Beneath your beautiful

Fifty years ago Paul McCartney and John Lennon sang about Eleanor Rigby and more recently Emelie Sanday joined Labrynth in a similar subject.

Masks.

This idea is not a new one, the artists of ancient Greece would wear masks while on the stage, as did the performers in most Asian countries years before. We get our word hypocrite from a transliteration of the name given to the Greek performers.

In a media driven age where superficiality and skin deep outward appearances are largely all that matter it is extremely difficult to allow ourselves to be the real us.

“Eleanor Rigby, picks up a mask that she keeps in a jar by the door, what’s it all for?”

“You let all the girls go Makes you feel good, don’t it? Behind your Broadway show I heard a voice say please don’t hurt me”

Our young men and women are all at sea without a moral compass to direct them; they look to celebrities and YouTube to give them guidance on everything. They forget that these are also people painting on a personality to gain a level of acceptance.  We love to build up those in the public gaze and they lap it up until they ultimately crash and burn.

Every biopic of music stars and tragic Hollywood actors with meteoric rise follows an incredibly similar pattern; and the public have a huge hand in it.

Having objectified ourselves over everything higher than brute beasts we seem to be drowning in a morass of our own slime. The first Ghost busters film was a play on this idea; a city which saw the manifestation of itself in ghostly forms running rampant and causing mayhem. If we could only see the problems that we are heaping up for ourselves in coming generations.

It would be easy at this point to regress to a simpler age and go all misty eyed about the fifties or something, but remember that those were the years that prompted the Stepford wives stories.

I think that we would need to go back to a time where life was short and there was no time for pretensions. If you are working by the age of 8 you don’t have the capacity or inclination to pretend to be someone you are not. However,  even in those days the wealthy wore wigs and powdered their faces; it’s just in us as humans to cover up.

From Adam and Eve with their fig leaves to us today, we hide!

Maybe it’s an age thing, but I want to be the genuine me.

The main problem with being me (or you) is that it rubs against other personalities; in and ideal world we wouldn’t all be as sensitive as we are but sadly we annoy each other.

Outside of my window just now is one of my colleagues, he talks to everyone that passes and laughs heartily all day at nothing at all. He has one of those voices that you could hear above a dreamliner on pre-flight full power and makes full use of it. But he is completely without pretense of any kind, he is a basic type of person who doesn’t spend time over thinking like I do. He is happy with his family and job and what you see is what you get;  today he is bugging me because I can’t concentrate above him. But that is totally and completely my fault; he is epitomising what I am writing and proving my point.

We need to make room for each other if we are ever going to get to see the true people that we meet; it does get a little ugly at times but it would be worth it.