Pulchritude Finally Has Its Name Cleared

It always starts out small. One little fact, a slight reference that intrigues and suddenly, I'm off. I'm reading from page to page, following wherever the links lead. I'm talking about my addiction to the Information Super Highway. Yes, the internet. One day, I read about modern day spies and next thing I know, I'm on wikipedia learning about every spy known to the CIA. And each lovely little link was a name I haven't heard before and that I MUST know. It was about 2 hours later when I looked up. This is how I lose time on the internet. It's bloody brilliant.

Yesterday, when I was at the gym, I watched Emmerdale, an English evening soap. It featured a stunning woman more in my hue. Yes, that's right, another 'Leyla', but this time, swanning about this tiny village Oop North, startling the local townspeople with her exoticness. A nice flash of colour, I thought. Anyway, the subtitles weren't on (thanks a lot, David Lloyd) and I couldn't figure out if she was meant to be Iranian or Mediterranean.

Naturally, this morning I turn to the internet. Sadly, I am only able to find out that the actress, Rokshaneh Ghawam-Shahidi, is of Persian ancestry. Apparently, not one viewer who watches Emmerdale gives a hoot from which ancestry the actual soap family hails. Not one of my more fruitful searches.

Until I scroll down and read the two comments below the actress' picture on The Holy Soap (Yes, that's what the site is called! What? It's not mine. Never been there before, I swear.) The first comment is fairly standard 'most stunning woman on TV', but the second is a beauty of alliteration and just plain punchy. Possibly my two favourite things when it comes to words.

It's just two words: Persian Pulchritude.

Hmmm. Is this code? Is it rude? I confess I've never bothered to look up 'pulchritude' and always assumed since it looks dry and nasty, it must mean something unpleasant and not particularly interesting. Nothing for it but to put it through Merriam-Webster. And I'm surprised. Genuinely and happily surprised. It's not often that I completely misjudge a word.

pul·chri·tude : physical comeliness

Pulchritude, my sincere apologies. You are a gem in the rough.

Okay, meaning understood. Still, the whole phrase just doesn't sit right with me. Why would someone put the two together, even for the glory of true alliteration? Most people who comment on the internet (especially The Holy Soap, I imagine. No offense, HS) don't really bother to go to those lengths.

Not satisfied, I put the whole phrase through Google. Next thing I know, I'm onto this Nicolas Poussin painting. See? Isn't it gorgeous, velvety dark and vibrantly bright all at once? I would never have come across this if I'd just minded my own business.

So there I am, reading this article (Poussin's "Esther before Ahasuerus": Beauty, Majesty, Bondage by one Jonathan Unglaub) on Poussin's painting of the same name. Scanning, really, for Persian Pulchritude, which Google insists will appear somewhere in this 22 page art history thesis.

Okay. At this point, I do realise that I should walk away. That this is why P calls me crazy in my research mode. [I think he really means tenacious, but I let it slide. It's one of his favourite peeves.] But I'm so close. How can I walk away?

So, I read on about Esther, the beautiful Queen who is secretly a Jew and swoons before her angry King's countenance (you may have guessed he's the guy in the bright red robe). I'm rewarded for my determination on the 6th page. Turns out, the King chooses Esther from a collection of virginal beauties brought together for this purpose and some art historian is geekily overwhelmed by this idea of 'Persian Pulchritude' arrayed before the King. Esther, of course, is the most beautiful, yadda, yadda, yadda.

But, I do love cracking a mystery. I now want to run up to people and inexplicably shout 'Persian Pulchritude, ' while punching my fist in the air.

Oh dear, I wonder if you're regretting the peep into my mind-workings now.

Necessity is the Mother of Invention. Word.

I found myself surprisingly hungry this afternoon. Surprisingly—because it was unscheduled, unplanned, and, for which I was unprepared. My late afternoon lovechild. Metaphorically speaking. Those of you who work in an office or live and die by a routine will totally get this.

Standing in front of our kitchen cupboard, all I see is my Oat-ee-bix cereal (rolled oats for my now wheat-free diet), a nearly empty jar of reduced fat peanut butter and some runny honey. A fantastic idea begins to weave together in the back of my mind and as I haven’t got much to lose—it is after all 4pm on a workday—and much to gain.

