😃
Collection of essays by the French mystic nicknamed ‘the categorical imperative in skirts‘
Let me convince you with this quote: ‘We want to get behind the beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that reflects to us our own desire for good. It is a sphinx, an enigma, a sorrowfully irritating mystery.
We want to feed on it, but it is only an object we can look on; it appears to us from a certain distance. The great sorrow of human life is knowing that to look and to eat are two different operations.’
I WANT TO EAT THE SUNSET I want to HAVE IT that is what is so great and sexy about food, you can eat the gorgeous pastry, you can consume it, it becomes apart of you and sustains you. But a beautiful painting or person or landscape is different - you can’t have it. You can’t do anything with it. its beauty exists in virtue of its remove from you. true beauty is useless and the fact that I can’t have or do anything with the beautiful thing is unbearable.
Jul 20, 2024
Related Recs
this quote from Jessica DeFino, beauty reporter and more importantly, critic, on the one person from her past that most influenced who she is today (and I really must agree):
"I am going to take the phrase “who you are today” very literally and go with Harry Dean Stanton — specifically, Harry Dean Stanton in conversation with David Lynch; that famous interaction where David Lynch says “How would you describe yourself?” and Harry Dean Stanton says, “As nothing. There is no self,” and they laugh.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of the self today for an article I’m writing on beauty as so-called “self-care” and “self-expression.” I bristle when people use these terms because in order for beauty products to be a tool for self-expression, you first must have a self to express, and I get the overwhelming sense that most people saying this don’t know who they are outside of what they buy and apply. Beauty products are more often used to create an image of a self than express an existing self. I don’t know. I’m taking a class on existentialism and Simone de Beauvoir, so that has something to do with it. But the more I think and read about the self, the more I’m convinced there is no essential self, not in any way that matters, and pursuing solidarity with the collective is a more interesting and liberating project than defining the self anyway? So yeah, today, specifically, I am luxuriating in the nothingness of being with Harry Dean Stanton (and Buddha before him)."
Mar 7, 2024
"Beauty privilege is very real. None of us are imagining it, and if we aren’t born genetic lottery winners, our only option is to compensate with style, grace, and charm. Of course, none of that shit comes cheap. That’s kind of the whole point. It’s all meant to be aspirational and exclusionary. We’re supposed to feel depressed by our skin, agitated by our bodies, and anxious about our invisibility. That’s the insidious subtlety of social control.
The worst part is that we know in our rational minds that it’s all bullshit, and yet we’re still plagued with self-loathing when we can’t live up to unattainable beauty standards. No matter how much self-acceptance we achieve, we can still look in the mirror and instantly catalog all the things about ourselves that we don’t think measure up. It’s maddening. It makes us feel like hypocrites even though it’s not our hypocrisy."
– The Coquette, Ugly-Sexy: Cool? | Adult Mag (2014)
Oct 2, 2024
⭐
(I am boldly applying this paragraph to the experience of consuming Perfectly Imperfect recs)
“One of the characteristics of taste is that it is infectious. The essence of a mesh is that it is a repeating pattern, and although each repeat may depend for its shape on the operation of outside forces — economic, social, religious, political, climactic and so on — yet those forces can only operate on single individuals. And the particularly sensitive individuals who first respond to them become, themselves, forces that affect the whole surrounding area.”
Jan 17, 2024
Top Recs from @heidegirl
⭐
if I go somewhere (train station, highway, supermarket) and there are massive screens which play ads on a loop, purposefully bright and loud and situated in a public space I experience this as an evil. It actively harms me. i don’t think we need to go any further than Times Square to find proof that aesthetic value is at least partially grounded in moral value.
Jan 31, 2024
⭐
You are obligated to make a good faith attempt to like your friends boyfriend five separate times. However five times is quite generous of you and if your don’t like them on the sixth occassion it is out of your hands.
Jan 28, 2024
🌱
Pilates + not eating processed foods + minimum 8 hours sleep + no coffee past 12pm… who knew feeling like an anxious, sleepless, over caffeinated mess all the time didn’t have to be the case!
May 23, 2024