Oh please, just a little more clergie
I am in the thick of this paper on Cligès and have reached the point of panic and utter exhaustion. Its all the same. As usual, I have managed to write myself into a brick wall with mortar made of gum drops. I could take it apart but the bricks are heavy and typing with sticky hands is difficult. I am writing identity as a drawing after the outline, chivalry, narratology, social hope, and translatio, translation, and transfer according to Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Curtius, and Nietzsche, mixing citations from the 12th century with Nietzsche and Dryden, disaster desastre désastre. All the while I am erasing lines like: it is here that chevalerie and clergie break hands, …these processes create an overwhelming sense of movement in Cligès, a feeling of process, shifting, fanning, and flipping. All the while I am loving it. Its like opening a bag of flour incorrectly, dropping some on the floor, and then giving in to the urge to continue ripping, until the entire bag of flour is on the floor of a pristine kitchen. Then you roll in it, pushing it under the refrigerator and in all of the uncleanable corners.
I read over the paper I turned in last week and realized that I had written lines that start with sense and end in bad poetry: Aunque la imaginación, quizás por haber robado y propiciado la violencia de la Guardia Civil ha ganado, queda existiendo, gimiendo, en ese conflicto entre la imaginación y la realidad, “juego de luna y arena.” The last sentences of that paper address decadence and see-saws. May the gods (all of them) be kind.
The truth is, ah, I have said this so many times in the past months, I am still wondering why, well, the truth is, I am so burned out from this semester and yet so alive and wanting to read and learn, and FAN and FLIP, and more than anything, to write. And yes, I’ll say it just once more, because I am tiring of the term myself, oh yes,
the feral chorus is singing.
Burned-out and very alive? Panic and exhaustion? Nietzsche and chevalerie? Clergie and flipbook? luna y arena?
désastre in progress?
Oh Eliot! A friend showed me your lovely poem.
...The river is within us, the sea is all about us;
The sea is the land's edge also, the granite
Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses
Its hints of earlier and other creation:
The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone;
The pools where it offers to our curiosity
The more delicate algae and the sea anemone.
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
(The Dry Salvages, No. 3 of 'Four Quartets').
I am not sure where I’ve ended up in this dichotomy that is not really a dichotomy at all. A foot in each? Doubtful. I have one broken oar at my side, a shattered lobsterpot in my garage and am shaking hands with the shoe of the foreign dead man throwing starfish. Horseshoe curiosity, broken creation, granite loss—I’m still thinking its all one voice.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Friday, December 15, 2006
Thursday, December 14, 2006
The translation of translatio
Several nonsensical ideas I am pondering as I write today:
When I think Chivalry, I am thinking: the chasing of a name, the fruition of a name through deeds, exploits, acts.
What name is ultimately being chased and remade in Cligés? How is Chrétien ultimately involved in a contest of chivalry himself, a performance of deeds? How are these deeds not just rhetorical, but also a violent proces of becoming of a man's identity? There is more than character identity shifting. Chretien is flipping, becoming. He is winning his ideniity through a proess of translation and transfer. In the end, the translatio in Cligés is about Chrétien. Whoever he might be.
This citation is packed. I am looking for some of its meanings. All day.
:
One can gauge the degree of the historical sensibility an age possesses by the manner in which it translates and by the manner in which it seeks to incorporate past epochs and books into its own being. Corneille’s Frenchmen—and even those of the revolution—took hold of Roman antiquity in a manner that we—thanks to our more refined sense of history—would no longer have the courage to employ. And the Roman antiquity itself: how violently, and at the same time, how naively, it pressed its hand upon everything good and sublime in the older periods of ancient Greece! Consider how the Romans translated this material to suit their own age and how, intentionally as well as carelessly, they swished into the oblivion the dust from a butterfly’s wing—thus obliterating its one unique moment! Horace, off and on, translated Alcaeus or Archilochus; Propertius translated Callimachus and Philetas (poets who were in the same rank of Theocritus, if we permitted to make such a judgment). How little concern these translators had for this or that experience by an original creator who had imbued his poem with symbols of such experiences! Being poets themselves, these translators were averse to the ancient intuitive spirit that preceded the historical sensibility. As poets they did not recognize the existence of the purely personal images and names of anything that served as the national costume or mask of a city, a costal area, or a century, and therefore immediately replaced all this by present realities and by things Roman. They seemed to ask us: “Shall we not refurbish antiquity to suit our own purposes and should we ourselves not becomes comfortable in this newly established entity? Why can’t we breathe our soul into this dead body—for it is dead, no doubt, and how ugly all dead things are!”. (From Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882).
