop;
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
I like poems with DEATH in the title. What the hell, I like old Auden’s stuff.
At least I get it, kind of.
Anyway. Let’s hear it for good old W.H. Auden. Nobody fucked with him. He smoked like a chimney. Stravinsky’s maid complained he lived like a pig. He took a bath every once in a while. He didn’t give a fuck. I like Auden. I like anybody lives like they wanna live…especially the one’s that make up shit and write stuff…with a voice you can’t dismiss.
“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”
― George Orwell
George never made it to fifty. He died shortly after penning the above quote at 46. TB cut him down. He fought it for years.
Young Orwell pictured in a passport photo in Burma. This was the last time he had a toothbrush moustache; he would later acquire a pencil moustache similar to other British officers stationed in Burma.
I’m thinking he widened his stash on account of Adolf Hitler. I mean come on. Who wants to look like Adolf Hitler?
Fred Trump, the former Prez’s Old Man, wore a Hitler Mustache. That’s him in 1950. Kinda makes sense, don’t it?
I’m tight with Orwell
I don’t need to read any George Orwell to get a sense of the man. I already have a pretty good sense of the man. I’ve read four of his books, maybe five. I’ve read more George Orwell probably than any other great writer. I’m not one of those who figure he maybe wasn’t all that great, either. If I had to argue the point with some so-called-literary-scholar, I’d say George Orwell is a great writer not based so much on the quality of his writing but to his commitment to the truth. Telling the truth is not so easy as you might think. It’s not just a matter of telling it like it is. For starters, you need to know what it is. Then you need to know how to tell it. With crystal clarity. George Orwell was a master of this seemingly simple talent.
And yet, I’m stuck trying to figure out exactly what he meant with the this quote.
“At fifty everybody has the face he deserves…”
What does this mean?
A person’s true character can be deduced by the careful study of the face according to believers in physiognomy. This notion dates back to the ancient Greeks, but nowadays it is often considered pseudoscientific. Believers contend that the human visage changes over time, and authentic character eventually emerges.
Quote Investigator. com
Is that what Orwell meant?
Authentic character eventually emerges.
Say you’re a real bastard all your life. You put a lot of effort into hurting other people just for the hell of it. Does this mean you get uglier and uglier until you resemble a toad?
Is that what it means?
If that’s what it means, how do you account for this guy?
I suppose there’s an exception to every rule.
Does Morality really count?
I think, what I think, I think you can be a real bastard all your life and end up looking pretty as a peach. Especially if you’re health conscious. You take care of yourself. You don’t drink or smoke. You get plenty of exercise. You’re a Sociopath to start with. So right off the bat you’re ahead of the game. A sense of goodness (or empathy) is foreign to you. You don’t care about other people. All you really care about is yourself. So you don’t spend any time worrying about being bad or good. You only worry about getting caught. You’re a smart dude. You’ve boned up on how to act good. You know that acting good will bring rewards and a successful life. So you do it. You project yourself as Altruistic. And you end up looking like this:
Actually, I’m giving you a bad example. Sam is only thirty one years old. He hasn’t lived long enough to look truly bad, or good, depending on you position. Plus, he looks bad already. He started out looking bad. What about his mother?
This is her at Sam’s trial.
No gushing beauty, that’s for sure.
This is what she looks like in her Stanford Professor’s profile:
Look’s way better, don’t you think?
Even attractive.
It’s the smile. A smile will always improve your appearance. Even old Auden looked better when he smiled.
Okay, so Sam’s mom used to look good. I don’t know how far back this picture goes. It definitely is a big improvement on what she looked like at Sam’s trial. Granted, she was under stress. She loves her son. Doesn’t want him in jail for 110 years. Wants him fee.
I forgot my point.
Oh, yeah. YOU GET THE FACE YOU DESERVE. If this is the case, then Barbara Fried is a bad example. A bad example because she’s one of the founders of Elective Altruism. The group that proposes to do good. To make gobs of money so that you can give it away to the poor and downtrodden. Barbara is comitted to doing good and spreading goodness throughout the world. By this rubric she should be absolutely stunning by now. She should have a face resembling this:
Sorry George
I’m afraid George Orwell got it wrong. At fifty you don’t get the face you deserve. Life is full of hard luck cases. Broke players. It’s all about luck. Bad luck. Good luck. No luck. You end up with a real bad face because you started out that way…or you just drifted along, aging, losing a bit of the old shine until finally at seventy you look like shit. I see it everyday at my booze sample job. I check I.D.s of awful looking people. They start out looking adorable. Cuz everybody starts out looking adorable.
And they end up looking like this:
Not because they had it coming.
Because God planned it that way. God wants you to end up looking like shit.
Or maybe not…
I got a different idea
I happen to think beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Take old Auden for example. I mean, you couldn’t find a homelier dude anywhere. But I happen to think he’s kind of pretty.
Just like I think this dude is kind of pretty:
I like to think the older you get the prettier you are.
Take me for instance.
Here’s me at seventy.
I swear I get prettier every year.
One thing I like about my face, I got this big nose. I mean it’s a real take charge kind of nose, don’t you think? It’s not the greatest nose out there, but it’s definitely top shelf.
You want to see a top shelf nose?
