Of Soap Brands and Other Monumental Things
Friday, May 10, 2013
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Of Love and Dandelions
One night, Pecola, Claudia, and
Frieda are huddled together in bed, and Pecola asks as question: “How do you do
that? I mean, how do you get someone to love you?” To this, Claudia says in her
inner monologue, “But Frieda was asleep. And I didn’t know.” And I find myself
saying, you’re you, and if someone finds you love-worthy, then you’re loved.
Simple as that. But some people don’t have that ingrown belief that they are
special, worthy, and consider the simplicity of the answer, which is Claudia at
the moment.
Said love, or rather, relationship,
between a famile is explained through Claudia’s eyes: “They slipped in and out of the box of peeling gray, making no stir in
the neighborhood, no sound in the labor force, and no wave in the mayor's
office. Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness, each making
his own patchwork quilt of reality--collecting fragments of experience here,
pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one
another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way
they found each other." I’ve never thought about family in this way, only
as a type of foothold and balance in the basis of understanding and love. But
Morrison describes family as a group of people who unknowingly affect and are
affected by those around them, people who are touched by the people closest to
them and in a way molded to who they are.
As
for the conflict of the story, a certain paragraph caught my eye. Claudia is
scrutinizing dandelions and begins with the following: "Dandelions. A dart
of affection leaps out from her to them. But they do not look at her and do not
send love back. She thinks, 'They are ugly. They are weeds.' Preoccupied with
that revelation, she trips on the sidewalk crack. Anger stirs and wakes in her;
it opens its mouth, and like a hot-mouthed puppy, laps up the dredges of her
shame. Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and
presence. An awareness of worth." Here we see some of the reasoning behind
the main conflict of the story. The fact that if she loves something and said
entity doesn’t feel the same way, then Claudia responds by “hating” them. In a
way, it the means by which she protects herself from pain. Anger is better.
When something happens that leaves you raw and sad, maybe it’s better to feel
anger because it is a powerful sentiment and not so much a helpless one. In
hating dandelions, she is protecting herself. As for the white, blue-eyed
perfection, the opposite is true. She begins by hating them, but then turns her
feelings into love because you have more control over love.
Inspiration
For some reason,
we tend to have an idealistic view of poverty and what it entitles. Or some of
us do. The ambiance of poverty makes a love story all the more fervent. A film
wrapped in the trials and turbulences of economic shortages aspiring a greater ending
makes one passionate because if someone can do that with said background, then
maybe we ourselves can somehow prevail. It’s the poetry of poverty as it
blankets musicians, artists, writers in their journey through madness. It’s the
idea that no matter the circumstances, there’s certain sweetness to the act
of feeling happiness no matter what.
Claudia romanticizes poverty and hard times when she describes her mother’s
routing singing:
If
my mother was in a singing mood, then it wasn’t so bad. She would sing about
hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me times. But her voice
was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty that I found myself longing for
those hard times, yearning to be grown without “a thin ti-i-me to my name (27).
And it’s understandable. Claudia’s life is
mixed with unfeelingness, a bland numbness, that she craves some time of
passion, whether it be positive or negative.
And this makes me look back on a commencement speech that J.K Rowling
did at a Harvard graduation where she said, “Poverty
entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty
humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is
something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by
fools.” And maybe in this case, Claudia isn’t so much a fool as much as she is a girl naïve to
the hardships in life outside of her own, kind of like all of us. She goes on to say that “Misery colored by
the greens and blues in my mother’s voice took all of the grief out of the
words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, but
sweet.” I think about in describing her mom’s beautiful voice, she uses the
colors blue and green to describe it. No brown, no black. The fact that
Morrison manages to convey the argument and conflict of the story with the sole
description of the main character’s mother’s voice, is lovely. In using those adjectives
to describe what she deems a beautiful voice, the reader gets the fact that she
herself finds blue and green to be beautiful, which points back to the
obsession with being white, perfection. Also the fact that the beauty of her
voice took out the grief of the lyrics left me thinking. Is that possible? To
live something horrible, to liv pain, and yet find a way to make it softer,
even a good thing? As for the last line, it follows that same trail of thought,
and is enlightening in its own way. Pain is not only endurable, but sweet. That
is inspiration at its best.
