The Fear of Beauty

La Pudicizia ("La Modestia"). Antonio Corradini. 1752.

From the distance or the generality, any illusion interferes with enjoyment and correct contemplation. The appearance of the annoying veils always runs by own merit, by submission to the fear of being destroyed before that imposing, charming and bewitching image. The sabotage itself begins, as always, with doubt: the constant hesitation between desire and the idea of merit, when Beauty only requires the firm man, planted and given to the pleasure of knowing oneself corresponded, of conceiving oneself united to this, someday that, sublime image that awakens in him the deepest memories of Love.

Possibly many of us feel as misfortunes of destiny their own inability to generate this wonderful experience. Perhaps we feel the gloom of sadness turned into envy, or the cold of nostalgia instead of the furor of hatred we believe distant and separated from the ideal. Wrapped in that cowardice expressed as pain, one must always ask: Why?

The Rape of Proserpina (Detail). Gian Lorenzo Bernini. 1622.

The signs bloom abundantly around me. With a phrase of the muse, "To believe is to create", I found myself suspended again between the imaginary veils, these delicate testosterone thieves, while my plexus shouted for the wound. "I stopped believing?" I thought beaten. No, but I stopped feeling love as something intrinsic by projecting it as an inaccessible element, perhaps as infinite fragments scattered on the highest peaks, only to play once more the hero, the wise, the magician or the mystic.

Dejected by the weight of the dreaming fabrics, creations that were previously subtle but now heavy as lead, the statue of the Goddess seems inaccessible, imperturbable. Each look of Her burns like lightning, each voice lacerates my nerves, each grimace is another abyss of incomprehension. In front of the Lady I am diminutive, unworthy, lacking the necessary virility to ascend through her wavy forms, lacking in strength to enter her oasis, in the amber nectar that runs through her desired valleys.

Whenever beauty looks, love is also there. Rumi.

Another muse told me with a nostalgic look, surrounded by an indigo reflected in her copper skin: "You fear love." Incredulous before the attack, I continued beating my wings towards an external center, distancing the encounter with the eternal truth, embracing dreams, mirages of life, stripping the pain of the lie again and again, forever.

Virgin Veiled. Giovanni Strazza. 1856 (aprox.).

So I continued to be the eternal teenager, the persecutor of ghosts, the idolater of goddesses of sand and water, fire and steam. Thus fear has manifested itself around me as romantic misfortunes and passional impossibilities; like knots of stone, sadness and hatred. Looking back, focusing through the innumerable veils of the past, I finally glimpse my salvation: that desired forgiveness, the memory of the weeping of reconciliation, the soft observation of vice, of the mistaken feeling, of the first ancient veil that reflected my inadvertent flight of Beauty.

“What is beauty? What saves us from ourselves”. Yasmina Khadra.