Triumphant Pollution: Aphrodite Idealized
“…and beneath your gaze, Naked of reticence and shorn of pride, Spread like a chart my wicked little ways…” [1]
This study has developed an interpretive model to examine the singular drive of Western culture to purify, idealize and define itself by fictions, by visual or written images, the latter also being termed by convention “figures” or “tropes.” The compulsion of the West to create an artifice by which to present itself readily becomes a need to transform itself into an artifice. Western identity is a project of transformation and the result, like the heads of Orpheus or Medusa, otherwise so different retain an image-making power in the mesmeric horror of their attenuation that mirrors the traumas in which the drive to the artifice began. The death and loss of Eurydice and the rape by medusa by Poseidon are the founding traumas; the decapitations and the song, sculpture that eventually result are artistic forms the idealize the horror from which they sprung. As the trajectory of culture plays itself out, the internal horror becomes discussed and represented with increasing clarity in mages of Medusa, Sphinxes, the death of Orpheus, sexual ambiguity and novels like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ultimately, with the birth of the early Modern period, in the mid-Victorian and Symbolist era the horror and ambiguity is seen as good by increasing numbers of intelligentsia first and then, seeping downward the lower classes, “workers, puppets” or “cattle” of the idle nobility who alone know beauty, as Ruskin put it [2]. At that point, I should say, this point, whichever way one seeks to flee is hell because institutions, assumptions and ideals have been redefined in hellish, that is traumatic ways with the ultimate terror being the arrival of a virtual reality, an ultimate artifice that displaces life as utterly as the Demonic triumphs in “Christabel.”
Milton long ago identified this process of transposing evil and good with Satan whose role, in Christian mythology is the ultimate meddler, commingler and insinuating “mar-plot” as Melville terms him, always intent on “slipping in his card” whenever human beings are in ambiguous or out of place situations [3].
Not only the horror of the originating trauma, confusion or ambiguity but also the horror and terror that arise when life is absorbed, displaced or suppressed by artifice accounts for the myriad “Wasteland” tropes that fill the arts, values, ideology, politics, pop culture and geopolitics of the West from the reign of Hadrian or Constantine till this day.
We have explained, principally in “the Geometry of Trauma” and “Struggles of the gods” that Aphrodite or, more properly, the genesis and formation of Aphrodite epitomizes the metamorphosis that is essential to Hellenist thought, the restless and apparently irresistible root of the West, and to the primary deities of traumatic transformation, displacement and image-work on whose attributes this study reflects: Aphrodite herself, Apollo, Athena and Ares. I understand Ares not merely as war per se but as strife, conflict and any contest that is somewhat organized. In this I follow Huizinga whose fascinating study’s alarming tone and values precisely measure its inability to account for, and predictable failure to more than briefly mention Judaism which is the negation of his mad, Wagnerian paean to “play” in all its insane, Hellenist-Gothic ferocity. “The noble life is seen as an exhilarating game of courage and honor” and “bloody violence can only be fully experienced and enjoyed as an aesthetic function.” This Dionysian rapture confounds his view of “idleness or leisure as the principle of the universe” and, as he relates it, essentially Greek. What a pity that the hierophant of “play” didn’t bother to read the first chapter of Genesis in which the creation is made for peace and rest, for Sabbath [4].
Edna Millay’s life was a celebration of ambiguity and artifice centered on liberated sex. It is difficult to find a more through blending of the alluring “deceptions, delight and sweetnesses of love” made as formally elegant and beautiful in alluding to enchanting sexual openness and mixtures. Transgression and dirt, “matter out of place” is the liminal status in which Millay, a quintessential Hellene glories. The ultimate adulterate structure is the composite being she makes of her life and art, each feeding the other but ultimately constrained by the image work that compels Eros to mingle with its sweet design. “I have him” [5] cries the queen of a strikingly beautiful but necessarily doomed wasteland of life consumed by its devotion to its Aphrodite-laden version of the Orphic project.
