The Beauty (and Power) in “Ugliness:”A somewhat rambling essay on Ugliness

The Face of my Loathly Lady doll in progress

​We have to go through “Ugly” on the Way to our Creative Vision
In some of the doll making groups I have led, there is often a point at which participants talk of their dolls being “ugly.” This is especially true when they are making needle felted faces. When you put together a needle felted face, there is a stage where you have to turn the face inside out, add the nose and upper lip, attach it to the forehead and stretch it out to create a realistic face. It looks monstrous and ugly. It is an awkward process and it takes time to manipulate the face into something even distantly resembling life-like. It is so easy to get frustrated at this stage. 
But the reality is that our hands, if they are unfamiliar with this process, need to learn the movements and gestures to make in order to effect this transformation of the face. And our minds need to learn to be able to tolerate this messy stage, which is such an import part of the creative process. 
 
In any case, no matter the medium, making faces is arguably the most difficult part of creating a doll, and this may have more to do with psychology than anything else. The face is the first thing we respond to when we see a doll. It looks back at us and when we are the maker, we know unconsciously that this face is reflecting something of ourselves back to us. There is something nakedly truthful in this process. And we often don’t want to be faced with this truth. 

Two needle-felted faces in the ugly stage of mid-creation

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"Schizophrenia" from the Osho Zen Tarot deck

​Why do We have this Gap between our Vision and our Results? (at least at first)
We are, as humans, pre-programmed to, in the creative process, see in our heads how we want something to turn out, and it can be so frustrating as part of the learning curve, to not be able to realize that vision. Ira Glass, of This American Life, puts it this way:
 
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be. It has potential. But your taste -- your taste is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. 
 
“A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting creative work went through years of this…It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap and your work will be as good as your ambitions. It’s gonna take a while. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
 
This isn’t exactly my main point in this article, but it is relevant. In life and in the creative process, we need to accept the whole complex mess of who we are, of what our creative message is. As a member of the human race, we also need to accept all stages of development, including the awkward stage of adolescence, the “ugly duckling” stage, all the way up to old age. And in old age, that means accepting age spots, wrinkles, weird humps, and all the ways that bodies change as we age. As I approach 65 this year, this last has become truer and truer for me. 

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​The Loathly Lady
I have been fascinated lately with the story of the Loathly Lady that comes from the Celtic tradition. I was introduced to this powerful ancient woman from the writings and teachings of Sharon Blackie, “whose work sits at the interface of psychology, mythology and ecology.” In her book, Wise Women: Myths, Stories for Midlife and Beyond,” Blackie introduces us to the neglected stories of elderly “hags,” “crones,” and “wise women,” in their role as teachers, guides and shape-shifters. She was drawn to pull together this collection of tales, as a response to the ways in which elderly women are only depicted in folk and fairy tales as either dangerous, threatening figures or shadowy, weak figures in the background of the story. 

I have written elsewhere about a doll I am currently working on, who is a “loathly lady.” At least for now. I usually don’t know what my dolls are going to be about, what their stories are going to be until I finish them. Sometimes it is months or even years afterwards that I discover their true meaning. Or sometimes the meanings shift. But at least for now, and I have a feeling the meaning is going to stick, this doll is a loathly lady. Blackie has a story about the Loathly Lady in the ”Wise Women” story collection, called “Kissing the Hag.” In this story, all the brothers of a particular royal family go on a journey into the woods and encounter an old hag who is guarding a well. Not only is she ugly but she is truly loathsome to look at. 
 
“Instead of a head of hair, she had a gray, bristly mane like the coarse hair along an old boar’s back. Her teeth were green, crammed unevenly into a mouth that stretched from ear to ear. Her nose was crooked, and her nostrils gaped. Her skin was spotted with pustules, and her legs were twisted and set at unlikely angles. Her knees were knobby, her ankles were thick, her shoulders were huge, her nails were filthy, and the stench of her breath was enough to fell a horse.”
 
Each of the brothers are disgusted by the hag and refuse to kiss her and thus are not allowed to drink from the well that would have quenched their thirst. Until finally the last and youngest brother, Niall, who has a completely different reaction to the hag. 
 
“Niall threw back his head and laughed, then roundly declared, ‘I’ll do more than give you a kiss—I’ll lie with you, if you like!’ and he drew a deep breath, pulled her into his arms and kissed her heartily.” 

​The Reward in “Kissing the Hag”
His reward then is that the hag is immediately transformed into “the most beautiful woman in the world.” And he is allowed not only to drink water from the well but to take some back to his family and more importantly, he and his family are given sovereignty over Ireland. She is the Sovereign of Ireland, freed by his kiss. 
 
