Tammy Faye Messner: 1942-2007 What Is Beauty?
Jul 22nd, 2007 | 12 responses
This is a picture of Tammy Faye Baker Messner. It looks a little bit like an outsider art portrait done by Francis Bacon or by Egon Schiele, doesn’t it? Two days ago, in this video still, Tammy Faye weighed 65 pounds. She had cancer that went to her lungs. My reason for bringing her image here is not to discuss her life, but this act, her last public act, that she initiated, calling Larry King and asking to be on his show… to literally give an ‘end time’ public view of what those of us who have worked in hospice long before it was ever called hospice, have seen often… but a view that is often shut away from the public… only those who have loved their loved ones to the end and past the end… see how the body even though diminished, can still carry enormous spirit.
We’re taught to look with the culture’s cynical eye at those who are dying; to shut them away from view. Or, the dying person themselves having learned shame from the culture, closes the drapes against their physical changes, wanting to be remembered as they once were in some time before. It is alright, to each their own. Truly, each person’s choice.
And, at the same time, I think we ought no longer be afraid to look on the faces and bodies of those who are rowing toward a somewhere we can’t yet see, for if we look away, we’ll miss the huge showers of sparks their spirits keep throwing off, even in their last days. There are other ways to, not look, but to see those so very close to dying…
…One can look with an artist’s eye at those who are dying and see that they have a beauty all of their own. It is not magazine uni-beauty, that is true. It is a kind that is both daunting and beautiful, like desert mesas with no roads in or out in the dust of sunset are beautiful; like mountain escarpments are beautiful; like a gold mine nearly played out but with one last vein of glowing gold ore left, is beautiful, sometimes like a shattered jewel is beautiful, because every part still catches light, and some shards you thought lost suddenly sparkle from seeming nowhere…
For those of us who are only dying more slowly than those who are dying more quickly, I think it takes guts for us to look differently at those who are literally in their last days, to not follow the pop culture’s line, which is to unworthy the worthy. JP Squared, that is, Pope John Paul II, in his bent over Ichabod condition at the end, while insisting on blessing the crowds from his window, barely able to raise his head or hand, shaking to pieces like a jitney with too big an engine… is said to have admonished those who tried to keep him in his bed: Let them see me dying; let the people see.
What did JPII want us to see? I think, that there is dignity and ferocious love inside a person, no matter what many or few threads of their bodies are still left unbroken. And others who keep going, ‘Too dumb to quit,’ as many people put it when they have been devastated. And it seems quite a proper attitude amongst the clearly dying… to act arch toward anyone who tries to talk them out of their commitment to live on as long and in the most heroic, funny, eccentric ways they can dream up.
I am not suggesting ‘rose colored Death glasses,’ for in the work I do, I’ve seen so many different ways of leave-taking amongst the dying, including egregiously rough roads of dying caused by ignorance, and wrong medicines, or too much, or not enough of something timely, or families in the screeching blaming smack-downs of their lives right at the dying person’s bedside while they’re trying to die. So it’s not that.
It’s just to consider that there’s a greater self than the ego, for it is ego who is most easily charmed by pop culture’s shallow sight. It is the ego that is horrified at the faces and bodies of those close to dying. It is ego that turns away, pastes together its ridicule, squeezes out a bit of black humor. It is the little monkey-ego that speaks of disgust and nausea. In mythos, ego always plays a part like Barney Fife’s: big talker but hides when the chips are down, lovable, but not the strongest element in the psyche by far. There are several stronger and they have not just sight, but vision: Spirit, Soul, Heart, creative fire.
I know it’s a little odd perhaps, to be speaking of Pope John Paul and Tammy Faye together… a highly unusual duo, not to mention throwing in Bacon who characterized beauty as ledges and crevices, and Schiele who purposely recorded all manner of physical beauty outside mainstream acceptance, as well. I add Lucien Freud, painter of extravagant bodies. I add too, Ivan Albright, painter of the spirit of those still rowing in the midst of the ruins… yet there is a little red thread that binds all these sheaves, no matter whatever we might think of all or each of these souls…
… What if they are all artists, Tammy Faye, Pope John Paul, Albright, Schiele, Bacon, Freud: performance art as it is meant to be: in depth, utterly ballsy, arresting, demanding. This brace of artists didn’t just show the dramatically changed body to us in public ways –which was daring enough– but also, for those who have the eyes to see, they showed the rarest thing, despite all else: the naked life force still crackling and fully alive.
the artists:
left top: Lucien Freud: Reflection
right top: Ivan Albright: Man Created God In His Image
left middle: Francis Bacon
right middle: Egon Schiele: Self-portrait
bottom center: Tammy Faye Messner/ CNN, aired July 20, 2007, her death announced July 22, 2007, 2 days after she died on
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12 Responses to “Tammy Faye Messner: 1942-2007 What Is Beauty?”
[...] What did JPII want us to see? (more…) [...]
A very thoghtful and thought provoking essay.
It is telling how we usually hide away those visibly dying from the rest of us, those dying less obviously Perhaps the dying of others is too uncomfortable a reminder that we will be joining their ranks one day.
Ironically, one way to lessen fears about our own deaths would be to make death and the dying a normal part of life – to not hide the dying away and to not turn our eyes from the sight of death.
