Every creature is so beautiful they can only be the present culmination of a once celestial Eden.
"The sky was set over the earth, the land was ringed by the sea, and empty void retired to its own place; the forest received wild beasts to keep, and the air birds; ye lurked, ye fishes, in the liquid waters" (Ovid 99).
Instantaneous. A crystal prism scatters a single shaft of light out in rainbows. A brain receives, then interprets, trillions of sensory data input into a workable contrivance. Similarly, the rhetorician is also a vessel in which an ineffable universe is decoded, and whose fundamental aim is to disassemble, and then re-translate, reality for the purpose of invoking perception. In this way, all facets of the conceivable world -- the furnishings in our house, the clothes we wear, the people we know, how we interact with them -- are all in reciprocal flux and transference with every other rhetorical artifact whose interior contains essential, coded motes by which reality is conjured up. Creation is all one great rhetorical bacchanalia.
"Then mankind wandered in the lonely fields; brute strength was theirs and forms uncouth; woodland was their home, their food grass, their bedding leaves; and for long none knew his fellow" (Ovid 99).
And the vessels we are, drifting, unanchored ships, presently find themselves awakened as their hulls bury into a sandy shore. There is suddenly birthed before us a prolific expanse of verdant flora that house many winged, tropical creatures flying to and from each branch in a cacophony of screeches and bright dancing feathers. Sir David Attenborough narrates from an unseen vantage, as if the whole of life were previously inscribed in a book, or in the brushstrokes of an elaborate painting...
Dancing. Actio. Every creature is so beautiful that is all there is worth doing. The flick of a feather, the flourish of a quill, a frolic in the ink and the incantation has been writ. This is how writing happens, how reality is conjured up. It is also how love happens; on the island of the birds it is a rhetorical performance. The male displays a colorful plume of feathers, puts on his dancing shoes, and coos softly. When the dance has been done, the letters of love delivered, the male waits hopefully for the female's reply. Linda Wong, in her article Rhetorical Performance: Performing the Rhetoric, says "the dancer’s body is in its own right
a piece of art work, but, like oratory, can also
fluently speak with total silence, with motions. Actio
is a means for the dancer to transcend the legalistic
manipulation of the bodily movements, and helps free
himself to explore deeply and intellectually on
man’s passions and creative potential" (Wong 192).
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| A peacock on display |
Mating rituals, whether animal or human, are performances. When we play the dating game, we are rhetorical birds playing the mating game. And just like every ritual, there is some intention behind it. The male peacock does not display his tail feathers before the batting eyes of a female because they need stretching. Similarly, clubbers don't gyrate and thrust their hips at the local dive because of bad ball and socket joints that need regular movement to keep the bearings greased; you don't lean in with your elbows on the counter to flirt with a cute barista because it's loud in the coffee shop, or because you're a bit jaded and enjoy teasing the service industry. Love is rhetoric on display, heart thumping hopelessly in the throat and dancing.
Beguiling pleasure is said to have softened those fierce spirits: a man and a woman had tarried together in one spot; what were they to do, they learnt themselves with none to teach them: artlessly did Venus accomplish the sweet act" (Ovid 99).
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| Daphnis and Chloe |
If to swoon an audience is your purpose, then your performance must come equipped with just the right amount of stimulating logos, raw, sexual pathos, and a graceful, eloquent ethos. Even Plato is pinning his toga a bit higher above the knee these days because we all – well, most of us – inherently know how to grab the attention and draw in a potential spouse, lover, spontaneous dance partner, ad infinitum. But how does one learn to act this way? Where do we find our audience? How do we win them over?
The Art of Love, Ovid's guide to dancing and dating in ancient Greece, takes the approach to love as a craft that must be perfected. He says, "by skill swift ships are sailed and rowed, by skill nimble chariots are driven: by skill must Love be guided" (Ovid 13). Just as the birds of paradise don't attract their curious partners by haphazardly flapping their wings and bouncing around, so we don't write with our quill a song of love without first learning how to direct our passions. In short, we must first learn to artisans, rhetoricians of love. Conjuring up love " is not meant to be [a] savage brush of
gross movements, but decorous, with grace" (Wong 191). As rhetoricians, lovers who wish to create in the object of affection a certain perception, flashing our colorful side "does not mean 'mere display,' as though orators simply were exhibiting their skills" as Lawrence Prelli argues in his introduction to Rhetorics of Display, "rather it means making manifest or highlighting the fleeting 'appearance' of excellence in human experience that otherwise would remain 'unnoticed or invisible'" (Prelli 3). It is a chase and the birds know this. The dance of love is not so much a game of persuasion through aesthetic appeal or sentimental entreaties. It is a narrative that must gradually unravel itself, whose qualities of attraction have more to do with "the dynamic between revealing and concealing" (2).
This is not to say that merely dancing in place will attract hoards of potential lovers and partners to your doorstep. The narrative is rather an active process with a specific object in mind. It is about pursuit of love, and direct action on the part of the performer. This familiar scene from Disney's Lion King serves as a good example. Their back and forth dance, a constant interplay between revealing and concealing, eventually develops into a chase. Despite the walking-in-slow-motion-with-a-chorus-of-angels-singing-in-the-background image that we have often been shown in popular culture and film, Ovid is wise to warn us that "she will not come floating down to you through the tenuous air, she must be sought, the girl [or guy] whom your glance approves" (15).
It would seem that love-as-rhetoric is not about persuasion, but about the artful invocation of a tangible pathos through ritualistic dances and performances, as well as the spontaneous creation of narrative between two lovers that has no apparent ending or conclusion. And why?
Every creature is so beautiful. "As many as are the flowers that the new-born earth produces." Everyone is a rhetorician, whose existence is brought about by language (in all conceivable forms) creating and interacting with language. There must be "a god in us; we are in touch with heaven: from celestial places comes our inspiration" (Ovid 131).
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| Prom |
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| Princess Bride |
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| Bonnie and Clyde |
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| Ken and Barbie |
