For the moderns, beauty became a problem. It stopped being an evidence that brought with it a number of things that were not subject to questioning and instead were worthy of veneration, laughter, silence and voice. There is no muse for beauty; in other words, beauty is not exactly a creative disposition of the voice or the body. Beauty is a brilliance that never fades: Phanes, an invention of Orphic poetry, the splendour, the brilliance of the divine sceptre, whose realm is the night, invisible source of light, approximation to the immediate, to the hermaphrodite heart of life.

Plotinus (the last Greek philosopher, as Giorgio Colli referred to him), who so clearly revealed that we are almost always in the Dyad, which has to do with the division of intelligence itself and the creation of forms, devised the One (even saying this word seems too much) to refer to that (although it is not a “that”) which is beyond all division and multiplicity: the inexhaustible, never-ending energy that comes before all form and all intelligence, potential without any determination. And what were the access routes, or, in other words, how did Plotinus arrive at that which evades all words, that is beyond the multiplicity in which our life is woven? By means of abandonment of the sentimental structure for that which provokes feeling and feelings – the vision of a beautiful man, the taste of a wine, the fragrance of a perfume – so that there is a tear, so to speak, in the space-time weft; in other words, beauty, intoxication and odour absorb him who senses them.

Pleasure, reproduction and delay

There is no place for causality when it comes to pleasure. Like the rose, pleasure does not have a reason. The pleasure of the beautiful (the Kantian aesthetic pleasure) likewise does not have causal justification, with the added particularity that it is self-reproducing. He who takes part in this pleasure experiences a delay that has to do with that reproduction, does not tire of being in that delay, wishes for more delay and, if it weren’t for the question of survival, would not interrupt it.

The pleasurable and that which one seeks

The moment beauty is reduced to that which pleases me, all conversation about it begins to take on a bad taste. Indeed, the word has fallen into misuse and has become a kind of interjection (somewhat similar to rubbing one’s stomach, when hunger is soothed by a snack, Wittgenstein dixit). One feels that it is better to avoid it for now, although one could never go without it, for beauty was once that which was sought, that which one loves most. It was thus that Hermann Broch, in one of his texts on the evil within the value system of art, called for abstention, a purifying diet, and demanded that one drop the word beautiful when speaking of art, at the same time as making beauty the infinite target of the system of art itself. In truth, there is no possible pedagogy for beauty. At the end of his writings on the proportions of the human body and face, Dürer, having masterfully shown a diagrammatic method capable of reproducing proportions, exclaimed (as if shouting): and how to distinguish between two beautiful human figures by judgement? He concludes: such is the darkness to which the understanding succumbs.

Touching the edges of life

The decision to not put aside the hermetic element of art – 
beauty – is surely one of the reasons for Benjamin’s inactuality (as we know, avoiding the discussion of beauty has been one of the features of the dominant critical thought since Modernism). Even in his more programmatic texts we can always observe the critical effort to convert beauty into an object of knowledge: the passage that goes from the brilliance to the inexpressive, and to the without expression. There is no beauty without brilliance, but without the inexpressive the brilliance is condemned to being a simple attraction, to seducing. The symmetric reduction, in other words, the inexpressive without brilliance, would be a type of stillborn (a spirit without body, an idea that provoked horror in Benjamin and which, in cruder terms, in Hamann became the inability to imagine a Divine spirit without genitalia). That passage feeds off itself, it is a tension that knows no end and in which one recognises that art is touching the edges of life.

Beauty, nature and history

That many periods have lavished attention on certain works of art means that they seem to be immune to critical judgement, meaning that they are no longer subject to scrutiny: that is the paradox inherent in historical beauty. As far as natural, illiterate beauty is concerned (with a bow to Herberto Helder), we are faced with a resistance inherentin that which belongs to itself: the thing presents itself to us in its pure state of semblance – like the dew or the Aurora, which, indeed, we would not be able to invent. These ideas proceed from a text by Benjamin on Baudelaire.

For now, departing, in flight

Baudelaire surprised modern beauty – a gesture of heroicness that consists in converting that which passes, the transitory into something eternal. It’s not so much a feat of magic as a step of desperation, for in recognising that nothing remains other than that which passes, this is, through intensification, protecting it from its own nature (a paradox that is reflected in the symmetric paradox of the novelty, understood as that which cannot but repeat itself, i.e. the shock it provokes returns infernally).

