Recently I announced the book “The Interior Sight”, my first book that I co-created in collaboration with my endearing friend and book author Victor Peláez. This is one of the stories in the book that we titled “The Perversion Of Purity”.
Here is the story:
According to Greek mythology when Venus, goddess of love, beauty, and desire saw lilies for the first time, jealous of their beauty cursed them, placing a large yellow pistil in the middle of the flowers, thus creating this perverse dichotomy between the external purity of the flower and the great pistil, bursting from the bowels of it, we speak then of “the perversion of purity”.
Usually, perversion is understood as a type of human behavior that deviates from what is considered orthodox or normal. It is Freud who associates it with sexuality and Thomas Mann — an admirer of Freud — makes it an existential poem in his admirable “Death in Venice” where Gustav Von Aschenbach — central character of the novel — a writer, neat mature man, and faithful representative of the Belle Epoque — period of history from about 1890 to 1914, characterized by aristocrats retired to a frivolous fairy-tale existence of their own creation — who experiences a sudden passion for Tadzio, a Polish child of a baffling beauty.
Gustav, in a very short time, abandons reason, the jewel of Western thought, to succumb to his passion without ever consummating it, his desire immerse him down in an abject perversion that leads him to death. We could say that the cause of Gustav’s death was “the purity of his perversion”
Luchino Visconti, the brilliant film director, was able to imprint on the celluloid the controversial story of Gustav Von Aschenbach, brilliantly played by Dirk Bogarde. Morte a Venezia, Luchino Visconti, 1971.
If you like this story and my photography you can acquire either the book or magazine. All the content — including more than 40 images and respective stories — is presented in two mediums, as a coffee table Book-Art for collectors that enjoy a large format (12×12 in, 30×30 cm) printed on the finest Premium Matte paper for only $225.99 USD plus shipping.
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