In other stories of loathly women, the hag isn’t transformed into a beautiful woman and the Loathly Lady in other stories, sometimes chooses not to transform herself (as in the story of the Loathly Lady and Sir Gawain seen below.) But that wasn’t the point here. Niall was clearly ready to accept her as she was, not expecting in any way for her to transform herself. One way of looking at this story, it seems to me, is that in kissing her, he shines a window on her inner self, revealing the beauty within. 

Loathly Lady, from a retelling of the Loathly Lady story with Sir Gawain, by Selina Hastings, illustrations by Juan Wijngaard.

​The Long Tradition of “Ugliness” Being Transformed
If you look back at fairy tales, there is a long tradition in which ugliness is transformed into something else. Ugliness often signifies evil but it also can signify something hidden beneath the surface. A truth that only the wise or brave, or especially the one who isn’t seduced by the norms of their society is able to see. Or sometimes the one who encounters “ugliness” is unwittingly invited to go beyond the surface and see what lies beneath. I think of stories such as The Frog Prince, where the beautiful maiden is forced to kiss the frog, in return for his kindness to her in retrieving her golden ball that had fallen into the well. In older versions of the story, she is throws the frog against the wall and he is transformed this way into a prince. 
Then there is the story of Medusa, whose ferocious ugliness not only puts people off but kills them. I have written elsewhere about the way the Medusa story was manipulated, even at its inception, to implicate Medusa herself as evil, when in fact she is the true victim of the story. But even without that back story, Medusa remains a powerful figure, forceful and strong, a symbol, embraced more and more as a representation of fierce femininity. 

"Medusa" by Caravaggio

And there is the story of the “Ugly Duckling” who is mistakenly raised in a duck family when in fact he is a swan. This story reflects to me the way in which ugliness is so much related to context. And it also speaks to the awkwardness of adolescence, that almost all of us had to endure. I know I definitely did. To me, this story also reflects the adolescent stage of the creative process that I was alluding to at the beginning of this essay. In the creative process, as in life, we have to go through that initial stage when we don’t fit in, when we, especially when we are meant to grow into something large and expansive and true, take a long time to find our way. ​

​Sometimes it is all about Context
We can see the importance of context in fashions/trends and new ideas in any field. How often is it that a new idea is rejected at first as awkward and ridiculous, because it is too big for the sensibility of the time within which it is born? I especially love Oliver Sacks and his writings about science (and I really miss him-he died in 2015.) His work with “locked in syndrome” inspired the Robin Williams movie, “Awakenings.” Sacks wasn’t afraid to experiment and explore ideas in a creative way that didn’t fit within the dry, clinical approach of the scientific community of the time. 

Alice Drummond playing one of the patients and Robin Williams as the doctor based on Oliver Sacks, in the movie "Awakenings"

​The movie, based on a book he wrote of that name, describes his treatment of patients who were suffering from “encephalitis lethargica” and were in a sort of “locked in” state. Professionally isolated at the time, Sacks experimented with a drug L-Dopa, treating these patients who were mostly written off by the medical community. His results were dramatic and surprising, causing the patients to suddenly “wake up” from their frozen state. The results were not long-lived-most of the patients ended up having side-effects to the drug and were not ultimately cured. And yet, Sacks’ approach heralded a change in the way science and medicine was written about and conveyed to the public, in a way that honored marginalized patients and neglected communities. I have always loved his writings, and have very much appreciated the way he is able to take dry, remote medical stories and phenomena and make them vivid and real through his expressive and empathic approach. And he, who was at one time a sort of ugly duckling in the scientific community is now mostly lauded for the changes he brought about in ways of seeing and understanding the patients he treated. And there is something magical and fairy-tale like in the story of the waking up of these neglected patients, like something out of the story of Sleeping Beauty. 
 
Accepting Ugliness as Part of the Whole Picture
As I was thinking and mulling over what I was going to write in this rambling essay, the phrase “ugly crying” came up. What do we do when we “ugly cry?” We cry with abandon, not caring or perhaps caring but not being able to stop crying because the emotions are so strong. We relinquish the smooth-faced perfection-epitomized in the need for facial surgery or the use of Botox-and instead allow our faces to squeeze out like a sponge, surrendering to the wash of strong emotions. We surrender to a force stronger than our small selves. 
 
This kind of crying transforms our face, making it “ugly” but more importantly allowing the release of deep feelings that overwhelm us. Once we allow ourselves to cry like this, we are left afterwards with a sense of release and freedom. Both in that we have allowed the strong waves of emotion to wash through us and also because in the end, we realize that it doesn’t really matter what we look like when we cry. We give ourselves permission to be “ugly” and in the process, allow ourselves to be whole.