Reign of Aphrodite
A renaissance for beauty in apocalypse
Alma Tetto
For JANE, issue seven (2020)
In the contemporary art world, the beautiful has long been dismissed. There is a discomfort with beauty, an implicit judgement of its mere simplicity: superficial, skin-deep, easy, vacant, and vain. In an era that descends further into nihilism, beauty becomes absent. The painter Agnes Martin called beauty the mystery of life. Perhaps as modern science has explained—or rather, explained away—the cosmic mysteries, beauty has dissolved into objective facts, hard and opaque. Yet Martin was a visionary, one to see a fact as sheer. She could see through the ugly, feel the pain and longing in it; she called negative art a protest against the lack of beauty in life. ‘We respond to beauty with emotion,’ she held.
Our notion of emotion evolved out of movement, from Latin emovere and French émouvoir, that which moves and stirs. Emotions are movements of the soul, and nothing so moves the soul as beauty. The art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl likened an encounter with beauty to the power of a conversion experience. It can lift and transport one momentarily to the realm of mystery and wonder. One who has faced a Martin or Rothko painting in the flesh, moved through a field of bright fleshy poppies, or stood witness to the birthing of flesh in labour and delivery may so attest.
In a talk delivered at Centro Pecci, the museum of contemporary art at Prato near Florence, in the winter of 1991, James Hillman, the radical psychologist who pioneered archetypal psychology, addressed the art world with a thesis: the aesthetic has been repressed to cosmic detriment. The conference took place at the time of the Gulf War. Was it, Hillman pressed, ‘precious, fascist, even elitist’ to regard beauty during the apocalyptic ruin of war? Certainly not. The spirit of the time reflected an illness of the soul—that of the repression of beauty.
The repression of beauty extends well beyond the art world, out into nearly every aspect of worldly life. Psychology, psyche logos, the study of the soul, has too, most ironically, denied beauty her place. When speaking of beauty, Hillman was not referring to the lofty rhetoric of Plato—that virtue of mimesis—or of beauty as a moralism, but of aisthesis, sense perception, which relates to the Homeric aisthou, to gasp and breathe in. The subject he regarded, as we do here, is aesthetics that stir the soul to response. Yet, an anesthesia, an act of psychic numbing and soul dulling, characterises the nature of our time.
Consumerism and the constant distractions of our consumerist world contribute to our mass anesthesia. The notion of the modernist wasteland, as prophesied by T.S. Eliot’s epic poem, comes to mind. To swim in the thick mud of inauthenticity and a false sense of meaning and connection is to become worn, exhausted, and, for some, intoxicated. Mindless scrolling, a daily encounter with a continual stream of advertisements often encountered in digital trance, becomes an attempt to ward off the stress of our capitalist culture’s pace, an act of numbing. Many of us are being fed empty calories, often sold under the guise of beauty and sustenance, and yet, in our devouring, we’re in a constant state of hunger and seeking for more. A constant striving for personal growth, both inner and material, is fuelled by the capitalist paradigm of economic rise that refuses a ceiling—it will never be enough. As such, we are always reaching.
We find ourselves caught in a trap of infinite struggle, the cost of which we cannot pay. Our investment becomes shallow, devoid of soul. We reach for cheap fixes, inflated frivolity, for our balance is depleted. Yes, the cost of ugliness is much too high. Hillman asks, ‘What are the economics of ugliness: What are the costs to physical well-being and psychological balance of careless design, of cheap dyes, of inane sounds, structures, and spaces?’ These symptoms of ugliness distract us from true beauty, making habit of neglecting our senses.
The Platonists warned we must not neglect or forget the gods. In our turning away from beauty, we have shunned Aphrodite, the goddess whose radiant presence enlivens everything we find pleasurable. Aphrodite is the embodiment of the aesthetic, beauty made manifest. She is the soul in all things, the anima mundi. The soul is the form of the body, so Aristotle said. Soul, then, is essence in revelation. (Note: “revelation” is the original meaning of apokálupsis in Greek, from which we get our term “apocalypse.”) Nature, the body of Aphrodite, seeks to reveal herself, to show more of her soul essence. The apocalyptic tremblings of the Earth are Aphrodite, the soul of the world, crying out to be heard, like a long-neglected lover, once loved and held sacred then discarded as torn nylon. She is wounded and angry.
