[MD] The Birth of Tragedy/CH2 and the MOQ

[david buchanan]

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 historical 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...