COLUMN: Unnatural Beauty

From Sonja Stumacher's "Fragments of the Sun," Fall '95 From Sonja Stumacher's "Fragments of the Sun," Fall '95Walt Whitman celebrated the lusty jubilance of the human figure, unconstrained and whole in its raw, clean strength. He saw a fire in every face, a splendor of motion and stillness as natural as the ebb and flow of liquid tides. He found no shame in the simple grace and stark nakedness of the unclothed form: not a dimple to smother, a blemish to cover or a scar to conceal. Whitman sang of the electric body, a song of robust power and untainted vigour, a song that slowly recedes in our ears. A woman runs by like the transparent breeze of the sunny afternoon through which I walk. Her slight frame trips ahead of the wind, thin and cold like leftover winter ice. Skin-covered bones running an interminable marathon, a race that never ends. Her starving body hovers into itself, clinging to the meager morsels of flesh left to insulate its prancing motion. Down on the weight bench a man piles the iron higher and higher, slamming his biceps and pectorals into bursting shape. His muscles swell from hours spent each day lifting and lowering, bending, straightening. Soon the mass of sinewy fibers expands to fill the very limit of his stretched skin. A sheath and a bulk of giant proportions, driven to press and push itself beyond beyond human recognition. Too many of the faces brimming on the horizon have been robbed of their natural delight. A nose has been pinched, an eyelid chiseled, a chin tucked away. The marks of natural lazy ease and hearty glee are carefully folded out of sight, streamlined, downsized, leaving behind an angry thinness and steel sharpness. The message comes from magazine pages, billboards, news articles and television commercials: Beauty exists only within our conformity to unnatural and narrow limits created by an unrealistic ideal. In an age when we are supposed to have discarded old inhibitions about religion, dismantled myths about sexuality and unraveled gender inequalities, a single vital element remains for many shrouded in mystery and cloaked in shame: The natural human body. Beneath this cloak hides a form which is in itself a miracle to behold. A mysterious and splendid machine, one that has survived a thousand turmoils, discovered the wonders of wisdom, created infinite expressions of beauty and of art. The body beneath this cloak demands pride and exaltation. Unlike Whitman, I am not surrounded by curious, breathing, laughing flesh. The figures which stalk through my day are hard and sculpted, lean and hungry. There is a gnawing gash in their stomachs, an empty void their bodies cannot fill, an unrealized potential and a lingering sadness imprinted upon their drifting faces. The true celebration of ourselves lies concealed by the shadow of a looming, disguised shame many of us continue to feel about our bodies. And buried within shame is fear: of the power, of the puzzle and of the mystery of our own forms. I see the struggle of self abnegation. I also see people who thrive in their bodies and relish a wholesome spirit in themselves. But the anxious expressions are the ones that arrest my attention, because a glimmer of their misery reflects itself within my own existence. If we turn back to the words of a poet who knew the intrinsic sacred quality of our bodies, we may discover a spark of truth within the vigour and vibrancy of his ponderings. We may stand close to each other, frolic in each other's embraces and cut loose the constraining binds of severity and suppression. Most importantly, we may visit the unveiled pride within our own liberated, jubilant selves. If life and the soul are sacred the human body is sacred; And the glory and sweet of a man is the token of manhood untainted, And in man or woman a clean strong firm fibred body is beautiful as the most beautiful face. --Walt Whitman