What is beauty?

It’s sure not me

When I look in the mirror, all I see

Is a reflection of imperfections and problems that need to be fixed

I can’t really remember the last time or even a time

When my skin was perfect

All I remember are the same questions and remarks people made:

“Oh my god, what happened to your face?”

“Do you wash your face enough?”

“Don’t touch your face so much, you’ll make it worse!”

“Here’s a remedy I read about online, I’ll forward it to your mom”

These people that constantly made these remarks

They weren’t just random people I’d never see again

They were my relatives: my aunts, my uncles, my cousins, even my own mother

Everyday, I struggled to meet their definition of beauty,

To be beautiful in their eyes

I used lightening cream to be “whiter”

I used every homemade remedy out there to get rid of the one problem that stared back at me

And still nothing….

It only got worse to the point where it physically hurt to move my face

Acne was winning, and me, I was losing to a battle that I was fighting for way too long

This idea that beauty had power over me,

A power that I couldn’t escape

Until I finally got rid of all the weight on my shoulders,

The weight of expectations that weren’t ever mine,

I stand in front of you today,

Nowhere near perfect,

But better

I stand here today,

with scars from my battle against Beauty,

Scars,

That serve as a daily reminder

That what I see in the mirror,

Isn’t a reflection of imperfections and problems that need fixing,

But rather a reflection of all that I conquered and survived through.

Finishing the rest of Nightwood, I found many parts that seemed problematic or just hard to understand with everything that has happened with a conclusion that is open to interpretation.

The passage that I choose to focus on specifically is on page 153, where Robin stumbled and “she said seeing a poor wretched beggar of a whore, ‘Giver her some money, all of it!… They are all God-for-saken, and you most of all, because they don’t want you to have your happiness. They don’t want you to drink. Well, here, drink! I give you money and permission! These women- they are all like her, They are all good-they want to save us!” When Robin said this she was very intoxicated and previous to this instance was taking out her anger and drunkenness on Nora, calling her a devil and confirming that they believed that truly. In this passage, Robin refers to a “they,” which I am having trouble understanding who that “they” might be referring to and what the source of all this pent up anger was. With the progression of Nightwood much dialogue from Robin wasn’t included, just descriptions of what others had to say about her, so hearing how outspoken she was at that moment came to a surprise to me.

A combination of her intoxication and her odd behavior of giving all her money to a random homeless woman give some insight to the peculiarity of what she actually said. After reading it over and over again, what I’ve come to understand is that Robin was directing this to the women in her life, but more specifically Nora. She blamed her for taking her back home, away from the bars and the liquor but praised and appreciated her for her how much she cared and took care of her. In this line alone, Robin tried to play victim: saying that she needs permission to live life the way she wants to and to be happy, even though throughout the novel, she does exactly that not taking into consideration any of the people in her life and how much anguish they may have with her actions. The nature of her character at this particular point played a contributing factor in what she had to say because it revealed some truths yet in a discombobulated manner.

On Wednesday, October 11th, I attended along with some of my other classmates to a reading with Andrew Zawacki at the Graduate Center. A reoccurring theme that was brought up throughout the reading was translation. The theme of translation was described as having many parts to it. Professor Zawacki expressed that translation makes it possible to channel someone else. As a psychoanalyst, he said it made him able to translate the text farther from the face value. Psychoanalysts appreciate the way the text reads in the original language which helps them be some of the best people to translate a text to another language and in their own interpretation. The opposite of a psychoanalyst would be a domestic translator, who don’t really take the language of the original text into account. Having a constraint of sticking to the same format as the original text is easier to translate.

Translation, in on its own, has its own constraints. There are things you can do in another language that you can’t do in English; there is ambiguity in English, with pronouns such as “I,” but with another language it is clear on whether “I” is referring to a male or female. The translation of a romantic language, such as Spanish and French, don’t translate the same way as English. With its German origins, the English language has hard consonant sounds, like the hard c, which doesn’t translate as romantic as Spanish or French, which is why the original translation of a text usually sounds better than the translation.

Translations are a lot of known unknowns. Translators are the best critiques, finding how to best interpret a given text: keeping what they find is most important, which mean keeping the rhyme scheme, but losing the way it read originally.

The City That Never Sleeps 

You must never sleep. In the city that never sleeps.

