Blind Venus. Beauty’s Power.
Part Three
Christopher Bernard

9. Love's Illusion

Our need to know the truth - and the distrust we learn for our sudden intuitions of truth, which are so much like beauty’s revelations, but as misleading as they are briefly convincing - sometimes leads us to see beauty itself as an illusion, something that floats on the surface of an object but tells us nothing trustworthy about it. We see beauty as a will-o’-wisp, as Siren, Lorelei, witch; as the devil’s sweetest manifestation of untruth and destroyer of the soul - “thou shalt have no graven images before me” lest its beauty steal your soul. Puritans of all generations fear beauty, especially its highest form in the radiant flesh of youth, the splendor of a woman’s body, as much as they cannot help loving it, and with the demented passion of a jealous lover, try to destroy it. The most common complaint between lovers is “You lied to me” - but it is not the lover who lies; their beauty said one thing, and they said another; their beauty said “Yes” and their mouths said “No.” In bafflement and longing, we say, “You’re lying.”
						
	Schööne schein: the beautiful image, beautiful mask, shimmer on the surface of a lake in late summer, slick of oil on the road after rain, symmetrical cobweb quivering against the light in the woodshed, butterfly stretching its wings on a white windowsill, frothy anvil of a thunder cloud slowly piling into an afternoon sky, the darkness beneath it pulsing with flashes from unseen lightning. No sound.

	In all beauty there is sadness. Of two flowers that look exactly alike, but one is living, the other artificial, the living flower we see as more beautiful be-cause we know it will soon wither and die.

10. Art's Gambit

	Art is, by definition, an illusion, even when of itself: it is not what it seems, even when no more than what it seems, yet all the more aspires to be more real than what it seems. It is remarkable that appearance can be, so to speak, sheared off reality, like a sheep's fleece, and yet can bear an allegiance to reality all the stronger in spite of that: to the reality that might appear if it could appear, if sensuous appearance were part of its nature; if the real could be sublimated in appearance.
						
	Art and beauty have uneasy relations: beauty is a touchstone of art, but art does not want to be limited by beauty, by what beauty up to now has been: it wants the freedom to be ugly, unreal, deceptive, even openly evil, to celebrate the demonic, to cow its viewer and baffle its audience. Art wants beauty and its other. In the name of truth? Sometimes. Sometimes just in the name of itself, its autonomy and freedom.
				
	And beauty is suspicious of art: the beautiful work of art, by disconnecting appearance from reality, has disconnected beauty as well from reality, thus from truth. Beauty becomes a theater hiding the filthy back-waters with a Potemkin village of flats, the dingy frump with mascara and ratty velvet, the boozing, arrogant head of the troupe with a cardboard crown. Beauty becomes a movie about its own humiliation and demise, Sunset Boulevard set in Plato's cave, a fantasy of deso-lation, game of terror, feat of revenge, the complacence of pity and the daydream of a killer. Beauty reigns, ter-ribly, in films about the Holocaust, World War II, etc. Our fascination finds nothing so compelling, so seductive of our pity and our dreams of supremacy. It makes us dizzy with wonder and awe - awe at ourselves, at our terrifying power and the lengths we will go to assert it, even when we know that power is the strongest of our illusions, that power, in the strict sense, does not and cannot exist, is a beautiful illusion - schöne schein. Everything perishes - there is no power: there are only the powerless dreaming power.
	And beauty retreats from its triumph and terror, its strangely lovely awfulness, to a dream of sorrow, of a pity that encompasses all things, even the stars and beyond the stars, the vacancy between the stars and the endless roads between them, between galaxies, and the walls of hidden things that annull them. Matter disappears into the dream of matter; in the end all that is left is illusion. And beauty stretches across the world as on a divan and gazes over it with a certain sorrow, a certain irony, a certain joy, then turns her face to the wall and sleeps.
						
