The Death Of Venus: Beauty, Landscape, and Grief

Full moon in Aquarius x Venus Rx

In June I found a Mulberry tree hiding in the hedges in my yard. When left to grow wild, the shrubs in the backyard of the house I rent have always harbored all sorts of beautiful things: fragrant honeysuckle and winding vines that form a shady trellis across a lush corner of the yard. Normally the bushes bordering the yard are hacked within an inch of their lives by the landlord, but this year, for one precious moment, he had slacked and let them grow tall and unkempt. I went out one morning to find one particularly unruly part of these bushes painted by a smattering of red, and found that the oddly-shaped portion that jutted out (and had always been unceremoniously lobbed off as a result of its non-conformity) was not a part of the bush, but a mulberry tree dripping with fruit. I felt like a child, joyful that some color had returned to my world- like an animal who had wandered for weeks in the desert, starved, finally discovering food. It was a deeply minor occurrence in the grand scheme of things, but in that moment, discovering the mulberries had felt like the greatest windfall of my life. When my secret was found out a month later and the mulberry tree was cut back (with no small effort, I imagine) to fit into the neat rectangular shape into which the rest of the shrubs had been forced, I felt genuine grief over its loss. The tree hadn't born fruit for a while, but its manicuring heralded another execution endemic to the suburb where I live. It's a place where the buzz of lawnmowers and weed whackers persists steadily from 8 in the morning to 8 at night during the warm season. As the cool and quiet death of autumn comes to pass, you still hear the rabid, territorial hum of leaf blowers; the extended funeral march of fanatical landowners enacting their lust for perfect, barren emptiness. 

Empty Birth of Venus, by Jose Manuel Ballester

I grieve again now in August as the humidity breaks and the time for sneakily harvesting wild medicinal plants in abandoned areas creeps up on its end. The race against the clock is over and a bulldozer spends the night on top of the fertile field where I used to harvest St. John's Wort and Yarrow just weeks ago. Soon, luxury apartments will suffocate the soil where their seeds have been released. All of the secret hiding places that used to be teeming with the vibrant colors of their natural plant inhabitants have been severed within an inch of their lives, covered only in a fine layer of grassy dust. The mugwort is cut back at the abandoned seaside asylum where I go to swim and forage, and in my righteous indignation I cannot help but take it as a message that whoever ordered the punishment does not want me to dream. Soon, the beautiful haunted buildings at the site will be demolished to make room for something less unsightly. I cannot bring myself to swim there anymore because I’m too afraid of the loss. The only thing that remains wild is the knotweed- and even that indelible foe withers away, shriveled and brown and sprayed with poison by someone who doesn't know its name. 

In every flower senselessly cut before its time and left to rot in a bag, our culture's pathological aversion to beauty is tangible. When I grieve the natural beauty systematically and casually excised from my own immediate environment, I often find myself returning to a sentiment uttered by James Hillman: "That the world is loveless is a results directly from the repression of beauty, its beauty and our sensitivity to beauty." Repression of beauty is also connected to depression: is it not also true that when we are depressed, our ability to find beauty in the world around us is greatly dulled? The connection between depression, inability to perceive or feel moved by beauty, and our societal obsession with neutering the natural landscape of its organic splendor is not accidental. It is not groundbreaking to acknowledge that we are indoctrinated into a culture of beauty that historically lauds artifice, valuing sameness. If the landscape is as unimaginative as its proprieters, then it is inoffensive- and inoffensive is as good as beautiful. It is simply too distracting to experience beauty as a nourishing sensation emanating from a focal point deep within the Soul, to experience the numinous awe of appreciation with absolutely nothing expected in return. Our relationship with beauty is also connected to our relationship with desire- and in a culture that is not only diametrically opposed to cultivating and experiencing beauty but also uses capital as a weapon to purposefully bar human beings from relational existence with our home planet, the mechanism of desire is inherently dysfunctional. The desire known by our capitalistic societal model is not the desire of Eros, but the desire Hades feels for Persephone- the desire of subjugation. The flip side of senselessly removing beauty from the natural landscape because we are anesthetized to its presence is being so covetous of the resources indicated by the presence of beauty (see: overharvesting/overzealous foraging practices) that we destroy it to take those resources as our own. In either instance, the treasured flowers of Aphrodite are not left to inspire a dizzying affection for the planet we inhabit, but are doomed to become mere capital- a fate worse than any other. 

