Blind Venus. Beauty’s Power.

(Part Two)

Christopher Bernard

5. Love Against Love

The experience of hatred is altogether secondary to the experience of love: it is the experience of a withdrawal of love, just as cold is experienced as a withdrawal of warmth. And is just as bewildering. How could it happen? We feel hatred from others before we feel hatred for them - the glare that frightens us comes from apparently nowhere and seems to have no cause, except for one fact: it is preeminently human.
	Sometimes we are able to make a connection between an action of ours and the hatred of another: we have done wrong, harmed someone, broken a rule. Soon, according to some, we anticipate the anger that might, as a result, come our way, plus the pain of the angry blow, and indulge in a little of the civilizing self-hatred (essential for seeing oneself in proportion to the world) called “feelings of guilt.” 
	But it goes too far to equate anger and hatred: hatred is, after all, a far more fearsome thing, involving deeper and longer lasting layers of feeling. Anger is a kind of geyser of emotion that goes off irregularly. Hatred, on the other hand, is the slow and relentless feeding of a volcano: 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 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 carnivals of the offensive, often pursued for its own sake in an indulgence of what Mencken once called a “libido for the ugly”?)
	Ugliness is gaudy, vital, teeming with invention - grotesque and greedy for the sunlight. It is rife with energy and imagination; unlike hatred, which is concentrated and essentially cold, ugliness is a kind of explosion of vitality - in effect, the release, because the expression, of hate.
	The ugly thing, or moment, expresses an anterior hatred, a desire to offend, even destroy, the spectator. And for a time, it fills the field of vision and incriminates the world.
	We speak of the beauty of nature but rarely of its ugliness - the bleached bank of grass in drought, the decaying body of a fox at the edge of the meadow, a stinking gully on a beach in midsummer, dead miles of woods in winter, bleak escarpments of hillside rock. Calling such things “ugly” seems a blasphemy - so we either ignore them or, if they are large enough (the dead hill ranges of Nevada, northern Mexican deserts, blinding miles of salt flats, wastes of the moon), we call them “awe-inspiring,” or examples of the “sublime” - they invoke unease, a sense of vulnerability, even of fear, yet we can also identify in them certain of our own urges toward domination and waste, toward the assertion of ourselves against the world, against other selves; our own “ugliness” and the hatred it implies: a hatred that sovereignly negates the other, not in the complex unities of love, but in something far simpler, such as murder.
	We are loath to give the experience of hatred and ugliness a value equal to that of beauty and love: we resist the thought that they provide equal insight into the nature of the world. We fight the vision of horror they offer - a vision that culminates in that which horrifies us the most: ourselves at our worst. And we take on what we call evil; take it on ourselves so that the world can be free of its despair.
	Of course, that despair, lying like a chasm in our hearts, is a reflection of the indifferent cosmos, cold with a beauty that kills life even as it fosters it. It is the other face of beauty, its reflection in the mirror of love – brutal and hard and destroying. Kali was, as we know, a goddess.
	And in such ways, beauty and ugliness, hatred and love meet, mix, mingle; become one.
	
6. The Ice in the Mouth of Venus

	She rises naked from the waves. A retainer huddles a wrapping toward her to warm and hide her. Two spirits ride the air nearby, wrapped in each other's limbs, a certain awed joy on their faces. She herself stands pensive, unself-conscious, gazing at, yet through, the viewer, rapt in daydream. The revelation seems complete, or as complete as it can be (what is she thinking? she does not, cannot speak). The veil has fallen, the vision appears; the ghost of that ancient presence has raised its eyes to meet our own.
	Thus beauty speaks to us: there is no veil between us and its startling joy, and yet there is a sense of hiddenness in even the clearest, most sharply defined beauty, a sense that there is more to find here, an infinite progression behind each shape, like a door opening into a palace of labyrinths.
	Thus beauty, insofar as it is beauty. Yet there has grown up a counter-myth of beauty: beauty as deception, lure and snare, will-o'-wisp leading into the marshes of corruption, as misery, as curse; beauty as the worldly destroyer of the soul. Against the Hellenic worship of beauty as the visible embodiment of goodness and truth, the Hebraic fear of the graven image (was not the Golden Calf beautiful?). The destruction of the icons in Byzantium in the eighth century and of Catholic images by Protestants in the violent sixteenth - to say nothing of the long suspicion of the effects of certain forms of poetry on the audience, going back to Plato and resecured in each generation by puritanical sects of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, in love with a certain moral and spiritual beauty but fearful of, even hating, the beauty of the body - were examples of an underlying tension in our own relation to beauty: is it revelation or distraction, angelic annunciation or Pascalian divertissement, saintly testament or demonic assertion, path or trap? And if beauty can be used by both good and evil, truth and deception, what are the ways to distinguish them? How dare we try to read these signs that have the power to destroy their interpreter?