One reflection. Today I realized that
literatureislifeandlifeisliterature.
When I say I read people like books, I think: that's a nice idea, but that it is just an idea from the literature space part corner of me. There is not a literature space part corner of me and this space that I am writing in now is not sacred. Not special. Its all one space. We are living one space. There is never any turning off. Everything and everyone just floats. And that is the problem.
Several nonsensical ideas I am pondering as I write today:
When I think Chivalry, I am thinking: the chasing of a name, the fruition of a name through deeds, exploits, acts.
What name is ultimately being chased and remade in Cligés? How is Chrétien ultimately involved in a contest of chivalry himself, a performance of deeds? How are these deeds not just rhetorical, but also a violent proces of becoming of a man's identity? There is more than character identity shifting. Chretien is flipping, becoming. He is winning his ideniity through a proess of translation and transfer. In the end, the translatio in Cligés is about Chrétien. Whoever he might be.
This citation is packed. I am looking for some of its meanings. All day.
:
One can gauge the degree of the historical sensibility an age possesses by the manner in which it translates and by the manner in which it seeks to incorporate past epochs and books into its own being. Corneille’s Frenchmen—and even those of the revolution—took hold of Roman antiquity in a manner that we—thanks to our more refined sense of history—would no longer have the courage to employ. And the Roman antiquity itself: how violently, and at the same time, how naively, it pressed its hand upon everything good and sublime in the older periods of ancient Greece! Consider how the Romans translated this material to suit their own age and how, intentionally as well as carelessly, they swished into the oblivion the dust from a butterfly’s wing—thus obliterating its one unique moment! Horace, off and on, translated Alcaeus or Archilochus; Propertius translated Callimachus and Philetas (poets who were in the same rank of Theocritus, if we permitted to make such a judgment). How little concern these translators had for this or that experience by an original creator who had imbued his poem with symbols of such experiences! Being poets themselves, these translators were averse to the ancient intuitive spirit that preceded the historical sensibility. As poets they did not recognize the existence of the purely personal images and names of anything that served as the national costume or mask of a city, a costal area, or a century, and therefore immediately replaced all this by present realities and by things Roman. They seemed to ask us: “Shall we not refurbish antiquity to suit our own purposes and should we ourselves not becomes comfortable in this newly established entity? Why can’t we breathe our soul into this dead body—for it is dead, no doubt, and how ugly all dead things are!”. (From Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882).
One reflection. Today I realized that
literatureislifeandlifeisliterature.
When I say I read people like books, I think: that's a nice idea, but that it is just an idea from the literature space part corner of me. There is not a literature space part corner of me and this space that I am writing in now is not sacred. Not special. Its all one space. We are living one space. There is never any turning off. Everything and everyone just floats. And that is the problem.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Decadence takes off [its] coat: some background and too much literature.
Calinescu (Five Faces of Modernity), reminds us that even the Greeks were complaining about decadence, citing Plato, Philebus 16c,”The men of early times, were better than we and nearer to the Gods”. Christianity seemed to have decadence on the mind when it fashioned concepts like the Last Judgment. Even though I’ve just started to think about decadence, other people, well, not the same ones, have been doing it for at least 2000 years. Probably since the beginning of man.
