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by Geoff Weiss

I remember playing with my great grandmother’s hair combs when I was four years old, surrounded by awkward eyes and clenched, scared, disappointed smiles. I remember my shame at the age of 6 when my mother walked into the dim, dense closet where I’d been trying on her clothes in careless secrecy. Her panty hose were halfway down my scrawny bald legs; her eyes were wet and wide. I remember choreographing and executing figure skating routines during recess in the fifth grade. I remember my father’s disgust at dinner one evening when he saw my short thick hair wrapped chaotically into a tight ponytail on the top of my head. I remember the insatiable desire I had at the age of 7 to play with my friends’ Barbie dolls, the immense pleasure I derived from styling synthetic yellow hair and coordinating ridiculously bright outfits. I remember all of my unusual fixations—make up, gymnastics, eyelashes, braids, jump rope, high heels, dancing, breasts. Most of my childhood memories, as innocent as they should have been, were eclipsed by disapproval. Although I hadn’t chosen how to feel or what to like, I was still obligated to feel shameful about being myself.

Emotions are natural and unintentional, yet my blatant and unsettling weirdness brought extreme discouragement from everyone around me. My feminine tendencies were for the most part rooted in maternal reverence, my mother the embodiment of a soothing womanly ideal. Moments in which I was able to experience the pureness of her womanhood were always tainted (in their ends) by guilt and shame. A humiliated cringe followed any sense of revelation or feminine appreciation, no matter how beautiful or instinctive: I was not supposed to be who I was. The recollection of my feminine inclinations evokes an awkward contradiction between the vast reverence and enlightenment that I derived from my femininity, and the pitiful, mortified mess that these feelings simultaneously produced. Individuality is given to us in intense, passionate, irreconcilable doses. Originality typically takes cover suppressed within, inhibited by cowardice. But sometimes it soars.

My mother’s momentous influence produced mixed contradicting sentiments of freedom and indignity. One night as I entered the kitchen where she was preparing dinner, remorse smacked my soul because I could only see her back. She was washing the dishes again. Her liquid hair shook lightly as her hands scrubbed dutifully. She whipped around towards me with an angelic smile and radiant green eyes to snatch a glance. Why’d she have to do that, I wondered. My general inability to emulate all that I admired about my mom was partially derived from laziness, partially the result of misguided regret. I felt invalidated and abnormal about my intense feelings towards her. I felt guilty about all the sparkling soul that she’d created in her labor; I could never be that wonderful. When she turned to offer me the wishbone, her eyes became tight lines as they always did when she smiled. Superstitious and sentimental, my mom had amassed a small collection of wishbones, which she kept packed in a jar near the sink. I noticed her gentle outstretched hand trembling with tenderness as it always did, and the wishbone quivered with childlike enchantment. Jaded, I attempted to reason with her that cracking chicken bones was inhumane. I finally gave in to her endearing superstition and gripped my portion of the bone. She squeezed her face together in anticipation of the eventual crack. My eyes were fixed on hers with quiet wonder because I could never muster enough faith or delight to squeeze my eyes shut with actual conviction. I must have winced casually when the bone broke towards her, as it should have, because her smile softened when she looked up at me. “I wish that Geoff’s wish comes true,” she announced. The shivering started deep in my belly, surfed up my spine, and swelled in the gulps of my throat. The intensity of my appreciation and excruciating guilt, combined with feelings of general inadequacy in comparison to her made me weep. I was overwhelmed by her wish. I stopped, not to analyze the situation, but to ingest it. I looked intently towards the floor while she walked past me to throw the broken bone in the trash. I hugged her, and I think she might’ve understood. We smiled some more, but then I think I started to think again. For whatever reason, I had come from her, and she’d wished for my wish to come true. I felt as if I’d garnered her acceptance, but this was overshadowed by my guilt, a dirty sense of reverence, because I knew that in some sense I could never precisely replicate my mom’s beauty. Even though I was exalted by her purity, my own self-consciousness and shame prevented me from imitating her nature. We humans experience arbitrary, elated instances of individuality and truth, which are almost always subsequently grounded by the realization that our exposure to such integrity only illuminates our own unnaturalness. Experiencing perfection is at once liberating and confining: femininity represented emotional ecstasy, unreality, and essence to me, yet everything about my world discouraged homosexuality. Illogically, I knew that even though my wishes would probably never come true, my mom’s already had.