Sunday, April 14, 2013
Loving Hatred
It’s safe to say Toni Morrison is a
great writer. Beautiful, even. Just her words and their imagery as well as the
deeper meaning and thought carve out a beautiful statue of the human
conscience, even if a very specific one. She ends one chapter by saying, “There is really nothing more to say--except why. But
since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” And
while it refers to a specific account, I can’t help but ponder the veracity and
wisdom behind those words. Because it’s true that when we’re hurt, that when
things happen to us that prickle our skin until the light graze turns into
bloody torture, we want to know why. We want to know why our significant other left
us, why we were rejected from our dream school, why our parents don’t love us. We
want to know why. But why is painful. We can’t handle the fact that he left us
because we’re not pretty enough or because our impulsiveness drove him away, we
don’t want to know we didn’t get in because sometimes ‘good’ just isn’t good
enough. We don’t want to know our parents don’t love us because we’re us and
that’s explanation enough. Why hurts. How is less painful. How would be our
lover’s leaving as a slow waltz out of our lives on a plane to Paris, How would
be getting a college admissions letter saying, ‘thank you but no thank you.’
How would be gentle. And Claudia is saying that the why is too painful, the
reason her hopes can’t come true. But I’m pretty sure she knows why, I’m pretty
sure we all do.
And it was this pain from the unfair
why’s and the unalterable aspect of it all that I’m guessing led to her
relationship with white, blue-eyed dolls. “I had only one desire: to dismember it. To see of
what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the
desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me. Adults, older girls,
shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs--all the world had agreed that a
blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child
treasured. "Here,"
they said, "this is beautiful, and if you are on this day
'worthy' you may have it.’” Here we see the internal conflict that plagues
Claudia’s mind in a society where she’s set up to be inferior. Because who’s to
say what is beautiful? Who has that right? Blue eyes are just that. Blue. But
in that time, it was the idea of perfection and freedom. Beauty. It was the
bright sign saying Claudia was anything but.
She clearly harbors a strong
antagonism towards the blue-eyed pale porcelain dolls, and by definition the
humans that represented them. She says, “I could not
love it. But I could examine it to see what it was that all the world said was
lovable.” And this makes me question the rest of the novel, seeing
as the premise is supposed to be Claudia’s obsession with said object of
hatred, her aspirations to be the former. Because she even destroyed them: “If I pinched
them, their eyes--unlike the crazed glint of the baby doll's eyes--would fold
in pain, and their cry would not be the sound of an icebox door, but a
fascinating cry of pain. When I learned how repulsive this disinterested
violence was, that it was repulsive because it was disinterested, my shame
floundered about for refuge. The best hiding place was love. Thus the
conversion from pristine sadism to fabricated hatred, to fraudulent love.” And
so here, so simply written, we see the shift of hatred to the love that will
encompass the novel. One would think that would help her cope, her not drowning
in embitterment. But it turns out that the
change was “adjustment without improvement,” and, if possible, it
only became worse.
Seeds of Hope
I
have this about metaphors. I’m all for them. But, I have to admit, the words, “We thought, at
the time, that it was because Pecola was
having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow,”
didn’t really alert me to the fact that I would soon be confronted by one.
Quite honestly, I was just wondering if the words were literal and a girl was
actually having her father’s baby. In which case I cringed at the thought and
later went on to imagine just what family terms would be deigned in the
situation. The baby’s grandfather would be his father as well and his
grandmother would be his father’s wife.
On
that note, let me just say that it left me deeply troubled. But what captured
my interest was when Claudia began to talk about the seeds. While on the subject of Pecola’s baby, Claudia
says, “A
little examination and much less melancholy would have proved to us that our
seeds were not the only ones that did not sprout; nobody's did. Not even the
gardens fronting the lake showed marigolds that year. But so deeply concerned
were we with the health and safe delivery of Pecola's baby we could think of
nothing but our own magic: if we
planted the seeds, and said the right words over them, they would blossom, and
everything would be all right.” It’s difficult to decipher just what
she means by the seeds. But my best guess is that she isn’t talking about
babies, about physical entities you place in dirt. She’s talking about hopes
and ideas, goals. The ability to make things happen, kind of like Pecola’s dad
made the baby happen. And that if you take those hopes, those goals, and
dedicate a lot of time to them to nurture them, they might just sprout. We
might just get what we hoped for and that might just be enough to make us
happy. The fact that most people’s seeds didn’t sprout says a lot about the
social situation of where Claudia lives. The fact that she herself admits to
think of nothing but her seeds demonstrates that she has a lot of hopes, and we
might just find out what they are.
