Showing posts with label venus anadyomene. Show all posts
Showing posts with label venus anadyomene. Show all posts

19 Feb 2022

Reflections on Venus Emerging Slowly From an Old Bathtub


The Venus of Willendorf [1]
Image: Naturhistorisches Museum Wien
 
 
I.
 
I recently reflected on how the figure of a woman emerging from the sea allows us to glimpse something of the goddess Aphrodite in her flesh; and how, in turn, this invites us to consider the relationship we have with our own bodies and the bodies of others (as well as the nature of the divine) [2]
 
Of course, such meditations are made easier when that woman is, for example, Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder, or Ana de Macedo skipping among the fishes and rock pools, like a Portuguese Venus; one could spend all day happily musing on lithe and lovely limbs and firm young breasts, etc. 
 
It is not so easy, or so pleasurable, however, to consider what we might collectively term vile bodies - i.e., old bodies, ugly bodies, obese bodies, deformed bodies, mutilated bodies, and, at the extreme, dead bodies (there is surely nothing more repulsive than a decomposing corpse, which is why necrophilia remains such a rare phenomenon).
 
The problem, as Nietzsche pointed out, is that everything ugly weakens and saddens the spectator [3]. Thus, reflecting upon vile bodies has a dangerous psycho-physiological effect; it actually depresses and deprives one of strength. 
 
Ugliness, like sickness, is therefore not only a sign and symptom of degeneration, but a cause of such; which is why healthy happy souls prefer to be surrounded by beauty and turn to art when such is lacking in reality; for art, as Nietzsche says, is the great stimulant of life - a counterforce to all denial of wellbeing [4]
 
However, having said all this, the philosopher, as Nietzsche understands them, is one who lives dangerously and who can not only embrace more of human history (in its entirety) as their own, but, like the artist or great poet, find beauty in those individuals, things, and events where most people would see only horror and look away in disgust. 
 
 
II. 
 
And so we come to Rimbaud's poem, Venus Anadyomène (1870); one that I think important, but which critics often overlook, or dismiss as less serious than his later (more mature) verses. 
 
For one thing, the poem - written when Rimbaud was just sixteen - challenges static and traditional ideals of feminine beauty [5] and dares readers to glimpse some aspect of the divine even in an ulcerated anus (which, admittedly, isn't easy). 
 
Wherever the poet might be taking us, we're a long way from Botticelli and moving towards Bataille territory; this hideously beautiful Venus in an old bathtub serves as the vehicle of love in much the same manner that a drunken woman vomiting - or a dog devouring the stomach of a goose - perform the role [6].   
 
Ultimately, not being a scholar of French literature or a Rimbaud expert, I'm unsure what he intended with this verse; is it a serious (slightly disturbing) attempt to revalue beauty, or simply an adolescent parody of the Venus myth - who knows? 

Anyway, readers can decide for themselves by clicking here to access Venus Anadyomène as found in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, a bilingual edition trans. Wallace Fowlie and revised by Seth Whidden, (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
 
 
Notes
 
[1] The Venus of Willendorf is a small figurine, carved from limestone tinted with red ochre, and believed to have been made almost 30,000 years ago in the Paleolithic period (i.e., the Old Stone Age). It was found in 1908, during archaeological excavations at a site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria. Anyone wishing to see it should get along to the Natural History Museum in Vienna. 
 
[2] See the post entitled 'And Venus Among the Fishes Skips' (18 Feb 2022): click here
 
[3] See Nietzsche, 'Expeditions [or Skirmishes] of an Untimely Man', §20, in Twilight of the Idols.  
 
[4] See Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), §853 (II), p. 452.    

[5] For more on the challenge to these ideals presented by Rimbaud's poem, see the essay by Seth Whidden, 'Rimbaud Writing on the Body: Anti-Parnassian Movement and Æsthetics in "Vénus Anadyomène"', in Nineteenth-Century French Studies, vol. 27, no. 3/4, (University of Nebraska Press, 1999), pp. 333–45. This essay can also be accessed online via JSTOR: click here.
 
[6] See Georges Bataille, 'The Solar Anus', in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Alan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie Jr., (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), pp. 5-9. The lines I refer to are on p. 6. 
 
 

18 Feb 2022

And Venus Among the Fishes Skips

Ana de Macedo: the Venus of Alentejo
Photo used with permission from her Instagram account 
 
 
 I. 
 