Ecology has restored feminism to the body of the world, seeing Gaia as a vital organism, breathing and alive at her core and out through her tiny microcosms. This feminism of the Earth, this recognising of vitality and of connection between all things—mountain, cloud, bird, oyster, grain of sand, human—stands in stark contrast to the mentality of Descartes, that notion that our thoughts are the world and matter is dead. Ecology sees the Earth as ensouled, attends to the form of her body.
Yet, as the Earth withers at her edges, and her organs, quite literally, burn, we face a dire ecological crisis. A moral duty to clean up and preserve the Earth will not be enough, Hillman claimed at Prato nearly thirty years ago. His appeal was to love: ‘below the ecological crisis lies the deeper crisis of love, that our love has left the world.’
‘We want the world because it is beautiful, its sounds and smells and textures, the sensate presence of the world as body,’ Hillman said. By shunning Aphrodite, we also lose her son Eros, the god of love. Eros stirs the depths of the soul. Eros, the mythological figure, is the root of desire, born of beauty and chaos, and deeply connected to the passion that regenerates life. We get the erotic from Eros.
In her essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,’ the feminist writer Audre Lorde offers us the wisdom of Eros. For Lorde, the erotic is a life force, that throbbing, vibrant, creative energy that moves the world. To connect with the erotic is to participate in the sensate world—sharing deep experiences with others and nature, opening ourselves to response, feeling, even pleasure. ‘We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings,’ Lorde reveals. She points to the erotic as a kernel of intense color and feeling that must be released from captivity within our being. Free, the erotic becomes a powerful energy that heightens the senses and invigorates experience. This is an act of beauty, the practice of beauty. Our attention and deep engagement with the world enlivens both self and the “object” of our attention, dissolving otherness into love. In a consumerist world where objects and Earth are transacted at face value, love is absent, and the world becomes defined by separation. The act and practice of beauty is lost in such a world.
It is worth noting that Lorde’s use of “the erotic” is in the true sense of the word, from Eros’ realm of passionate love, which she distinguishes from the pornographic. “Passion” arises from the ground of pati, to experience and endure. “Passion” evolved into desire and strong emotion in the late 14th century, its use shifting from the passion of martyrs (such as the passion of Christ) from earlier centuries as “a suffering.” One might think of the suffering in love, such as Dante suffered when he encountered Beatrice: ‘Here is a deity stronger than I; who, coming, shall rule over me.’ Passionate love ruled by eros was often unrequited, yet it empowered and inspired—to inspire is inspirare, to breathe into, such as life. Passion was thought to activate creative life, as in Dante. The inspiring force of “passion” narrowed into sexual love, a mere corner of its generative power, only later, in the 16th century.
The erotic is sensation and feeling, together, while the pornographic is simply sensation with the absence of feeling. True feeling gives the erotic its power. ‘For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing,’ Lorde urges. The erotic can be felt in all encounters; it is related to that attention to sensate presence. In true attention, we cannot help but be stirred to aisthesis, to feel the stirring of the soul. Certainly, our growing ecological crisis is becoming a provocation to reawaken to the fragile beauty of the world, without which we will cease to live.
Erotic guides exist within us, housed within our form. Our erotic feelings, those inner promptings of the soul, must be recognised, lest they fall deep into the shadows, becoming dark and frightful, something to be feared. What we turn away from becomes repressed, lodged within the unconscious; it builds heat like magma that threatens to erupt. To turn away in fear and disgust, or even in cowardice, is to stow away vital life energy, causing a sickening blockage, dulling the soul. We must live from the inward outward and return back within—the energy moving in two directions, flowing between us and the world. This is passionate attention, sensate and emotive, full of soul motion.
The erotic leads us toward pleasure, Aphrodite’s domain. Hillman pointed to pleasure as the path toward freeing beauty from the caverns of captivity, from the illusory bondage of soulless commercialism: ‘the road to beauty begins in pleasure, opening the soul’s body to delight, which anyway is what is implied by that sensate word taste.’ We must open to taste, welcome pleasure. This opening takes us deeper within ourselves and, accordingly, into the depths of our world. This is where we reach a place of true connection, an experience of our entanglement with all of life.
We must not turn away from beauty. Beauty is relational, requires our participation. Aphrodite has been calling; today, she pleads. Answer, and allow her revelations to reveal the longings of the soul. Then may Aphrodite return to her reign.
∞
Collage images shot on 35mm, Santa Paula and Lake Casitas, California, 2020