Poeticize Your Presence

Important things happen when your targets are alone: the slightest feeling of relief that you are not there, and it is all over. Familiarity and overexposure will cause this reaction. Remain elusive, then, so that when you are away, they will yearn to see you again, and will associate you only with pleasant thoughts. Occupy their minds by alternating an exciting presence with a cool distance, exuberant

moments followed by calculated absences. Associate yourself with poetic images and objects, so that when they think of you, they begin

to see you through an idealized halo. The more you figure in their minds, the more they will envelop you in seductive fantasies. Feed these fantasies by subtle inconsistencies and changes in your

behavior.

He who does not know how to encircle a girl so that she loses sight of everything he does not want her to see, he who does not know how to poetize himself into a girl so that it is from her that everything proceeds as he wants it—he is and

remains a bungler To poetize oneself into a

girl is an art.

—SØREN KIERKEGAARD, THE SEDUCER’S DIARY, TRANSLATED BY HOWARD V. HONG

AND EDNA H. HONG

What else? If she’s out, reclining in her litter, \

Make your approach discreet, \ And-just to fox the sharp ears of those around you—\ Cleverly riddle each phrase \ With ambiguous subtleties. If she’s

taking a leisurely \ Stroll down the colonnade, then you stroll there too— \ Vary your pace to hers,

march ahead, drop behind her, \ Dawdling and brisk by turns. Be bold, \ Dodge in round the

columns between you, brush your person \

Lingeringly past hers. You must never fail \ To attend the theater when she does, gaze at her beauty—\ From the shoulders up she’s time \ Most delectably spent, a feast for adoring glances, \ For the eloquence of eyebrows, the speaking sign. \ Applaud when some male dancer struts on as the heroine, \ Cheer for each lover’s role. \ when she leaves, leave too—but sit there as long as she does: \ Waste time at your mistress’s whim. \

Get her accustomed to you; \ Habit’s the key, spare no pains till that’s achieved. \ Let her always see you around, always hear you talking, \ Show her

your face night and day. \ When you’re confident you’ll be missed, when your absence \ Seems sure to cause her regret, \ Then give her some respite: a field improves when fallow, \ Parched soil soaks up the rain. \ Demophoon’s presence gave Phyllis no more than mild excitement; \ It was his sailing caused arson in her heart. \ Penelope was racked by crafty Ulysses’s absence, \ Protesilaus, abroad, made Laodarmeia burn. \ Short partings do best, though: time wears out affections, \ The absent

love fades, a new one takes its place. \ With

Menelaus away, Helen’s disinclination for sleeping

\ Alone led her into her guest’s \ Warm bed at night. Were you crazy, Menelaus?

—OVID, THE ART OF LOVE, TRANSLATED BY PETER GREEN

Poetic Presence/Absence

In 1943, the Argentine military overthrew the government. A popular forty- eight-year old colonel, Juan Perón, was named secretary of labor and social affairs. Perón was a widow who had a fondness for young girls; at the time of his appointment he was involved with a teenager whom he introduced to one and all as his daughter.

One evening in January of 1944, Perón was seated among the other military leaders in a Buenos Aires stadium, attending an artists’ festival. It was late and there were some empty seats around him; out of nowhere two beautiful young actresses asked his permission to sit down. Were they

joking? He would be delighted. He recognized one of the actresses—it was Eva Duarte, a star of radio soap operas whose photograph was often on the covers of the tabloids. The other actress was younger and prettier, but Perón could not take his eyes off Eva, who was talking to another colonel. She

was really not his type at all. She was twenty-four, far too old for his taste; she was dressed rather garishly; and there was something a little icy in her manner. But she looked at him occasionally, and her glance excited him. He looked away for a moment, and the next thing he knew she had changed

seats and was sitting next to him. They started to talk. She hung on his every word. Yes, everything he said was precisely how she felt—the poor, the workers, they were the future of Argentina. She had known poverty

herself. There were almost tears in her eyes when she said, at the end of the conversation, “Thank you for existing.”

