Defining Character
A light-hearted overview of what character is and who has it.
The force of character is cumulative. All forgone days of virtue work their way into this.
-Ralf Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (1841)
I have some of the biggest hair you will ever see, which is surprising for a white girl. I dyed it blue one summer. For two months, a veritably blue afro indeed. My ambiguously perceived follicular agenda incurs suspicious looks from other white people. Sometimes in late November 2004 when it was all being decided for me, I uttered the word fiat, and thus my very wealthy parents named their automobile manufacturing company. No- but that is what Mary said when she was asked to carry baby Jesus to term: ‘if that is God’s will, then let it be so.’ I uttered the same and was born with enough hair for the heads of the five thousand. In my more misplaced trains of thought I wonder if it is not the same force of nature that gave Winnie Harlow as much white pigment in the skin that also gave me African volume in the hair. A little swipe of racial attributes freely redistributed among the population for a laugh.
I am in some ways memorable: I know this because people tell me they remember me, however unserious it may sound. When someone is unrelentingly told that they are something, be it ugly, a good actor or a physical landmark, they become it. We all carry the conviction that we are in some innate and impossible way different from other people. Maybe no one has ever been able to define, in any medium, the all-uniting principle of humanity. One day, the world will join hands and say ‘I am not special. I do not want to be special. I love you and I am you.’ I’d say this is a rather long way off, and so, in the meanwhile, we are all left defining character.
Character is never twice recurring in expression between multiple individuals. And it is almost always born from a deficiency. I suppose I am deficient in straight hair.
There is something to be said about the correlation between negatively perceived physical attributes, their negativity in reality synonym of ‘desserving conventional beauty standards’, and the presence of character in a person. Despite me owning such a trait, until I was seventeen and learnt to tame my beastly appendage, I am not in some roundabout way claiming to have reaped the full benefit of character. A certain degree of vibrancy and humour, undoubtedly.
Indeed, when an individual is gifted with a unique attribute of physical nature, it may serve as a vector for achieving great character. Bullying and ostracization catalyse this process. Bearing the feeling of being innately apart from the herd on an individual scale engenders a sort of dissociated mental upbringing, nurtured by a lack of self-love, low self-esteem, and dwindling self-respect. When one comes to terms beneath the new dawning rain of adulthood, one usually releases these inhibitions and is left with a self preserved uniqueness; a reactive strand of character. A little well incubated depreciation is glitter and gold. Most people pin their claim to notoriety on the amulette of self-respect and all the associated virtues there symbolised. Unfortunately, this implied passiveness proves the absence of almost all conviction worth having. Self-respect in moderation is fundamental for credible, virtuous confidence, but at its extreme is nullifying of character. Joan Didion, famous advocate for self-respect, referred to character as:
‘A quality which, although approved in abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues.’
I nod in agreement, the correlation is undeniably present in this direction. Character at the expense of virtues. Virtues at the expense of character. Another, less recent bout of wisdom proclaimed by Ralf Waldo Emerson in his 1841 Self-Reliance (see introductory quote), argues similarly: that character is built up, and is done so at the daily expense of virtue. Virtue can be a hinderance for self-expression, cannot be part of one’s vocabulary if it takes up room destined for one’s true integrity.
In some cases, the seeds of character can be artificially sown, notably by reading books, which goes to explain why, as Bowie so candidly expressed, people nowadays have the depth of a glass of water. The literary miseducation of the common masses took for me the ampleur of a nauseating reality when I discovered that of my three most frequented friends at university, all English, not one knew who Jane Austen was. I have since carried with me a particularly fibrous, snobbish rage concerning this. There is no character to be found in this abysmal deficiency. This, all deficiency and no character, is a common combination.
The immediate takeaway is that vibrancy requires a deficit, yes, but usually one of good moral consciousness, and not education. Rarely are the memorable individuals owning of good moral character. One could probably name a historical figure from each century, with each being increasingly more dubious than the last. This provides evidence that goodness is not a memorable quality. One that is, is humour, though that and goodness also tend to be mutually exclusive in the extremes too. Some may say that the funnier jokes tend to be the ones referencing nationality or race, though not offensively dispensed ones.
One of my favourite character archetypes are those incident of a deficiency in self-preservation. The reckless and untamable wild horses that Kerouac wrote about, that I met for the first time as they hotboxed a club bathroom and then later on caught unplugging the loud speakers. The ones who introduce us to the concept of only living once, living very fast, and for a not-very-long time. The die-youngs who surprise us all by kicking about and later veering unsteadily into the lane of the wise. This is just a weekday preference.
It is to be stated that fame and character are hardly synonymous -celebrity is another, entirely different field of play concerning its own inherited deficits. But it does widen the scope when selecting inspiration for our own tentatives at building persona. Sometimes it is best to admit when a fad is nothing more than a fad, and the post-era, accurately but humiliatingly named phase, was just that. In our pubescent attempts to unearth some unique-but-socially-reputable traits, most come out the other end sorrowfully empty handed and shamelessly wisened. And that is precisely it; we cannot all will ourselves to be Che Guevara, and frankly, that sounds rather tiring. The humble defeat of the charactless individual is for its own reasons enviable. For one, it ensures a certain amount of happiness and stability. These people do not waste their time writhing at their own insignificance unlike many, much more boring people do. The prerequisite commitment to having character means living by the creed of staking your life on the high mountain of your conviction. For many people, the top of a mountain is a lonely place to be, and for that reason elect to remain at sea level.
The acute-eyed observer will admit that though there is no one strict path to follow to excavate the treasure -or the curse- of character, there are possible observations to be made about it all. However hypothetical, some truths are best expressed candidly: not everyone has the capacity for it. Ultimately, defining character is like defining clouds; you run the risk of sounding awfully abstract and much like a contemporary art magazine.
