Capítulo 3: Revival
The Peak of Life, everybody wants to listen to the story of the underdog who eventually succeeds and gets back what he owns rightfully, but nobody likes to read about their fall.
Strange isn't it? Back then, Aristoteles had proclaimed the superiority of Tragedy over Comedy in the art of the Teathre or as I call it, the art of portraying Humanity, so how could the genre lose in popularity to our everyday wish-fulfillment blockbuster/webnovel?
The "Pharsalia" of Lucano, the Tragedies praised by Nietzsche and Racine's plays are some of the most famous ancient tragedies which inspired great authors of both the Medieval and Modern age, up until now, if they are so good what can explain their decline?
Everyone wants to read stories with good endings rather than seeing bad endings, why so?
What is so wrong about a bad end, aren't they both ends in the end?
In Nietzschean terms, we are witnessing the crushing of the Dyonisiac Spirit by the Apollinean Spirit, and I like to trace back this tendency to the universal success gained by Dante Alighieri's "The Divine Comedy". I think that what Dante actually did was an operation on the unconscious of his readers that may have affected the whole world, Dante may have sown the seed of our current view of Life, that is that Life in and of itself is a Tragedy.
The Comedy, the happy ending can only be found in the afterlife, in Death. But here is what many forgot, Dante's journey in the Underworld, the Purgatory and Heaven was done while he was still alive, the MC of his novel is made of the same flesh and blood as the writer. Yes, boys, we may actually be in presence of ante-digital version of The Novel's Extra. Now if we remember all of this doesn't that mean that life and death as much as the Yin and the Yang are thoroughly entwined?
The former contains the seed of the latter and vice versa, the two Nietzschean Spirits are specular attitudes to the same experience known as life but they differ in their authenticity. The Dyonisiac Spirit is more down to earth, it always keeps in mind the most authentic possibility that is Death, the end of all projectuality and of all Ambition, in doing so allows you to truly live as you become aware of the Nature of life which lays in its Discontinuity.
[Later will be defined the degrees of discontinuity]
The Apollinean instead focuses on life itself, on the feeling of the myriad other possibilities, on the continuity of Time and the power of choice which exist before Death razes everything to nothingness, emptying them of meaning, it's a kind of Forgetfulness a way to make life bearable as Death in itself is not perceived as much of a danger as it is Life.
What Man, the Faustian Western Civilization made possible was to make the greatest horror that has persecuted Life itself, Death, Thanatos, desirable. As Paul Klee wonderfully puts it:
"The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract."
WWI, the rise of Fascism and Nazism, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Cold War and the danger of Extinction, we are threading a narrow path leading to the stars.
Beneath is the entire World, above is Heaven, or at least our representation of it. A place with no discontinuity, no Death, only You.
[For art is meant all kinds of it, literature, theatre, music. As Kandinskij said, music was the first art to fully become abstract due to its inherently ethereal nature, followed by art and now by literature and cinema. The explosion of fantasy literature and the popularity of books like The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter can so be explained, I don't need to mention Marvel and the work done on MCU and Avengers.]
Yes, we replaced Death as the object of our innermost fears. In the past children would fear more the darkness and the mystery of the Black Man, now the Man is the greatest danger. Man and his creations, the tools he created to carry out his limitlessly desiring will.
We live in a time where we could plunge in the Abyss of Mutual Assured Destruction in the next second but at the same time, we turn the creation of the Elixir of Immortality into an actual possibility.
That's why in literature and comic books the MC is always beyond humans in some sense, he can defend himself for the vast majority of fellow men with some vulnerability aka Achilles Tendon to keep him human. He is strong but has one fragility, which still makes him human.
The great hopes we have in science(In that we are not much different from the positivists) may be as great as the despair we fear when we face ourselves, we hope that our always improving tools will one day end up our misery forever not knowing that such a condition of endless bliss isn't much different from death. We hope that the endless advancement will one day give us the maturity to join as a whole and move forward together, unaware of the price we will have to pay for such a desired unity.
