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The physiology of the aesthetic.

To pleasure.
To ‘beauty’;
To terror.

The ouroboros – an aesthetic.
Orgasm as pleasure – to Beauty as death.

“… Beauty is nothing
but the beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us…” (Rilke)

Does it terrify because we have betrayed it?
In betraying it we ‘corrupt’ ourselves and all things around us.

“Nietzsche became hysterical because he believed God was dead. Funerals often promote hysteria, but there exist more proper ways of mourning.” E. Heller.

“We have produced the hardest possible thought – [the Eternal Recurrence of All Things –] now let us create the creature who will accept it light-heartedly and blissfully!”

Nietzsche. Musarion-Ausgabe. 23 vols. Note in Zarathustra.

“No people sing with such pure voices as those who live in deepest Hell; what we take for the song of angels is their song.”

Kafka. Unpublished letter.

“…whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue grazing placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and even the most sun-filled days—that’s something else.”

Ernest Becker. The Denial of Death, etc.