And while I'm at it, here's another of my favorites. For those who are a little younger than me, yes, that's Steve Winwood. And for those younger still, who know not who Steve Winwood is, well... You might find Wikipedia's article on John Barleycorn to be rather interesting. Or, not...

I'm going to purposefully, blatantly sound like a fuddy-duddy, but this is a good excuse to revisit my occasional compelling need to post a music video. Remember when pop stars were pop stars because they could. just. sing?

I was sitting around tonight thinking of music, and this idea I have once in a while of including music videos in this blog. Usually I stop short of doing so, because I find that sort of thing distracting when I read other blogs that are concerned primarily with the arena of spiritual discussion. Admittedly, I face the same thing when I put posts in here about Spadefoots, complete with photos, but hopefully I've written enough explanations as to how the Spadefoots fit into my discussions of faith.

At any rate, I was thinking of music and also of my desire to present something a little less rambling and thrown-together than my recent posting trend. And then along came to my mind a short, informal assignment from my first class in grad school. It covers both of the bases I was looking for tonight, so here it is. (I'm making my first attempt at embedding video in the blog, so let's hope it works. And I will mention, as a reminder to myself, that this song is intriguing in its own right for its appeal to Heaven in the wake of a friend's suicide. It deserves a post of its very own, some day.)

And, uh, I recognize that the claim I'm making, to place this song into anywhere near the same realm as Nietzsche and Greek tragedy may seem absurd, but—I dunno; think about it. Here's the paper:

The professor asserts:

I see [Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy] as an argument about culture and the role language plays in the shaping of culture. I include literature and rhetoric within the broad category of language. The relics of language including literature and recorded oratory map the progress or degeneration of culture. This assertion, however, comes close to being a tautology. (If only a tautology, would Nietzsche have spent so much time writing, rewriting, and qualifying The Birth of Tragedy?) There must be a greater purpose.

Response:

MY ANSWER begins with an image of war. Nietzsche mentions briefly in—but significantly, at the beginning of—An Attempt at Self Criticism that The Birth of Tragedy was conceived during the Franco-Prussian War. What Nietzsche does not note is that he was serving in that war, in the Prussian army, as a medical orderly. At the time he placed pen to paper, a young Nietzsche was witnessing first-hand the horrors of war. This is far from trivial, and in attempting to wager what The Birth of Tragedy's greater purpose may be, we must consider Nietzsche's immediate situation as a possible causal element in his thought process. If we attempt to place the imagery of warfare, the dead and the dying, the blood on Nietzsche's hands and garments into our minds, it begins to make perfect sense that, as he further notes in An Attempt at Self Criticism, he finds himself pondering science, life, religion, art and morality(3). In the middle of man's greatest horrors, horrors often intensified by the genius of science, legitimized by morality and sanctioned by religion, his staggering intellect is brooding with a depth few of us will ever fathom. It is brooding over some thing he considers to be "of utmost importance and… deeply personal." And the nagging question haunting his classical mind is, "What is the Dionysian?" The greater purpose of The Birth of Tragedy (and let us pretend there is only one) is an idea born from a synthesis of all these constituents; an amalgam formed in a crucible heated by the fires of war. In what proportions it is mixed we cannot say, but we can make some sense as to the type of product the synthesis produces.

NIETZSCHE'S PRESENTATION and analysis of Greek tragedy demonstrates Dionysian art as an art that transports the artist beyond himself, to "become art itself" and into the eternal nature of the world. This alone, according to Nietzsche, is man's escape from illusion and mask. Art is the greatest expression of humanity; Man's only pure expression and experience of what it means to contact existence itself(4). But against this salvation stands a modern science, which in gestation destroyed Nietzsche's beloved tragedy and in middle age is advancing the horrors wrought by an ever more modernized warfare. Allied in effect with this science is a sterile morality that seeks to destroy art and thereby nullify Man. Both science and morality appear as anti-life, and therefore as young Nietzsche's enemies. In a calculated response born of his romantic mind, Nietzsche creates and chooses for himself a discipline of life that is anti-moral and pure art. He names it The Dionysian.