At the same time one can observe in Baudelaire a fear of becoming old, i.e. of no longer being legible, of “becoming history” (for the “Manifesto of Futurism”, this fear, masquerading as rage, contempt and destructive impulse, is one of its sources of inspiration), of becoming an “antiquarian’s” object, and a desire to become an Ancient (a word that has fallen into disuse in the 20^th century), i.e., to be immortal, a type of immortality that is not to be separ-ated from the way in which artists and poets are presented by Baudelaire: “chasseurs perdus dans les grands bois”, as if they had never been part of the city.

Architectural things

That there are no periods of decline is a pathos on the flip side of that which was generated by historical awareness, i.e. the understanding that we are not them and that we came after them, accompanied by a perception of irremediable loss that was sealed with the name decline. Benjamin made that pathos the core of his work on the Passages (19^th-century architectural elements in Paris, which, according to him, concentrated and expanded all the paradoxes of the experience of being modern). Thus, for Benjamin, “every city is beautiful to me […], just as all talk of particular languages having greater or lesser value is to me unacceptable”. And yet, the modern city is fertile in the decline of the aura; in it the unreturned gaze rules. However, the invention of photography and cinema led to a shake-up in the relationships between the aura and its decline, surprising the decline with a new magic of the gaze. A metamorphosis that some cannot observe.

Indeed, one must emphasise that, for Benjamin, the space is the experience with the city, with the names of the streets and with its limits. Losing oneself in the city – an intoxicating discovery of childhood – is one of the matrixes for any discovery; losing oneself in the familiar and drawing the consequences. One cannot but evoke the familiar gazes of the windows, street lamps, streets and ships of Lisbon in O sentimento de um Ocidental by Cesário Verde. A poet who practised like few others the art of the copy in opposition to the art of the reading, i.e. (and applying a Benjaminian distinction), he was capable of surprising the power that each undulation of the city radiates instead of hovering over the city, converting it into pure topographic extension.

Are the more recent parts of our cities still able to offer that experience of losing oneself in them?

Security issues

It is most impressive that in his “Analytic of the Sublime” Kant took the body as the template for experiments of immeasurableness and impotence, pertaining respectively to the mathematically sublime and the dynamically sublime, thus emphasising its originary and sacrificial value. The body, outstripped by the incommensurable greatness (which is measured in relation to the body and not using any other standard, and this is why the sublime is an aesthetic judgement), feels tiny, and the body feels defeated by the excessive power, feels fragile, at risk and is afraid, even if the threat is only an imaginary one. The relationship between the fear caused by aesthetically qualified impotence and the religious element is inevitable. Many times in the more hostile parts of our cities that fear visits us and the religious element takes on the grotesque form of a security issue.

The unabsorbable

Even in a nature lover such as Goethe we find a strange confession: “One can put up with everything in this world, except not with a long stretch of beautiful days.” But perhaps the incongruity dissipates when we recognise that excessive prolonged splendour that cannot be absorbed by the soul can annihilate us. In Baudelaire we find a confession of a similar nature: “The persistence of the sun oppresses me.” Edgar Allan Poe, who proclaimed his love for artificial light, was his master. And Benjamin, for whom the prospect of a cloudy sky in his childhood was a promise of joy, declared: “In the history of the poètes maudits, the chapter describing their battle against the sun is yet to be written.”

Remembrance and meteorology

Penetrating a Greek temple is undoubtedly the most precise and complete source of intuition of what Antiquity was – more so than Greek poetry and philosophy. In other words, moving our body, observing the discipline of the architectural form, provides the conditions for rendering fully effective the movements of the memory (drawing a little on Giorgio Colli here). And this is because the measure-
ments of the body begin to be measured and transformed symbolically, which is why, as Benjamin writes, it is not we who enter the temple; it is the temple that enters us. The moment we enter the temple it begins to act upon us, feeding our respiration and investigating the depths of our body. The authenticity of the architectural forms shows itself in them segregating their own atmosphere. We are, so to speak, afected by that meteorology: it’s about finding out the weather there.

Asking the moment to not go by (because it is so beautiful)

Is like saying to someone who has just died: “Rise, Lazarus!” The poets are the lords of that request.

A procession without a hierarchy

Brilliance, authenticity, revelation, secret, mystery, cohesion, resistance, distance, proximity, joy, intoxication, infinite, undulation, fusion, breathlessness, harmony, entirety, torso, profundity, skin, splendour, gold.|