Glamour
As a boy of 7 or 8 I had a dream about a schoolmate of mine. She’d been nothing special to me, but in my dream she was on a throne, looking straight at me. The next day, in class, she seemed to carry with her a strange glamour, and for a while, I was entranced.
Glamour: A word, and concept, with deep roots. Derived from Middle English Gramarye, which refers to application of occult knowledge, the practice of magic. “Grammar” shares the same root, the rules of which I’ve often regarded as occult in themselves.
But by the 18th century the Scots were using the term actively, and might accuse a charismatic someone of “casting the glamour;” by 1814 it was a verb – to enchant or bewitch. John Jamieson, in an 1825 supplement to his first-ever Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language associates glamour-gift as an enchantment specifically applied to “female fascination.”
Allure, apparently, was something to be wary of; fascination may very well be something imposed upon you, slipped into your drink. The word has roots in old Icelandic, too, in which the term glám-sýni, illusion, shares a stem with the word “gleam.” |
And since the onset of mass media, the word “glamour” has been used to describe the occult power that celebrity exerts on the public imagination.
It’s no accident that the term was popularized by the Romantic Walter Scott. The Romantics recognize the glamour of objects: they saw it as a link to that spark of the divine, the glimmer of a neo-platonic ideal manifesting itself in landscape or face. Allure, to the Romantic soul, was a signal that in such a spot the veil of reality was thin and translucent.
But those late romantics – the aesthetes, the symbolists – came to recognize the holy glow as one that radiates outward from within the viewer. Glamour is a veil viewers cast on an object for their own fascination. Allure is a testament to one's own creative imagination.
Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge? The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of Art ... For what is Nature? Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life.
Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying"
I wrestle with that late romantic shift. I am susceptible to glamour. An ordinary looking passer-by can fascinate me, if the face has a certain arrangement of features, and I am in the right mood.
A figure can snag my imagination, catch it up.
A landscape can transfix me, if it has a certain colors, geophysical features, and the cast of the sun is just right.
Or a work of art can ensorcell me utterly, and what I know of Botticelli’s intent adds to the luster of his magnificent Primavera for me.
Popular culture is late capitalism's glamour machine, bewitchery commodified.
In my most appreciative moments I see glamour as a fabulous collaboration of self and object, a spell I cast on the world that draws me out of myself and toward it, again and again.
In my days in a glamour-befuddled band, the DandyLions, I wrote and recorded my tribute to the abstract notion of glamour, and you can listen to it here:
The veil that’s draped around you
Hangs stars before your eyes
Lets you see the world in its magnificent disguise
Let her know the golden glow around her
Is made of more than dreams
Let her know that everything is everything it seems
The veil that’s draped around you
Hangs stars before your eyes
Lets you see the world in its magnificent disguise
Let her know the golden glow around her
Is made of more than dreams
Let her know that everything is everything it seems