	What is love’s truth, what is love’s illusion? There are some who might say, love's truth is the ac-creditation of value - “I love you” means: I see your beauty, your beauty is an attestation of your goodness, goodness is what I cannot help desiring, and therefore I desire you. Or I could say, “Your goodness makes you beautiful, beauty is what I cannot help loving, and there-fore I cannot help loving you.” Love is seen as the per-ception of worth through hiddenness, secrecy, or misun-derstanding. Love's truth is love's perception - where then is love's illusion? In the granting of worth where there is no worth, in finding value when there is none? Love is blind, they say. And yet we all suspect that love sees what no one else can, that love's illusion for one person is, for another, love's deepest truth, that the natural way of being, that for which we are made, is in fact love, and that love is the only dependable revealer of truth; that being in love is in fact our natural state: then, and only then, does life indeed, and not just apparently, “make sense” to us. Love, our natural state - can it be so? A natural madness - a salubrious madness - a healthy frenzy that, for a time, cures us of the disease of daily life: the revelation of time's medicine, the continually varying beauty of the world that makes us fall in love with the world, contained in time's poison, the death that makes us fear it. 

11. Its Dying

	“We scratch on the world's window, gaze expectantly into the world's eyes, await the world’s an-swer, and get nothing. Or abuse. We meet with silence or disdain, or worse, a smile and a promise and then waiting, and then nothing. Then we try again. And wait again. And the eyes turn away, the eyes that used to joy in us now grow shadows at the sight of us, the air grows a degree colder when we enter a room. Where was the love that once loved us, the beauty that once joyed us? The object is here but the time has fled - ‘that was then, this is now’: another favorite lover’s excuse. You no longer make me happy, is the meaning. You are no longer beautiful to me. I no longer love you.
	“The death of love is the death of beauty is the death of love, et cetera, in a nightmare circle we won’t linger on. We have all known its despair and anguish, we have all known the fear of it, the self-contempt it leads to. Let it hide its wounds - let it suffer, then heal, and grow calm.”
						
	The death of beauty is a daily event - the beau-tiful woman eventually wakes to a mirror that no longer radiates gladness and satisfaction back to her. What she meets is a wall, and peering back through the wall, two holes in which are found two eyes, anxious, searching, disillusioned, angry. The face petrifies into a mask, and the eyes glare with hate. The regal self shouts commands at the world, which titters sarcastically in a corner at the fool who has lost her power and is the last to know it. Of course, life does not end quite yet, or doesn't need to: the years of beauty are a hectic squalor, the years without give a chance to know beauty – that of others, the world, the not-self, so vast, now, in its appeal and almost reassuring in its indifference. All eyes no longer on you, your eyes can now look on all, serenely, unself-consciously, invisible and involving, in possession of their sovereign state at last. Farewell, my beauty - welcome, beauty that is mine.

	We slip off the skin of beauty the better to wor-ship it, raise it above the altar like the robe of an angel caught as it was flying off, and sing it choruses of praise. It has the sweetness of being beyond us: it seems easier to love, now it is no longer ours. 

	Easiest of all perhaps - who knows? - when it has never been ours.

12. A Knock Against a Wall

	At times the soul, like the mind, draws a blank. It doesn't rise to the occasion it has always taken in the first attack. What is left in its fingers? A hollow where there ought to be a hand. It blinks quizzically, feeling nothing, hardly thinking. It looks again: nothing.
	A slight ache opens at the back of the mind; not far back, just beyond reaching. That itch of frustration where there used to be merriment: the nagging instaura-tion of boredom.
						
	Listening for the thousandth time to a piece of music you once loved passionately: the excitement fades, you can predict every note, every harmony, every pause before it happens. You have to put it away for at least ten years, “wound it with time as with a blunt instru-ment, until, once again, it bleeds.”
					
	Boredom can stand in the way of beauty like a curtain, or like a sentinel; boredom can surround beauty like a frame. Boredom is a withdrawal of awareness, an attempt to find what isn't there, a failure, even refusal, to see what is: beauty stands waiting for boredom to wake up. (Boredom: I will, when you, Beauty, stop lying to me.)
	Boredom has its own pride: to me, nothing is beautiful. Boredom is a revelation of what the world hides beneath its shimmering promises: vacuous, mind-less, mechanical, without point, a game of chance in a baroque casino. I see through your lips to the back of your skull.
					
	Boredom can be a way of dominating and con-trolling our frustration by embracing it. “I will, I assert, my own unhappiness, it is part of myself, I am nothing without it, I feed on it: it offers me no false hope because it offers me no hope, it is kind to me in its careless brutality, it does not lie to me. It offers me a knot I can-not unravel and a blunt sword to cut it with. It laughs at me, to be sure, but to my face, not behind my back. It humbles me but it does not humiliate me.
	“Whereas beauty . . . ” and imagine the length of the accusation.
							
