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shiori_makiba) wrote2016-02-01 05:21 am
Poem: Eye of the Beholder
by shiori_makiba
55 lines
Part of the Berettaflies thread of Polychrome Heroics, created by ![[personal profile]](https://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmith. Title comes from a list of her prompts for the January Creative Jam Session. This is a little late for that but . . . you can only do what you can do.
“Eye of the Beholder”
Beauty was a tricky thing.
It was subjective.
What was beautiful to one person
might be irredeemably ugly to another.
It wasn't always that extreme
but the point stood.
Which was why Jean-Claude and his team
did not focus on beauty as a general concept.
They didn't try to have their clients meet
some kind of arbitrary standard of aesthetics.
They focused on what made their client feel good.
That could be quite the challenge.
In more ways than one.
Part of that challenge was purely physical.
Depending on their client's needs,
they might have to invent everything from patterns
to the materials out of whole cloth.
And that was just for clothes.
The same could be said for meeting
some of their clients' other personal beauty needs.
It could and often did take considerable experimentation
to find what worked and what didn't.
This required patience and a willingness to adapt
when things didn't go according to plan.
Fortunately Jean-Claude had good people.
The bigger challenge was not physical.
It was emotional and mental.
Because many (far too many) of their clients
had been made to feel ugly.
That there was something wrong with their bodies
because it wasn't a certain way.
Sometimes for years.
That is not the sort of wound
that heals easily or quickly.
It sometimes took all of his effort and the efforts of others
to get clients to see themselves worthy of having clothes at all,
never mind ones that fit or didn't hurt them.
It made him angry
and it made him sad.
It also made him determined to show them
that anyone who said otherwise were wrong.
That they were entitled to have clothing
that fit them, that didn't hurt them.
That they were entitled to the products
to wash and style as they pleased
that didn't damage their skin, hair, feathers, fur, or scales.
That regardless of what they looked like or wore,
they were beautiful.
And to hell with anyone who thought or said otherwise.
Beauty was in the eye of the beholder.
The most important beholder was yourself.
Jean-Claude would do what he could to help them
see their beauty for themselves.
Because everyone was beautiful.
They just sometimes needed help to see that.
no subject
I didn't recognize Jean-Claude's name, so I felt (only very slightly) at sea till I read and recognized "All Bodies All Beautiful" in the comment.
• invent everything from patterns
to the materials whole cloth.
This doesn't quite hang together grammatically. "Whole cloth" isn't an adverbial idiom like "(go) whole hog". Are you thinking of the idiom "(to make something up) out of whole cloth"? That has several rather different meanings (Wiktionary):
~~~~~ ~~~~
Noun
whole cloth (uncountable)
1. A newly made textile which has not yet been cut. [original literal meaning]
2. (figuratively, used attributively or preceded by various prepositions) The fictitious material from which complete fabrications, lies with no basis in truth, are made.
Mr. Doe's account of the accident was made from whole cloth.
1917, National Geographic, _What Great Britain is Doing_, by Sydney Brooks:
All those tales that came clicking over the wireless of the capture of huge stores of grain and oil were fables out of whole cloth.
3. Something made completely new, with no history, and not based on anything else.
The plans for the widget were drawn from whole cloth.
• 1883, Mark Twain, _Life on the Mississippi_, chapter 27:
And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion.
~~~~~ ~~~~
To use the idiom, your lines would be
invent everything from patterns
to the materials out of whole cloth
or something very similar. The close similarity between the literal and figurative meanings of the expression lend an unusual twist.
Thanks Dr Whom
I think my brain skipped over the "out of" part because I've heard the idiom as just "whole cloth" instead of "out of whole cloth" so many times.
Don't know if that is a regional tic {American, currently live in the South, grew up in the Southwest with Mom from the former and Dad from the latter} or a family speech tic {ex. dad tends to say ideal when he means idea and I still catch myself doing that sometimes}.