+++
title = "Exuberance"
glassblowers = ["cristobalsciutto.md"]
+++

In the ![Proverbs from Hell](bib:ab1b95b7-6787-4e6d-8900-4f1282022270) from *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell*, William Blake offers us aphoristically: "Exuberance is beauty". It is an ambiguous proverb, gesturing towards indulgence and opulence as damned sins, in contrast to prudence and measuredness. Is Blake exalting decadence, foreshadowing the glimmer of Des Esseintes' bejeweled tortoise in the dining room's shadows? (See: ![](bib:c00d21dd-9013-4cd6-b282-93694044dfdf))

> He finally decided on minerals whose reflections vary; for the Compostelle
> hyacinth, mahogany red; the beryl, glaucous green; the balas ruby, vinegar
> rose; the Sudermanian ruby, pale slate. Their feeble sparklings sufficed to
> light the darkness of the shell and preserved the values of the flowering
> stones which they encircled with a slender garland of vague fires.

> Des Esseintes now watched the tortoise squatting in a corner of the dining
> room, shining in the shadow. He was perfectly happy. His eyes gleamed with
> pleasure at the resplendencies of the flaming corrollas against the gold
> background.

We must not forget that Des Esseintes grows hungry and forgets of the tortoise, who, under the weight of the jewels collapses dead. It is, after all, a proverb form *hell*. Exuberance is not a naive praising of nature, whose indifference Nietzsche rightly emphasizes early in ![Beyond Good and Evil](bib:c30d82e1-406a-4451-922f-a9f7b5103738), and whose baseness echoes in a Werner Herzog's accented English on *Burden of Dreams*.

Nonetheless, there appears to be a redemptive quality to exuberance, an exaltation to not forget the beauty of complexity, often foreshadowed by the pleasant mechanistic order of simple models. Behind the opulence lies an attentive eye for the varieties and hues of the constructed world. It is notable that Georges Bataille chooses the proverb as epigraph for his treatise on political economy, ![The Accursed Share](bib:d7f7a71c-3d8f-4e07-b683-7fe8db3ba6fd). His work proposes an inversion of the discipline, away from scarcity and measured allocation, towards excess and consumption.

> I will begin with a basic fact: The living organism, in a situation
> determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily
> receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess
> energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism);
> if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely
> absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must
> be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.