Decadence wasn’t ever wearing a coat. Its just not its style. Really, it might not have much of a style at all and that is part of the problem. It runs from tradition and linear time, from the concepts, moving in a zigzag pattern with detours, progressing, but only aimlessly, towards some other world, word, or space. Nietzsche, drawing on Paul Bourget’s Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883), decided, nevertheless, that it was safe to make a few comments on “the style of decadence”:
What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the simile of every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disaggregation of the will…”
Thus, decadence’s style is a taking apart, a disintegration of established norms and boundaries and perhaps more importantly, of the “will”. A jumping off of linear, horizontal, we might say Christian time, departing from tradition, and trading it for obscurity, confusion, the brilliance of some in exchange for the sacrifice of many, a trading-in of a worn mass for something or someone that gleams. It is worth sacrificing these wholes to produce a brilliant few, few being intellectuals, works of literature, art, and music? Who and what are the wholes? People? Institutions? Time? Categories? What does it really mean to put these wholes to death such that the “page gains life”? I wonder if “taking apart” is really the correct way to express this disaggregation. It seems like “taking apart” would be more appropriate than falling apart.
Despite its lack of style, sorry, dear decadence, I suspect there is some plan, or at least a clear motive in its becoming (or is it degeneration?). Here I seem to have pointed out that there might not be much difference between "progress" and "decadence".
A last brief thought to continue tomorrow: How is decadence related to imagination?
Writing about poor Lorca today, thinking about decadence, or should I say, moving towards decadence, or probably, really, moving away from it, the following occurred to me:
If the metaphoric and metonymic processes in some of his Romancero Gitano poems work in a seesaw fashion, bouncing back and forth between plain/prosaic and image, between narration and metaphor, might we say that this seesaw has a parallel with the readers own perception and will?; that is, his processes, seesawing back and forth between deciding either to step into the other world, into the disaggregation, or to stay in linear time?
Calinescu (Five Faces of Modernity), reminds us that even the Greeks were complaining about decadence, citing Plato, Philebus 16c,”The men of early times, were better than we and nearer to the Gods”. Christianity seemed to have decadence on the mind when it fashioned concepts like the Last Judgment. Even though I’ve just started to think about decadence, other people, well, not the same ones, have been doing it for at least 2000 years. Probably since the beginning of man.
Decadence wasn’t ever wearing a coat. Its just not its style. Really, it might not have much of a style at all and that is part of the problem. It runs from tradition and linear time, from the concepts, moving in a zigzag pattern with detours, progressing, but only aimlessly, towards some other world, word, or space. Nietzsche, drawing on Paul Bourget’s Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883), decided, nevertheless, that it was safe to make a few comments on “the style of decadence”:
What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the simile of every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disaggregation of the will…”
Thus, decadence’s style is a taking apart, a disintegration of established norms and boundaries and perhaps more importantly, of the “will”. A jumping off of linear, horizontal, we might say Christian time, departing from tradition, and trading it for obscurity, confusion, the brilliance of some in exchange for the sacrifice of many, a trading-in of a worn mass for something or someone that gleams. It is worth sacrificing these wholes to produce a brilliant few, few being intellectuals, works of literature, art, and music? Who and what are the wholes? People? Institutions? Time? Categories? What does it really mean to put these wholes to death such that the “page gains life”? I wonder if “taking apart” is really the correct way to express this disaggregation. It seems like “taking apart” would be more appropriate than falling apart.
Despite its lack of style, sorry, dear decadence, I suspect there is some plan, or at least a clear motive in its becoming (or is it degeneration?). Here I seem to have pointed out that there might not be much difference between "progress" and "decadence".
A last brief thought to continue tomorrow: How is decadence related to imagination?
Writing about poor Lorca today, thinking about decadence, or should I say, moving towards decadence, or probably, really, moving away from it, the following occurred to me:
If the metaphoric and metonymic processes in some of his Romancero Gitano poems work in a seesaw fashion, bouncing back and forth between plain/prosaic and image, between narration and metaphor, might we say that this seesaw has a parallel with the readers own perception and will?; that is, his processes, seesawing back and forth between deciding either to step into the other world, into the disaggregation, or to stay in linear time?
Monday, December 11, 2006
Jorobada y nocturna: a bit more decadence (actually, corruption).