	And, accused, what can beauty do but bow her head? All true, in every instance, except one: beauty offers the glory of the moment, but what you took for a promise was given. Beauty is born in the moment in which beauty dies. There’s nothing left. There is no future for beauty. If you are lucky, there’s a memory. 
					
	You knock on a door. A voice inside calls out, “Coming!” The door fails to open.
	Repeat of the above.
	Repeat of the above. Repeat.
	Frustration begins to gnaw. You must get in.
	You hit the door.
	No response.
	Hit again.
	Swear under your breath.
	You call out, with false politeness: “Hello? Is anybody there? Can I please come in?”
	Silence.
	You stand before the door with arms akimbo, bite your lower lip; imagine various levels of violence (shouting, kicking the door, hammering it with a large stick, threatening the people inside, etc.).
	You consider other means of entry. Unfor-tunately, there are no other means of entry.
	You swear again.
	You wait, as there is nothing else to do. Even-tually, someone must leave or someone must enter; even-tually the door must open. Mustn't it.

	No, says beauty. What would be really beautiful here would be if the door never opened, never had opened, never would open, and the poor fellow never knew, thought he was the only one, and wrecked his life trying to get through a sealed door. And then one day he had a revelation of the essential nature of the door, which is not to open, and he became a wise man, a saint, set up a hermitage on the door's stoop, smiled gently and looked wise and gave advice and learned serenity from accepting the Eternal Closure of the Door. And then one day, as the old man was resting on his palisse on the Stoop, dozing in a senile torpor, the door suddenly opened, and the old man, astonished, looked through the opening and saw what he had thought he had needed so many years ago, but he didn't know, because he had long forgotten it, and the door, having opened for a time, slowly closed again.
						
	Very Kafka, said beauty. I so love Kafka. He even turns frustration into a thing of beauty, into, paradoxically, fulfillment.
					
	Fulfillment: the first taste of water after a hot afternoon playing tennis. The thirst measured the fulfillment, the hunger the satisfaction. Fulfillment requires a certain amount of frustration: if only the re-verse were true, what a paradise life would be. We would perish from it. Indeed, maybe that’s what we perished of.

	Does in fact fulfillment require a certain amount of frustration? Why else do we continue to butt our heads against that wall if it not for the memory of past fulfillments? One more blow, and it must come down.

	Different people are able to tolerate different levels of frustration. A friend told me once that he never attempted a door a second time that failed to open at the first touch. Another friend said he'd only just begun trying after his fist was bloodied from knocking. Some people thrive on frustration: a life too easy is a life emp-ty. Some need a steady stream of success: they couldn't bear being thwarted a moment, they immediately dam up, swell like a frog and burst. For them, breathing is as much frustration as they can bear.
							
	(Can anyone like being thwarted? Probably only if it’s a feint, a promise of future satisfaction. As in intellectual exploration. Physical adventure. Worldly am-bition. Spiritual progress. Love games.)
					
	(You make me suffer so that I might love you the more, says love to beauty. I know you. Do you, says beauty as she turns her back.)
					
	(Nothing being easier, after all, than to turn your back on love.)

	“The most you can hope for in the game of love is a draw. If you win, you lose.”
						
	The ultimate frustration equalling the ultimate fulfillment: love me as I love you - absolutely and for-ever.

	“And if you lose, you lose.”

	“So. Admit you're beaten.”

	“Never. On any terms. For any reason. And on both counts.”

	. . . The war without surrender between beauty and love . . .

13. Caress of Humility, Scald of Pride
	
	Moral beauty. The beauty of modesty, of humility, of the self withdrawn, withheld. Held in suspense before my self. Teaching it honor of the other, courtesy, respect, the morality of consideration. Teach-ing it, indeed, honor.
						
	The beauty of action: ballet, sports, the hunt. The vivid line created by the motion of a human body. Moral beauty is also a beauty of action, but discovered in the interpretation of an action, not its immediate rep-resentation: hence its abstractness. A courageous deed is beautiful, but not because of its visual delightfulness. The same for the act of humility, of generosity, of mercy, of kindness: it is the motive that gives it radiance.

	Moral beauty is a beauty accessible through language, since it is a beauty of meaning. Indeed, without language, it might not have existed at all.
						
