Turn off the lights and it glows
Vampire love stories have hit the mainstream and Forks, Washington, a former unknown, unvisited logging town, is a destination stop for Twilight fans. Yet vampires might be passed right over by the magnetic pull of zombies. Zombies – and the possibility of a zombie apocalypse – have made it to the big time.
We’ve got zombies on TV, zombies in the movies, zombies on the field at half time for NFL football, zombies in military training. My son is sleeping tonight in an “I’m with zombies” glow-in-the-dark t-shirt. The Centers for Disease Control released Preparedness 101: The Zombie Pandemic, in May, 2012 as part of a social media campaign for emergency preparedness, in advance of the annual hurricane season. Wonder if it helped on the East Coast last week.
I like theater make-up as much as the next person, and I for one will always be thankful to Michael Jackson for showing us that zombies might be terrifying, but at least they can dance. I’ve yet to see vampires and werewolves break a move.
I’m not all that convinced that mute, will-less, soul-less corpses, taken over by evil supernatural forces, are my biggest threat. For me, it’s the platinum blond practitioner of healing arts I see in the waiting room when I go for an occasional massage. It’s a practice with multiple professionals, massage therapists and acupuncturists and skin aestheticians and those who offer body work, reiki, cranial sacral therapy, spiritual counseling and old-fashioned counseling. She’s beautiful and shapely and curvy and thin, late-20’s young, a professional in sexy-hot form-fitting clothes that draw attention to her breasts, which are round and high and seem slightly too big for her thin frame and legs elongated by five inch heels. Surprisingly, her face isn’t all that pretty; her nose is slightly small and her cheekbones flat, there is no light or shine in her dusty brown eyes. I don’t know which healing art she practices, but she scares the living daylights out of me.
She’s like a dare – do you look where she wants you to look? Or do you ignore the over-aggressive sexuality and try to meet her eyes? It takes huge amounts of mental energy to look up or away, given that millions of years of evolution draw men and women inexorably to breasts, and the fashion industry adds just the right amount of “oomph” to frost this sexual cake. Without a single musical note, she is the embodiment of the siren song. There is no escape. I’m straight, reasonably pleased with my own body (at least everywhere other than this waiting room) and possibly more than 20 years older than this woman, and I still struggle with where to leave my gaze. She renders me mute and will-less, as if I am more dead waiting for my healing arts session to begin than I have ever felt outside her presence; I am taken over by supernatural forces of envy and irritation, jealousy and inadequacy. In her presence, she is Beauty, and I am the dead zombie Beast who needs to do a better job with my hair and make-up, and ought to do something about those extra few pounds.
She is woman, she is sexy, she is blond; she would win any contest of physicality, except perhaps the capacity to carry a child to full term in pregnancy without teetering and falling off her high-heeled perch. My cowboy shoe-boots might win on cool footwear for motherhood, but I don’t think this gal would enter that contest, and winning by default is rather unsatisfying.
Yet for all her parts and features and fashionable, tight clothing, each individual piece pretty, sexy or striking, there is nothing harmonious or elementally pleasing about her appearance. Her perfect breasts are unexpected and jarring; her long shapely legs distracting. This is, after all, a waiting room. For whom did she dress this morning? No one in this waiting room, parading in and out for whatever form of healing respite they might desire, is her intended. Having no personal object of her desire, her sexuality is person-less, no different and no more desirable to experience than the discomfort of an aroused dog’s unwelcome use of your leg.
I’ve been thinking about my reaction to this woman, and it took the inspired prose of Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog to provide me with language to understand what I was experiencing. Barbery calls attention to the role of harmony in true Beauty: that which pulls us in to a timeless, placeless, eternal state where we are overcome with appreciation.
“We have a knowledge of harmony, anchored deep within. It is this knowledge that enables us, at every instant, to apprehend quality in our lives and, on the rare occasions when everything is in perfect harmony, to appreciate it with the apposite intensity. And I am not referring to the sort of beauty that is the exclusive preserve of Art . . . (it comes from) a certain ordering of ordinary things and from the certainty that all is as it should be, the conviction that it is fine this way.”
In another, a description of a still-life painting, Barbery describes a great work as follows:
“it clearly does inspire a feeling of consonance, a feeling that this is exactly the way it ought to have been arranged. This in turn allows us to feel the power of objects and the way they interact, to hold in our gaze the way they work together and the magnetic fields that attract and repel them, the ineffable ties that bind them together and engender a force, a secret and inexplicable wave born of both the tensions and the balance of the configuration–this is what inspires the feeling of consonance.”
The woman I am describing creates no such state of consonance, no conviction that she is exactly as she ought to be. She eventually repels the viewer, rather than creating appreciation and the desire to allow your gaze to linger. The sum of her perfect parts paradoxically creates an emptiness of sexual magnetism into which she invites others to pour momentary longing. No one will get lost in her eyes, no one will wax dreamily about long afternoons discovering her secret and inexplicable waves.
The end of the world, for me, would be when we are attacked by a roaming mob of bloodless, soulless, dull-eyed young women who society deems, part by part, to be beauties, with implant-perfect breasts and body fat a mere 2% above anorexic, exuding supernatural, unbounded, unbridled impersonal sexuality as a dare. When these sex-zombies, or sexbies as they might come to be called, invade, every facet of our democratic family-based society will be at risk. The CDC and all branches of our military will face an epidemic a bit unlike that for which they are preparing. Those in charge may instead be the first to succumb.
I offer up this tactic for survival – look only in their eyes. The siren pull of empty allure will be shattered. Mortal men and women need only to turn to the real live women in their lives, with blood and vitality coursing through their imperfect bodies. There they will find eyes to get lost in, souls that will preserve them, erotic spirit that will ignite them.
Maybe the invasion has already begun. Buxom NFL cheerleaders; deliberately unclad women oozing sexuality to sell cars, beer and soup; botox-injected lips swelling unnaturally under shiny lipstick; MILFs we watch in videos, on stripper poles, and at PTA meetings and other school functions, slightly tipsy and provocatively underdressed; the ubiquitous sex kittens at Halloween.
Yes, this is the apocalypse I fear.
WHEW! Scorching writing gal. Swooning.
JJ