The Chisel of Praxiteles

A short analysis of what it is seduction and love using Casanova as a reference

The essence of seduction is that it be a mutual and bilateral transaction. All the parties involved- of any gender- need to be an essentially involved part (mentally and/or physically) of the matter at hand. However, that is just the tip of the iceberg, and the bulk below represents the amount of effort needed to get to the stage of convincing all individuals to consent.

A target is as integral a part of seduction as the chaser who harvests desires of any kind for the target. Therefore, a seducer (or chaser) needs to find one target based on either natural or artificial motives. My interest- for the moment- considers only natural desires thanks largely to a thorough perusal of Casanova’s Memoirs and I shall use him as a reference in this short work, but also as someone I would have been eager to befriend had fate not deemed us undeserving to be contemporaries.

Casanova usually loved his targets- especially those he loved; he saw in them Venus herself in her most purest form and an inner depth to their character which I suspect drew him into a stage of lustful love- a moment when he would go to the end of the earth for the girl lucky enough to have him under her spells. As might be suspected by the reader- and something Casanova also acknowledges himself- was that the girl would mostly also be equally if not more invested into their fleeting moments together. As he reasons at one point in his Memoirs:

The voluptuous man “is amorous, but he enjoys himself with the object of his love only when he is certain that she will share his enjoyment, which can never be the case unless their love is mutual.”

It can be therefore extrapolated that Casanova lured those whom he found to be superior to all other women in the world, and those who he was positive would give him love back. There were cases in which not all criteria were filled, and those affairs died off soon or with undesirable consequences which he alludes to by saying: “We allow ourselves to be often deceived in love”.

But the women gave into him not only because they found him physical attractive. He had an aura about him sparkling with emotions of the artistic and passionate kind. He paints his loves in a voluptuous manner in his recollections of their “mutual felicity” and describes their physical characteristics in the demeanor of somebody whose addiction was love itself; who sucked in its glossy fumes and let out dense smoke that was perfumed with the very scents of Venus herself.

The girls did not only want a moment or few of physical trembling; they did not only crave a night of unleashed passion; nor did they want short conversations to be over too soon. Rather, they needed to be painted, to be pronounced and cherished as they were the reincarnation of Cleopatra from a man under her spell just like Antony on his knees before the woman he gave his existence to.

They wanted Casanova to love them like they were his sculptures and he was Praxiteles chiseling away the rough edges, laboring to show them off to the world as perfection with no rivals. And once finished, Casanova would look back at the trembling heap lying at his side and know that he had lived because he had felt, only to desperately feel once more for “I shall exist no more when I shall have ceased to feel”.

Author's Note

First time writing after a long while; having just read Casanova's memoirs and getting high I decided to see if I still had a little writing skill left clinging on.