Poor Wagner is “the Cagliostro of modernity,” a “typical decadent who has a sense of necessity in his corrupted taste, who claims it is a higher taste, who knows how to get his corruption accepted as law, as progress, as fulfillment” (Birth of Tragedy). Decadance, I recall, is a danger because it shows itself as its oppostite. Dear decadence, do you know you are a liar? I think so.
Wagner wasn’t really poor at all: he was an individualist, a maker of new music, a Dionysus who had control of his instrument. He also seemed not to be able to let go of tradition and perhaps according to Nietzsche, at the end of it all, was a liar who knew the “truth”, but refused to live it.
What does “corruption” mean here? How do we recognize corruption? What is behind it?
Corrupt is sometime solicitors with images of starving children on coffee mugs who keep the change, its countries whose governments participate in the slaughter of their citizens, its, well, its a lot of things, from the kid who used to beat up my mom on her way to school to civil war.
I suspect that in this case, in the case of Wagner, and maybe in many others, there is something good behind corruption and that for Nietzche, my pedestrian conception of corruption would be as boring as a Catholic Christmas-eve sermon. Remembering that one of Nietzsche’s jobs as a philosopher was to see deeper, to eradicate believe in the concepts, the hard lifeless noumena, I have to ask: is corruption a concept? If so, what was there before it became solid? Can it ever melt again?
Let’s see:
What is generally overlooked is that the ancient national energy and national passion that became gloriously visible in war and warlike games have now been transmuted into countless private passions…Thus it is precisely in times of “exhaustion” that tragedy runs through houses and streets, that great love and great hatred are born, and that the flame of knowledge flares up into the sky (The Gay Science)
It seems that times of exhaustion, which may or may not be on a similar plane with corruption, give us not just about wars and bullies (if those are around at all), but rather give rise to something beautiful: “corruption is merely a nasty word for the autumn of a people”. Who are these people? New intellectuals, born strong from extreme torment? I’ve seen this movie before. Is corruption a “natural” process? How is it related to decadence?
More to come.
Friday, December 08, 2006
Conte do
Today in a conversation with someone else I asked myself why I can enter so-called theoretical texts more easily. I am going to let this vague, likely meaningless categorization go.
Today its one for the drawer.
Why is it, then, that despite not being able to understand it, I jump right in as I read (silently):
Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence—I had reasons. “Good and evil” is merely a variation of that problem. Once one has developed a keen eye for the symptoms of decline, one understands morality, too—one understands what is hiding under its most sacred names and value formulas: impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness. Morality negates life. (The Case of Wagner).
Why do I feel my heart hurt and see my face hiding when I hear myself read aloud:
Mientras por competir con tu cabello,
oro bruñido al sol relumbra en vano;
mientras con menosprecio en medio el llano
mira tu blanca frente el lilio bello;
mientras a cada labio, por cogello,
siguen más ojos que al clavel temprano;
y mientras triunfa con desdén lozano
del luciente cristal tu gentil cuello;
goza cuello, cabello, labio y frente,
antes que lo que fue en tu edad dorada
oro, lilio, clavel, cristal luciente,
no sólo en plata o viola troncada
se vuelva, mas tú y ello juntamente
en tierra, en humo, en polvo, en sombra, en nada. (Góngora Soneto CLXVI)
Because I think I should understand it. As opposed, for example, to the freedom I feel when I sit in a class where I have every right, well, 5 out of 6 rights to not know, to have no idea. Unfortunately, it is when I think I have the right to no idea that I begin to have ideas. Why do I have no fear of my weak readings and questioning of the Nietzsche citation? What is decadence for Nietzsche? Well, decadence is a liar who lies so well that his lies seem like the truth. Worse yet, decadence’s lies seem even more verisimilar than truth. Decadence’s winter coat, what she shows herself to be, what she tells the lady next door is: I want something more, a higher, truer life. Dear decadence: do you know you are lying?