William Faulkner believed that the only way to be truly alive was to be original, “to create out of the materials of the human spirit some thing which did not exist before.” Faulkner believed that individuality propagated essence, that there was nothing more destructive than those “who clung blindly to the vices of their ancestors,” those who subscribed to the masses and lost themselves in the ordinariness of being a mostpeople. My girlish individuality was channeled through Britney Spears, an oversexed pop star who was essentially my own nymph-like, alluring, coy, spiritual muse. When I see Britney Spears perform on stage I am at once shocked, roused, horrified, and moved. I am inspired by her power as a result of my own radical feminine inclinations, yet at the same time, I am ashamed of the inspired me that responds to her performances with insight and awe. Britney Spears is always almost naked: purple vines, golden leaves, graceful neon fabric, and spangled diamonds scarcely covering her taught body. She is locked securely in a cage, a tiger roaring behind her as it licks its mouth with a thunderous gulp. She sulks as she suddenly throws the cage open with confidence and alarming force. She is backed by a dark wet jungle inhabited by hovering yellow snakes and exotic natives with scrawled war paint on their chests. She emerges from a metal octopus, crawls down a flight of metal stairs firmly gripping the banister and rips off her tuxedo in one swift movement to reveal a rounded bare torso and thick hips. The outfit is nude except for a bare minimum of sparkles that conceal her integrity. She launches her top hat into the audience with sturdy certainty. She is exposed and aware that every eye in the audience is focused on her stripped body, but she manifests that vulnerability into loud power. Her hair flies freely around her face with each gesture like winged strings. The snake slowly corkscrews its massive flesh around her body. Lions sing crickets scream thunder rumbles birds bark. Thick trees shield the black backdrop of the stage almost completely. Only tiny holes of light twinkle through the foliage, like stars. Eventually the snake settles around her shoulders, and she cuddles with it around her neck, grasping its ends with both hands, palms facing upward in a powerful embrace. She absorbs its slithering authority as if she’s in a trance.

I could be my brazen, untainted, effortless self when I experienced Britney Spears in all of her filthy sinful splendor, yet the moment of existing as myself was always reduced by my own inhibitions. Just as my mom’s love for me burst with her unconditional reception of my strangeness, when I experienced Britney Spears, I experienced acceptance and freedom. But freedom is stained by the fact that the raw individual self is rarely acceptable by outward standards. We humans are gladly willing to sacrifice identity for fear of variance, for insecurity, in order to fulfill a twisted desire for homogeny. When I was young (but not young enough) I used to dislike myself because everyone considered my disposition unacceptable: I remember how hard it used to be for me to disclose my weirdness, how ashamed I was of the belt I wore around my neck in order to simulate the effect of long hair, my weird infatuations with kittens and high heels, my queer obsession with back handsprings. Most people make a valiant effort to hide from their strangeness, but I’m seeing now that we should make an effort to cling to it. The concept of individuality is both caging and liberating: the unconsciousness and liberty found within such a moment is atypical and inappropriate by society’s standards, but the openness and sincerity we find within ourselves supercedes society’s reservations.

