severance
Myths are important not just because they ‘can’ be reexamined, but because they are ‘supposed’ to be. Myths are meant to be held and looked at closely. We are required to turn them over and over. To see them from differing angles. To witness the light bending with and through them, and to watch what changes.
Return with me to Hesiod’s Theogony. To Aphrodite’s birth scene. To the severed flesh of Uranus. To the foam. To the sea.
We know that Aphrodite arrives before all the other gods. That beauty is present as a kind of first principle, before any system of order had a place in the world. But what else does it say? What else is happening?
In an act of violence, Cronus throws his father, Uranus’s flesh into the waters. The sea does not hide it or wash it away. Instead, it foams around it. And it becomes the very site from which all beauty is born.
Beauty is something that emerges from a wound. From a severing. From something cut off, lost, and thrown away.
When Aphrodite emerges, she does not walk alone. Eros and Himeros are waiting to be her company. Beauty is not abandoned in the brutality. Is not isolated in the hurt. Love (Eros) and Desire (Himeros) are always with her.
To be human is to know what it means to be broken. To feel the loss and pain of betrayal and travesty. To know what severance is.
The sickle of time slices through us maniacally. The goals we never achieved. The dreams that never came true. Divorces, layoffs, desertion, and everything else that takes without asking. Each one leaves us smaller than we used to be. But each cut is also the place where beauty can be set free.
And when beauty rises from the wound, love and desire will be there, waiting to stand beside you. To hold you and to carry you if need be.
May you see that you are never abandoned in your wounds.
May your cuts become the ground where beauty grows.
May love and desire find you exactly where you’re breaking.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything.
p.s - Recently Jill McDougall and I had the great pleasure of having a conversation with the insightful and inspiring Michael J Gillette about his film, Ordinary Greatness Here’s a little taste:
The unedited video of the conversation is available for paid subscribers here.
p.p.s. - I added two new prints to my shop:
Love 💕💕💕
An avid consumer of your posts here. This one felt quintessential and spoke to me.
Keep up the production of the lovely collages and excellent writing. The world is a better place for having it.