The aesthetic finish calls up an image of genteel elders passing serenely away. This is not at all what I mean by “aesthetics.” The word roots itself in a gasp (aisthou), a sudden short intake of breath in the face of wonder, or horror. Aesthetics begins in the startle of surprise, the breath caught, held in astonishment.
Aesthetics arises from an epiphanic image, the full force of character revealed as in a work of art.
Can a person become an epiphany?
Can we entertain the idea that all along our earthly life has been phenomenal, a showing, a presentation? Can we imagine that at the essence of human being is an insistence upon being witnessed–by others,
by gods, by the cosmos itself….and that the inner force of character cannot be concealed from this display. The image will out, and the last years put the final finish to the image.
It is then only natural that we become more like apparitions, already sepulchral effigies, stand-ins for ancestors. Visits to us become ceremonies; gifts, offerings; conversations, liturgical repetitions. We are left as traces, lasting in our very thinness like
the scarcely visible lines on a Chinese silkscreen, microlayers of pigment and carbon, which can yet portray the substantial pro-
fundities of a face. Lasting no longer than a little melody, a unique composition of disharmonious notes, yet echoing long after we are gone. This is the thinness of our aesthetic reality, this old, very dear image that is left and lasts.
James Hillman, the Force of Character and the lasting life
BlissNinja 