I’m a liar. Maybe that is why I think that there is more space to jump in and read in a theoretical text. My silent wondering allows for all my confusion and neurosis to float pleasantly, landing here and there, on Nietzsche’s earlobe back to my grandmother’s hands. Wandering, really, en nada in particular. I let go: I let myself lie over and over again until I reach some sort of momentary conclusion, that will probably mean nothing tomorrow. In poetry, I trip on the metaphors and sprain my ankle midway, laboring to get up, but too afraid to try for fear I will see something really me, as pathetic as the present statement: a truth about me I don’t like, as opposed to the nice echo of a piece of desirable me I get from theory. Feel good confusion vs. not know guilt.
Oh, Nietzsche! I address you apostrophically because I really want to know: am I hardening the poems into life destroying concepts, precluding any escape into a metaphor? Am I wearing decadence’s coat? Tell me please, whisper it: you know I like it better where its all quiet and nothing but my pleasant confusion. I should really apologize to Gónogra: Sorry sorry night.
My new goal is to read Gónogra's poem while sitting on Nietzsche’s earlobe.
Today in a conversation with someone else I asked myself why I can enter so-called theoretical texts more easily. I am going to let this vague, likely meaningless categorization go.
Today its one for the drawer.
Why is it, then, that despite not being able to understand it, I jump right in as I read (silently):
Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of decadence—I had reasons. “Good and evil” is merely a variation of that problem. Once one has developed a keen eye for the symptoms of decline, one understands morality, too—one understands what is hiding under its most sacred names and value formulas: impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness. Morality negates life. (The Case of Wagner).
Why do I feel my heart hurt and see my face hiding when I hear myself read aloud:
Mientras por competir con tu cabello,
oro bruñido al sol relumbra en vano;
mientras con menosprecio en medio el llano
mira tu blanca frente el lilio bello;
mientras a cada labio, por cogello,
siguen más ojos que al clavel temprano;
y mientras triunfa con desdén lozano
del luciente cristal tu gentil cuello;
goza cuello, cabello, labio y frente,
antes que lo que fue en tu edad dorada
oro, lilio, clavel, cristal luciente,
no sólo en plata o viola troncada
se vuelva, mas tú y ello juntamente
en tierra, en humo, en polvo, en sombra, en nada. (Góngora Soneto CLXVI)
Because I think I should understand it. As opposed, for example, to the freedom I feel when I sit in a class where I have every right, well, 5 out of 6 rights to not know, to have no idea. Unfortunately, it is when I think I have the right to no idea that I begin to have ideas. Why do I have no fear of my weak readings and questioning of the Nietzsche citation? What is decadence for Nietzsche? Well, decadence is a liar who lies so well that his lies seem like the truth. Worse yet, decadence’s lies seem even more verisimilar than truth. Decadence’s winter coat, what she shows herself to be, what she tells the lady next door is: I want something more, a higher, truer life. Dear decadence: do you know you are lying?
I’m a liar. Maybe that is why I think that there is more space to jump in and read in a theoretical text. My silent wondering allows for all my confusion and neurosis to float pleasantly, landing here and there, on Nietzsche’s earlobe back to my grandmother’s hands. Wandering, really, en nada in particular. I let go: I let myself lie over and over again until I reach some sort of momentary conclusion, that will probably mean nothing tomorrow. In poetry, I trip on the metaphors and sprain my ankle midway, laboring to get up, but too afraid to try for fear I will see something really me, as pathetic as the present statement: a truth about me I don’t like, as opposed to the nice echo of a piece of desirable me I get from theory. Feel good confusion vs. not know guilt.
Oh, Nietzsche! I address you apostrophically because I really want to know: am I hardening the poems into life destroying concepts, precluding any escape into a metaphor? Am I wearing decadence’s coat? Tell me please, whisper it: you know I like it better where its all quiet and nothing but my pleasant confusion. I should really apologize to Gónogra: Sorry sorry night.
My new goal is to read Gónogra's poem while sitting on Nietzsche’s earlobe.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
Oh, tell me a novel conte
I would, it I knew what that meant. Actually, for now, I’d be happy to know what conte means in terms of Cligès.