In the next few days, Eva managed to get rid of Perón’s “daughter” and establish herself in his apartment. Everywhere he turned, there she was, fixing him meals, caring for him when he was ill, advising him on politics. Why did he let her stay? Usually he would have a fling with a superficial young girl, then get rid of her when she seemed to be sticking around too much. But there was nothing superficial about Eva. As time went by he found himself getting addicted to the feeling she gave him. She was intensely loyal, mirroring his every idea, puffing him up endlessly He felt more masculine in her presence, that was it, and more powerful—she believed he would make the country’s ideal leader, and her belief affected him. She was like the women in the tango ballads he loved so much—the suffering women of the streets who became saintly mother figures and looked after their men. Perón saw her every day, but he never felt he fully

knew her; one day her comments were a little obscene, the next she was the

perfect lady. He had one worry: she was angling to get married, and he could never marry her—she was an actress with a dubious past. The other colonels were already scandalized by his involvement with her.

Nevertheless, the affair went on.

Concerning the Birth of Love • Here is what happens in the soul: • 1. Admiration. • 2. You

think, “How delightful it would be to kiss her, to be kissed by her,” and so on. • 3. Hope. You observe

her perfections, and it is at this moment that a woman really ought to surrender, for the utmost physical pleasure. Even the most reserved women blush to the whites of their eyes at this moment of hope. The passion is so strong, and the pleasure so sharp, that they betray themselves unmistakably. •

4. Love is born. To love is to enjoy seeing, touching, and sensing with all the senses, as

closely as possible, a lovable object which loves in return. • 5. The first crystallization begins. If you

are sure that a woman loves you, it is a pleasure to endow her with a thousand perfections and to count your blessings with infinite satisfaction. In

the end you overrate wildly, and regard her as something fallen from Heaven, unknown as yet, but certain to be yours. • Leave a lover with his

thoughts for twenty-four hours, and this is what will happen: •At the salt mines of Salzburg, they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of

crystals. The smallest twig, no bigger than a tom- tit’s claw, is studded with a galaxy of scintillating diamonds. The original branch is no longer recognizable. • What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything

that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one. • A man in love sees every perfection

in the object of his love, but his attention is liable to wander after a time because one gets tired of anything uniform, even perfect happiness. • This is what happens next to fix the attention: • 6. Doubt

creeps in. He is met with indifference, coldness,

or even anger if he appears too confident. The

lover begins to be less sure of the good fortune he was anticipating and subjects his grounds for hope to a critical examination. •He tries to recoup by indulging in other pleasures but finds them inane. He is seized by the dread of a frightful calamity and now concentrates fully. Thus begins: • 7.The second crystallization, which deposits diamond

layers of proof that “she loves me. ” •Every few minutes throughout the night which follows the birth of doubt, the lover has a moment of dreadful misgiving, and then reassures himself, “she loves me”; and crystallization begins to reveal new

charms. Then once again the haggard eye of doubt pierces him and he stops transfixed. He forgets to draw breath and mutters, “But does she love me?”

Torn between doubt and delight, the poor lover convinces himself that she could give him such pleasure as he could find nowhere else on earth.

—STENDHAL, LOVE, TRANSLATED BY GILBERT AND SUZANNE SALE

In 1945, Perón was dismissed from his post and jailed. The colonels feared his growing popularity and distrusted the power of his mistress, who seemed to have total influence over him. It was the first time in almost two years that he was truly alone, and truly separated from Eva. Suddenly he felt new emotions sweeping over him: he pinned her photographs all over

the wall. Outside, massive strikes were being organized to protest his

imprisonment, but all he could think about was Eva. She was a saint, a woman of destiny, a heroine. He wrote to her, “It is only being apart from loved ones that we can measure our affection. From the day I left you . . . I have not been able to calm my sad heart. My immense solitude is full of

your memory.” Now he promised to marry her.

The strikes grew in intensity. After eight days, Perón was released from prison; he promptly married Eva. A few months later he was elected president. As first lady, Eva attended state functions in her somewhat gaudy dresses and jewelry; she was seen as a former actress with a large wardrobe. Then, in 1947, she left for a tour of Europe, and Argentines followed her every move—the ecstatic crowds that greeted her in Spain, her audience with the pope—and in her absence their opinion of her changed. How well she represented the Argentine spirit, its noble simplicity, its flair for drama. When she returned a few weeks later, they overwhelmed her with attention.

