Things could be different. Things could be completely different to how they are.
That’s what I’ve been trying to get at, in the On Different Ways of Thinking entries. Because (I hope) it can keep possibilities open for you.
But that’s hard to keep fresh.
We know it abstractly, that the given isn’t given, and yet it’s hard not to believe there’s an inevitability to the status quo.
Some differences, however, are easy to keep in mind, once you hear of them.
What is beautiful — what is considered beautiful — that’s something which has changed so often, within and between cultures, we can focus on it clearly, simply.
I’d like to suggest you one wonderful example: teeth.
Junichirō Tanizaki’s book In Praise of Shadows gives example after example of how Japanese aesthetics differs from Western.
‘One thinks of the practice of blackening the teeth… Today this ideal of beauty has quite disappeared from everyday life, and one must go to an ancient Kyoto teahouse, such as the Sumiya in Shimabara, to find traces of it. [In Praise of Shadows was first published in 1977.] But when I think back to my own youth in the old downtown section of Tokyo, and I see my mother at work on her sewing machine in the dim light from the garden, I think I can imagine a little what the old Japanese woman was like. In those days – it was around 1890 – the Tokyo townsman still lived in a dusky house, and my mother, my aunts, my relatives, most women of their age, still blackened their teeth.
(Pg 44, In Praise of Shadows, Vintage, 1991)
I don’t know about you, but I find it very easy to go with this.
Despite decades of me watching toothpaste ads, and bright white teeth beaming at me out of almost every movie (Deborah Moggach once told me she felt Donald Sutherland’s Hollywood-perfect gnashers were a serious problem in the opening scenes of her adaptation of Pride and Prejudice), I can make a switch to a different view — which brings a different world.
I can incorporate that flip without feeling it’s ‘unrealistic’.
I can see my mother, looking beautiful, with blackened teeth.
When I want to remind myself of possibilities, of alternative universes still close to ours, I think of a very dark smile.
(Photo credit: Lesley Downer.)
I hate toothpaste, the taste of it. I never use fluoride either. I heard it shuts the third eye, and I have to say, my psychic abilities are way beyond anyone else I know. I had visions me whole life, since before I was 6 years old. I can do telepathy, know the future, see things others can't and solve impossible problems, and I'm invincible, as well as many other things.
But, because of avolition, due to being schizo, I sometimes don't brush me teeth for days. Or wash either. Me missus makes sure I stay clean, or at least, don't rot to filth. "Go and have a bath, you dirty bastard, you're not getting into bed like that! And brush you teeth, you look like you've been sucking on a shit!"
I got hold of a non-fluoride toothpaste, so when I do have the motivation to clean me pegs, I ain't got to pollute me third eye with that evil tool of subjugation imposed on us by insidious forces to oppress our magical potential.