AH!
AH! is a pseudo “self-help” book in the form of a collaged zine. The “advice” within reads almost like a meditation guiding the reader through their own relationship with the interminglings of beauty and terror. The book is a work-in-progress.
In my research into this relationship, I kept stumbling upon quotes from various poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. These texts relate the two concepts to each other philosophically as well as physically; our human experiences of the two are surprisingly similar.
In Rilke’s First Elegy from The Duino Elegies, he writes:
“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
And we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us.”
The connection between the two is in the experience of weakness or inferiority in the face of something. A fear for your life knowing that something has enough power or strength to end it, or a sense of awe from knowing that something is far beyond yourself or your own ability
At the end of his essay (which I highly recommend), George Menz describes beauty: “it is blinding, like the light of the sun; it is destructive, like the light of a nuclear explosion. Beauty is that which we refuse to acknowledge, because in acknowledging it, we risk our own destruction at its hands. Better, then, to take what has been said as idle speculation, and think on beauty no more.”
The zine aims to lead the reader to find the line where beauty turns to terror in their own perception and their own memory, though the advice is not necessarily advisable to follow.
As Rilke says:
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
Selected Sources:
Menz, George. “Beauty and Terror.” Gadfly, Gadfly, 17 Oct. 2017
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies ; and, The Sonnets to Orpheus. Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Vintage International, 2009.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. “Go to the Limits of Your Longing.” Translated by Joanna Macy, The On Being Project, 16 Sept. 2010