Venus rising from the sea - or, as the Little Greek would say, αναδυομένη Αφροδίτη - is, of course, one of the iconic figures within the cultural (and pornographic) imagination of the West.  
 
According to Athenaeus, the idea was inspired by the ancient Greek courtesan Phryne [1], who liked to let down her hair and step naked into the sea, particularly during the time when the Eleusinian Mysteries were being celebrated, or festivals held in honour of Poseidon . 

The renowned painter Apelles created a much-admired picture of this event [2], whilst the equally renowned scuptor Praxiteles - who was one of Phryne's many lovers - is believed to have used her as the model for his statue of Aphrodite (the first life-sized nude female form ever sculpted in ancient Greece). 
 
Although some historians have pooh-poohed the story of Phryne's skinny dipping in the sea as sensationalised fabrication [3], I can happily believe it, and see how it might inspire artists. For as D. H. Lawrence writes, we glimpse the gods in the bodies of men and women [4] ... 
 
 
II. 
 
In his poem 'The Man of Tyre', for example, Lawrence describes a man watching as a woman who had waded into the pale green sea of evening in order to wash herself, now turns, and comes slowly back to shore:
 
 
Oh lovely, lovely, with the dark hair piled up, as she went deeper,
      deeper down the channel, then rose shallower, shallower,
with the full thighs slowly lifting of the wader wading shorewards
and the shoulders pallid with light from the silent sky behind
both breasts dim and mysterious, with the glamorous kindness
      of twilight between them
and the dim blotch of black maidenhair like an indicator,
giving a message to the man. 
 
So in the cane-brake he clasped his hands in delight
that could only be god-given, and murmured:
Lo! God is one god! but here in the twilight
godly and lovely comes Aphrodite out of the sea
towards me! [5]
 
 
However, Lawrence also catches sight of the gods in the bodies of animals too. Thus, in the poem 'Whales weep not!', he informs us that Aphrodite is a happy hot-blooded she-whale:


and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.
 
 
These are surely some of the loveliest lines in Lawrence's poetry and, crucially, they encourage us to reconsider (i) the relation we have to ourselves and our own flesh; (ii) the relation we have to others and their bodies; (iii) the relation we have to animals; and (iv) the relation we have to the gods.
 
And, surely, that's the purpose of art, isn't it?    
 
 
Fresco from Pompei, Casa di Venus, 1st century AD 
A classic example of Venus Anadyomene
 
 
Notes
 
[1] Phryne, whose real name (somewhat ironically) was Mnesarete, was born c. 371 BC and became a notorious member of that highly educated class of companion women known as hetaerae [ἑταῖραι]. She is perhaps best remembered for her beauty and for her trial for impiety (a capital offence), where she was defended by the orator Hypereides (another of her lovers). 
      When it seemed as if his arguments might be falling on deaf ears, Hypereides removed Phryne's robe and bared her breasts before the judges in order to arouse their pity. This seemed to do the trick; the judges decided they could not condemn a priestess of Aphrodite to death. And so Phyrne was acquitted. Little wonder that modern poets and artists have continued to find her irresistable.     
 
[2] Sadly, this picture is now lost. It is mentioned, however, in Pliny's Natural History [XXXV, 86-87] According to the Roman author, Apelles employed Pancaspe (aka Campaspe) - mistress to Alexander the Great - as his model. 
 
[3] See for example Christine Mitchell Havelock, The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her Successors: A Historical Review of the Female Nude in Greek Art, (The University of Michigan Press, 1995). 
 
[4] See the post 'I Shall Speak of Geist, of Flame, and of Glimpses' (29 Sept 2021), where I speak of Lawrence's idea of glimpsing something divine in mortal being with reference to his poetry. 
      And see also 'The Southend Venus' (26 Aug 2016) and 'The Southend Venus (Alternative Version)' (27 Aug, 2016), where I write of glimpsing the goddess in the girl on a beach in Essex. 

[5] D. H. Lawrence, 'The Man of Tyre', in The Poems, Vol. I, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 606-607.

[6] D. H. Lawrence, 'Whales weep not!', in The Poems, Vol. I, ibid., pp. 607-608. Lines quoted p. 608.
 
 
For a related post to this one, discussing Rimbaud's poetic take on the idea of Venus anadyomene, click here