precedence
I believe that myths are true. Not true with a capital T, but true in a more lower case symbolic source of depth and meaning. I believe that myths are true not because they happened, but because they point toward something that happens and goes on happening.
There’s a question that’s been sitting quietly, yet insistently and persistently in my head for weeks. It’s become a koan for me; what is beauty? Where does it come from? What is it for? What does it mean?
In Hesiod’s Theogony, the Titan Cronus cuts the immortal flesh from his father Uranus and casts it into the sea. The water envelops it. Foam rises, and from out of that foam emerges the goddess of beauty, Aphrodite, fully formed.
Before Zeus. Before the Olympians. Before Olympus. Before councils and hierarchy and governance. Before systems and civilizations and societies. Aphrodite was there.
Beauty arrives without lineage, before order and all forms of ordering.
It’s easy to see beauty as frivolous. As a luxury. As a privilege. As a form that follows function. As something that adheres to the rules of symmetry and proportion and color theory. But beauty is something more primordial. It is the sensuousness of raw existence itself.
“The soul is born in beauty,” James Hillman says, “feeds on beauty, requires beauty for its life.” Beauty is not optional. It is necessary. It is the very ground of our being here.
May you remember that you were born in beauty.
May you feel it in the bones of everything.
May you feed it back into the world.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
p.s. - I added a couple new prints to my shop
Duane, I hope you are collecting these essays with the associated collages for what people call a "Substack book." Yes, they can be cast to the wind and those wonderful thoughts will shimmer into the universe, but I think they could be best-selling books of inspiration. Life requires grit, sober reality and encouragement. Really, each essay speaks everybody's heart language—not too esoteric, and coming from a real center of love and wisdom. Thank you!
Brilliant, Duane. The idea that beauty is primordial is spot on. It can be found in earth's landscapes and in the galaxies across the fabric of time as much as it is found in the faces of the people you love and in acts of pure kindness. It is our language for the wonder that can be found within any thread of existence, and yet, there is really no language for what 'it' is. Phew....ok...I'm going to go eat a snack now.