How Books Come to Life…
Sharon Brown from over at the Silver Bowl Blog sent me this beautiful video that captures how books transport and deliver us into landscapes that we’d never otherwise visit.
Last night we visited China. Sort of….It was our book club dinner meeting last night and we were discussing [amazon_link id=”0812968069″ target=”_blank” ]Snow Flower & the Secret Fan [/amazon_link]over piles of take-out Chinese food.
We all liked the book, though the general consensus was that it lagged or somehow glossed over the last portion of Snow Flower’s life. But we all agreed that it provided an amazing insight into that time in China and how women’s lives were conducted.
The footbinding was beyond anything I’d ever imagined. Somehow I just thought…well honestly, I don’t know what I thought…but I sure had no idea of what those poor little girls had to go through. And to think how it never ended, that even as old women, if they didn’t continue to bind their feet, they’d be unable to walk at all.
It’s staggering what we will do because of cultural ‘norms’. The discussion got going about the notion of beauty and bodily modifications, and of course, I needed to wander down that trail.
So, I double-dog dare you to search in ‘google images’ using the terms of ‘cultural and historical bodily modications’ . I’d never stumbled across ‘corsetting’ for instance. Honestly, the images make me squirm, but apparently I’m a lightweight in that department. Just in case you don’t want to go looking…I’ll throw a photo up here for you.
Obviously, there are people that find this beautiful. I am not one of them. All I can think of is the pain and continuing discomfort. But everything is about context and this just doesn’t happen to be my view of beauty.
Books take us down paths that we would never otherwise find. I had no idea when I started looking for images of bound feet that I would stumble upon such an array of tattoos and ways to alter the body. Bodily modification has been done throughout human history, across all cultural contexts.
The Mayan used to file their teeth into different shapes and augment them with in-laid semi-precious stones and metals. Making that discovery made me think our current obsession with glaring-white teeth is rather benign.
Then let’s look at our current North American ideal of the Vogue-model-anorexic-look. What does that say about us?
The point is that all of this started with a rather slim book; a book set back in time, in a far-off land about two good friends, and yet everything about it is completely relevant to this very minute. I just love that.
I need to go crack another book.