I'll get to 7 sometime soon, but I feel like I have to grapple with 6 a bit more. So in 5, we had a distillation process. We distill flower's beauty away from the non-essential flower. Beauty has value. So now we have an abstraction, but this sign is still very much filled with meaning. But how does that distillation retain its value? By being refigured. So beauty actually has no value in itself. It is only through the act of USING the beauty that it takes on value. The process of exchange offers infinite life. Death is going to come, but if you were smart and spent your beauty, then the life of your beauty (which wasn't yours to begin with. the whole thing is only made possible through a loan) has a chance to live on.
This is not about having one kid. This is about exponential growth. It's not a sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset, situation we've got going here.
What does being self-willed do? It means that your beauty never is handed over. You're caught up in equal exchange. You spend 3 points, but you get 3 points back, so you haven't really increased the total number of points in the pot. And then when the debt collector comes, what do you have to show for yourself?
Don't be a self. Selves have to die, and dying is an ugly business. But what can you be instead of a self? You can empty yourself into the process of refiguration. This requires giving yourself, which is no easy business. But man oh man is it worth it. Dying sucks.
And then we go from worms in the ground to Jerusalem at sunrise.
To connect this thinking to Sonnet 7, consider that medieval theories of vision held that the eye sends out light (Booth mentions this in justifying the connection between the sun and eyes; both illuminate). Elsewhere, Booth offers examples of the use of "gilded" as something the eye can confer, just as the sun lights up the world. This is where the idea of beauty comes in--the eye makes it happen, confers the quality upon the world.
ReplyDeletePerhaps this sense of participatory beauty can be extended to worship as well: "Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still" can be understood as mortals passively consuming beauty, but it can also be active. To adore something, in the aesthetic or in the religious sense, is to participate in its realization. The OED supports this, offering this definition of adore: "To worship as a deity, to pay divine honours to," and offering this quotation: "We may worship them in their Pictures though wee may not Adore the Pictures themselues" (from 1628). The precaution against adoring pictures suggests the action is more than an error in interpretation; it is a sacrilegious deification.
So as the old man's sun sets, "thyself outgoing in thy noon," and he is "unlooked on," he (or at least he as a manifestation of beauty) becomes less real. This in turn makes the consolation of having an heir feel more substantial.