From the moment you open your eyes, they say “keep moving”.

Keep moving, for Life will not stop for you. Life will keep moving despite what you do, how you feel, what you eat, what you smell, what you see and what you don’t see. Life will keep moving.

On your way to work, to school, to friends, to family, if you find yourself drifting away, slowly closing your eyes to endless slumber. Remind yourself that life is endless and you must not give into the desire to rest your eyes for a couple of minutes which will slowly turn into hours.

Remember, as you run from place to place that Time is against you. Dreaded Time, what makes you a prey to the deprivation of sleep and addicted to our only source of energy, caffeine. Shaky hands, shaky leg, eyes wide open, using every muscle in your body to defeat the power that Time has on.

Trying everyday to find a way to defeat your only true enemy: Time. People from cities far, far away, see New York City, your home, as the “city that never sleeps.” Beeping cars, elevator dings, the constant tapping on a keyboard, “The next stop on this train will be 23rd Street, please stand clear of the closing doors please”

After a long day of fighting against Time, standing still in a quiet space, you finally admit defeat, closing your eyes and laying motionless as everything around you continues moving for the next few couple of hours, only to repeat it all again the very next day.

The one of the specific stylistic elements I choose to imitate from the prose poems that Charles Baudelaire wrote in “The Parisian Prowler” was the use of personification and representation of an idea like time have a human like manner to it. In his prose poem “Get High,” Baudelaire shows to the reader the physical burden that time can have on an individual. “not to feel the horrible burden of Time/ wrecking your back and bending you to the ground, you/ must get high without respite.” I noticed how he also capitalized Time rather than using it in lowercase, to further implicate the personification he was displaying; that time isn’t only an idea but like the name of a person it should be capitalized, mimicking human like mannerisms. I also tried to imitate how descriptive Baudelaire in his writing, having an impact of the sensory aspect of the reader. In the prose poem “Cake,” Baudelaire describes the fight scene with the two homeless men in great detail to the reader, done to details such as the following “the first one, infuriated, clutched the second by the hair; the other one bit his ear and, with a magnificent swear in dialect, spat out a little bloody piece of it.” I used a combination of the two elements I mentioned: personification and descriptive text to describe NYC to the best of my ability and what it means to me at the moment, living a busy and hectic life at times. 

Enlightenment thinkers, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all had very similar beliefs of what made an individual enlightened and what made a society/nation enlightened. An enlightened person was defined as “one who dares to think for himself… trampling on prejudice, tradition, conventional wisdom, authority, in a word, all that enslaves most minds” according to the French Encyclopedie. Many enlightenment thinkers also disagreed with religion and authority in general. Europeans, during the age of exploration, sought out unfamiliar territory to find new goods and services to bring back to their land. Being exposed to a nation governed by reason and rationality, Europeans looked down upon native countries and cities that governed their nation based on their religious faith, traditions and culture. They saw them as “primitive and unreasonable” human beings, not to mention, “childlike” and basically inferior to the people back in Europe. Kant believed in enlightened monarchs with strict order and a “well disciplined army” not a country that is convinced to change their opinions constantly based upon what the higher authority had to tell them or a purely democratic nation.

Reading through “What is Enlightenment?,” there were many ideas and concepts that I agreed with that Kant or the Enlightenment thinkers believed in, some of which include the notion of freedom, rationalism and critical thinking as factors to what defined an enlightened person. But there were definitely a few ideas that I personally disagreed with. In the beginning of the reading, the author established what makes a human being human? They asserted that human beings, unlike animals, are governed with the faculty of reason: having the capacity to reflect on the the relationships between object or events throughout their lives. Though according to Enlightenment thinkers this is the characteristic that makes a human being human, a woman isn’t acquitted the same freedom and authority that men possess. Many of the enlightenment beliefs allude to supporting the notion that inequality of reason and knowledge varies among gender, race and religious beliefs, which I must say I personally disagree with. Kant’s belief that an enlightened nation is one that has strict order shows in part his support for inequality which still is very much present even today. The notion that your religious background or your ethnic background plays a factor in the superiority of your knowledge and reasoning capacity is completely absurd. We have successful Christian advocates, we have successful Muslims, there successful Asians and African Americans, not limited to the Europeans only.