Edward Albee’s play, “The Goat or Who is Sylvia?,” perfectly exemplifies the hardships endured by the unconditional individual. The play is centered on a handsome, middle-aged socialite who falls in love with, and fucks a goat. Martin is a married man who resides in New York City. He encounters the she-goat (Sylvia) as he is purchasing vegetables at a farm in the countryside. Martin believes that he has genuinely fallen in love with Sylvia after he sees her gentle, droopy, saddened eyes. Naturally, this is difficult for Martin’s family to accept: his wife, Stevie, is at once baffled and nauseated by the affair. His son, Billy, is initially disgusted by such blatantly selfish perversion, and he pities his mother for the suffering that she must endure. Martin relentlessly tries to make sense of the affair, to prove that his intentions are genuine and true. He honestly feels love for Sylvia, and he sees no wrong in a relationship with her. Stevie is unbreakable in her adherence to societal norms as she is unable to fathom that a human being could possess such twisted feelings. She prefers a reality that is coated by standards. With each attempt that Martin makes to defend his true feelings, to defy convention, to pronounce his individuality, Stevie smashes plates and destroys sculptures and punches holes through paintings—she is utterly disgusted by the rawness of the truth. Towards the end of the play, Billy, a homosexual man himself (and therefore a man who has experienced an unconventional existence) learns to accept his father’s feelings, and he even admires his father’s ability to accept the oddity, if not agony, of his goat-loving existence. As they experience a reconciliation near the end of the play, father and son experience a brief impulsive kiss that is immediately interrupted by a family friend. While the son is shocked, scared, and puzzled by the line that he’d crossed with his father, Martin is bravely eager to accept the kiss as a reasonable expression of the way that they actually felt about one another. In the culminating moments of the play, Stevie, after being absent from the stage for roughly half an hour, reveals Sylvia’s bloody corpse to her husband, a white mass of blood and horns that she’d shaped with her own hands. This act suggests that unconventional and perverted forms of love cannot exist in a world like our own, no matter how self-assured we might be or how true the love itself is. Martin is an individual: he is willing to accept and express his feelings even when they do not coincide with typical ideals about love, sex, and relationships. He is only happy when he experiences his individuality, but this happiness is at the expense of all the people who surround him and care about him. Martin’s motivation for loving Sylvia is pure and sincere, yet his individuality instills pain and awkwardness within the people who know him best, people who supposedly care for him the most, (even though they are unwilling to accept who he really is). If we were to realize that everyone is fundamentally defective and weird if there were not one definite answer to life’s questions, humanity might be afforded infinite wisdom and love; individuality could be the essence of living and not a painful barrier to happiness.

The human mind is both miraculous and detrimental because it is infinitely limited. Although we are the compilation of the seemingly unbounded ideas and beliefs generated in our minds, we can never be completely understood or known. In order to be inclusive of one’s individuality, the mind must exclude any form of universal accord among humanity. Therefore shame, confusion and disagreement come at the expense of individual expression. When I exist as myself, revering Britney Spears or my mom, I experience my own jam-packed fulfillment, but I’m detached from everything that is not a part of my whirling, naked, wishbone world. Although I have experienced sorrow imposed by external sources—my parents, my classmates, the universe—I know that individuality can be blissful when another sympathetic individual confirms it. e.e. cummings’ poem, “it’s” comments on such an interactive, candid, truthful experience—the coexistence of unconditional selves: “it’s/so damn sweet when Anybody—/yes;no/matter who,come/total(preferably/blonde/of course)/or on the other/well/your oldest/pal/for instance(or/;why/even/i/suppose/one/‘s wife)/—does doesn’t unsays says looks smiles/or simply Is/what makes/you feel you/aren’t/6 or 6/teen or sixty/000,000/anybodyelses—/but for once/(imag/-ine)/You.” According to cummings, mutual understanding occurs when a person “does doesn’t unsays says looks smiles/or simply Is” and it is because of such unactions, or lack of intention, we appreciate and accept ourselves and others. Existing as the unconscious, unintentional, unacting individual can create painful repercussions because such practices are rarely understood or respected by the mostpeopleness of our society. Nevertheless, when originality is accepted, caressed, and enabled by other unthinking receptive unjudgers, we can soar.

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