[DMB]
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.
[Arlo]
No doubt. There is a book called "Supernatural" by Graham Hancock you
might want to check out. It takes a new look at the world of
'hallucination' (or as many have said 'de-hallucination'). I don't agree
with some of his conclusions, but its hard to escape the very obvious
historical fact that nearly every 'society' throughout every 'age' has
used mind-expanding substances to empower their 'religions' and their
'art'. Even the philosophy we are here to discuss has its origins in a
peyote ritual. Nietzsche is careful to disassociate Dionysian from raw
hedonistic biological quality, and I think that is an important
correlation with Pirsig's ideas.
[DMB]
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 ...
[Arlo]
Absolutely. The fallback of the (failed) hippie movement has been one
that has been rapidly pursuing Victorian culture. You can see this in
religious trends, economic trends, political trends and social trends.
I'd go so far to say as we are about as far away on the pendulum swing
from the beat hippies (like Pirsig and Kerouac and the Merry Pranksters,
and Lennon and Dylan and so on) as possible. My only real hope is that,
given history, the pendulum will start to swing back, although it will
be a decades long ride before we ever get back there. Nietzsche
definitely parallels Pirsig in bemoaning the dominance of Apollonian
impulse in the modern world, and like you pointed out had hopes that
some forms of modern art would restore the Dionysian balance.
[DMB]
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...
[Arlo]
Well, its not "the" answer but it can be "a" answer in that many forms
of static habituation are nearly impossible to crack without some
alteration of consciousness. This is near heretical to say in our modern
Prim and Pure Victorian world, where the goal should be to be good and
responsible 'citizens', to work hard and in silence and to die without
causing too many ripples in the social fabric. But when you look back
anthropologically and find some variance of fermentation or narcotic
farming in nearly every single culture, its hard to discount that this
not just a biological perversion to be overcome by Holier-than-Thou
prudery, but has something significant to offer to the human condition.
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