7. Beauty's Honesty

	After a time of confusion and darkness, when we feel deprived of truth from those from whom we most expect it, there sometimes comes a moment of relief, cleansing and sometimes burning, when someone tells us a truth both hard and brutal - some fact we are forced to acknowledge that does not flatter or please us - and we feel grateful despite the pain it brings, the offense to our egos and insult to our self-love; relieved to “know, at last.”
	The profoundest experiences of beauty have a similar power of revelation, although the accompanying feeling is joy. The world is, for once, giving us a direct and unambiguous answer. We are being given something hard and true in the very gentleness and delicacy of a moment’s flight; are being told something, if we’ll listen. And it is, strangely, a home truth of joy.
	So how can such openness into the hollows and caverns of light lead us into such darkness that torture itself might seem a relief?
	Beauty steals us from ourselves, for a moment - then, without a thought or a care, drops us back into ourselves, and we wake up in a small boat in a storm at sea. This is its most serious danger, and what makes its gifts perilous. It attacks the ego with splendor; many an ego can’t bear it and drowns. It is an anticipation of looking into the face of the god, a presentiment of Semele’s joy and death. It breaks through our boundaries and threatens us with destruction; its call seems a demand, a demand on us to be as perfect, as radiant, as whole as it is; to charge our lives with its power. As Henry James wrote of “good fiction,” that “it stimulates our desire for perfection,” so is it true of all beauty: it is an almost silent but insistent demand to meet it on its own terms, rise to its occasion, be as sovereign and complete. And the reaction can sometimes only be an all-encompassing despair, before we learn that beauty is not in the thing (and thus not in, not of ourselves), but only of the moment and disappears with the moment and will not be held back on any terms. 

	Beauty is the self meeting the objects outside it, its world, in a moment of harmony and accord. Some objects speak to a particular person’s harmonies or disharmonies more readily than others, and for longer or briefer periods - but none do for long, and none can forever. Not even a person. Not even I. Not even you. Otherwise we would never have known that gray futility called boredom.
	Boredom, the frame of beauty. Boredom, that frustrated search for stimulation; hence the ache that attends it. Apathy, on the other hand, is simple lack of interest, indifferent to cause or consequence, the armor of the nerves. It has a bad reputation, undeservedly, since it is surely higher than the experience of pain (the motto “No pain, no gain” being based on a misunderstanding) and is often the prelude to serenity, which is, as a constant mood, the highest happiness we will know.
	“Ever,” whispers beauty’s honesty.

 	What is the extent of the illusion of beauty - is beauty's illusion in a sense beauty's truth? Must it be that what appears always has to be belied by what is - or is that too merely an appearance to be torn from the next “is,” and so on, until the end of time?
						
	Yet beauty is a perception - an act of thought and judgment - and not merely a sensation. To call something beautiful is to judge it, to call it good and true: we can trust its report to us and its effect on us. Beauty is indeed the visible embodiment and expression of goodness and truth; if not, we no longer feel quite right about calling it “beauty”; at best “pretty,” as in “pretty fake.”

8. Beauty's Truth / Truth's Beauty

	 “‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’ - that is all
	Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

