☀ What Sparks Poetry: Gregory Pardlo on "Beauty School Wig Head: The Marion Devotions"

It could have been any number
of fever dream visitations—
this was around the time I became a girl
dad. I don’t know what possessed me
to bring the Styrofoam wig head home.
It could have been Teresa Ávila, my
patron saint, her spectral presence,
implicit as any bias, that came to haunt
the beauty school wig head I
liberated from the museum of trash
bags that lined the curb on Fulton Mall.
Museum. As in altar to the muses
rising from objects appraised in
an alien tongue. At the time,
I would have called the wig head’s
face sublime, fair, proportionally
ideal. In a word, Beautiful, in that sense
the majority culture calls conventional.
From the trash heap the wig head
caught my eye when a wailing fire
truck scuffed my optic nerve and flamed
the halo of a migraine. I was waiting
for the late bus home under a dunce
cap of light. Teresa Ávila, of course,
patron saint of headaches come to mock
the habit of mind I was inclined
to project onto the wig head. Namely,
that beauty is the residue we find
when color is stripped away. That
instead of color, I should praise
the thing that color leaves behind.

*

Security gates veiled the storefront.
Dead leaves and papier-mâchéd junk
mail clogged the doorway. That old
school of beauty was defunct, emptied
of its mirrors and lamps. What’s left
was mere edifice with a for-rent
sign that read Bring your imagination.
The vacant storefront reminded me
of the graphic design studio
my mother owned in the late ’70s.
She made her living as a commercial
artist, art she made to sell. She was a sub-
contractor for the Yellow Pages.
The bulk of her business, she made
display ads that were in turn sold
to plumbers, dentists, personal injury
lawyers. She called it piece-work, a term
I misspelled in my ear. A term
which kept her in protracted
labor day and night, contemplating
beauty at her tilted drafting desk.
Each quarter-column ad
was a stained-glass panel,
colors illuminating pages
to transfix consumers and proselytize
the merchants’ creed. Her side
table held T-squares, X-Acto knives,
a cosmos of leads and markers.
Her fingers blackened like
a scribe’s, she brought forth upon
blank pages of ginger,
taxicab, sunflower. The flare
at the center of my memory.
It’s how the world looks
without the filter of my eyes.
Beauty as market share, as
coercive force. Beauty as capital,
its source and its demise.

*

Beauty is, I’m trying to say, not
the muse but the regime. The dreamer
is the subject of the dream.
Reputed to have been,
like my mother, a great beauty,
St. Teresa Ávila inspired in countless
men a frenzy to reproduce
her, the muse and mother of so many
inventions, so many versions of her
it hardly matters what she looked like,
only that the idea of her remains fruitful,
beauty as ticket to the carnival of witness
where one finds funhouse mirrors
in every stranger’s eyes. Now that I
think of it, I never heard my father
call my mother beautiful,
though I have no doubt he found
the idea of her fruitful.

*

“You press the button,” Kodak
claimed, “we’ll do the rest.”
The company’s twentieth-
century dominion over film
processing and production meant
the childhoods of Boomers and Gen
X’ers the world over were
haunted by a woman named Shirley.
I found her photo in the darkroom
of my mother’s studio and learned
without being told how Shirley’s
spectral presence, implicit as any
bias, haunted birthdays, road trips,
barbecues and weddings,
by haunting the photos that would
define how these moments lived
in our memories. For years,
the “Shirley card”—named for
the first woman it featured—
governed the development of every
Kodacolor print. Technicians used
Shirley like a tuning fork
to “correct” colors in the photo-
finishing process, an innocent
stand-in for the skin
tones that would be offered
to the eye. Shirley, over the years,
was many women with one
thing in common. I learned
from her without being told, to see
in the key of her conventional beauty.

*

I’m afraid I looted this wig
head to work out my own
theories and memes, to work
out this dysmorphia the wig head
excites, and which beauty schools
still teach, that though I may be
comely, perhaps, by their rubrics
I could never be—nor find the history
that made me—beautiful unless I first
unlearn the beauty that is an
assimilation, subordination to a
lifeless ideal. For the beauty
of convention is lifeless even
to those who believe it
is attainable. If I could be
the forensic dreamer and breathe
her alive, this Styrofoam prop,
and give her the hue and tint
of life like Greek statues rescued
from the whitewash of time,
however ecstatic, my art
would nonetheless be
a mortician’s paints. Some say
the pallor lubricates allure. Beauty
as fugitive, indescribable. Beauty
as a closed door.

*

There’s a meme that pits
a closeup of Bernini’s
Teresa against a tabloid
photo of Lindsay Lohan
blissed-out in her passenger
seat after kicking it
at da club. Her hoody,
the posture of repose,
the inglorious source of her
slack jaw, all erode
the innocence I was taught
that kind of beauty must
convey. The symmetry
between Bernini’s Teresa
and Blissed-Lindsay
is uncanny, as if it occurs
by accident and not by
templated design—the same
woman multiplied, producing
a public of one mind. Lohan’s
repute as a troubled
starlet and the schadenfreude
that is her fortune cast both
as mute martyrs to beauty,
both arrested in an attempt
to take flight. Lohan bleached
to the bone in the blitz
of the paparazzi’s light. Teresa
in the tradition of women whom
men have imagined passive or
whom men have turned to stone.

