Contemplating the classic pairing of love and war in mythology after hearing a lecture on Hillman book, A Terrible Love of War. The class couple is Mars and Venus or Aphrodite and Ares. I could not help but imagine mixing and matching contemporary cartoons to make couples that represent the relationship between love and war
Quote from Hillman’s book:
Aesthetic intensity offers an equivalent to war by providing an obdurate enemy – the image, the material, the ideal – to attack, subdue and convert. Venusian passion offers the erotics, the sacrifice, a devotion but without doctrine, and a band of comrades dedicated to the same search for the sublime. As war is beyond reason, and religious faith is beyond reason, so too must be the aesthetic parallel to war……..
Rather than cordoning off the magical power of making cultural beauty, civilization can find demonstrative modes of realizing the passionate Venus. When both accidental and intentional catastrophes hover over our heads, over the planet itself, we must imagine other ways for civilization to normalize martial fury, give valid place to the autonomous human, and open to the sublime. Is civilization so dedicated to repression that it fears an outbreak of culture? Imagine a nation whose first line of defense is each citizen’s aesthetic investment in some cultural form. Then civilization’s wasteful “stress” converts into cultural intensity. All the diabolical inventiveness, the intolerant obsession and drive to conquer compelled toward culture. Would war lose some of its magic?
