Photo by Stephen Michael Camp
I first heard of Charles Bukowski while taking a night course in Advanced Poetry Writing at New York University in Greenwich Village in New York. His writing was far from my sensibilities then. It's been thirty-four years, and now Bukowski has entered my life again—this time with a powerful and transformative effect.
Five months ago, I was thumbing through an Indian magazine published in English as well as in Hindi, while waiting at a dentist's office. I'd stopped on an article—"Ugly Fashion Trend"—interesting, I had thought, if not at all a way I would dress. In the middle of the writing was this poem by Charles Bukowski:
Beauty is nothing, beauty won't stay, you don't know how lucky you are
to be ugly, because if people like you, you know it's for something else.*
The words reached deeply into me. I'd torn out the lines and clipped the ragged-edged scrap in a refrigerator magnet as a daily reminder. Even before I read these words, I had been making changes in my life to get to know me in a new way. My natural beauty had held until my early seventies. At that time, a change in my life had affected my weight, greatly reducing it and leaving my body thin to skeletal (as one person had said). A wonderful therapist* had guided me through to fuller weight. Then two years later, another physical condition had caused my long, thick hair to keep breaking over an eleven-month period. It was an introspective time when I thought of women who lost all of their hair—a condition I was strongly resisting by my doctor's direction to apply almond oil to my scalp for a month, using no shampoo or conditioner. I continued for two-and-a-half months, wearing my continuingly thinning hair in oily braids, as the hair strands that broke shone in the sunlight as a halo of springy curls. With my hair stylist's guidance, I found a baby shampoo that had a ph rating of 5. While I didn't ever think that I looked ugly, and in fact I began to view my springy curls as "kind of cute," one day when I'd heard by inner message, "Beauty is as beauty does"*—I'd known that I'd found truth in simple, yet explicit words.
My realization is, "A way to live that accepts that everything has a purpose that elevates and expands our understanding brings us closer to truth."
* Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers, 2001), and on www.goodreads.com › quotes › 577200-beauty-is-nothing-beauty-wo... Bukowski was an American author, prolific and influential 20th-century poet, short story writer, and novelist.
* See: https://www.purelyprema.com/welcome/2019/4/17/2018-diving-deep?rq=Diving%20Deep
* Beauty is as beauty does." Gregory Y. Titelman, The Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings (New York: Random House, 1996.) The first record of the original proverb, "Handsome is as handsome does" (of which this is a more recent customization), was found in The Wife of Bath's Tale c 1387, written by Chaucer. In 1766, Oliver Goldsmith used it in the preface to The Vicar of Wakefield, an Irish novel that illustrated that character and behavior are more important than appearance. The proverb's first appeared in the United States was in 1774 in a "Journal of a Lady of Quality." Over two hundred years later, its meaning remains relevant, occurring in different forms, including "Beauty is a beauty does."