A Dialogue With Plotinus

PLOTINUS: Beauty, like any faith, has form and formlessness: the highest, most sublime and most exclusive, and yet crude folk worship amulets and idols - icons amidst the ugliness of Earth.

ME: The lyric of a smile’s line, with and by the symmetry of cheeks and chin.

PLOTINUS: Do you have the virtue of a saint?

ME: Not any more.

PLOTINUS: But art and sex don't change.

ME: Beauty embarrasses artists too now.

PLOTINUS: Good!

ME: Why do you say that?

PLOTINUS: If it means those madmen leave it in peace.

ME: And stop expressing it?

PLOTINUS: The inexpressible! That's why they're mad. They copy it in impure forms and fail, but if you leave the world and live in beauty, the liberated spirit swims in bliss. Tell me, why waste your life with pen or paint, when you can seek and find your perfect beauty?

ME: By love?

PLOTINUS: The highest love - the love of truth.

ME: Not human love?

PLOTINUS: NO not human love. That is the love of shadows! No, Devotion to the moment of release, the love of freedom.

ME: Who’s religion is this?

PLOTINUS: The priests of beauty are philosophers.

ME: What, an academic discipline of logic?

PLOTINUS: The logic of the soul is pure delight - philosophers are lovers.

ME: And vice versa?

PLOTINUS: We're the best lovers - lovers of the best!

ME: Where is this perfect beauty?

PLOTINUS: Everywhere and nowhere! It's the true reality. Listen - we need to find the perfect being: the perfect being must have perfect beauty.

ME: How do we do that?

PLOTINUS: Close our earthly eyes, awaken pristine vision - see the soul. The soul is beautiful, but look beyond the soul - the beauty of pure intelligence - look deeper.

ME: Beyond the heart?

PLOTINUS: Beyond the sweetest sense - divine perfection, uncreated beauty, the primal, transcendental absolute.

ME: An ecstasy of silence.

PLOTINUS: A shrine of mind - the inner sanctum of eternity.

ME: What world-creating radiance we bring when we return to breathing!

PLOTINUS: Why return?

ME: In order to share it.

PLOTINUS: What's already universal? Our lives - the faintest traceries upon it. Stay where the light shines brightest.

ME: Safe at source? No grey of rain, no strangeness of the night, and no feelings of ghosting through us? Is this freedom?

PLOTINUS: No, I meant our birth from death.

ME: From all the cares of life?

PLOTINUS: Eternal contemplation of perfection.

ME: But human beauty...?

PLOTINUS: Is a contradiction!

ME: Sometimes the unmiraculous is lovely.

PLOTINUS: Beauty is heartless.

ME: Perfect beauty too?

PLOTINUS: Consider someone beautiful. What causes their vague, ascetic sense of self-betrayal - the petulance that praising them ignores them?

ME: They feel their beauty isn't theirs.

PLOTINUS: They're right. It's a disguise of which their lives are lost behind.

ME: Despite the power it gives them?

PLOTINUS: They are still its victims.

ME: But they might be philosophers, like us.

PLOTINUS: Wise images? That’s very unlikely.

ME: Yes, of course, philosophers are always ugly.

PLOTINUS: No! Though we're no longer objects of desire - the self-absorption of the soul in beauty makes it pure subject.

ME: Masks of cold perfection, alienate the witness like the wearer, it's true. But there are other beauties too - a childlike gravity before replying, the bathing gaze, and the soft smiles of gentleness.

PLOTINUS: Tiny reflections - blurred and brief as teardrops - of the oceanic light of perfect being.

ME: A teardrop, cinematic with emotion, or an extraordinary, empty ocean?

PLOTINUS: An easy choice: what dies or what's eternal?

ME: Is an eternal flower more beautiful than one that fades?

PLOTINUS: It will be soon.

ME: But now? Or rather, not more beautiful, more precious, more lovely to the heart?

PLOTINUS: Yes, but not the soul - eternal beauty is the soul's own nature, therefore more precious.

ME: More precious than a mystery? Maybe I don't mean beauty then - I mean love - although love is beautiful by nature too.

PLOTINUS: And beauty is the source of love.

ME: Not solely. There's love of beauty and more human love.

PLOTINUS: Love of what isn't beautiful?

ME: That's right. Beauty inspires a solitary love: poetry, certainty, incandescent visions and dark obsession - self-love of the soul - but not the deeper love that meets and shares.

PLOTINUS: Reciprocated love? Don't be absurd!

ME: It's possible.

PLOTINUS: Do you love someone?

ME: Yes.

PLOTINUS: A golden chain that links us to the gods breaks when we fall in love.

ME: You're optimistic.

PLOTINUS: Tell me about this person of whom you love. Does she love you?

ME: No.

PLOTINUS: Your Beatrice!

ME: Isn't she past your bedtime?

PLOTINUS: Beauty's timeless - she's beautiful?

ME: What really floods the heart isn't her beauty, nor her intelligence - the moments of love's deepest tenderness come from the clumsy, quirky, shy or wrong - simple surprises of what's ordinary - not perfect beauty, but its imperfections open the soul to overflowing love.

PLOTINUS: Tell me, would you still praise these imperfections if beauty hadn't made you fall in love?

ME: The siren shock of beauty awes us, scares us - what lights our love are qualities of feeling.

PLOTINUS: Yes, they are very beautiful as well.

ME: But they're alive, and not to be contemplated in order to relate to.

PLOTINUS: The soul can only contemplate perfection by self-perfection - that's why it's worthwhile, and this is the reason why love of beauty is the way to freedom - it purifies the soul's intrinsic state or condition.

ME: I still think humble love is more profound than even the most transcendental wonder. Not love of likeness, but the soul's surrender to what's mysterious, unknowable, the unpredictability of life. Each moment dances! Is it logical to say that the absolute excludes the world? It's full of all its earthly opposites - what's fallible and fades, our needs and passions - the intimate as well as infinite. It's freedom of another sort - a way to unconditional, unbounded love.

PLOTINUS: Do you know anyone for whom this works?

ME: I don't know anyone set free by beauty.

PLOTINUS: Beauty is fire.

ME: A heat that leads to heaven?

PLOTINUS: I saw a fly swallow across a flame, scorching its wings. Another swallow soared high in the summer sky, danced in its light - the iridescent ether of the sun.

ME: Love is like water - when a little stream reaches the sea, the tides of every ocean on every coast throughout the world, rise higher and higher.

PLOTINUS: Water and fire are opposing elements - are love and beauty?

ME: Call the soul a spring - its source of the sun and fire is beauty - and love is its fountaining stream.