Eva too had changed during her trip to Europe: now her dyed blond hair was pulled into a severe chignon, and she wore tailored suits. It was a

serious look, befitting a woman who was to become the savior of the poor. Soon her image could be seen everywhere—her initials on the walls, the sheets, the towels of the hospitals for the poor; her profile on the jerseys of a soccer team from the poorest part of Argentina, whose club she sponsored; her giant smiling face covering the sides of buildings. Since finding out anything personal about her had become impossible, all kinds of elaborate fantasies began to spring up about her. And when cancer cut her

life short, in 1952, at the age of thirty-three (the age of Christ when he died), the country went into mourning. Millions filed past her embalmed body. She was no longer a radio actress, a wife, a first lady, but Evita, a saint.

Interpretation. Eva Duarte was an illegitimate child who had grown up in poverty, escaped to Buenos Aires to become an actress, and been forced to do many tawdry things to survive and get ahead in the theater world. Her dream was to escape all of the constraints on her future, for she was intensely ambitious. Perón was the perfect victim. He imagined himself a great leader, but the reality was that he was fast becoming a lecherous old

man who was too weak to raise himself up. Eva injected poetry into his life. Her language was florid and theatrical; she surrounded him with attention, indeed to the point of suffocation, but a woman’s dutiful service to a great man was a classic image, and was celebrated in innumerable tango ballads. Yet she managed to remain elusive, mysterious, like a movie star you see all the time on the screen but never really know. And when Perón was finally alone, in prison, these poetic images and associations burst forth in his mind. He idealized her madly; as far as he was concerned, she was no longer an actress with a tawdry past. She seduced an entire nation the same way. The secret was her dramatic poetic presence, combined with a touch of elusive distance; over time, you would see whatever you wanted to in her.

To this day people fantasize about what Eva was really like.

Familiarity destroys seduction. This rarely happens early on; there is so much to learn about a new person. But a midpoint may arrive when the target has begun to idealize and fantasize about you, only to discover that you are not what he or she thought. It is not a question of being seen too often, of being too available, as some imagine. In fact, if your targets see you too rarely, you give them nothing to feed on, and their attention may be caught by someone else; you have to occupy their mind. It is more a matter of being too consistent, too obvious, too human and real. Your targets cannot idealize you if they know too much about you, if they start to see you as all too human. Not only must you maintain a degree of distance, but there must be something fantastical and bewitching about you, sparking all kinds of delightful possibilities in their mind. The possibility Eva held out was the possibility that she was what in Argentine culture was considered

the ideal woman—devoted, motherly, saintly—but there are any number of poetic ideals you can try to embody. Chivalry, adventure, romance, and so on, are just as potent, and if you have a whiff of them about you, you can

breathe enough poetry into the air to fill people’s minds with fantasies and dreams. At all costs, you must embody something, even if it is roguery and evil. Anything to avoid the taint of familiarity and commonness.

What I need is a woman who is something, anything; either very beautiful or very kind or in

the last resort very wicked; very witty or very stupid, but something.

—ALFRED DE MUSSET

Keys to Seduction

We all have a self-image that is more flattering than the truth: we think of ourselves as more generous, selfless, honest, kindly, intelligent, or good- looking than in fact we are. It is extremely difficult for us to be honest with ourselves about our own limitations; we have a desperate need to idealize ourselves. As the writer Angela Carter remarks, we would rather align

ourselves with angels than with the higher primates from which we are actually descended.

Falling in love automatically tends toward madness. Left to itself, it goes to utter extremes.

