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growing over time, vastly destructive in its effects. Hatred is not the cancellation of love nor, as one says, its opposite, but rather the turning of love inside out; as focused on its object as love, hatred wishes, instead of glorifying, and reglorifying, to destroy, and destroy again, and still again, its object, and yet not to finish destroying it, for that would deprive it of its satisfaction, indeed of its "love." For where there is hatred, there has been love. The self only knows this when it is swept with hatred's rage - its cold, frustrated fire, never freed in bursts and fire rockets of anger and resentment, to fall back in bright glitterings and traceries of relief, but forced to disease and burrow, canker and encyst. Hatred and love are infatuated with their objects - both revolve around them, both find their justification in them. Both are invasions of the self by the numinous 
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other, either of beauty or its opposite. Yet - what shall we call its opposite, "ugliness"? - "beauty's opposite" does not in itself arouse hatred - merely disgust or pity; we have all known ugliness, all felt ugly at one time or another, and those were the feelings aroused in us: disgust and pity for ourselves. And ugliness, like hatred, like love, fascinates. Ugliness is a power; its repulsion also a force of attraction - it holds the eyes and compels the spirit to assume its shape with a power similar to beauty's; sometimes greater. For the ugly, the forbidding, the offensive, releases the demonic - it is a curiously liberating power, for, whereas Beauty implies "one," even when there are many kinds of beauty, the Ugly implies plurality, though confined in the locus of repulsion. (Is it any surprise that one of the peculiar aspects of democracy is to celebrate liberation through  |
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