In other words, the Apollonian heat is burning hot red of the fevers of individuation - the need to disassociate from mother nature and come into one's own individuality - it is the pangs of one who wants to become an Artist by organizing the wild chaotic passion symbolized by nature-the-unmarried-nymph. The virgin. A married woman would be seen as tainted by the god Apollo. The apollonian oedipal instinct is to abandon home in the chase of the impossible immortality. The mother is feared of devouring him and he longs to escape. What is feared here is Retardation, regression. A question of space, need to explore. Attractive is who seduces with possibilities. She says, Be more. Degradation is erotic. Asking everything of him is her pride, and he is drawn to her need. The demand to prove and reveal himself, her cruelty, her needy desire, makes her attractive to him. The woman who gives him pain feels real to him. Courage is demonstration.
The Dionysian heat is cold incandescent white of the fury of individuation - the need to associate with mother nature and be reborn - it is the desire of one who wants to become a piece of Art Itself, by embrace of all the painful turbulence, contradictions symbolized by nature-the-married-wives who leave their homes and husbands. The whore. An unmarried woman would be seen as infertile by the god Dionysos. The dionysian odyssean instinct is to abandon calypso's offer of immortality in the nostalgia for return home. The mother is revered for making him a possibility and he longs to consummate. What is feared here is Oblivion, abandonment. A question of time, need to be remembered. Attractive is who promises hope. She says, As you are. Trust is erotic. Asking nothing at all from him is her pride, and he is drawn to her excess. The remand to gloat and revel himself, her vulnerability, her trusting desire, makes her attractive to him. The woman who gives him joy feels true to him. Boldness is self-love.
Retardation and Oblivion are both a kind of blindness, darkness... the eye of the Apollo is physical, and of Dionysos is inward.
Both desires are coupled with tragic wisdom of their kind. In Apollo's world - the trepidation of fleeting individuality gives a shiver. He becomes a wanderer needing to see and experience it all urgently... the voyeur. He prays to Apollo the Seer, the Healer for the song of visions. In Dionysos' world - the nihilism of acute perception of reality gives a paralysis. He becomes a recluse seeking to release all he has seen urgently... the sage. He prays to Dionysos the Demiurger, the Liberator for the dance of freedom.
A satyr is a bit of both - he chases and hunts as much as he plays the flute alone.
In any case, as N. finally concludes, whether resisting or submissive, man falls in love only with his own desire.
Interesting how in Troubador poetry, the two come together. The lowly knight singing to the unattainable lady of his lord merges into the worship of Marion as (both) Virgin-Mother. The desire for the eternal feminine is still to be in love with one's desires.
The "eye of Apollo" being physical probably relates to his defining characteristic being of sculpture, as the characteristics between the two seem to overlap and they become almost indistinguishable.
Quote :
Nietzsche’s description of the compositional process of the lyric poet Archilochus (a contemporary of Homer ) demonstrates the complexity of Apollo’s tie to illusion. In this instance, and through a number of other examples, Nietzsche tries to elucidate his intuition about the production of art in the “coupling” of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. He asserts that in order to write lyric poetry – a genre dominated by the “I” of the speaker-poet’s most personal account of love, sorrow and the like – the poet has to undergo a metamorphosis, a Dionysian process whereby the poet’s normal conscious self, the one that says “I” is “surrendered.” The poet now identifies with the “primordial contradiction and primordial pain, together with the primordial pleasure, of mere appearance.” Through the surrender of self-conscious ego and indemnification with the primal reality, however we imagine it, the poet is able to transform “mere appearance” [Schein] and give it depths and thus stamp the “dream images” of the Apollonian with the Dionysian eternal. Thus “the ‘I’ of the lyrists sounds from the depth of being: its ‘subjectivity,’ in the sense of modern aestheticians is a fiction” (BT 5). Referring in this section of The Birth of Tragedy, Jenkins argues that “art is only truly of aesthetic value when it appears as a response to insight into reality” – as a response to life, “an openness to the experience of life” and not “the imposition of meaning on life” (213). Apollonian “illusion” can become “truth,” crossing the tremendous chasm, when it lets its defensive barriers down and waits for life to speak first. Then, as a respondent, it “acts,” paints, and sings without subjectivity, and at the same time without concealment, having attained a state of receptivity to the world where the subject/object dichotomy simply dissolves. As Nietzsche puts it, “The whole opposition between the subjective and objective…is altogether irrelevant in aesthetics” (BT ). Paul de Man notes that “this exchange of attributes [between the Dionysian and the Apollonian] involving the categories of truth and appearance deprives the two poles of their authority” (Allegories of Reading 72). Nietzsche begins by linking Apollo to some characteristics and Dionysus to others, but finds that it is impossible to keep them in place. The oppositions tend to vanish into thin air, monstrous as they are, the poles to lose their authority.
