The body of a sensualist is the coffin of a dead soul.
- christian nevell bovee
what i have already learned participating in flickr's 365 days project is that people, in general, have faces that they make in response to the sight of a camera or mirror, and not just when they are caught off guard by these devices - people have a "presentable" face, a "presentable" angle, and since participating in the project i have been on the lookout for the chin tilts, lip purses, eye widenings, that negate the candid moment.
i recently trolled through a breadcrumb trail of knitting blog links and realized that, once you were on the lookout for it, it was easy to spot all the little tricks of language that similarly eradicate the individual voice. although i was looking at knitting blogs specifically, there are some commonalities that are evident in non-knitting blogs too. like that "something mc something" construction - my god, how many variations of this does one have to see before it doesn't look fresh and winsome anymore? (answer: two.) and the "somethingy goodness" thing. i think blogs might be the worst thing to happen to language in centuries.
and it's still remarkable to me that writing about knitting (air quotes around that "write") is so heavily infused with pseudo-sexual or pseudo-semisexual language - as if the only way to express any kind of sensualism is with this limiting, babyish, knee-jerk talk. vixen, trollop, slut, harlot, yummy, tantalizing, sooooooooooo anything. is anybody getting laid out there? because this all borders in my mind on the kind of thing that gets the women's magazines describing chocolate desserts as though they too were blue material.
rather thirdhand - and followed by some research that indicated that this is a more or less universal problem in our increasingly flat world - i recently heard about the justifiable horrors that yarn shop employees sometimes experience when a customer comes into their place of business, picks up a skein or a hank, and then proceeds to rub it against their face luxuriantly. good god! and it's not like they go into a corner and do this hoping to attract no attention; they do it in front of yarn store staff! they rub yarn on their faces - in front of what is essentially a paid audience - to what end? to demonstrate their intense appreciation of the fiber that they haven't purchased and yet are smearing their maybelline all over?
you can just imagine individuals like this striding up to the door of the secret clubhouse and telling themselves with confidence, "i'll just flap my hands around and whatever i do is so likely to approximate the secret handshake that they'll just let me on in." these people, whose incredible lust for their tools has materialized in their sebaceous oil glands, have got camille claudel looking down at them from the great beyond and shaking her head. clay, clay is sexy, says camille. what the fuck is with the yarn?
is there some unspoken suggestion that if one does not succumb to la petit mort upon contact with a limp ball of cashmere, or does not use the words, the tone, that one is dispassionate about knitting? not really "hardcore"? that one is unappreciative, or has such a dulled palate for yarn that they should just sit at home with a couple of plastic straight needles and some acrylic?
it sort of - and i'm the last person who'd call themselves a feminist but i guess it sort of stands to reason that so many, many people are happy to be yarn ho's, but it seems that words like hog, glutton, and pig are, while not entirely unused, a little less popular. i feel that the language has gone from a thread of familiarity to a nest or bunker, to a downright prison, and that iterations of the same sentiments, phrased similarly, used to gain entry like a key for a lock, and are in this capacity detrimental both to originality and to expression.
on blogs - knitting and otherwise - it is sometimes awfully, transparently sad to see how people in the comment fields of any given post will be downright contorting in their efforts to parrot tone and message to the person who wrote the entry upon which they are commenting. what is ironic about this is how much of it is often touted as "outspokenness" and telling-it-like-it-is. it seems well proven: when "vitriol" meets a yes-man mentality, there's no mutual exclusivity; "vitriol" plus yes-man mentality equals blog comment. one might call this phenomenon divide and concur, as it so heavily relies on both herd-culling and boot-licking.
this language, these secret handshakes, both flubbed and approved, are the chin tilts, the lip purses, the eye widenings that people apply to their "faces", not necessarily with bad intent, to make themselves what they think they ought to be. i have learned already - and seen others learn, in the 365 days project - that, while it is perhaps hard to catch one's on patterns as one flits from blog entry to comments on another blog or comments on yet another blog, it is impossible to miss those patterns when you have to take a photograph of yourself for three hundred and sixty-five days in a row. and what might have been a "bad" picture of you on day one is a lot more acceptable on day forty - because, without learning to accept it, you'd have to have dug in hard and believed, beyond all question, that you only have one acceptable face. and that round-eyed mc rictus and all its chin-tilty goodness gets pretty tiring after day three, and starts to look like an outright scam by day ten. maybe earlier.
why should people put leg-irons on themselves when expressing their creativity? haven't i made it through this entire entry without calling it a "rant" or my own thoughts "random"? why aren't tickets being issued for those who do? and what is there like the 365 days project that could be applied to knitting? it would have to take only a snippet of time if necessary, longer if one had the time.
suddenly, it seems so obvious.