Lucy's Face

Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face was not a story about cancer. It was a story about a girl eventually becoming a woman who wanted love yet wasn’t being fulfilled to her satisfaction. Her disfigured face seemed to her the culprit. However, like many people, Lucy’s loneliness and initial understanding of the world left her with the wrong answer.

Lucy was loved and Lucy was learning to love. The simple love of an animal or toy was her easy love. Her childhood friendships were a second love. Mature adult love became elusive. But Lucy found substitutes. She discovered “being good” love and “bravery” love and “medical” love and “sex” love and finally “knowledge” love. Ultimately Lucy is convincingly lovable and unlovable. It’s easy to believe that her face was an obstacle to romantic love, and perhaps a venue towards gracious love.

But Lucy did have cancer at the age of nine. She lived. She had life-long pain. She went home after surgery and then back to school with a large part of her lower jaw missing. Growing up in hospitals almost as much as at home certainly lends itself to another entire realm of development of self view, and world view. The amount that Lucy scrutinizes her own ideas and then the ways she copes with them is formidable.

The ability Lucy had to express herself was a wonderful gift. Her decision to write a story about her story was bold. It’s Lucy’s perception of luck and relativity and hypocrisy that seals her life’s most extraordinary work. The only justice that I can do is to refer back to her own writing. I am thankful to have read what she extracted from her life experiences and although the creation is hers, somehow I feel that Lucy and I might understand one another just a little. But, even if we wouldn’t, I appreciate my own needs in a new light and will consider others’ differently, as well.

Perfume

What would love inspire me to do? This question keeps circulating in my mind as I consider the actions of Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, and the reactions to him by everyone he meets in the story of a murderer, Perfume. How, when presented with grace and beauty and purity of a rare and pungent variety, does one – do I – respond?

To get there I’ll describe some of how I viewed the scentless Grenouille long before the fierce and troubling climax, pieces of which had been given away when I saw movie previews years ago, arrived. I viewed him with the same suspicion as his wet nurse. I’ve lived in France; I know how it can smell and how each person, although now habitually washed, has an identifiable scent. In the states it’s not nearly so easy to know one’s neighbor’s scent. There is compulsive washing followed by deodorizing and even, at times, perfuming. Mainly people smell like nothing, but it still remains pretty easy to smell their dog.

Now, if everything stank would I know myself distinguished from it? Certainly, I would. I would also know my family members, and a couple other special people whose fragrance has captured my imagination. (I’ve been told it has to do with pheromones.) Although, I will admit that perfume throws me off enormously. I still remember a strange time when I ate my mom’s hand lotion, thinking it should taste as good as it smelled. It didn’t.

Grenouille’s elevated view of his powers was another fascination for me. Of course he should be given extreme approbation for the ability to smell his way around in the dark, to have a perfect memory of each scent he’d ever smelled and the ability to recall it at will, to smell each stage of a daffodil’s demise, to ascertain the color of a child’s hair by her smell, and most of all to combine the essence of each item he admired into perfumes of great persuasion.

But Grenouille’s ignorance of his hate, utter lack of any fine feeling for humanity, and overall incapacity to relate to other humans except in condescension, masked as it may be through his complete understanding of character, was baffling. Over and over I wondered how a human can survive with absolutely no support except the nearly magical abilities of his own nose. And what’s more phenomenal was his rather strange decision that he did not wish to survive any longer.

Leading me to ask myself, how would I respond to the wearer of the perfume of life, or, should that be too strong, the perfume of love. Eros, agape, philia, storge, are honest possibilities, or would I respond to the fullest of good emanating from a person with deep selfishness and destruction, the desire to consume such a one? I would desire to answer love with humility and grace. But there’s that niggling doubt that I might, as I did once with my mom’s lotion, seize it and devour my share.