The only set of paired terms in the table that remains a genuine opposition is form/formlessness, which subsumes sculpture/music. As sculpture and music are the particular property of the two gods, perhaps this is the one irreducible difference in the text. It is the one dichotomy that aligns, on the level of “dream interpretation,” with masculinity (hard, connected with vision) and femininity (soft, watery or wavy, connected with sound). And yet, so unstable are the poles, and so much transformation is carried out in the process of reading, that this settling into a meaning won’t do either. Other gender references must be taken into account. In the second half of The Birth of Tragedy, we at last encounter – twice – the mysterious “mothers of being.” They have taken the place of the “mothers of tragedy” from the notebooks, but are recognizably the same three fatal ladies. We first meet them here during one of the recapitulations of the main theme. Apollo has once again been named as “the transfiguring genius principium individuationis; while by the mystical triumphant cry of Dionysus the spell of individuation is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of things” (BT 16). Here are mothers-as-origin, clearly cited, the way to whom lies with Dionysus. In the second instance, the mothers reappear as a distant song: “Tragedy is seated amid this excess of life, suffering, and pleasure, in sublime ecstasy, listening to a distant melancholy song that tells of the mothers of being whose names are: Delusion, Will, Woe” (BT 20). As we have seen, delusion – Wahn – constitutes the images created by the will to attach us firmly to life. In the binary sexual scheme, “Delusion,” as image, is Apollonian and thus masculine. “Will” is Dionysian and thus feminine, while “Woe” is an interpretation of the context, life, provided in the text by Silenus (“the wisdom of Silenus cried ‘Woe! ‘woe!’ to the serene Olympians,” BT 4), who as a teacher of the satyrs and companion to Dionysus is also Dionysian, and thus feminine. Yet this wisdom is an interpretation, and therefore Apollonian and masculine. And so the “mothers” do not align neatly under Dionysus, as we might expect if we want Dionysus, or indeed the mothers themselves, to be feminine.
-[Nietzsche on Gender: Beyond Man and Woman]
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
Hrodeberto
Gender : Posts : 1318 Join date : 2014-07-14 Age : 37 Location : Spaces
For a certain kind of free-spirit, if there is one thing worse than or as bad as mechanical sex, it is the other extreme of overflowing gratitude-sex - settling dues and debts through sex. Many a times this overflowing is mistaken for real passion.
This kind of free-spirit enjoys the other's recognition, not the other's reassurance. For it, discerning this subtlety, how one could easily slide into the other - how a gift or gesture of recognition could appear so similar to a gift to reassure, is what makes trust so erotic.
Lyssa Har Har Harr
Gender : Posts : 8965 Join date : 2012-03-01 Location : The Cockpit
sovereign Virginity can only be the ferocity of life, the terrible and vicious, ruthless pumping in and pumping out oxygen like a body to keep itself clean, chaste... Chastity is an Asceticism and Asceticism is an Athleticism, an exercise, and not just etymologically.
"At bottom I abhor all those moralities which say: “Do not do this! Renounce! Overcome yourself!” But I am well disposed toward those moralities which goad me to do something and do it again, from morning till evening, and then to dream of it at night, and to think of nothing except doing this well, as well as I alone can do it. When one lives like that, one thing after another drops off. Without hatred or aversion one sees this take its leave today and that tomorrow, like yellow leaves that any slight stirring of the air takes off a tree. He may not even notice that it takes its leave; for his eye is riveted to his goal – forward, not sideward, backward, downward. What we do should determine what we forego; by doing we forego – that is how I like it, that is my placitum. But I do not wish to strive with open eyes for my own impoverishment; I do not like negative virtues – virtues whose very essence it is to negate and deny oneself something."
Misogyny masquerades whenever unnecessary sexualization is Added on to some readily available sociological theories to explain drives and attraction in the name of "objective" observations.
Watch out for those kind of thinking that is unable to accept a female can be capable of pure cold-blooded objectivity and arrogates itself to the "objective" view, she must be masking her emotions, her attractions, her instinctual drives whenever she makes an observation from a detached position.
Apparently, the female brain, is not capable of perceiving symmetry, pattern, higher states of order without also and necessarily being drawn to it!
Apparently, females can never appreciate beauty and attractive objects without also necessarily being attracted to them?!
This kind of sociological thinking is not science, but sexism... that intentionally wants to de-grade the female at the level of repressed reptilian reactions, like typical J.-Xt. Marxist theories. While most females may be so, and the rule is the majority are emotionally driven, to deny the possibility that there Are and Can be females who remain disaffected at their very nucleus, is abject, ressentimental hatred. I think one can perfectly find a shape, an object, a quality, a texture attractive without being attracted to/by it... and that applies to both males and females. A man can find blondes totally attractive and yet not be attracted to them because his tastes are shaped by his peculiar aesthetics and organ hierarchy. Likewise a woman. If it were not so, then we might as well consider every border, every boundary, every discrimination that we Are, as a clinical repression and modern compartmentalization... Might as well call ourselves the dis/ease, since at bottom, all is entropy and moving towards identification and union and uniformity with the other... Might as well say we are all sexually repressed because at the entropic state, everything is an attraction, is it not?!
Weren't the Xt. Patriarchs the most misogynistic arrogant cowards on the planet... typical.
Sexualizing everything is already a symptom of a very inferior and unclean soul... like Freud was. What could be more shameful than such intellectual dishonesty.
Where lurks the shining quarry, swift and shy, Immune, elusive, unsubstantial? In what dim forests of the soul, where call No birds, and no beasts creep? (the hunter's cry Wounds the deep darkness, and the low winds sigh Through avenues of trees whose faint leaves fall Down to the velvet ground, and like a pall The violet shadows cover all the sky).
With what gold nets, what silver-pointed spears May we surprise her, what slim flutes inspire With breath of what serene enchanted air? — Wash we our star-ward gazing eyes with tears, Till on their pools (drawn by our white desire) She bend and look, and leave her image there.
_________________ And here we always meet, at the station of our heart / Looking at each other as if we were in a dream /Seeing for the first time different eyes so supreme / That bright flames burst into vision, keeping us apart.