When I think about what might be happening in Cligès, I think about a big paper fan decorated with images. The fan begins closed and gradually opens up, one section, one crease at a time. What starts as a solid white voice of a poet-narrator gains color, complexity, and Chrétien as a narrative is revealed, and the fan opened up. What is being created in this romance? What is revealed? What is rewritten, transposed, shifted? What kind of images do we see: are they easy to discern, blurred, changing?
If its not a fan, the maybe this romance is a flipbook with many pages: as we flip through its pages, it is not only the characters that shift on the page, changing identity
(e.g. Alexander’s constructing of one of his early identities in a foreign county, self-betrayal, in matters of love [eyes betraying heart, eyes betraying reason] concealment of “true” feelings in the public sphere, their revelation in private, the questions: what’s in name, who uses what name, when is it appropriate to call a person such and such name)
but also the narrator himself. This narrator, who might be called Chrétien, a pushy force who poses questions and reflects on style and the validity of certain statements throughout the narrative, transposes himself on several of the “actual” characters in different moments in the narrative, including: Alexander, Cligès, and Thessala. More than simply the rewriting and the inclusion of what we might call “source material” (pieces from Ovid, the Tristan legend) there is a bigger translation happening here: a creation of book and author.
What is a conte? How do we make it? Who makes it?
Douglas Kelly (The Art of Medieval French Romance) cites a terrific quotation of Henry Miller. I cite it here:
What matter? There’s more where that came from…I have only to turn it on or off…I’m a prestidigitator, I am. And from the lie I would make a truth. I’d spool it off (my unfinished opus) like a man possessed—themes, sub-themes, variations, detours, parentheses—as if the only thing I thought about the livelong day was creation. With this of course went considerable charming.
I am going to avoid (at least for now), a discussion of what conte means, to ask the following:
Is Chrétien a prestidigitador? Is he a man possesed making a truth from lies? What kind of truth is Chrétien making? How does he create, and most importantly, what is his creation? By the end of Cligès, what has happened? Who now exists that didn’t exist before? What has died? What is the story? How was the story and the characters shifed on the page? Fan and flipbook, what kind of conte have you told?
I would, it I knew what that meant. Actually, for now, I’d be happy to know what conte means in terms of Cligès.
When I think about what might be happening in Cligès, I think about a big paper fan decorated with images. The fan begins closed and gradually opens up, one section, one crease at a time. What starts as a solid white voice of a poet-narrator gains color, complexity, and Chrétien as a narrative is revealed, and the fan opened up. What is being created in this romance? What is revealed? What is rewritten, transposed, shifted? What kind of images do we see: are they easy to discern, blurred, changing?
If its not a fan, the maybe this romance is a flipbook with many pages: as we flip through its pages, it is not only the characters that shift on the page, changing identity
(e.g. Alexander’s constructing of one of his early identities in a foreign county, self-betrayal, in matters of love [eyes betraying heart, eyes betraying reason] concealment of “true” feelings in the public sphere, their revelation in private, the questions: what’s in name, who uses what name, when is it appropriate to call a person such and such name)
but also the narrator himself. This narrator, who might be called Chrétien, a pushy force who poses questions and reflects on style and the validity of certain statements throughout the narrative, transposes himself on several of the “actual” characters in different moments in the narrative, including: Alexander, Cligès, and Thessala. More than simply the rewriting and the inclusion of what we might call “source material” (pieces from Ovid, the Tristan legend) there is a bigger translation happening here: a creation of book and author.
What is a conte? How do we make it? Who makes it?
Douglas Kelly (The Art of Medieval French Romance) cites a terrific quotation of Henry Miller. I cite it here:
What matter? There’s more where that came from…I have only to turn it on or off…I’m a prestidigitator, I am. And from the lie I would make a truth. I’d spool it off (my unfinished opus) like a man possessed—themes, sub-themes, variations, detours, parentheses—as if the only thing I thought about the livelong day was creation. With this of course went considerable charming.