It would be an obvious mistake to take this summary and label Nietzsche's presentation as simple, uncomplicated or straightforward. But it is not unfair to say that The Birth of Tragedy is verbose enough to obscure the fact that Nietzsche is being very human in the face of a timeless and very human dilemma. For all its riches, The Birth of Tragedy remains, in large part, a scene taken from a perennial play; the struggle of the individual to find its relationship to, and place within, the Universal. It is typical that this struggle is born of or greatly intensified by the worst of conditions, and wartime strongly qualifies as one. We see Nietzsche traveling, as each of us do, his own unique path to a resolution. Nietzsche's path was simply, but not merely, more intellectually stellar than that of the average person, and held Greek tragedy as one of its annotated waypoints. What we have in The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche's working out for himself a view of self vis-à-vis God; at least, a god-like spiritual reality that Nietzsche can acquiesce to consider God. For Nietzsche, it is The Dionysian that delivers one to such a place(4). This, I contend, is the greater purpose of The Birth of Tragedy. And can there be any greater?

WITH A NOD to [the professor], this analysis may well be tautological in its own right, and in a related sense I note that The Birth of Tragedy remains fully relevant for us today.

Contemporary culture in America abounds with analogs to the Dionysian concept, bringing to mind the words "extreme" and "edgy," especially in relation to trends such as body modification and radicalized performance art. Videos of alternative rock band members throwing themselves into crowds of frenzied fans come to mind, and it is difficult to deny that the very heavily tattooed and pierced person is not attempting to go beyond the performance of art to become art itself. Such practices can
be attempts to take humanity beyond humanity, into the realm that lies beyond (or under) humanity; to loose one's self of self. Not surprisingly, they are often intellectually unrecognized as such, and placed under the labels of trend and fashion.

When applied to our culture, Nietzsche's view of morality is most clearly represented in fundamental religion of monotheistic faiths, and in the less radical yet conservative evangelical Christian faith. These continue to exert the same art-nullifying influences against which Nietzsche rails. Nietzsche is correct in saying these influences are anti-art; which is to say, they are intent on stifling the creative urge in humanity. This remains today one of the great ironies of such religions; that ostensibly in the name of a Creator, they seek to attenuate the inherited Creative Urge gracefully breathed into the soul of the created. This nullifying element is represented by media in iconic form as America's religious right.

While both "Dionysian" and "moral" elements flourish in our culture, the Apollonian seems to be suffering. Fine art in "plastic" forms is relegated to museums, visual arts are limited to moving imagery and are often only in tertiary support of other mediums, and the higher ideals inspired by Apollo are mistakenly equated to morality per se. The resulting vacuum remains a tremendous weakness in our society: pundits incite the populace to reduce everything into binary quantities of the Dionysian versus the moral. Missing are Nietzsche's Apollonian, and a second form of mysticism Nietzsche himself had likely encountered yet happens to ignore completely(5). We are left in a state far less than ideal, for when the Apollonian does not exist to temper Dionysian, and other forms of mysticism are ignored, it remains far too easy to believe that everything capable of loosing us from ourselves is unquestionably expedient. This tendency is exacerbated by the intuitive realization that our society's only advertised alternative is an arid, life-limiting morality few find appealing.

The Creative, Artful Urge within us is telling us to run from that which stifles it and into the arms of its eternal source, and indeed we are often quick to run. But I am afraid our running is frequently blind, and not always to God.

Notes and points of discussion:

1. An example of contemporary Dionysian art?

Say Hello 2 Heaven, by Temple of the Dog. Seriously open to debate (and even more so to musical taste), but listen to the ending chorus, as the singer begins to loose himself of any concern of being a singer. The art is overtaking the artist. In the spirit of this paper, listen to the song while imagining a battlefield. I think one can begin to get an idea of art transporting us to a place that science and morality cannot:

2. Sources

Quotations below are from The Birth of Tragedy translated by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, last revised June 2003. An etext is available at:

http://www.mala.bc.ca/%7Ejohnstoi/Nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm

3. Excerpts noting the constituents of Nietzsche's dilemma

"Whatever might have been be the basis for this dubious book, it must have been a question of the utmost importance… a deeply personal one… Testimony to that effect is the time in which it arose… that disturbing era of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71… The issue which that bold book dared to approach for the first time… to look at scientific enquiry from the perspective of the artist, but to look at art from the perspective of life…"

"…above all the issue that there is a problem right here and that the Greeks will continue remains, as before, entirely unknown and unknowable as long as we have no answer to the question, 'What is the Dionysian?' Indeed, what is the Dionysian? This book offers an answer to that question…"

"We see that this book was burdened with an entire bundle of difficult questions. Let us add its most difficult question: What, from the point of view of living, does morality mean?"

"… art, and not morality, was the essential metaphysical human activity, and in the book itself there appears many times over the suggestive statement that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon… the entire book recognizes only an aesthetic sense and a deeper meaning under everything that happens..."

"And what about morality itself? Isn't morality… the greatest of all dangers? And so, my instinct at that time turned itself against morality in this questionable book, as an instinctual affirmation of life, and a fundamentally different doctrine, a totally opposite way of evaluating life, was invented, something purely artistic and anti-Christian. What should it be called? As a philologist and man of words…I called it the Dionysian."

4. Excerpts supporting the idea of Dionysian art as contact with the ground of being

"…it is possible for us to imagine how he sinks down in the Dionysian drunkenness and mystical obliteration of the self… his own state now reveals itself to him, that is, his unity with the innermost basis of the world…"

"Only this 'I' is not the same as the 'I' of the awake, empirically real man, but the single 'I' of true and eternal being in general, the 'I' resting on the foundation of things. Through its portrayal the lyrical genius sees right into the very basis of things."

"But insofar as the subject is an artist, he is already released from his individual willing and has become, so to speak, a medium through which a subject of true being celebrates its redemption… We should really look upon ourselves as beautiful pictures and artistic projections of the true creator, and in that significance as works of art we have our highest value…"

"This is the most direct effect of Dionysian tragedy… the gap between man and man give way to an invincible feeling of unity which leads back to the heart of nature."

"The ecstasy of the Dionysian state, with its destruction of the customary manacles and boundaries of existence, contains, of course, for as long as it lasts a lethargic element, in which everything personally experienced in the past is immersed. Through this gulf of oblivion, the world of everyday reality and the Dionysian reality separate from each other."

"The sphere of poetry does not lie beyond this world as the fantastic impossibility of a poet's brain. It wants to be exactly the opposite, the unadorned expression of the truth, and it must therefore cast off the false costume of that truth thought up by the man of culture. The contrast of this real truth of nature and the cultural lie which behaves as if it is the only reality is similar to the contrast between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the total world of appearances."

"Hence our entire knowledge of art is basically completely illusory, because, as knowing people, we are not one with or identical to that being who, as the single creator and spectator of that comedy of art, prepares for itself an eternal enjoyment. Only to the extent that the genius in the act of artistic creation is fused with that primordial artist of the world, does he know anything about the eternal nature of art, only in that state in which (as in the weird picture of fairy tales) he can miraculously turn his eyes and contemplate himself. Now he is simultaneously subject and object, all at once poet, actor, and spectator."

It seems reasonable to view these types of images as analogs to concepts of God we find in systems of spiritual and religious thought: non-duality in select Eastern religions, and God as "the ground of being" in Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology.

These lead me to believe that Nietzsche's concern is really one of (his) humanity in experience of and/or relation to true deity (i.e., God).

5. The mysticism that Nietzsche neglects

It's interesting that Nietzsche comments on Christianity yet limits his observation, apparently, to Orthodox and/or reformed orthopraxis. Nowhere is there mention of Christian mysticism, although can't we assume that Nietzsche would have been familiar with Meister Eckhart? Perhaps not, though, in his twenties?