I scramble for a bowl. A few minutes later, I’m stood looking at a bowl of cereal drizzled with honey and peanut butter. I was actually feeling that tingly nauseated feeling that comes from a combination of excitement and anxiety. It was just like waiting for your ride on a rollercoaster, hearing the monster roar and tear through the air above you, wondering if you’ve just made a terrible mistake and if these people wouldn’t mind you shoving past them for the exit.

I rushed back to my desk to tuck into my new culinary invention. Sure, it doesn’t look right. I mean, peanut butter isn’t exactly the consistency that ‘drizzles’ well. It’s more the consistency of ‘clumped.’ One bite and I know that looks aren’t everything. The crisp oat chunks provide the perfect texture, the peanut butter on oat reminds me of peanut butter cookies and the honey adds a refreshing zing to the milk. The oats even seem to delay their soggy process in the milk—as if the physical properties of peanut butter, milk and honey combined slow down the inevitable breakdown into oat slush. Tasty and practical?!

Verdict: WEIRD LOOKING BUT AWESOME. Will revisit.

Too bad the office is looking at me askance now. Guess I got the rumour mill going last week when I had tuna fish with pilaf rice for lunch (What? It wasn't too bad. Just a bit salty). Clearly, I’m playing fast and loose with the rumour mill now. My cereal and its accoutrements need a name. Perhaps ‘Relax, Definitely Not Preggo’?

How to wear Literature

Those of you who know me well know that for nearly the last 10 years I have been talking about the same idea. For those of you who don't know me well, please know that I am not a one-note wonder. I have talked about other things the last 10 years as well!

I suppose the idea has been steadily growing ever since my first reading of Wuthering Heights. I remember where Cathy tries to explain her dreams to a skeptical Nellie:

"I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind."

Such a stunning image--that our minds are a canvas and our dreams and experiences transform the canvas with all the colours of living. As always, hats off to Emily Bronte. But to go all English major on you, presenting the mind as a canvas sets the mind (soul, heart, character, the It of a person) as something tangible. I suppose I should say 'as opposed to nebulous' and 'necessarily indefinable'. This something tangible can be known and understood and maybe even shared. Where someone close to you can look to the canvas and have an ah-ha moment: 'That--there you are! I see it now' And cue instant harmony of souls. Or so the young romantic in me imagines it'll go. It's pretty to think so, isn't it? Maybe it's just me, but there is something divine in being truly seen in one glance. Others may like to pick through the clues and put together an understanding of One. Not me. One soul-searing glance is the ideal. That or handing a new acquaintance findingmoxie's very own cultural lexicon made up of all the bits that are integral to findingmoxie. A real 'Here's What I Love: Go home and come back, knowing it all, ready to commune with this Awesomeness.'

Ahem.

Well, you know the why. Let's go on with the what.

Years later, it took Michael Ondaatje to take this seed of an idea and run with it. The English Patient has weaving through the centre of its story Almasy's desire for a world with no maps. And for a time, living and working in the desert, Almasy can perceive an existence with no borders, no nationalities while the rest of the world around them explodes into opposing countries and armies. I confess that as a twice displaced individual, I found very seductive this dream of saying NO to maps and all their accompanying divisions. Beyond the political and geographical indicators, we're still who we are and always will be. Maps just break up happy homes, peoples!

Although rejecting maps and borders, Almasy does believe in the body:

"We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience."

Yes. That's it exactly. I want to be marked. Marked by all that I have loved, sweated, survived and been moved by. I think it's a hauntingly beautiful idea to essentially honour all the people and things who have passed through your life. Lord knows, I haven't stayed in once place and in the course of my wanderings, I've encountered so many amazing people and though some of these relationships have been transitory in nature, their effect on me has been no less obvious and no less visceral than my staples in family and friends. It's nothing new really that each person carries these experiences with us; but rather than just memories rattling around in your mind, unseen and intangible, Ondaatje gets physical. These markings don't have the softness of memories, these are freaking MARKINGS, carved into your body. You've been lived in, friend. And housekeeping hasn't been in to refresh.