I am going to avoid (at least for now), a discussion of what conte means, to ask the following:
Is Chrétien a prestidigitador? Is he a man possesed making a truth from lies? What kind of truth is Chrétien making? How does he create, and most importantly, what is his creation? By the end of Cligès, what has happened? Who now exists that didn’t exist before? What has died? What is the story? How was the story and the characters shifed on the page? Fan and flipbook, what kind of conte have you told?
Sunday, December 03, 2006
Distanced from Dionysius and far from the sun: some notes on the Birth of Tragedy
The Apollonian-Dionysian duality: how can it help us to understand varying points or experiences of the artistic process? Nietzsche connects Apollo and Dionysos, respectively, not only to the plastic arts and/versus the non-visual art of music, but also to dreams and intoxication. All of these pairs in my view (and probably outside the scope of this text), are not typically considered opposites, and might be better described as marriages, maybe marriages of varying degrees of happiness.
Do we, like the Greeks, also have a deep necessity for dreams? If the Greeks’ sense of necessity for dream experiences was expressed in the image of Apollo, who or what stands for our need for dreams? Do we think we need dreams?
Nietzsche quotes Die Meistersinger (Hans Sachs) and tells us that the interpretation of dream’s is a task for poet. He continues, suggesting that those who are responsive to the stimuli of art (?), [artists? intellectuals?] respond to dreams much as philosophers approach the reality of existence. The philosopher, like those responsive to art, observes exactly and “enjoys his observations, for it is by these images that he interprets life, by these processes that he rehearses it.” The philosopher and the artists, then, are talented observers that hold a privileged position that allows them to interpret life differently, but not only to interpret, but also to “rehearse” life. This begs the simple question: if the privileged are rehearsing life what are the rest of us doing? Who are the privileged? What do they look like?
Apollo not only stands for the necessity of dreams, but is also a divine image of the principium individuationis [Schopenhauer], man’s state of individuality, his separateness from the chaos of life (as opposed to Dionysus, who represents the disintegration of the principium individuationis). What is the relationship between Apollo and Dionysus for Nietzcshe? Is it hierarchical? Does Dionysus take over when the limits of reason (eg. when Apollo has done his best and cannot go any farther) do not allow for future artistic growth?
Nietzsche tells us that man has the unique capacity to forget what he knows, to trick himself. Hayden White (Metahistory) provides a synthesis of this idea that no brief citation of the Birth of Tragedy could capture:
...[man] has an ability to dream, to frolic in images, and to clothe the terror, pain, and suffering caused by consciousness of his own finitude in dream-like interpretations of immortality. He can bewitch himself, escape into a Metaphor, provide a believable order and form for his life, act as if the Metaphor were the truth, and turn his awareness of his imminent destruction into an occasion for heroic affirmation.
This escape into a metaphor presupposes a rejection of metonymic conceptions of the world; instead of arranging life into “concepts”, the reduction, the simplification of events into agencies, or of phenomena into “manifestations”, we should "frolic in images".
Again White:
Most of the killing illusions of modern, no less than of primitive, man arose as a result of a tendency toward Metonymical reductions of events into agencies, or of “phenomena” into “manifestations” of imagined “noumenal” substances…To dissolve belief in these imagined noumena, substances, spiritual agents, and the like, was Nietzsche’s principal aim as a philosopher. To expose the illusions produced by what was, in the end, only a linguistic habit, to free consciousness from its own powers of illusion-making, so that the imagination could once more “frolic in images” without hardening those images into life-destroying “concepts”…By means of Metonymy men create agents and agencies behind phenomena; by means of Synecdoche they endow these agents and agencies with specific qualities, and most especially the quality of being something other than what they are.
What does it mean to reduce events into agencies? What is it to mold and subsequently harden events into agencies? Is Nietzsche’s conception of noumena similar to Kant’s? [distinction between things as they appear to us and things as they are in themselves] Can we ever know or understand noumena? What is the danger of endowing agents and agencies with certain qualities, the quality of being something “other than what they are”? How is (if it is at all) this assigning of meaning, a dumping of characteristics onto a phenomenon similar to metaphor? Why can’t we “frolic” in concepts? Do the meanings and qualities assigned hold us back, stunt our ability to create myth, disable our imaginative qualities, distance us from Dionysus?