Barbara Streisand has the greatest nose out there.
Now that is a nose that takes charge.
It’s all about your attitude
Stop thinking by somebody else’s standard of beauty…
Come up with your own standard.
Do that and you find beauty in just about everything you look at.
Maybe not everything…
But most everything.
Pretend everybody’s beautiful.
That’s how I approach life.
Take it easy and groove through this crazy life.
That’s the ticket.
4 thoughts on “The Face You Deserve”
Great post, Boomer.
As far as having the face one deserves, either at 50 as Orwell claimed; or 30 as Sartre stated, who knows? I figure 35 is when people start to see the world winning over their dreams, leaving the face to sponge up disappointed (Isn’t it the shattered mirror of the soul?) – as did Saint Veronica, who according to hagiography, held a cloth against the bleeding face of Jesus on his way to crucifixion; and leaving his imprint on the cloth. Alas, she has since been de-canonized, even if her name in Ancient Greek means Vera(true) Icon (picture). Alas, the same fate befell no-longer Saint Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, after his plastic effigy was found in too many car wrecks.
Anyway, the face is no longer an existential discovery, as in was in the Middle Ages, when isolated villages would be visited by a stranger, whose face was an epiphany of difference. If you and your blog readers want a masterpiece on the face, I suggest you read Max Picard’s The Human Face. Today, in consumer societies such as ours, people no longer have faces; they have “looks,” predicated on all sorts of factors that have nothing to do with one’s true face, more like with the celebrities in the latest issue of People.
In any case, I wanted to get to Auden, who, in 1972, led a graduate writing seminar at Columbia University in which I was a member. I had heard the line about the Wedding Cake face, although I don’t think Auden would have said it about himself. More likely W.S. Merwin or some wag, similar to another quote about the lines being so deep that an ant would break its leg crossing them.
To me, Auden was gentle, wise and not armed with the weapon of English irony that has humiliated so many young and brash Americans. In fact, at the first writing session, Auden, who was at the opposite end of the table, asked me, “What is the best book you have recently read?” Terror. I didn’t know how to answer… the truth or sound smart? I went with the truth. “Dom Casmurro,” I replied.
Auden smiled, “I’ve always wanted to read Machado de Assis.” I was redeemed. He ended the seminar by asking us to write a villanelle and bring it to class the following week? What’s a villanelle?” I wondered, until I looked up a definition of the verse form and found Auden’s “If I Could Tell You” and Dylan’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.”
Auden was a sort of Philip Nolan in exile, not at sea, but ashore in America. After all, he had left England before World War II and failed to return to serve in the war of all wars for the English. That lapse doomed his reputation for quite a while. He wasn’t a coward He was a profound moralist without moralizing.
While at Reed College, a few years before Columbia University, I read that Auden kept an apple in his Oxford library carrel, which, desiccating over time, mirrored the globe’s rotting condition. Ever naïve and impressible in those days, I brought in an apple and left it on my bookshelf in the library. It disappeared over night
Anyway, if you want to see the effect a face can have, forget watch Visconti’s Death in Venice, and wait for the moment Von Ashenbach first sees Tadzio at the Lido hotel. Then, if you want to hold up a different cloth to his face, read what happened to the Björn Andrésen, the 15-year Swedish boy who portrayed Tadzio. He didn’t need a canvas to conceal the truth, like Dorian Gray. Extended over time, Andresen’s face revealed the fate of such beauty as his, which Rilke said was the beginning of terror. Orpheus was hunted down and killed for the beauty of his music although apocrypha has it his contempt for the Harpies brought about his death, which probably birthed the expression, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
In closing, I have included my prose poem about the face and the energy surrounding it.
History of the Halo
History has it that Tibetan monks, fleeing persecution or simply seeking a life of solitary meditation, hid in the myriad caves of the Himalayas — but there, while studying their sacred scrolls, were unable to keep candles burning amid the relentless winds.
Deprived of light, they concentrated on reading their scriptures in the dark.
At first, nothing.
Monks embedded in endless onyx. Yet they never ceased trying to light the darkness with themselves.
Then, beyond the limits of patience, they felt the heat of their bodies pool in their feet; rise through their legs and torsos; channel into their chests; and, at last, fuse into their heads — forming a dim illumination around their faces: a lamp of the self to see the word of God.
Later, the halo drifted from the caves, crossed the mountains and scattered into the attendant landscapes of its reappearance.
Now the halo remains its own sign — announcing and anointing the presence of the venerated.
Simply put, a halo is produced by compressing darkness and squeezing out the juice of light, which, when exposed to air, paint, and the heat of adoring gazes, congeals to a residue of eternity: God’s fingerprint left pressed against a face.
Children on their way to martyrdom, it is said, produced the greatest light from their frail forms. In many cases, they caused torches to drop and swords to veer away, blinded by a reflection brighter than their blades.
Even today, a halo can be found concealed within our lives, such as inside a restaurant, waiting for someone to sit down and notice it.
The plate is merely a pretext for having a halo to contemplate, and to evoke light in the darkness we huddleinside.
-#-
A memorable comment, Stewart. Prompts me to read more of Auden’s poetry…as for Halos, the comparison hadn’t occurred to me. Insightful as always!
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