The Visual Lover (I)

Anteros*

I have a decorative and superficial concept of profound love and its usefulness. I prefer visual passions, keeping my heart intact for the sake of more unreal destinies.

I don’t remember having ever loved more than the ‘painting’ in someone, the pure exterior, in which the soul’s only role is to animate and enliven it, making it different from a painting done on canvas.

This is how I love: I fix my attention on a beautiful or attractive or otherwise lovable figure, whether of a woman or a man (where there’s no desire, there’s no sexual preference), and that figure captivates, obsesses, possesses me. But I want only to see it, and nothing would horrify me more than the prospect of meeting and speaking to the real person whom the figure visibly manifests.

I love with my gaze, and not even with fantasy. Because there’s nothing I fantasize about the figure that captivates me. I don’t imagine myself linked to it in any other way, because my decorative love has no psychological depth. I’m not interested in knowing the identity, activities or opinions of the human creature whose outward appearance I see.

The vast succession of persons and things that make up the world is for me an endless gallery of paintings, whose inner dimension doesn’t interest me. It doesn’t interest me, because the soul is monotonous and always the same in everybody; only its personal manifestations change, and the best part of the soul spills over into dreams, behaviour and gestures, thereby entering the painting which captivates me and in which I see faces that are faithful to my affection.

A human creature, as far as I’m concerned, has no soul. The soul is his own affair.

It is thus in pure vision that I experience the animated exterior of things and beings, indifferent – like a god from another world – to their spirit content. I delve into their being by exploring the surface; when I want depth, I look for it in myself and in my concept of things.

What can I gain from personal acquaintance with people I love merely as décor? Not disillusion, since I harbour no fantasies and love only their appearance, which won’t be affected by their stupidity or mediocrity; I hoped for nothing from them but their appearance, which was already there and which persists. But personal acquaintance is harmful because it’s useless; materially useless things are always harmful. What’s the point of knowing the person’s name? And yet it’s inevitably the first thing I’m told when we’re introduced.

Personal acquaintance should also mean the freedom to contemplate, which is my way of loving. But we can’t freely regard or contemplate someone we know personally.

From the artist’s viewpoint, anything extra counts as a deficit, for it interferes with and thus diminishes the desired effect.

My natural destiny is to be a visual lover of nature’s shapes and forms, an objectifier of dreams, a passionate and indefinite contemplator of appearances and the manifestations of things.....

It’s not a case of what psychiatrists call psychic onanism, nor is it what they term erotomania. I don’t fantasize, as in psychic onanism; I don’t imagine myself as a carnal lover or even as a casual friend of the person I gaze at and remember. Nor, as in erotomania, do I idealize and remove the person from the concretely aesthetic sphere; I don’t think about or desire anything more from the person than what I receive from my eyes and from the pure, direct memory of what my eyes have seen.