Do you believe in love at first sight? – a journal (1)

Peter Paul Rubens - Venus & Adonis (detail) ca. 1635

"Once, when Venus’ son [Eros] was kissing her, his quiver dangling down, a jutting arrow, unbeknown, had grazed her breast. She pushed the boy away. In fact the wound was deeper than it seemed, though unperceived at first. [And she became] enraptured by the beauty of a man [Adonis]." (Ovid, Metamorphoses 10. 525 ff; trans. Melville)

Eros appears in ancient Greek sources under several guises. In the earliest sources, such as the cosmogonies and the Eleusinian mysteries, he is referred as being one of the primordial gods coming into existence right after the advent of Chaos, Gaia and Tartarus. In other myths he is the son of Aphrodite and in later works, appears as a blindfolded child (signifying the blindness of love) which is the precursor to the famous chubby Cupid of Renaissance paintings.

According to the myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, one day Cupid accidentally pierces her mother with one of his arrows making Venus fall in love with the first person she sees, the young and handsome Adonis.

Ah, and that’s how love chances! Love always happens at first sight. Love always comes at first glance. It can take seconds or years but, every time, its threads are cast at the first baffled stare. As if we just opened our eyes to the world for the first time, ever being shut until the moment the lid is lifted and the design [creation] unveiled.

Forces are difficult to fathom, moving us on erected filaments, guided on silver strings. Gently tossed and flung into shades and beams of silhouettes we don’t descry. The hesitant steps, the modest smiles, the timid look under the dark shade of hair. Two young outsiders in an innocent game of tag. 

“A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous” 

- Ingrid Bergman

Then suddenly it happens, just like a spell, just like magic, two people speaking a dialect only they tell, a mute vibrating language of rhythms and pulsations.

The realm mutates.

Sea and air gush its blue, overflowing their shades above the frame [sketch, skeleton]. Rosy-red blurs of movement and yellow drops of fate. Colours shine brighter, music sounds louder, lips move faster, words mute… and everything motionless. Blood rushes, the heat rises my crown and everything breathes. Everything lives. 

Paolo Veronese - Venus and Adonis 1582