Millay began the outward phase of her career (utterly in tune with the ‘bleeding edge’ of the times as it was, already a generation into the thrilling phrase, “Boston marriage”) by demanding in school that she be called “Vincent.” Sent to Vassar with funds from a female admirer, of her art, the beautiful maiden had various Sapphic amours some of which were turned into verse whose formal mediocrity does not detract from the horrible power of her Hellenist-Modernist project. She found her way to Greenwich village where a commitment to the ‘shock of the new’ was the surest way to merge with the tangled ambiguities of communion of the day’s most sophisticated players among whom a Dionysian sexual sharing was as much or more a ticket to stardom as the ability to live life as an artifice, an essential preciosity that reflects the resurgent goddess rapture of the Modern West. This narcissistic mode emphasizes image, reflection and surface all of which Millay had with beauty; she also was a master image-maker, a singer who beguiled maenads, centaurs and rhapsodes alike. Being that her prime was the second quarter of the 20th century, sixty years into “this strange disease of modern life” it also garnered her kudos and awards from those who wealth enables them to define and re-shape culture; the oligarchs who manage the dos of play and the Orphic project.
Millay works on the other side of the ‘doubleness’ of the sacred; she sets herself apart from the “cattle” to mingle herself more thoroughly as an artfully fashioned prostitute (kedaisha) who carries her own temple in her body and transposes the “set apart” into the way she elects to mix with anonymous revelers in Dionysian ecstasies. She plays out the horror, perhaps the trauma of her “deceptions, delights and sweetnesses” in “fair imaginings…of the honor and beauty” of her unique body work [6]. The castration is imagined, proudly, and the memorial implanted in the lover’s memory as “a ghost in marble” as if an image (“ghost,” “memory”) implanted by a Medusa with Aphrodite’s (or Vivien’s) charm and body, — and her bloody bisexual substrate [7].
Millay’s poem of demonic, Medusan possession is cast as a mental act, a series of imaginative figures: “I think I should have loved you presently,” she begins, launching the series of alluring, taunting hypotheses of what she might have offered to her oblivious partner, a body without a name for it is the function and role of the player in her drama that matters. The entire ‘promise’ is a jest, is subjunctive and liminal: “I think I should have loved” but s/he and we will never know for what matters are the “deceptions” and image play of the goddess. And every figure that follows contains transformation, sliding what was into what could have been according to the artist whose artistry and magical core was overlooked, an intolerable offense to one who deals in images and constructed identities and relationships and whose entire project is “to capture the eyes” and “steal the mind” [8].
….. [opening of chapter 16; please support these trans-cultural studies on the nature of the West and its relation to Israel].
1. Edna St. Vincent Millay, “I think I should have loved you presently,” 6-8
2. John Ruskin, A Crown of Wild Olive, Lectures on Industry & War (1866) quoted by Huizinga.
3. John Milton, Paradise Lost IV 108-110 and 75-9 alluded to in the lines above. I quote Melville’s “Billy Budd,” chapter 2: Billy’s “stutter… was a striking instance that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet…he is sure to slip in his little card…”
4. Homo Ludens, 103-122, 161; contrast Genesis 2:1-3; moreover, even a cursory knowledge of Hebrew scripture repeatedly commands elaborate and exuberant ritual and ‘art’ as part of the sacred, the “set apart” for joy and integrity, as in the ceremonies of the three pilgrim feasts, the tying of the first fruits, etc. “The free man had no need to work for his living,” enjoying a society built on slavery and the Israelite, who was commanded to work six days a week was “set apart” (kadosh usually mistranslated as holy”) from this worldview which continues to try to obliterate its antithesis in various kinds of fusion from theosophy to the third Reich to Mr. Blair’s slyly imperial “Faith Foundation.”
5. Millay, “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines,” 1952, see discussion below.
6. Homo Ludens 101
7. Tennyson, Idylls, “Merlin and Vivien” 42-51 compare the tale of Vivien’s birth upon her dead father’s bloody body with the formation of Aphrodite from the brine and bloody foam of the members of Ouranos. Like Kronos, Vivien’s father was a rebel against the king and brought forth filth from filth that Vivien transforms into the “smiles and deceptions” of a lie (70-83), buttressing her claim that “there is no Truth!” Everything, like Aphrodite, her medium, substance and the representation of the lie is the traumatic horror of displacement and Vivien aptly locates her bloody genesis on “the sad sea-sounding wastes of Lyonesse.”
8. Moshe ben Maimon (“Maimonides”), Mishne Torah (“Review of the Torah”), comments on negative commandment #32 as itemized and explained in Sefer HaMitzvoth (“the Book of the Commandments”). Essential to the way of Judaism is to forbid and warn against the witchcraft of such image-work.