 	Oh? Hasn't every high school student smirked at least once at these lines from Keats’s great ode? The one thing we did know, after all - or thought we knew, we wise high school students - was that the truth was not a thing of beauty: not that smell of rotten eggs coming from chemistry lab or the exquisite torture involved in finding a solution to a quadratic equation. We might even go as far as to say that something was true only if not beautiful, if it offended eye and psyche and mind, if it cut deep enough to hurt. That only pain was redemptive, the price of success, and that of course only the successful deserved to be redeemed; that the search for beauty for its own sake was a morally objectionable attempt to escape (and the inhabitants of this earthly prison must not be allowed to imagine that they can escape - they must not only accept the prison of existence, they must embrace it, with enthusiasm), and that beauty itself, in all its glory, was morally unworthy, a distraction from “the program” that one is obligated to “get with,” a guilty pleasure, existentially suspect.
	Beauty does indeed distract us from our concentration on the abstract imperatives of moral action: it is a power in itself, a sovereign god, and like all gods, somewhat contemptuous of the oblations owed to others. And the god of moral order has a right to be suspicious: its mistake, as with all the sanctimonious, is to feel that rightness, indeed truth itself, is all, and solely, on its side. There is a rightness outside, and countermanding, moral rightness, even as there are moral acts of such beauty as to overwhelm us and to make us, indeed, fall in love with the good.
	And what of truth's own terrible and mighty beauty - must we deprive even truth even at its worst of all its one-time loveliness? Are mathematicians wrong to find “pretty” solutions to complex problems the “truest,” “elegant” answers to thorny questions the most convincing? Was Occam an art critic at heart?
	And what of the awe of beauty before the hardest, the harshest, of truths?
	(We should go gently here, for we are dealing with matters delicate and painful; the wounds beneath our fingers are still raw. It is the truth of the wound we are speaking of, and to find anything beautiful or redemptive in the wound as it bleeds, in the suffering that allows no sleep, might seem malicious, mocking. . . .)
	And yet - is there in fact nothing one can find? Nothing, indeed? truly, nothing?
	A cry of pain startles me awake. You pull over, or get up, or, despite your unease, go back to sleep: you have heard the cry in the night, you have been torn from yourself into a world not your own yet not to be denied. A stern love whispers into your ear: is this not another face of beauty? Is this not a beauty whose truths can fathom absolute darkness like a golden pail down an infinite well, dropping until it creates the water it is seeking?
						
	The quest for truth has always required a suppression of our quest for sensuous delight, an abeyance, at least temporary, of the pleasure principle, and therefore a suppression of our half - the subjective half - of the equation of sensuous beauty. On the other hand, that quest also promises a more abstract pleasure: the pleasure of finding out; and ultimately even the discovery of a more abstract beauty: the beauty to be found in the symmetries of mathematics, for example, the orderliness beneath the confusion of events, the elegance of a simple rule governing the apparent randomness of experience, and a resultant feeling of serenity that can be deeply reassuring. The search for truth may not have been the same thing as the search for beauty, but it is a search for a certain form of satisfaction, and it can result in as startling a revelation: truth can fall on you out of nowhere, just like beauty; it can sweep you up, cause sleepless nights, give direction to your life; the search for truth can conquer your mind and soul and heart with a passion as hot as any worldly love's.
	The difference, of course, is that beauty is given immediately: it exists in the feeling that it exists, whereas truth has to be demonstrated, needs proving. Truth has to be taken out of the moment of insight and made repeatable - “here, let me show you again” - until its polish has been worn off, its aura dissipated, and it can be handled unself-consciously and without wonder - until its “beauty” has faded away.
						
	We sometimes say that a solution to a particularly hard problem is “brilliant” - it glows with a hard, warm light - it is “beautiful.”

	Some feel that our sense of truth lacks awe, which is never entirely lacking in sensations of beauty. That we are too quick to use truth, to reduce it to the status of a tool or a weapon; that we humanize it, subject it facilely to our will. That in this way we are losing half the value of truth, which is joy in its revelation. And that therefore when we laugh at Keats's lines, it is only because we have been quick to impoverish our truths, demean them or make them slaves, deface and violate their beauty. And in a way, we therefore feel guilty about all the truths we know, the truths we have extracted from the world and from ourselves; and when we realize that we use those truths to further only our own aims, we feel doubly guilty. The most beautiful truth in the world might be hard pressed to defend itself against such an attack.
	So we convince ourselves that truth - the facts that we have accumulated, in many cases created (truths of history, of culture, of social and political life), and many of which we have used to create a world that serves us - that truth is, among other things, no beauty at all, and never has been: truth is hard, the world brutal and cold, life bleakly unfair and unjust, and, of love, only the tough survive. For a time.
	And all that, of course, is so. Isn’t it?

The third  part of this essay will appear in the next issue.