Peacock rhetoric is the instinct for beauty. Beauty is athletic like the “Feathered Prince” who is crowned with lilies and peacock feathers. Athletes are strong and can throw us off guard. Beauty threw Darwin off or he threw it off because the instinct seems so useless for survival. Even the eyes of peacock’s tail cannot see! The Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay described Beauty as an assault. Here is a section of her poem “Assault” from the collection Second April.

I am waylaid by Beauty. Who will walk
Between me and the crying of the frogs?
Oh, savage Beauty, suffer me to pass,
That am a timid woman, on her way
From one house to another!

(“Assault” from Second April).

Beauty resembles the revenant—the arrival, the return, and the coming back of April from the dead of winter that buried sound of the frogs.

To be haunted by a peacock is to summon a practice of “writing with the shadows” (skiagraphia).

The House of My Sojourn follows the ghostly whisperings of women interred in the basement of rhetoric. Rhetoric had helped women to declare their rights, but the classical structure of the techne had been erected in terms of control and power over women’s capacity to speak in public and hold decision-making leadership roles. A new techne calls for Beauty. If I walked down the road to the House—the Capitol—would I hear frogs singing?

The peacock instinct—Beauty—dared me to pass between one house to another.

“ I am in the Capitol, climbing the stairs out of the basement to the Rotunda. Once I enter the Rotunda, I cross the threshold of the house of rhetoric. In this house, the Portrait Monument is my cairn. I use it to locate the trailhead and start following the stepping-stones that women set down during their moving toward the Capitol.” From The House of My Sojourn, “The Path—Then”