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

[Arlo Bensinger]

[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.