	When I try to think of instances of moral beauty seen in my own life, I think, strangely enough, of pets - dogs and cats, especially dogs, loyal to their masters and mistresses beyond reason, waiting patiently for them to recognize who their saints really are. Of course, the one dog I ever owned ran away from me one day and never came back. So maybe after all, the stories of the loyalty of dogs are, like so many other things, white lies, at best.

	Or the delicate kindnesses, the thoughtfulness, of lovers early in their romance, before the the first dis-appointment and disillusion and anger and storms and pride begin.
					
	Or the deep generosity of animal lovers, who find in animals an easier goal for their loving than people: the animal is no more than it appears, and as it appears, so it is, whereas who knows what a person is, or what a person will do or how what a person appears to be is connected to what in fact he is, she is. We don't know, and our lives are sometimes a painful education in that ignorance that encompasses, and includes, us. Until we learn to love without understanding, almost without beauty, because without either inner or outer light, in the hope that that light, and thus beauty, will one day appear.
						
	A painful exercise one can hardly be expected to carry out for long.

	And so we fall back on something less ambig-uous, such as animals or plants - simple, transparent, responsive to the touch, flourishing beneath our hands - alive without menace.

	Or fall back even further, on books, music, movies, art, etc. - the traces, sometimes of an over-whelming loveliness, of those ambiguous, ambivalent, confusing, contradictory, threatening beings, one of which each of us is. The beauty, the beast, in the mirror.

	“What about pride?” - “What about it? - The preferred term these days seems to be ego, or arrogance, anyway.” - “All right, what about arrogance, what about ego?” - “Not beautiful, not lovable, not nice, not pretty, not cool, not hip, infra dig and non-U. But what fun!”
					
	The beauty of pride - easy to despise it, easier still to misunderstand it. The woman with the stunning face and the cold eyes walking icily across an inter-section. The cocky young executive trying out his suit in the lobby mirror, turning to flatten the onlooker with an empty stare. The eyes that see you yet do not ack-nowledge being seen by you. The lips twisting in small scorn, in scrupulous disgust. The eyes turning away. The apparent invulnerability.
	The matador saluting the crowds as they chant his name in the bullring.
	A bullying lawyer, furious with contemptuous energy, insulting his way across his office.
	A former Supreme Court justice hurling insults at the television cameras, at the viewers, at us. Don't get near me!
	A politician dropping an obvious lie and expecting his listeners to swallow it without comment even if they don't believe it - and they do swallow (in fact he does not expect them to believe it or even to pretend to believe it - just not challenge it, as with an advertisement).
	The beauty of commercials, the immense skill of them. The beauty of the well-wrought lie every word of which is true. The beauty of expert manipulation. There are commercials so good, they make viewers weep, even those of us who curse them through our tears.

	(The beauty of photographs of the nuclear bomb, of the mushroom cloud billowing higher into the sky on its strange column: like no other explosion, it has a unique profile, grand and terrible and, what is worst of all, right in its perfection. The beauty of mass death. Of scenes of battle, bombed-out cities, the dead and dying littering blasted fields: the beauty of the immense pity we feel, the sense of waste. The beauty of the end of the world, as we, or rather as Hollywood imagines it, for us, over and over again. At the end, I leave the theater with a peculiar feeling of clearheadedness, satisfaction, relief. So - that is that.)

	Aristotle distinguished pride (which he considered generally a good thing to have, although it depended on who had it: “a good man should be proud, a bad man should not be”) from arrogance, or pride’s excess. Our own attitude to pride (we called it “ego”) is conflicted: we consider it acceptable only for the op-pressed to be proud and say so (“Gay Pride,” “Black Pride,” etc.) - in other words, when it is cosmetic and poses no threat - but obnoxious elsewhere (“False mod-esty is better than no modesty at all,” to quote a popular political commentator). To “have a big ego” is one of the few things where bigness is not considered a virtue.
						
 	The ugliness of pride: when it allows of no identification with itself. Ego: the “I” that allows no “you.” We are dismissed without a hearing, the door shuts in our face, we are scorned, treated as if non-existent, “disappeared” before our own eyes. It is a brisk, little assassination, not of ourselves, but of our signi-ficance: we are allowed to linger on, in the misery of our beggary and humiliation. The eyes swivel across the room, pass through us without a flicker or at most the memory of a sneer: we are turned into ghosts of the might-have-been. And we feel scalded with rage, without knowing why, so swift has been the execution of our pride; so neat.
    The final part of this essay will appear in the next issue.