« Beef in Guinness | Home | Greetings from Iowa »
November 9, 2005
Acting Tall
Someone recently expressed surprise when told how tall I am. “Really? Five foot six? That’s all? You seem taller. Must be the way you carry yourself.”
This is something I have heard many times in my life. The fact of the matter is, I just act tall. I always have. It’s not just a question of standing up straight, although I try to maintain good posture; nor does it have much to do with trying to appear tall: yeah, I own plenty of high heels (although I wear them less and less the older I get, because I’m less and less willing to be uncomfortable), but the point of heels is to look girly and dressed-up, and being taller is just a side effect. No, acting tall is often a natural consequence of feeling like you can occupy as much space as you need. I need a lot of space, and I take it.
The flipside of taking up so much space is that I try to give everyone else as much space as they need, too. And I am a terrible judge of other people’s height. I can usually tell whether someone is shorter or taller than I am, but as far as guessing exactly how tall someone is, I tend to assume most people are about the same height I am, give or take a couple of inches. One of the administrative assistants in our office asked me to help her make a skirt; in trying to figure out how much fabric she’d need, I asked her height and was shocked to learn she was only 4'10". Of course I knew she was shorter than I am, but I figured she was, say, 5'3" or 5'4". Another friend recently mentioned the he was 6'1"; I would have guessed he was 5'9". After I’m told this, I can stand back, survey the person, and notice that there is indeed a large discrepancy in our heights--but it always feels like an optical illusion, like I should distrust this visual evidence, that it’s really another one of those puzzles where two lines exactly the same length are somehow distorted so that one merely appears longer than the other.
The thing is, when you talk to people, you make eye contact, and unless I strain my neck maintaining that contact, I figure the person is about at the same level I’m at. You could say that this means I’m oblivious to details and don’t scrutinize others carefully, or you could say I have a strong egalitarian impulse. I’m going to go with the latter interpretation, because that’s what a person who acts tall would say.
Posted by holly at November 9, 2005 12:16 AM
Tallness is probably too easily assimilated into authority, sort of like in the notion of “lording over” someone or “sitting tall in the saddle.” I think you’re wise to distrust the visual evidence and keeping the world at your height is wonderfully subversive.
I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the britcom where I saw this: it had to do with some priests in Ireland, one who is pretty dim. The dim one and another priest are riding on a train through the countryside and the brighter one, holding a toy cow, patiently explains to the dim one that “these are small, those are far away.”
On a more theoretical plane, the practice of perspective corresponds to a need to catalogue, order, and dominate space. The techniques for representing perspective – the techniques that are used playfully in those optical illusion puzzles – developed out of techniques developed for navigating ships (the more expensive and high-risk merchant shipping became, the more important it was to know where ships were in space). Very creative people also figured out that these same techniques could be used to represent space – famously useful for architects in Italy; also useful for surveying land, making it divisible into plots that could be sold (it used not to be usual for land to be a commodity); and also useful for controlling the interpretation of a representation, as perspective situates the observer with regard to the image just as much as it situates the objects represented.
I don’t think that the correspondence between perspective and the need to control makes perspective any less amazing or beautiful. Edward Hopper is one of my favourite painters. He uses perspective to put the observer a little bit beyond the control asserted by the laws of perspective (does this sound like what you do, with the egalitarian impulse to see people at the same level as you?). “Nighthawks” is probably his most famous painting and it does incredible things with perspective. If you look at the construction of the painting from back to front, the dark, near buildings in the background are painted with the normal disappearing lines. But the diner in the foreground slices into the visual plane like a knife, with a completely different set of perspective lines. The effect is to flatten out the visual field while making the way perspective is operating on the observer – rather than the assumed verisimilitude of perspective – the organizing force of the painting. This means that if you try to really look at the painting, you can’t tell where it is putting you. Since we would look at a street in a city while we walk or drive through it, in motion, this does not feel vertiginous as much as it just feels like the way the visual plane flattens out anyway when we walk among tall buildings. (What makes the painting creepy is that there is no door to the diner.)
Spike wrote, 'I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the britcom where I saw this: it had to do with some priests in Ireland, one who is pretty dim. The dim one and another priest are riding on a train through the countryside and the brighter one, holding a toy cow, patiently explains to the dim one that “these are small, those are far away.”'
I'll bet anything it's "Father Ted," which I love, love, love. Father Ted must be explaining things to Dougal.
I have more I could say about "Father Ted," but it must wait until I am back home.