Arlo said t'all:
"... energies in which nature's art-impulses are satisfied in the most
immediate and direct way: first, on the one hand, in the pictorial world of
dreams, whose completeness is not dependent upon the intellectual attitude or
the artistic culture of any single being; and... as a drunken reality, which
likewise does not heed the single unit, but even seeks to destroy the
individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of Oneness." (Nietzsche)
... For Nietzsche, the Greek Dionysian was not simply biological
"licentiousness, whose waves overwhelmed all family life and its venerable
traditions" (Nietzsche). ...If the Apollonian tendency can indeed be mapped
onto the entirety of "static quality" (with the recognition that Nietzsche is
only immediately concerned with what would directly correspond to 'intellectual
quality'), it certainly seems here that the Dionysian is perhaps equatable to
Dynamic Quality itself. I've thought about this for a while, and I think its
better to think of these as Nietzsche does, as "impulses" or tendencies, and to
see one as the "tendency towards static quality" and the other as the "tendency
towards Dynamic Quality". So we are not really talking directly about "static
quality" but as the impulse that pulls these patterns out of the unpatterned
landscape, and we are not talking directly about "Dynamic Quality", but about
the impulse that shatters these stable patterns and pulls us towards
the immediate moment of experience. This is perhaps a subtle, if not
marginal, distinction, but I think a valuable one in considering Nietzsche's
view that "the continuous development of art" emerges from this duality, as it
tries to look, at least peripherally, as to how DQ/SQ interrelate or the
point/s of contact between the two.
dmb says:
Have you ever been that particular kind of drunk wherein you have that "mystic
feeling of Oneness"? I have. It's easy to imagine why the ancients thought of
it as a the power of a god, as a divine gift. It's also easy to see how wine
could get too much credit for it. I mean, you can go there without any booze
and you can drink your brains out and never know this feeling. The drinking is
neither necessary nor sufficient, and yet it is often involved in the
experience. Revelry is like that too, especially if there is live music
involved. Have you ever lost yourself in the crowd at a rock concert? Have you
ever been absorbed by a band in a smokey dive bar? If not, you have my sympathy
because it's downright religious and orgasmic. Dionysus is one god I can
believe in, but this is based on experience, not faith.
Orpheus is the son of Apollo and the Muse of epic poetry. He was a Dionysian
reformer. He loved the wild and the wild loved him and yet he thought their
rituals were too brutal and too wild. The Dionysian priestesses would work
themselves into a kind of ecstatic frenzy and then tear wild animals apart with
their bare hands and eat them raw. Orpheus was a vegan who thought that was the
wrong kind of naughty and wild. Chill out with the animal mutilation, baby, he
said to those priestesses. So they tore him apart with their bare hands, ripped
off his head and threw it in the river. Despite his murder, Orpheus's floating
head didn't stop singing. His aim was to mellow the wild with some daylight
rationality, the kind he got from dad's side of the family. Today we have
approximately the opposite kind of imbalance. There is way too much daylight
rationality and not enough drunken, dreaming wildness. Our culture was
potty-trained at gunpoint. We're in a neo-Victorian reactionary hi
storical moment and I'm pretty sure that tight-asses just don't get much
tighter. Seems like the whole freaking world has been baby-proofed and
Disneyfied. And what's less baby-friendly and McSafe than a motorcycle?
I'm thinking about Pirsig's complaints, especially those visceral images
wherein we are drinking life through a straw and wherein we are dogs racing
after a fake rabbit that can never be caught. The heartbreaking idea behind
those images goes way beyond words. They stir up something that you already
felt and knew on some level, no? Cut off from your own life, somehow, cut off
from nature both inner and outer. That's the prison that the "contrarians" feel
that they have to break out of or they're gonna die. It feels like slow
suffocation, a long drawn-out starvation diet, of never getting enough, like
something vital is missing. Wine is not the answer, but...
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