Cocteau Dream

 I dreamed I met Jean Cocteau. He told me, "'Beauty and the Beast' is about the conflict between two aesthetics: the classical aesthetic, the aesthetic of beauty, that is, composition, proportion, completeness, meaning - and the modern aesthetic, the aesthetic of absurdity: incompleteness, fragmentation, pastiche. The Beast is modern man in his absurdity: life without God, without soul, without purpose, without any given meaning for his existence, a mere animal. Beauty is humanity’s self-image, its ideology so to speak, its self-justification, the way it lies to itself about itself. Obviously, absurdity includes beauty, embraces it as it were, but in a fragmentary, pastiche style, out of place, like the armless Venus de Milo next to a pair of rubber gloves, an automobile and a urinal. Beauty is absurdity’s prisoner, as we are prisoners of the modern world. The life of the beast - the life of modern man - is entirely circumscribed by time, entirely temporal, ephemeral, evanescent, historical - this is symbolized by the rose that is slowly losing its petals. And it is a love story: one must, in a sense, renounce eternity in order to discover eternity within history. One must renounce the absolute in order to discover the absolute within the relative. One must renounce the universal in order to discover the universal in the particular. One must renounce the infinite to discover the infinite within the finite. When we create our own meaning for our existence - that is to say, when we love - and loving means loving a mere human, an absurd, hideous, insignificant monster - this transforms our existence. Only then can the human exist as human. But what I discovered is that this is not merely an essentialism - our task is not merely to find the inner beauty deep inside the beast. Rather, the relationship is reciprocal. Rather than searching for beauty within the beast, that is to say a classical aesthetics within the absurdism of the modern world, I found a beast within beauty itself. I mean that there is also an absurdity, a kind of arbitrariness within beauty, a strange modernity within the classical - just as I discovered an absurdist parable within this ancient fairy-tale.”

 

[originally posted on Facebook; transferred here Apr 8 2024]

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