It took the supremely talented Anthony Minghella to give this idea of mine a stunning visual. He had me in the opening credits, for goodness' sake:

(Apologies for the handheld action--you now know where my strengths don't lie.)

In this Ondaatjeverse, others plunge into and swim up our bodies as they mark us, remaining part of us. The film opens with a hand gracefully painting these stick figure swimmers onto rock, while Hungarian folk singer Márta Sebestyén mesmerises you, and suddenly it's shadows on sand dunes, that last ever flight through the desert.

BAM--it hit me like a freight train.

That's how I'm going to be marked by everyone and everything I've known. Little stick figures will be painted unto my foot and will swim up my body. So, when you see the little dudes on my foot, forever embarking on their journey, you'll understand what it means to me.

And that's how to wear literature, folks.

the ONLY way to get me to Baltimore

There is something about this photo (posted by one of my former RAs, Alex P., an actual denizen of Maryland) that both repels and tempts. It's definitely the sort of photo that vegans wouldn't like and trust me, when you know a vegan, suddenly, a lot of photos seem in ridiculously poor taste. Especially anything involving a mallet and pliers.

In any case, this is what you get when you take yourself to Obrycki's Crab joint in Baltimore.

Not sure if crabs are just spilled onto your table haphazard, but it seems in keeping with the cartoonish brutality of filching all the flesh from crab shells.

After sitting through two seasons of The Wire, I vowed that NOTHING would induce me to pass through Baltimore. But, I have to say that that gluttonous glory of Obrycki's might make me reconsider. Besides, how bad can Baltimore be? I'll just stay away from the waterside and the East side or the West side. Hmmmm.

Luckily, the crabs shown here live smack dab in the center of Baltimore. Could be neutral ground.

This Can Only Embarrass Me

Sometime between the release of the first two Underworld movies (I told you this wouldn't make me any cooler), I read an interview with Kate Beckinsale. What's more, something she said stayed with me. Naturally, I hate to set one of the tent poles of my life to a Kate Beckinsale-ism, but hey, it's a sight better than Carson Daly, is it not? At least, Kate Beckinsale was never dumped by Tara Reid: where rock bottom gives way and you fall another 30 feet through sludge and more sludge.

In the usual manner of interviews in fashion magazines, it was supposed that we care less about Ms. Becksinsale's accomplishments (I know, but stay with me) than her beauty regime and musings on what make women truly beautiful. What she had to say was so honest and so true (for me anyway) that it floored me. When asked if she felt beautiful and confident, she answered that she believed that whatever or wherever you were as a 12 year old never left you. That you could be glamorous, successful, the most stunning woman in the world and you would still feel like that gawky 12 year old--if indeed you were a gawky 12 year old. She admitted that she was chubby and awkward as a 12 year old and that that was her default, where she stuck sometimes.

Cut to me gobsmacked. Holy crap, yes! Rationally, I know I'm not that little girl anymore, strange and awkward, not really understood by my peers. But it makes sense that some strong vestige of that key developmental part of your life has stayed up way past her bedtime.

And it also makes sense that some people just don't have that lingering breath of gauche. Some people are so amazingly confident and unconcerned that it takes your breath away. These are the people who had an easier transition at 12. You know them, the sort of 12 year olds you imagine had a bright pink bike with a white wicker basket, parents who didn't argue and grandparents that didn't worry about their weight in front of them. And in my case, the kind of 12 year old who was every bit an American from birth (maybe blond, blue-eyed and named Laura). So yeah, I guess I personally had a long way to go to find serenidence. Much like Faulkner, this one is on me. Self-coined: where confidence isn't brash or arrogant. But instead shows itself as a serenity and a certain quietness of mind.

To tell you the truth, I haven't actually thought of Kate Beckinsale's theory of 12 in years. It actually crept into my mind as easy as pie this evening. It takes one awkward and stilted social encounter and suddenly, I'm 12 years old and Kate Beckinsale is right. Dammit.