Love and Beauty: le petit morde

"I have to show up; it's my job. Love retreats to abstract havens where the indignities of misrepresentation can't reach. Love isn't obvious. Aphrodite leads you into Hades and brings you back, into life. Kind of a pivot point, right? I like saying that. Pivot point. The place where it comes together; where birth and death are united, swinging from darkness...into the light. Something to think about, how the French phrase it, : le petit morde--the little death--at climax.

--But where does Love and Beauty go when every actress is deemed a goddess and each passing infatuation is passion, and everywhere you look, you're surrounded by the defiant faces of the annointed Beautiful and when the highest act of emotion itself just might eventually kill you--

What is Aphrodite, then, but a statue, a frozen chunk of a creator’s endeavor, a cold descripton of an ideal--and you see, the artist puts me here--. And I defy the darkness. Like I say, it's my job."