Like many others in an affluent society, I fight a repeated personal Battle of the Bulge, waging war at the front over which I have only tenuous control. My enemy is a shape, the semisolid geometry of my body that changes like an amoeba. The generals behind the warring parties in this battle are The Ideal and The Real.
Maybe, just maybe, I’m at my base weight and shape, that is, the weight and shape that a semi-active person of a certain beyond-my-prime age should be. Maybe, what I am physically is “less than perfect” because I have an ideal shape floating in the recesses of my neurons, some body shape I have mapped as having “perfect contours.” The battle, as I said, is between the ideal and the real.
Putting the battle of my personal bulge in this collection is, I’ll admit, irrelevant to your own struggles between The Ideal and The Real. But mentioning the war we all wage is relevant. No mental map is a perfect representation of the world outside the mind. Like flat maps of the oblate spheroidal world called Earth, our personal maps are lies of convenience.
You might, if you can’t remember your geography class lessons, ask what I mean by “lies.” Just think of a round world and a flat representation of it. Try as any of us can, none of us can turn the peels of an orange into a perfectly flat representation of the orange—there are always gaps. So, too with flat maps of Earth. On flat maps we fill in the gaps by stretching the oceans and landmasses. Look at a flat map. The North Pole is a point, but on the flat map most people are used to seeing, the North Pole is the entire top of the map. Stretch-and-fill: that’s the process of making many flat maps of round worlds. Even the “ideal” map of Earth’s shape fails the truth test. Globes are spherical, but Earth has a bulge at the Equator much like the bulge I fight to contain daily. Earth’s diameter pole-to-pole is less than its diameter Equator-to-Equator, measurements of diameters that differ by about 27 miles. Our planet is not the perfect sphere that globes portray, but globes are definitely convenient representations and certainly easier to make than something irregular like an oblate spheroid.
So, here I am, looking in the mirror and mapping a bulge that fluctuates, but that never assumes the shape of the ideal. Such personal mapping is a difficult process because of its object’s variations and because of our overprinting ideal shapes on real ones. By extension, shape is not the only battlefield front between the ideal and the real. Most intrapersonal battles are conflicts between what we think we are and what we really are. We desire, we hope for, we expect, we imagine, and we even pray that the ideal manifests itself. The “real” rarely conforms to expectations, imagination, or prayer, so we superimpose the ideal.
Beyond physical shape lie the shapes of our lives, and these, too, are mappable. Do we map the real or the ideal? How much “stretching-and-filling” do we do? How do we distort our memories to justify how we got to where we are today psychologically as well as physically? If we can recognize the “stretch-and-fill” in others, can we recognize it in ourselves?
Maybe, just maybe, I’m at my base weight and shape, that is, the weight and shape that a semi-active person of a certain beyond-my-prime age should be. Maybe, what I am physically is “less than perfect” because I have an ideal shape floating in the recesses of my neurons, some body shape I have mapped as having “perfect contours.” The battle, as I said, is between the ideal and the real.
Putting the battle of my personal bulge in this collection is, I’ll admit, irrelevant to your own struggles between The Ideal and The Real. But mentioning the war we all wage is relevant. No mental map is a perfect representation of the world outside the mind. Like flat maps of the oblate spheroidal world called Earth, our personal maps are lies of convenience.
You might, if you can’t remember your geography class lessons, ask what I mean by “lies.” Just think of a round world and a flat representation of it. Try as any of us can, none of us can turn the peels of an orange into a perfectly flat representation of the orange—there are always gaps. So, too with flat maps of Earth. On flat maps we fill in the gaps by stretching the oceans and landmasses. Look at a flat map. The North Pole is a point, but on the flat map most people are used to seeing, the North Pole is the entire top of the map. Stretch-and-fill: that’s the process of making many flat maps of round worlds. Even the “ideal” map of Earth’s shape fails the truth test. Globes are spherical, but Earth has a bulge at the Equator much like the bulge I fight to contain daily. Earth’s diameter pole-to-pole is less than its diameter Equator-to-Equator, measurements of diameters that differ by about 27 miles. Our planet is not the perfect sphere that globes portray, but globes are definitely convenient representations and certainly easier to make than something irregular like an oblate spheroid.
So, here I am, looking in the mirror and mapping a bulge that fluctuates, but that never assumes the shape of the ideal. Such personal mapping is a difficult process because of its object’s variations and because of our overprinting ideal shapes on real ones. By extension, shape is not the only battlefield front between the ideal and the real. Most intrapersonal battles are conflicts between what we think we are and what we really are. We desire, we hope for, we expect, we imagine, and we even pray that the ideal manifests itself. The “real” rarely conforms to expectations, imagination, or prayer, so we superimpose the ideal.
Beyond physical shape lie the shapes of our lives, and these, too, are mappable. Do we map the real or the ideal? How much “stretching-and-filling” do we do? How do we distort our memories to justify how we got to where we are today psychologically as well as physically? If we can recognize the “stretch-and-fill” in others, can we recognize it in ourselves?
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