This is well known by the “conquistadors” of both sexes. Once a woman’s attention is fixed upon a man, it is very easy for him to dominate her

thoughts completely. A simple game of blowing hot and cold, of solicitousness and disdain, of

presence and absence is all that is required. The rhythm of that technique acts upon a woman’s attention like a pneumatic machine and ends by emptying her of all the rest of the world. How well our people put it: “to suck one’s senses”! In fact: one is absorbed—absorbed by an object! Most

“love affairs” are reduced to this mechanical play of the beloved upon the lover’s attention. • The

only thing that can save a lover is a violent shock from the outside, a treatment which is forced upon him. Many think that absence and long trips are a good cure for lovers. Observe that these are cures for one’s attention. Distance from the beloved

starves our attention toward him; it prevents anything further from rekindling the attention. journeys, by physically obliging us to come out of ourselves and resolve hundreds of little problems, by uprooting us from our habitual setting and

forcing hundreds of unexpected objects upon us, succeed in breaking down the maniac’s haven and opening channels in his sealed consciousness,

through which fresh air and normal perspective enter.

—JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET, ON LOVE: ASPECTS OF A SINGLE THEME, TRANSLATED BY

TOBY TALBOT

This need to idealize extends to our romantic entanglements, because when we fall in love, or under the spell of another person, we see a reflection of ourselves. The choice we make in deciding to become involved with another person reveals something important and intimate about us: we resist seeing ourselves as having fallen for someone who is cheap or tacky or tasteless, because it reflects badly on who we are. Furthermore, we are often likely to fall for someone who resembles us in some way. Should that person be deficient, or worst of all ordinary, then there is something deficient and ordinary about us. No, at all costs the loved one must be overvalued and idealized, at least for the sake of our own self-esteem.

Besides, in a world that is harsh and full of disappointment, it is a great pleasure to be able to fantasize about a person you are involved with.

This makes the seducer’s task easy: people are dying to be given the chance to fantasize about you. Do not spoil this golden opportunity by overexposing yourself, or becoming so familiar and banal that the target

sees you exactly as you are. You do not have to be an angel, or a paragon of virtue—that would be quite boring. You can be dangerous, naughty, even somewhat vulgar, depending on the tastes of your victim. But never be ordinary or limited. In poetry (as opposed to reality), anything is possible.

Soon after we fall under a person’s spell, we form an image in our minds of who they are and what pleasures they might offer. Thinking of them when we are alone, we tend to make this image more and more idealized.

The novelist Stendhal, in his book On Love, calls this phenomenon

“crystallization,” telling the story of how, in Salzburg, Austria, they used to throw a leafless branch into the abandoned depths of a salt mine in the

middle of winter. When the branch was pulled out months later, it would be covered with spectacular crystals. That is what happens to a loved one in our minds.

According to Stendhal, though, there are two crystallizations. The first

happens when we first meet the person. The second and more important one happens later, when a bit of doubt creeps in—you desire the other person, but they elude you, you are not sure they are yours. This bit of doubt is critical—it makes your imagination work double, deepens the poeticizing process. In the seventeenth century, the great rake the Duc de Lauzun pulled off one of the most spectacular seductions in history—that of the Grande Mademoiselle, the cousin of King Louis XIV, and the wealthiest and most powerful woman in France. He tickled her imagination with a few brief

encounters at the court, letting her catch glimpses of his wit, his audacity,

his cool manner. She would begin to think of him when she was alone. Next she started to bump into him more often at court, and they would have little conversations or walks. When these meetings were over, she would be left with a doubt: is he or is he not interested in me? This made her want to see him more, in order to allay her doubts. She began to idealize him all out of proportion to the reality, for the duke was an incorrigible scoundrel.

Remember: if you are easily had, you cannot be worth that much. It is hard to wax poetic about a person who comes so cheaply. If, after the initial interest, you make it clear that you cannot be taken for granted, if you stir a bit of doubt, the target will imagine there is something special, lofty, and

unattainable about you. Your image will crystallize in the other person’s mind.