In the harsh buzz of every tool used to sever an expression of nature's infinite intelligence I cannot help but also hear an echo of our culture's persistent compulsion to destroy what it does not wish to take the time to understand. I am consistently baffled by a societal orientation toward obsession with explanations of the things we do not know and a simultaneous pathological need for complete and total ignorance. All signs point to a need for a diseased, deluded sense of rationalism which poisons the earth as much as it poisons our emotional processes. What's more, we dull the Soul's natural orientation toward experiencing beauty with every refusal to acknowledge anything new under the sun. I feel that often times an experience of true beauty coincides with an experience of newness- being shocked and full of wonder, marveling at the appearance of something you have never before noticed. Does a jaded, "I've already seen it" notion not block a dimension of perception? When we decide something is just one way, the way we think it already is (a sunset happens every night, a dandelion is just a weed), we rob ourselves of the joy of not-knowingness; the joy of being willing to learn a new way of seeing. This rigidity violently yanks us out of a rich awareness of the present moment. Then again, maybe that's the true goal of monoculture. 

As Venus makes its retrograde transit through my Leo first house, I have become even more acutely aware of my own experience of beauty- in myself and in the other- and the ways in which my sense of what is beautiful is growing and changing. As is natural for a first house transit, I am acutely aware of my body and its presentation in ways I have not been before- ways that fluctuate wildly between positive, negative, and neutral moment to moment. Living outside of a major metropolitan area has certainly made me hyperaware of how other people perceive my transness, and as the way I present shifts I find myself missing the semi-anonymity that was allowed for in a city with no shortage of beautiful androgynous weirdo freaks. I recently found myself in an encounter where casually transphobic and bioessentialist comments were made to me by a cis person about the general desirability of trans people based on our genitalia and the legitimacy of whether or not trans men were viable as objects of same-gendered sexual violence. The encounter was complicated and is, all in all, not worth recounting in detail here, but the implications left me both hurt and incensed. I felt that, in this person's transphobia, I had been completely stripped of the lush, beautiful and varied wilderness of my own identity which I naturally take for granted but I suppose evades cis people whose perceptions of gender presentation are tragically narrow and obtuse. After this encounter I went to the beach and walked into the water, eager to be held and rocked by the ocean. I felt the same kind of anger as I feel whenever I see a patch of wilderness mowed down and trampled into nothingness, and I realized that I felt that way because our bodies- the bodies of people who fit into any category of other in the eyes of the state- are just like the body of the earth. I realized that every time a portion of the world's naturally nuanced and unpredictable beauty is needlessly erased, it makes me feel like there's less of a place for me in it. I realized that I see so many trans people working closely alongside and listening intently to plants because we have to fervently cultivate our own inner gardens, and we have to work tenfold to ensure that our inner landscapes are suitable environments for life to actually survive.  This is true for anyone whose joy has been pruned, distilled, and sold as a commodity, and especially true for those who have ancestors who spent their lives stewarding natural life in reverence of the earth only to have the land pulled out from under them, stolen and paved over. To have one's beauty sacrificed upon the altar of monolith is an experience that binds us to the land even more than we are already bound to it by birth- this constant looming threat of anesthetized, conformist sterility serves as an ever-present reminder of the link between the microcosm of the body and the macrocosm of the earth. This planet knows us intimately- its non-human life forms listen to us just as intently as we listen to them, keenly understanding what we have been through because it is what they've been through, too. 

This summer has been a difficult one, and as someone who usually prides myself on appreciating the muted aesthetics of decay I have found myself shocked by how taken I have become this year with the vibrant, colorful aesthetics of new life. This newfound appreciation is accompanied in no small part by the fear of the lushness of the season dying away. Already, I mourn the passing of every flower that only blooms for a collection of hours, yearning to take in every moment that the sun shines on its face. I want to appreciate its beauty enough for its time here to have mattered. I know that it will hurt to reacquaint myself with the cycles of nature with which I claim to be so comfortable when summer succumbs to fall. I guess we always think we're more prepared than we really are when death comes knocking.