Come to that, we hide away great chunks of oher parts of life. I still can’t get over the national horror over the exposure of a performer’s brest on TV, as if the disovery of what a breast looks like were an earth shattering, life changing experience.
It is only quite recently that giving birth has stopped beitng a hidden away event and has gained acceptance as a normal part of life.
We still hide away the less than perfect examples of physical beauty as much as we can. Not too many members of sitcom families and friends have oversized noses or problems with exzema. When there is a fat person on board, the role is touted for its ‘specialness’ which is just another way of hiding overweight from normal life.
We run to plastic surgeons to erase our differences and thus narrow the field of what is part of normal appearance jistt like we narrow the field of what is part of normal life by hiding away the dying.
There is another side to frailty, illness and dying, though, because a great deal of private autonomy is lost. The body is poked and probed and violated and attended to in so many ways by others.that the effect can be quite dehumanizing. Some react by a wish to be left alone, so they can try to recover a sense of dignity in whatever privacy they can find.
This aspect makes me marvel at Tammy Faye’s voluntary public exposure even more..
Doc:
If only you had avoided the ‘all of us are artists’ cliche.
Look, Tammy was a con artist who repented. That’s it. I kind of liked her, but she was an older Anna Nicole with a Bible.
Even as much as I despised the closedmindedness and bigotry of JP2, he at least was a writer and poet- not particularly good- at the level of Mao Tse-Tung, both of whose Collected Poems I own.
But to call Tammy an artist is to trivialize and cheapen the efforts and endeavors of real artists, great artists, who devote their lives to audiences yet born, and those who are few and far between, so that they may be a little wiser and possess an iota more joy.
Scam artists are not artists, and let her rest in peace.
But, if you are irresistibly compelled to label her an artist, please, append the word ‘scam’ ahead of it.
cosmo,
I took Dr. E’s meaning differently with regard to artistry: I simply inferred the expression of one’s physical self, the image we present to the world, as an artform. The result of that expression of self may be judged good or bad, but I felt that Dr. E was rightly praising the willingness of individuals to engage in the expression of a self image which doesn’t meet the modern standard of conventional beauty. That act itself is completely separate from the way you’d judge the other acts and life of the person, much the way you might admire a performance of an actor or the work of a writer or painter without endorsing his/her personal life choices.
I know she was using the word din a diff context, but it’s still a distortion of the very concept of art.
Her makeup and persona were expressions of ego, not artistry, and if she liked that, so be it. I just tire of hearing every old person being called an artist when even so few of those who even practice the arts are worthy of that title.
[...] reading: What is Beauty, by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, writing at The Moderate [...]
In Cosmo’s quest to defend excellence in art and literature, a lot of potential sources for joy and enrichment in life can be missed or even destroyed, IMO.
A child’s efforts with crayons may not be worthy of exhibition in a museum, but the product represents the child’s interaction with the concepts of form and color. The child’s esthetic sense has grown in the process. Likewise, as the doting parent gazes at even the most elementary stick figures, he can grow in his understanding of how the child experiences the world. Everyone benefits; no one loses.
Nature creates art forms without benefit of judge or jury. We can either appreciate rock formations for the interesting shapes they are, or shut our eyes because there is something not quite right about the third rock from the left.
Between the lushness of excellence and the barrenness of nothing, there is a lot of potential for growth of the human spirit.
To dismiss potential is to throw opportunity in the garbage.
Good points, Doma, but utterly irrelevant to the post or my riposte.
And I have said nothing that’s in disagreement with your claim, if you read what I wrote, not what you think.
Regardless of what anyone might think of her, Tammy Faye was no doubt a woman of courage. Very few people would have the courage to show the world their dying face–very few. While she still hid behind her makeup, one can clearly see who is gazing back from underneath it. She was a woman of heart, regardless of her conditioning and oppression. No small feat.
True art is life istself–how we live it, how it lives through us, and what we give back.
As a midwife to the dying, I encourage readers to read my book, Midwifing Death, to learn more about how the dying process, when met with truth and wisdom, can be free of fear and full of love.
Leslene della-Madre
http://www.midwifingdeath.com
Well, I can remember the scandal, and thinking at the time, what a shame, that these folks, who so many trusted, turned out to be shady. I was infuriated by Jim Bakker because like so many of these characters he was a hypocrite. Someone’s personal life is their business, but the PROBLEM is, when you have a pulpit, and thunder to your flock the evils of adultery, and then commit it yourself, well, that’s how you lose creditbility. As far as Tammy Faye, I just pity her. I’m sorry that she passed, and in such an awful, painful way, but I’m most saddned by the picture you ran; look at her there, obviously so close to death, but she still has to wear all that damn mascara. Didn’t anyone EVER have the heart to take her aside and say “that’s too much mascara?” Very sad.
This woman …wether you liked her or not…hit rock bottom and came out on top. She judged NO ONE, and was able to laugh at herself. Which is why gays loved her. I believe she was a person who cared about others and walked the walk so to speak. She admitted that her make up was a gimmick…much the same as Dolly Parton and others. But the message behind it all was genuine.
I think she was on Larry king for one last time to show us all that while her body was disfigured…her heart and concern for others was not.
What Is Beauty?
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés remembers the late Tammy Faye Messner. (The Moderate Voice)…