*

Who wouldn’t want to be
a white woman in ecstasy?
Is ecstasy representable in any
other form? I’ll have what she’s having,
the lady at the neighboring table
in the diner says in that famous
film by Nora Ephron.
In a quiet moment of reflection
once, my father mused, “How do
ugly people make love?”
What I took from that, more than
the distastefulness of the comment,
was a glimpse of my father’s
empowered self-image. I don’t think
I’ve ever called myself beautiful
except in defiance.

*

When Jane Fonda plays Saint
Teresa as Barbarella,
her confessor, male, early
fifties, tucks her in beneath
the rubber sheet of his
excessive pleasure machine,
intending to torture her
heteronormatively, flood her
nervous system with dopamine
until she’s mad, but she
absorbs it. Her tolerance for
ecstasy exceeds his capacity
to deliver it. What will she do
now that man is insufficient
to the task? Eventually,
my mother left my father,
a move incomprehensible
to me because it made her
happiness independent
of our observation.

*

As birthday gifts go, my father
unwrapping a studio photograph
of her nude displayed
a logic that escaped me then and
escapes me now. It was the ’70s,
is all I can say. Meeting sight-
lines from the open door of
my parents’ boudoir,
the gallery-sized picture
facing my dad’s side of the bed—
the driver’s side if it were a car—
announced his Duchess
to a generation of houseguests
perusing the living
museum of our three-bedroom
ranch home. In the photo,
my mom faces forward
with her left shoulder canted
gently toward the camera. (It’s not
the same posture exactly, but
Prince’s self-titled album
cover evokes tangled associations
and gives me conflicting shivers.)
Her right hand’s armadilloed
in a silver gauntlet. A sword
gripped, tip-down in a posture
of surrender so that the cross guard
underscores her collarbone, a Jesus
piece that could make her an actual
martyr. The blade, surgical, is a flash
of light from a cracked door. Whether
it is being drawn or sheathed,
it hums with inertia like a train rail.
But what I noticed as a kid was
the way her chin curtseyed to meet
her left shoulder as if refusing
someone’s touch or, given her
lowered lids, transforming
surrender into ecstasy—a word
I could have only used in irony
like the scraps of costume armor,
the courtly incongruity of it, given
to her in a pretense of protection
from what.

*

This was not my mother,
unless the staging was her idea, an
allusion to Caravaggio’s Saint
Catherine of Alexandria, the martyr
kneeling beside the wheel
that failed to break her,
holding the sword
that would take off with
her head. Or could it be a more
subtle reference to Judith
Slaying Holofernes by
Gentileschi, the artist who,
instead of relenting,
instead of giving up
her insistence that her
testimony was true,
endured thumbscrews that
were meant to break her
resolve, break her refusal to recant,
her refusal to exonerate her
rapist in court, as instead, she
chanted through the pain,
È vero, è vero, è vero?
(It’s true, it’s true, it’s true.)
My mother could have been jamming
this beauty signal by ironizing
the violence of an art history
in which, as an artist, at any rate,
she could not exist.
What if, thinking of Gentileschi,
I imagined my mom drawing
her sword from the stone
of vengeance? Would the mash-up
make for a gothic soul aesthetic,
rip a rabbit hole in the Western
rules of seeing wide enough
to hold a wonderland of color?
My mother became an artist,
I believe, because she wanted
to wield beauty as a transitive verb.
Gifted, she became her gift because
my father Midas found her
becoming. He called her redbone.
High yellow. The color of parchment,
the legal pad I scratch on like
a gilt manuscript. The nicotine
on his fingertips staining
everything he and I hold dear.

*

I learned without being told
to love the fictions women
portrayed in the movies
my father loved. Tamara
Dobson as Cleopatra
Jones, who gives a boy
like me a dollar
to protect her muscle
car purring at the corner.
Vonetta McGee hauling bags
of cash, on the lam.
Yet, neither Vonetta,
Tamara, Teresa,
Lindsay nor even
the idea of the real
Egyptian queen Jones
bears in her fictional
name bears evidence
of flex or perspiration
the way Bernini’s Teresa
is veiled in a humorless
mystique, a fake-ID face
ageless as the obsidian
that cracketh not. I want to
imagine the wig head alive,
like an African mask. I want
to imagine my mother’s inner life,
not because she’s a woman,
but because the fiction
of her I have inherited
cannot imagine me. Gender
as occlusion. My mother is a mirror
in which I cannot appear.

*

My mother’s
beauty replaced her
face. I almost said
“my” face—mercy—
as if I could know
life through her eyes.
It troubles
me that I’ll never know
what she was
like before she made me
me. A stranger like the bus
driver I only knew through
the mail slot of her rearview
mirror, whose alto guided
my routine home.
Why did I keep it,
the wig head I held in my lap
like an infant? Not
as maidenhead or patron
saint. More than
gorgon or ornament
or effigy, but to summon
my love for what, I suppose,
by beauty I must mean
all that is woman in me.