Claudia later says, “It was a long
time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to
spring from our seeds.” In that I take it that the ‘greener pastures’ of new
beginnings and better-ness are far from her reach, or so she says, stating her
life to remain in its isolated cave from achieving bliss. She goes on: “Once we
knew, our guilt was relieved only by fights and mutual accusations about who
was to blame. For years I
thought my sister was right: it was my fault. I had planted them too far down
in the earth. It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might
have been unyielding. We had
dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola's father
had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt.” When she says
she planted her seeds to far down the earth she probably means that she cradled
her hopes and locked them tights as a means of protection, dirt, that they are
unable to reach out and grow. And that the earth itself is unyielding, life is
just not willing to make those hopes grow when it comes to her, when it comes
to this lifetime. What really got to me was the pun of the phrase, “We had
dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola's father
had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt,” where she uses the seed
and black dirt metaphor to later prove the literal sense of Pecola’s father’s
sperm, seed, into his African American daughter, black dirt. That pun in itself
just blew me. But it is just now that I understand what she means when she says
she had ‘dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt.’ That they had
lost the possibility of any of their seed’s growth, of any hopes and wishes and
goals coming true, by being black. And while the words themselves are
beautiful, their meaning is ugly.
Mundane Irony
I have an unhealthy fascination with light eyes.
Unhealthy is putting it harshly giving that said obsession is in no way harmful
to my health. But there’s something with the direct contrast of such color to
someone’s skin that is just so beautiful. But my interest with light eyes is a
trivial matter, not rooting itself in any other reason than pure beauty. It is
not in any way based on interior political or social concepts or insecurities.
Which is what I infer to be the case when it comes to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. The fact that it has to
do with the social aspect of African Americans during a period where equality
was far from what it’s defined as in the dictionary, shows itself in the title.
The longing to have blue eyes, usually encased with the Caucasian and white
persona, demonstrates the inner conflict of an African American girl who longs
to attain them, and in attaining them, attaining the life, the respect, and the
freedom they symbolize. But that’s just me wrapping myself in conjecture.
The opening lines of the novel are sharp and abrupt
sentences like, “Here is the house. It is green and white.
It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick,
and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She
has a red dress. She wants to play.” The structure makes it so that the
juvenile thoughts and childlike perspective is palpable. Fine, I said. She
wants to show the reader that she is actually speaking from her childhood. But
then the paragraph that is made up of these words is repeated sans any periods
whatsoever, creating an effect of eternity and someone loosing their breath, a
run-on of a sentence. A run-on of a life. And so now I feel that this is not
just a blatant demonstration of the character’s age, but also a clear portrayal
of how said character views her life. After that, the same sentence is repeated
but with every single word glued to each other, attached as if binding to form
one whole unending word. And that just makes it seem as if Claudia, the
protagonist, has repeated the former paragraph so many times that it just
becomes ingrained in her mind until it is but mere words, not meaning anything,
just a routine, common in its normalcy and blandness.
And
while anyone else might just skip over the same three paragraphs with mere
differences in punctuation and spacing, figuring them mere repetitions, I slow
my pace and focus all the more. Because in those three ‘similar’ paragraphs, I
think the entire generality of the novel lies naked in front of us. The words
themselves are mundane, “Dick and Jane”, “Mom and Dad”, Father is “big and
strong”, dog goes “bowwow.” The words themselves are so cliché and ordinary
that they should be overlooked, but in reality they highlight themselves. They
provide the reader with a semblance of normalcy but they really mean just the
opposite. The protagonist’s life is anything but that picture perfect
paragraph. It’s ironic. And the structure of the paragraphs lies in a way so
that they resemble not only her thoughts, but her desires. The way it slowly
comes together in one thread shows how much she has repeated that story to
herself, how it is one of those recurring dreams that plague you and crawl on
you in their reality in in their ability to consume you. Those three paragraphs
show how distanced she is from her life, and how much she wishes for something
else.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)