Bathroom Scrawl

I was perplexed by a dialogue a saw yesterday in the ladies washroom. One woman had written, 'You are beautiful' and another had replied, 'So are you.'

Assuming that the notes had been written at different times, it was tempting to think that the two women had commented on one another's good looks without having seen each other! Had they known each other from elsewhere and used the stall to convey their message? When the first woman wrote, 'You are beautiful,' did she already have the second in mind, and did the second sense that this compliment was especially directed towards her?

All of this seemed unlikely and so I set about finding another explanation of the dialogue. And in order to do this, I turned to the idea of 'inner beauty,' a beauty of the soul. Still, if the women had not met, how had they been able to evaluate the beauty of one another's souls?

I decided to work my way backwards from the second woman's remark. She must have reasoned thusly: it is a beautiful soul who is able to see the beauty in others, and thus the woman who wrote this remark about the beauty of others must herself be beautiful. The second woman had something to go on: that her stall scrawl interlocutor was one able to see the beauty in others.

But this left me perplexed about the note of the first woman that simply read, 'You are beautiful.' For even if she meant something about inner beauty, how did she know this was true? How did she know it would apply to the person who found herself crouching and squinting in front of it? What's more, this worry threatened to undo my explanation of the second woman's remark, since if the first woman had merely attributed beauty to others (perhaps falsely) rather than seeing it there, then she was no more than a flatterer and the second woman's admiration of her inner beauty was again unfounded.

Then I seized on the idea that the claim of the first woman was not a claim known through experience at all, but known a priori through her concept 'woman'. To be a woman *is* to be beautiful. The first woman saw beauty in each woman who came into the stall not as a matter of experience and observation, but as a matter of seeing actuality under the guise of ideality.

Feeling that I had understood the exchange, I left the ladies room quite satisfied with myself, feeling beautiful and determined to see the beauty in others.

Lo Now

Hey listen:
I've been listening,
as you've been shuffling,
shushing and hushing,
to that sweet sound
you've been whistling
and the rhythm of
corduroy between your thighs.

Hey mister,
you've been missing
while I've been missing
what you're dishing:
something like heroine,
something like booze,
like a mother's laugh
or a witch's giggle.

Lo now.
Low now.
Lo, low low
now:
hold me
like you held me,
like you never felled me,
like you never loved me
in the name of timber,
in the nick of time.

We've got the game for you

Are you frustrated with those games that seem simple at first but that leave you, at death, still feeling that mastery has eluded you? At our house we've got the game for you! More than a minute to learn; less than a lifetime to master.