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The measure of all things
Man behaves as if he had created the world and could play with it. Pretty
much at the beginning of his glorious development he coined the saying that
man was the measure of all things. Then he quickly went to work and turned
as much of the world as he could upside down. The Venus de Milo lies shat
tered on the ground. Man has measured with the measure of all things, him
self, measured and presumed. He has tailored and pruned away at beauty.
This cutting to measure gave rise to a fashion shop, the fashion shop gave rise
to madness in all its forms. Confusion, unrest, nonsense, insanity and frenzy
dominate the world. Foetuses with geometric double heads, human bodies
with yellow hippopotamuses heads, fan-shaped monsters with trunks like ele
phants, stomachs with teeth on crutches, corpulent or emaciated pyramids
with dragging feet and tears in their eyes, clods of earth with sex organs, etc.,
have appeared in painting and statuary.
Beauty has not vanished beneath the ruins of the centuries
When the personality, the intellect, philosophy arose from the legendary
depths of mythical humanity, when nature was discovered by man, when “the
earth, the wavy sea, the moist air and the Titan Ether,” were solemnly sung,
beauty dwelt naked among men.
In every century beauty changed. Beauty did not vanish beneath the ruins
of the centuries, it vanished into the Maya, into the mirage. So many rare and
priceless garments had been showered upon her, she no longer knew in which
to show herself.
Which is the original image of beauty? Which is the image “of beauty’s
gushing fountain, the picture that flows from the source . . . ”? Is it the naked
corporeality of the Greeks, is it the disguise, the veil, the pageant of the Renais
sance, is it the disembodied yearning of Gothic, is it the cube and the sphere,
is it the love and the harmony of which Empedocles said: “There were no two
arms extending from a trunk, nor were there feet or swift knees or organs of
procreation; there was a sphairos the same in all its aspects.”
Deception, appearance, artifice
Man became a childish demiurge, a childish creator. In his megalomania,
he wanted to create God and the world a second time. A loathsome bickering