More to come.
The Apollonian-Dionysian duality: how can it help us to understand varying points or experiences of the artistic process? Nietzsche connects Apollo and Dionysos, respectively, not only to the plastic arts and/versus the non-visual art of music, but also to dreams and intoxication. All of these pairs in my view (and probably outside the scope of this text), are not typically considered opposites, and might be better described as marriages, maybe marriages of varying degrees of happiness.
Do we, like the Greeks, also have a deep necessity for dreams? If the Greeks’ sense of necessity for dream experiences was expressed in the image of Apollo, who or what stands for our need for dreams? Do we think we need dreams?
Nietzsche quotes Die Meistersinger (Hans Sachs) and tells us that the interpretation of dream’s is a task for poet. He continues, suggesting that those who are responsive to the stimuli of art (?), [artists? intellectuals?] respond to dreams much as philosophers approach the reality of existence. The philosopher, like those responsive to art, observes exactly and “enjoys his observations, for it is by these images that he interprets life, by these processes that he rehearses it.” The philosopher and the artists, then, are talented observers that hold a privileged position that allows them to interpret life differently, but not only to interpret, but also to “rehearse” life. This begs the simple question: if the privileged are rehearsing life what are the rest of us doing? Who are the privileged? What do they look like?
Apollo not only stands for the necessity of dreams, but is also a divine image of the principium individuationis [Schopenhauer], man’s state of individuality, his separateness from the chaos of life (as opposed to Dionysus, who represents the disintegration of the principium individuationis). What is the relationship between Apollo and Dionysus for Nietzcshe? Is it hierarchical? Does Dionysus take over when the limits of reason (eg. when Apollo has done his best and cannot go any farther) do not allow for future artistic growth?
Nietzsche tells us that man has the unique capacity to forget what he knows, to trick himself. Hayden White (Metahistory) provides a synthesis of this idea that no brief citation of the Birth of Tragedy could capture:
...[man] has an ability to dream, to frolic in images, and to clothe the terror, pain, and suffering caused by consciousness of his own finitude in dream-like interpretations of immortality. He can bewitch himself, escape into a Metaphor, provide a believable order and form for his life, act as if the Metaphor were the truth, and turn his awareness of his imminent destruction into an occasion for heroic affirmation.
This escape into a metaphor presupposes a rejection of metonymic conceptions of the world; instead of arranging life into “concepts”, the reduction, the simplification of events into agencies, or of phenomena into “manifestations”, we should "frolic in images".
Again White:
Most of the killing illusions of modern, no less than of primitive, man arose as a result of a tendency toward Metonymical reductions of events into agencies, or of “phenomena” into “manifestations” of imagined “noumenal” substances…To dissolve belief in these imagined noumena, substances, spiritual agents, and the like, was Nietzsche’s principal aim as a philosopher. To expose the illusions produced by what was, in the end, only a linguistic habit, to free consciousness from its own powers of illusion-making, so that the imagination could once more “frolic in images” without hardening those images into life-destroying “concepts”…By means of Metonymy men create agents and agencies behind phenomena; by means of Synecdoche they endow these agents and agencies with specific qualities, and most especially the quality of being something other than what they are.
What does it mean to reduce events into agencies? What is it to mold and subsequently harden events into agencies? Is Nietzsche’s conception of noumena similar to Kant’s? [distinction between things as they appear to us and things as they are in themselves] Can we ever know or understand noumena? What is the danger of endowing agents and agencies with certain qualities, the quality of being something “other than what they are”? How is (if it is at all) this assigning of meaning, a dumping of characteristics onto a phenomenon similar to metaphor? Why can’t we “frolic” in concepts? Do the meanings and qualities assigned hold us back, stunt our ability to create myth, disable our imaginative qualities, distance us from Dionysus?
More to come.
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