The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

A very faustian themed tale in which Dorian bargains his soul away for eternal youth and beauty.  Sadly, the unattainable ideal of perpetual youth and beauty still permeates our culture.  Some anti-wrinkle creams contain Ceramides, derived from cow's brains or pig's brains (yuck), botox a.k.a. botulinum toxin (doubly yuck).  What a sad state of affairs we, human-animals are in when we start slathering animal brains and botulism on ourselves in the name of vanity.  Worse still, plastic surgery.  I cringe when I hear about reality shows in which individuals 'sell their soul' to corporate TV in the name of mindless 'entertainment' and vanity.  Their 'prize' - free plastic surgery.  I love the title of the documentary, Forks Over Knives in which the scientists and medical professionals advocate a healthy plant based diet (forks) and lifestyle to prevent unnecessary surgery (knives) later (e.g. heart problems, diabetes, etc.).  Dorian's youth and beauty is something shallow and superficial.  Much has not changed, alas.  We are still shallow and superficial over our looks.  People scoff at those who keep healthy - which really is the serum to good health and beauty.  We cannnot reverse the effects of aging altough corporations will keep telling us that we can through their products!  I, instead opt to age gracefully (no dying of hair when it turns grey, etc.), live healthily and to accept that aging/decay as part of life.  I am not immune to vanity, of course, I am only human, all too-human!  I do try to be critical of my actions, to close the gap between the principles that I hold on to dearly and the person I want to be.  This means balancing vanity with minimizing consumeristic tendencies, lessening harm to the environment, etc.

Some art idealizes youth and beauty.  I don't see anything wrong with this but of course, art isn't just about the beautiful and the sublime. Art doesn't have to be serious.  Art can be anything and is everything.  There is art that captures the sublime (beautiful scenery paintings) but there is also crossovers in which art can be many things at once: beautiful, sublime and educational.  Sometimes, art is just entertaining.  There is no ideal in art, in my humble opinion.  Art is subjective and one man's art is another man's junk.  Of course, not all art is create equal either - my point is that art is personal to the creator but as Jerry Zaslove mentioned, art can be interpreted in different ways that the creator did not intend and the art sort of takes on a life of its own.  I think this is what we have been doing in the GLS program all along.  We have been interpreting Job, etc. and other texts from a mainly secular viewpoint when it was written in a religious sense.  I confess that I have a hard time ploughing through many of the Christian texts we have been reading but once I interpret their contexts in a secular manner, new doors open up for me.

Influence seems to be portrayed as something negative in this text.  I think influence goes both ways - good and bad.  We cannot escape influence.  We are all relational in the sense that we are all made up from DNA, emotions, etc. of our ancestors.  We like to think that we have original ideas and we take pride in claiming writings, etc. as ours.  They are but they are also heavily borrowed from peoples past and present.  We need to acknowledge this collective consciousness and instead of focusing on the individual.  I have had bad influence and good influence.  Hopefully, we have more agency than Dorian Gray to live our lives out with human-animals, non-human-animals and all of nature in a respectful and ethical manner.  Ethics ≠ beauty!  Ethics is tied very much to the concept of conscience (at least to me) - being able to live with one's own actions (or inactions).