We desire to be freed from our fragility, without understanding that we would lose our humanity, but what of it, some may say? Is humanity useful in any way? Don't we have machines and the whole of the animal kingdom which are doing just fine without it? and isn't humanity in the end just a metaphysical concept without any factual, scientific base?
Why should we care about humanity if we have to suffer for its sake?
Well, if you actually think about it, you may notice that these are the same questions that had gone through Jesus' head before actually getting crucified and which may have tormented him before his passion. The power of the figure of Jesus lays exactly in that, in how human he feels. In fact he may be regarded as the best exemplification of the Confucian concept of Ren, the Benevolence and The Love which Dante wrote about beautifully in the last verse of his "Paradiso" after briefly seeing God and fulfilling the goal of his journey:
"L'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle"
"The love which moves the sun and the other stars"
The stars moved by God's Will are the Italian Poet's goal and his own will and desire also begin to move under God's Will, resulting in the end of all suffering and the dissolution of his raindrop-like will into the vast ocean of God's Will. Our journey will seek for a new answer seven hundred years later after the thriving churches became graveyards(Nietzsche again, Thus spoke Zarathustra).
Then where are we currently? But most importantly where am I? We are at the crossroad of Destiny since the first breath you have been here waiting for someone else to take that step instead of you, finding excuses, you are not enough of this or that, too fat, too high to take that step forward.
It's the Stasis of Existence, your will pursues many things but you are moved by none of them.
You feel that everything is changing only because they are doing so relatively to you, you are only a spectator. You are not an actor in your Life, you are not the MC even when you sleep you dream of others acting you just watch as the things go, as the world flows.
Time isn't valuable at all, you see it fly by as the pendulum swings(Listen to Linkin Park, you won't regret it) indifferent that with each movement it's one less chance to tilt your life a bit more towards Heaven, no you feel like the world is against you, any attempt of changing yourself will be met with resistance because everything is already changing and you have been out of it for too long.
But is it? What is Heaven if not a place where you can carry out your will with no hindrance of any kind, be it man, Buddha or god, no one can stand against you, why can't that place be here and now? If you meet Buddha, kill him. If you meet your God, kill him. Free, and sealed by nothing. You live your life without any constraints besides yourself."
Why does your Present Self have to bear life like a punishment, why do you need to feel experience as if you were being forced to take the most bitter medicine every single moment? Why can't you live by our own Way? By Your own Rules?
Why do you need to be in hell, where everything feels like an obstacle, and you are but a thing being done things to instead of Someone doing things? Do you really think this is the only way around? Yeah it is, because you allowed it. With each choice you sealed your path further and further, your routine became a prison, an illusory safe haven where nothing unexpected happens and by so you think that everything is under your control, while instead, the opposite is true.
You are under Their control, the control of your Past Selves who only thought about their Present, thinking that to carry out their will in the present was the greatest freedom. Do you really think that eating a few extra jars of Nutella could give you greater freedom, from your bodily needs? Don't make me laugh, instead of wasting your time doing lewd things you could have had lunch with your family instead of living so far apart even though you live under the same roof.
That's just a blindfold to keep yourself with no Ambition, a self-defense mechanism to avoid the suffering which is inherent to pursuing something new, to willing it into Reality, your Way. Instead of that, you prefer the Numbness which comes from your every-day experience, you dislike trying new things because they force you to leave something behind to make space for something new, you hate the loss needed for growth but no chicken can grow before losing its eggshell. And you are just an egg delaying birth for fear of the future slaughter, instead of working to save yourself or actually do something about it, you just wait and make of your life a dead swamp.
You only want to gain and feel the illusion of growth, while in fact, nothing has changed. Everything you do is superficial.
That's what you have been doing in the last year, sleeping your way through life you achieved nothing and stayed in a false Stasis which is but a static stagnation.
Answer these two questions and Beyond will take you on a journey of rebirths and eternity, Dreamscape and Reality, Will and Power, synthesized into one and the same at the end of your journeys.
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