Edition #12
Rio de Janeiro, 2009
“DKANDLE weaves swirling multi-colored vibrant unearthly soundscapes, blending fuzzy and reverberating Shoegaze textures, mesmerizing Dream Pop meditations, sludgy Grungey tones and moody Post-punk strains, heightened with soul-stirring lyricism and pensive emotive vocalizations”
Excerpts ON MUSIC from Nietzsche's first book
Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life. Without objectivity, without pure disinterested contemplation, we can never believe in the slightest truly artistic production.
Singing and dancing, man manifests himself as a member of a higher community: he has unlearned how to walk and talk, and is about to fly dancing into the air. From his gestures, enchantment speaks. Just as now animals speak and the earth gives milk and honey, something supernatural also sounds from within man: he feels like a god, he himself now walks enraptured and exalted as he saw the gods walk in his dreams. Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: the artistic force of all nature, for the delightful satisfaction of the primordial One, reveals itself here in the tremors of intoxication.
Based on our aesthetic metaphysics here exposed, we can explain the case of the lyric poet in the following manner. He first became, as a Dionysian artist, completely one with the primordial One, with its pain and contradiction, and produces the reflection of this primordial One in the form of music. This music becomes visible to him, as in a dreamlike image, under the Apollonian influence of dreams.
The poet, as the moving center of the world, must say "I": only this "I-ness" [Ichheit] is not the same as that of the empirical-real, awake man, but rather the only truly existing [seienden] and eternal "I-ness", resting in the depths of things, through whose reflected images the lyric genius gazes into the core of being.
To the extent that a subject is an artist, he is already freed from his individual will and has become, as it were, a medium through which the only truly existing Subject celebrates its redemption in appearance. We already are, for the true creator of this world, artistic images and projections. Therefore, all our artistic knowledge is fundamentally entirely illusory because we, as knowers, do not form one single identical thing with that being who, as the sole creator and spectator of this comedy of art, prepares an eternal enjoyment for itself.
Melody is the first and most universal thing, and thus can endure multiple objectifications, in multiple texts.
How does music appear in the mirror of imagery and concept? It appears as will, that is, as opposition to the purely contemplative, will-less aesthetic state of mind.
We have pointed out the only possible relationship between poetry and music, word and sound: the word, the image, the concept seek an expression analogous to music and now endure in themselves the power of music.
Lyric poetry depends as much on the spirit of music, as music itself, in its complete illimitation, does not need image and concept but only tolerates them beside itself. The poetry of the lyricist cannot express anything that is not already found, with the most prodigious generality and omnivalidity, in the music that compelled him to use imagistic discourse.
Precisely for this reason, it is impossible, with language, to fully attain the universal symbolism of music, because it symbolically refers to the primordial contradiction and pain at the heart of the primordial One, thereby symbolizing a sphere that is above and beyond all appearance. Before it, all appearance is merely a likeness: hence why language, as the organ and symbol of appearances, can never and nowhere be capable of turning out the innermost part of music, but remains always, as soon as it sets out to imitate it, merely in external contact with it, while the deepest meaning of music cannot, even with the greatest lyrical eloquence, be brought one step closer to us.
The optimistic dialectic, with the whip of its syllogisms, drives music out of tragedy: that is to say, it destroys the essence of tragedy, an essence which can only be interpreted as a manifestation and configuration of Dionysian states, as a visible symbolization of music, as the dream world of Dionysian intoxication.
Music is a character and origin different from all other arts because it is not, like all the others, a reflection [Abbild] of the phenomenon, but an immediate reflection of the will itself and, therefore, represents, for all that is physical in the world, the metaphysical, and for all phenomena, the thing in itself.
Schopenhauer, in "The World as Will and Representation," says: "Music, considered as an expression of the world, is a universal language in the highest degree, which even stands in relation to the universality of concepts somewhat as those concepts stand to individual things. Its universality is by no means that empty universality of abstraction, but of a completely different kind, and is joined with a precise and detailed determination. In this, it resembles geometric figures and numbers, which, as the universal forms of all possible objects of experience, and applicable to all a priori, are nevertheless not abstract but intuitive and entirely determined. (…) Metaphysics differs from all other arts in that it is not a reflection of the phenomenon or, more accurately, of the adequate objectivity [Objektität] of the will, but an immediate reflection of the will itself and, therefore, represents the metaphysical for all that is physical in the world, the thing in itself for all phenomena. (…) Melodies are, in a certain sense, like universal concepts, an abstraction from reality. (…) Concepts contain only the first forms abstracted from intuition, as, so to speak, the outer shell of things, and are, therefore, abstractions; music, on the other hand, provides the innermost kernel, which precedes all formation, that is, the heart of things. (…) Concepts are the universalia post rem [universals after the thing], whereas music gives the universalia ante rem [universals before the thing] and reality provides the universalia in re [universals in the thing]."
The poet of the word does not attain the supreme spiritualization and ideality of the myth; the creative musician can achieve it at any moment.
We understand why such a meager culture hates true art; for it fears that through it, its downfall will come.
Let no one attempt to weaken our faith in an imminent rebirth of Greek antiquity; for only in it do we find our hope for a renewal and purification of the German spirit through the magic fire of music.
Tragedy sits amid this overflow of life, suffering, and pleasure; in sublime ecstasy, it listens to a distant, melancholy song - it is a song that speaks of the Mothers of Being, whose names are: Illusion, Will, Pain.
Everything we now call culture, education, civilization, will one day have to appear before the infallible judge Dionysus.**
For you,
what is Nietzsche's best book?
Leave a comment below
previous page: THE PORTUGUESE LESSON ABOUT DRUGS
next page: HISTORY OF PSY-TRANCE
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:
CONCEPT X METAPHOR
The Apollonian instinct of truth and the Dionysian metaphorical drive
ABOUT INSPIRATION
How does it come?
How is it achieved?
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEX AND GENDER
Understanding the Complexity of Human Identity