Raising the brow bar

Sometimes when you check back in after a break, things have moved, often at a swifter pace than you thought possible. Like when you don’t own a tv, and then you catch some and think ‘was tv always this loud, crass and fatuous?’

Today it was eyebrows. I’ve always had a casual approach to eyebrow maintenance, and haven’t put them in for a service in quite a while. Feeling a tad unkempt about the brows, I had a look online to find a neighbouring brow shop. There are plenty, and since I last looked, they’ve experienced what can only be described as profession creep.

With a few clicks of the mouse, I stumbled unawares into a world of brow shapers, sugarers, designers, stylists and – I kid you not – brow whisperers. At a brow bar that looks more like a Byzantine kasbah, your ‘Arch Angel’ will perform a ‘face reading’ to gain an understanding of your personality and idiosyncracies. (I wonder, does one’s face have to be straight for this to work?) ‘Using the brow whispering technique they can then determine a perfect brow shape to suit each individual.’ Once you’ve had your brows whispered, you move on to your consultation with a brow artist, who’ll (eventually) give you a ‘wax, tweeze and alignment’ for just $70. If you prefer something more radically intrusive, you can pay considerably more for a browlift, which surgically removes excess fat and skin in your brow area, and tightens the muscles to give you the perfect arch of the permanently surprised.

It’s not really the money that troubles me, nor the possibility that if I were so inclined I could have my face surgically rearranged. Tempora mutantur, after all. It’s the spin: the psuedo-spiritual quasi-psychological lily-gilding that blurs a service industry with the helping professions and the arts.  Such spinning elevates beyond reason both the nature of the transaction and – it must be said – the participants. Removing hair with hot wax is not an art; the person who does it, however well, is not an artist. This wouldn’t bother me so much if I, as the buyer of these services, was not drawn into the pretence. Because that’s the worst part.  Going along with the elaborate charade that my eyebrows somehow deserve this much attention, this much gilt. That I care about them this much.

Maybe I should ask my brow artist to give me the ‘dead pan.’  I think I’m going to need it.

In libris

I’m sitting in the National Library, sucking down latte and wi-fi in about equal quantities. This is because we have moved house and so far have no internet at home. Hence the blog silence. I’ll be back soon with more posts and a fresh look for the blog; apologies in the interim.

I’ve posted about moving before, since I seem to do it about annually. Being married to a minimalist has curbed my tendency to keep everything in case it matters later. His view is: if in doubt, throw it out. So this move was a bit leaner than previous ones. And it was, I admit, pretty cathartic to throw away letters, papers, notes that I’ve been carting for a couple of decades that really won’t ever matter again.

I also threw away some books (gasp!) but I find books are a bit like the magic pudding. No matter how many you give away, you always seem to have just as many – way too many to make moving easy. But it’s good to keep one’s book collection dynamic. As you add to it, you can cut away some of the dead wood. You can think seriously about whether this or that book matters now in the way it did then, and if it ever did at all. You can audit your reading habits and history. You can cleanse your reading palate, and thus your intellect, and your imagination. It’s a way to ensure your books live and breathe in your life, that your library is not a museum.

In the quiet evening hours

Thinking of Isabel's sad wandering in Rome made me think of one of my favourite Christina Rossettis: 'An End'. To me it speaks about an ending that's not tempestuous or anguished, but quiet and still, sad and soft.  There's even almost relief, after the heat of death-strong love, in the coolness of it.

Love, strong as Death, is dead.
Come, let us make his bed
Among the dying flowers:
A green turf at his head;
And a stone at his feet,
Whereon we may sit
In the quiet evening hours.

He was born in the Spring,
And died before the harvesting:
On the last warm summer day
He left us; he would not stay
For Autumn twilight cold and grey.
Sit we by his grave, and sing
He is gone away.

To few chords and sad and low
Sing we so:
Be our eyes fixed on the grass
Shadow-veiled as the years pass,
While we think of all that was
In the long ago.

Isabel in Rome

I showed you Dorothea in Rome at the beginning of her suffering, and Isabel in Florence affronting her destiny with no hint of what would follow. Here she is in Rome, after her great doom has come upon her.

She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective, so that as she sat in a sun-warmed angle on a winter's day, or stood in a mouldy church to which no one came, she could almost smile at it and think of its smallness. Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with Rome; it interfused and moderated her passion. But she had grown to think of it chiefly as the place where people had suffered. This was what came to her in the starved churches, where the marble columns, transferred from pagan ruins, seemed to offer her a companionship in endurance and the musty incense to be a compound of long-unanswered prayers.

The year has two faces

January is named for Janus, Rome's two-faced god of gates. The Renaissance poets loved this idea, and often used Janus, who looked backward and forward at once, as an emblem of their own vocations. Here's Edmund Spenser, from his 'Amoretti' sonnet sequence (1595), describing the emergence of a new year from the gate of the old.

New year forth looking out of Janus' gate,
Doth seem to promise hope of new delight:
And bidding th' old Adieu, his passed date
Bids all old thoughts to die in dumpish sprite.
And calling forth out of sad Winter's night,
Fresh love, that long hath slept in cheerless bower:
Wills him awake, and soon about him dight
His wanton wings and darts of deadly power.
For lusty spring now in his timely hour,
Is ready to come forth him to receive;
And warns the Earth with diverse colored flower,
To deck herself, and her fair mantle weave.
Then you fair flower, in whom fresh youth doth rain,
Prepare yourself new love to entertain.