Cleopatra knew that she was really no different from any other woman, and in fact her face was not particularly beautiful. But she knew that men have a tendency to overvalue a woman. All that is required is to hint that there is something different about you, to make them associate you with

something grand or poetic. She made Caesar aware of her connection to the great kings and queens of Egypt’s past; with Antony, she created the fantasy that she was descended from Aphrodite herself. These men were cavorting not just with a strong-willed woman but a kind of goddess. Such

associations might be difficult to pull off today, but people still get deep pleasure from associating others with some kind of childhood fantasy figure. John F. Kennedy presented himself as a figure of chivalry—noble,

brave, charming. Pablo Picasso was not just a great painter with a thirst for young girls, he was the Minotaur of Greek legend, or the devilish trickster

figure that is so seductive to women. These associations should not be made too early; they are only powerful once the target has begun to fall under your spell, and is vulnerable to suggestion. A man who had just met

Cleopatra would have found the Aphrodite association ludicrous. But a person who is falling in love will believe almost anything. The trick is to

associate your image with something mythic, through the clothes you wear, the things you say, the places you go.

In Marcel Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past, the character Swann finds himself gradually seduced by a woman who is not really his type. He is an aesthete, and loves the finer things in life. She is of a lower class, less refined, even a little tasteless. What poeticizes her in his mind is a series of exuberant moments they share together, moments that from then on he associates with her. One of these is a concert in a salon that they attend, in which he is intoxicated by a little melody in a sonata. Whenever he thinks of her, he remembers this little phrase. Little gifts she has given him, objects she has touched or handled, begin to assume a life of their own. Any kind of heightened experience, artistic or spiritual, lingers in the mind much longer than normal experience. You must find a way to share such moments with your targets—a concert, a play, a spiritual encounter, whatever it takes—so that they associate something elevated with you.

Shared moments of exuberance have immense seductive pull. Also, any kind of object can be imbued with poetic resonance and sentimental associations, as discussed in the last chapter. The gifts you give and other objects can become imbued with your presence; if they are associated with

pleasant memories, the sight of them keeps you in mind and accelerates the poeticization process.

Although it is said that absence makes the heart grow fonder, an absence too early will prove deadly to the crystallization process. Like Eva Perón, you must surround your targets with focused attention, so that in those critical moments when they are alone, their mind is spinning with a kind of afterglow. Do everything you can to keep the target thinking about you.

Letters, mementos, gifts, unexpected meetings—all these give you an omnipresence. Everything must remind them of you.

Excessive familiarity can destroy crystallization. A charming girl of sixteen was becoming too fond of a handsome young man of the same age, who used to make a practice of passing beneath her window every evening at nightfall. Her mother invited him to spend a week with them in the country. It was a bold remedy, I admit, but the girl was of a

romantic disposition, and the young man a trifle dull; within three days she despised him.

—STENDHAL, LOVE, TRANSLATED BY GILBERT AND SUZANNE SALE

Finally, if your targets should see you as elevated and poetic, there is much to be gained by making them feel elevated and poeticized in their turn. The French writer Chateaubriand would make a woman feel like a goddess, she had such a powerful effect on him. He would send her poems that she supposedly had inspired. To make Queen Victoria feel as if she

were both a seductive woman and a great leader, Benjamin Disraeli would compare her to mythological figures and great predecessors, such as Queen Elizabeth I. By idealizing your targets this way, you will make them

idealize you in return, since you must be equally great to be able to

appreciate and see all of their fine qualities. They will also grow addicted to the elevated feeling you give them.

Symbol: The Halo. Slowly, when the target is alone, he or she

begins to imagine a kind of faint glow around your head, formed by all of the possible pleasures you might offer, the radiance of your charged presence, your noble qualities. The Halo separates you

from other people. Do not make it disappear by becoming familiar and ordinary.

Reversal

It might seem that the reverse tactic would be to reveal everything about yourself, to be completely honest about your faults and virtues. This kind of sincerity was a quality Lord Byron had—he almost got a thrill out of disclosing all of his nasty, ugly qualities, even going so far, later on in his life, as to tell people about his incestuous involvements with his half sister. This kind of dangerous intimacy can be immensely seductive. The target will poeticize your vices, and your honesty about them; they will start to see more than is there. In other words, the idealization process is unavoidable.

The only thing that cannot be idealized is mediocrity, but there is nothing seductive about mediocrity. There is no possible way to seduce without creating some kind of fantasy and poeticization.