“All of us—all who knew her—felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used—to silence our own nightmares, And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.”
This quote from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye sums up how our relationships towards ourselves and others are intricately bound by an inherited structure of oppression. Under this corrupted structure, we all inevitably exist on a see—saw in which in order for some to soar others must fall. Under this structure there is seemingly no way to extricate ourselves from either enduring oppression or assuming the role of the oppressor. The encouragement is toward soaring—but we only recognize this as soaring because others are flailing beneath us. We examine deterioration in others and we proclaim strength within ourselves. Whenever there is a sense of cleansing, it is being done at the expense of someone else’s dirtying. Our successes become relative, our failures become relative, our entire little ecosystem—including our selfhood—becomes a game of relativity. We understand permission through refusal, abundance through lack, and salvation through cataclysm. We understand our lot as relative to the lots of others. And yet we also understand our current lot based upon the lots we once had, within the selves we once were. To pit ourselves against another is to promote individualism, the undercurrent of capitalism. That same pitting gaze we hold outward—as a litmus test of our relative soaring—subsequently slings back towards ourselves.
Through this gaze we affirm our own identity through negating the identities of others. We can only affirm beauty when we recognize others lack it. Beauty is decidedly something to yearn for. It is a transient, ineffable quality to possess and yet we cling to as comfort, almost as an invocation of our deepest self. We clamor for it, its presence or absence in others incites us. We are generous in recognizing beauty in nature, where it is allowed to be bountiful, yet we are much more discerning when we turn our gaze onto each other. Much of our experience on this earth is in pursuit of beauty, in escape of horror. Beauty disarms, confuses, enrages—essentially catalyzes all existential upset. It deludes, it clarifies. If we think we carry it, there is the ever—persistent fear that it may vanish. If we think we lack it, there is the ever—persistent fear that it may never arrive. Both mentalities—which begin to blur as we feel ourselves slipping closer or further from our subjective proximity towards beauty—leave us wandering the world in the caverns of our perceived gains and lacks. In assessment of our perceived strides and missteps. Beauty makes monsters of us—jealous towards those who possess it, even jealous towards incarnations of ourselves when we presumed we fleetingly once had it too. When we uphold beauty we are fueling a bitter contempt towards others and ourselves. It is an ever—sharpening double-edged sword.
The identity we ground ourselves in immediately becomes fractured when we realize the values we once lauded were misplaced to begin with. Who we are is a fractured characteristic of who we claim we are not. Our own identity is ping—ponged around by these ever—shifting claims of self, self-proclamations. What we see in others, or rather what we impose upon others, becomes something we incorporate or refute within our own selfhood. We create ourselves based upon inherited attitudes towards others. We wield this inheritance outwards—believing we birthed this gaze—and as a result our selves are left more cobbled than whole. We then wield this same gaze inwardly. We misinterpret it as our own unique selectivity rather than structural imposition. Our gaze towards ourselves and others is only mediated by a mirror we had no part in crafting but yet are integral towards maintaining. In maintaining an abundant life under this system, we are also maintaining oppression. Our well—being is connected to the illnesses of all, and yet we stand by.
We chisel ourselves based upon others, and we call it craftsmanship. Who are we if not what others are not? We think this chiseling is self—made, but it is guided by a structure in which some seeds are meant to flourish while others never grow. As Morrison concludes the novel: “it was the fault of the earth, the land, our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live…” (206). Here, there is acknowledgement that the structure is to blame, not the seeds that failed to grow. And yet “we acquiesce”—we still make daily concessions of our own that prevent this structure from changing. We give in. The structure and its soiled seeds are what we “honed our egos on.” If we disregard the structure then we also must disregard the self that was built upon that structure. And then we have to concede that our selves are not craftsmanship—they are forms of delusion. They have been little appendages of the structure we convinced ourselves we exist separately from. Our persona is not a figment of autonomy but of confinement. Morrison reminds us that beauty is a structural flaw, that we are parading ourselves around to be adored or ridiculed, giving power to all who gaze back at us. Others are not reduced to the audience of our personhood, they are crucial towards the making of it. To hold the gaze means we value it enough to have it pierced unto us as well. And as long as we are connected to these systems we will birth this gaze ad infinitum. To extricate oneself from it, especially at a time when the gaze is employed online in addition to real life, is a labyrinth we each must find our ways out of. If complete extrication is too far—fetched or impossible of a consideration, then perhaps the first step is at least welcoming skepticism towards the structure, towards the self that is its product. When we question the self—chiseling born out of oppressive structures, we learn that persona and beauty are nightmares disguised as artful virtue.
If our selfhood is founded upon beauty and we decide against beauty, then our new selfhood has little foundation upon which to rest. Beauty is meant to contain us, and we are meant to be boundless. Freedom rests within the shards of that which we choose to dismantle. We have misinterpreted beauty as a salve for so long that the release of that pursuit frightens us. We have lived in blind insistence that beauty is an antidote, a remedy for our ailments, that we have ignored beauty as the ailment itself. The longing for beauty is a desire we know so intimately that we mistake it as our own will rather than a reflection of the system. To part with that longing becomes a sudden ego—death, and what then do we cling to? What is so captivating about Morrison’s writing is that it compels us to discern how value functions under oppression: to place value is to cast shadow. And in that shadow someone suffers. Our beauty becomes walking propaganda. Morrison casts light on that absurdity. We are neurotic towards beauty, and our identities are based upon that neurosis. What good can that do for a living thing? A tree is not concerned with how beautiful it is. Pining for beauty is a deeply felt human frailty that has been cultivated by a system created before our time. Morrison urges us to recreate this system, to cultivate earth that is not selectively fertile. In doing so, the Pecolas and marigolds will finally have a chance to bloom.
Azure Brandi graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where she studied Drama and Creative Writing. Brandi’s poem "Style" was published in New Croton Review's Spring 2023 Volume. Her poem “You Can Deny” was published in October Hill Magazine’s Winter 2024 Issue. Her poem “The Currents” will be published in The Underground Volume 30.
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One of those essays that feels right on time. Maybe could even be expanded to add the trend of 'body neutrality' (which is potentially a giving up or walking away from the intensity) or even the 70s punk trope of making something "so ugly it becomes beautiful" (both physical and sonic via intentional distortion) to the conversation.