Christian mysticism, and the spirituality it represents, are a missing element in Nietzsche's thought. Perennially, there are two basic approaches to mysticism in Man's spiritual traditions. There is the inward, meditative, emptying tradition (e.g., Christian mysticism, Zen Buddhism) and there is the super-man, beyond man, I have become God approach. This latter approach is foreign to me except for having read about it. I wonder if the Dionysian is an example of this. At any rate, both approaches have the same end: dissolution of the individual into the eternal; not Man as God, but Man in God.

A year or two ago, I started writing a post about falling in love at first meeting. You know, you meet somebody, and in just a minute or two, you feel a connection in your soul, and you think, "I love this person." Well, the reveal at the end of the post was that I was writing about a little girl who was about six years old at the time, and who happens to be blind. She calls herself "Yozzie," although I have no idea what her real name is or how I'm supposed to spell her preferred nickname.

Whenever I'm in the correct mood, which is to say I'm not in a hurried and/or self-absorbed state of mind, I try to kneel down when I talk to little kids. I like to be on their level physically, because it helps to put us on the same level in other ways. They know I care enough to be right there with them on their terms, and I'm forced to be so. (Try it sometime. It works.) So on this particular day, I knelt in front of this little blind girl, we talked for a few moments, and she held out her hands to touch me. She even asked first, which I'm going to guess is a point of etiquette she'd been taught. So she placed her little hands on my shoulders, my chest, my neck and the sides of my face. Maybe she wanted to know what I looked like in her mind, or maybe she was just trying to remember me. Or both. But, what really amazed me was how much different it felt to be touched by this little blind child than to be touched by anybody else. I really, truly felt like she was seeing me. It was one of the most careful, thoughtful, gentle touches I've ever experienced. It was beautiful. I doubt I'll ever forget it.

I have a very, very soft spot in my heart for the way that life always strives to find a way to keep living; to make the most of whatever it has been allotted in life. I've written about it before, and I hope to write more about it in the coming months. But for the purposes at hand, I'll just say that it is all the more moving to me when it involves the youngest among us, those who in the prime of their innocence and hope find their own paths in life—sometimes more meandering by necessity, and perhaps sometimes more direct than the rest of us; distracted less, I suppose, by the trivial and mundane. And so, I've summarized two posts here tonight.

Before leaving with those two summaries, I'll end with a third. I want to say thanks to the life of Jeff Healey, who died this month at the tender age of forty-one. More than forty years earlier, Jeff lost his eyes to a rare ocular cancer. A blind toddler, Jeff went on to learn to play the guitar, starting at the age of three. Whether he was self-taught or not, I don't know, and can only guess. He learned to play famously, play well, and play uniquely—with the guitar resting flat on his lap. To me, it's one of those seemingly simple things—a thing about innocence, about hope, about chasing what you love, and about how life finds a way for itself. ( If you want to see Jeff play, here's a cover I like.)

Jeff, thanks for the music, man. And Yozzie, wherever you are, I wish you the greatest of life's joys. I pray that you find a way for yourself; a wondrous path that shines brightly and beautifully in the lives of all those you touch. Meeting you was a gift, and I love you.

THE FIRST time I heard Pachelbel’s Canon I was not far into my undergraduate program in engineering. I was wandering about the residence hall one day and happened upon an older student named Roger, who was fiddling about in a rec room with an Apple II and a bunch of little boxes tied to it by umbilicals. I forget how many of the little boxes there were, but it was an impressive setup, arrayed out on a big table. He went to the keyboard and started a program, and the boxes were transformed into a classical music ensemble. I was as mesmerized as a geek could be. “What is that?” I asked.

“Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major,” he said nonchalantly, and began to talk about music, computers and software. I didn’t listen to him. I was in love with the music, and it had taken me somewhere else. For a few moments, it had lofted me out of that residence hall, off of that campus, to some other place.

The next time I heard the Canon I was driving at night, listening to public radio, and it was played by strings. If I’m not mistaken, it was originally written for strings, but no matter. I stopped my truck, and found myself sitting alone and silent, feeling as though I was slowly walking through a forest in long-ago Europe—serene, peaceful, with rays of sunlight piercing through the canopy to shine down in front of me, and guide my way.

Many years have gone by, and the other day at my daughter’s piano recital one of her friends played the Canon. I closed my eyes as I listened, and once again I felt as though I were somewhere else. Where, I cannot say. I have no idea. But, I was elsewhere. It occurred to me that I was experiencing a grand rhythm of life. For over three hundred years the Canon has been played over and over again, and to hear it is to travel through time, I realized, and perhaps this is the “elsewhere” that it takes me—not to a place but to a state of being—a state that so many have known through centuries, yet all share in some ethereal studio as though we all stand together in eternity. And coincident with this thought, it occurred to me that my life was not only a part of those hundreds of years, but was a miniature model of it, as the decades of my life came back to me, and melded into a few minutes. It was the passage of time, my childhood passing by me and into the childhood of my children and their friends, adults and children being born and dying as if to some rhythm for hundreds of years, united by mere lines and dots on paper, scribbled out once long ago in the genius of one man’s mind. It was the last thought that hit me hardest. I thought of the beauty in the mind of the composer, the ability to sense within himself a bit of art and place it onto paper, and the genius of it all. I kept my eyes closed, for I was in a crowd, and I wanted no one to notice the tears upon which my eyelids floated.

I KNOW the canonical form of music was not invented by a single person. For all I know Pachelbel’s Canon may have been worked out as much by science as by inspiration. And certainly even I can see that there has been far greater genius in music than his. I admit my understanding of things is only elementary, as a child with not much of an ear. But this is, perhaps, a blessing for me in that I do not have to worry about such things as I listen to the Canon performed. I only know that it takes me wherever it takes me, and that it is beautiful, and that all in all it is inspired of Genius—human or Otherwise. And that is what makes me weep—that Genius exists, and never dies.

But tonight’s post is not for Pachelbel. It is for those of whom we have never heard. I post tonight for all those who must have touched, at least briefly or almost, that same genius—but not quite. What a gloriously agonizing thing it must be for your soul to have a brush with genius; not one found within your own self, but as if Genius Itself walked gently by you in a forest of the night, the beauty of It a Whisper that teasingly touched the garments of your soul. You would be one of the many who have reached out in the darkness for a Genius they could smell, taste and maybe even touch—but never hold on to. My God. The beauty of such a thing. And the agony of longing it would leave behind.

I AM not learned in music. But I know enough to know that I am drawn to the fugue, and that it is therefore no coincidence that I love the Canon. Sometimes when I am alone, I feel as though I could become lost in them for ever. And so I suppose it comes as no surprise, either, that I have a wish I cannot make come true. How wondrous it would be, I have often thought, to write a composition analogous to these musical works of counterpoint, but in words rather than notes. And not just words, but expressions of human life in the light of God’s Love. It is this idea, too, that moistens my eyes; a work of melodiously and harmoniously repeating expressions of God’s love; all of the inversions and retrogrades weaving the totality of human life together into a single silver strand. The mystery of human pain and sorrow melded with ecstasy and joy. All the horror that we can invent, and all the sacrifice of love and salvation we offer one another to heal it. The question of evil’s existence, the duality of nature, and of God’s Love that overcomes evil and removes all duality. The innocence of children and the culpability of the old. The blind passion of life relished carelessly, the resentment of life fearfully wasted, and our contemptuous longing for death. Imagine each and every form of awe every human can experience, everything that goes beyond language and must be spoken in tears to make itself known. Imagine such a thing. Imagine it written in paragraphs and chapters that weave together for hundreds upon hundreds of pages and when they are done, they leave the reader stunned in silence, to weep in the knowledge that what the work has just said—is the glory that its words could not say. This is the wish I cannot make come true. It is an opus that can be written, this I know; but not penned by me. I have been touched enough to taste it, to smell it, and to feel it. I know it exists—somewhere—but it is not for me to author. For Genius has brushed by me in the night—but alas I could not cling to It. Its whisper of Love is all that I am to be allotted, and the softness of its voice is truly Glory to my soul—but, God help me, it is not enough.

I merely temper claviers, and dare to call my craft “writing.”