Nietzsche in Turin

For the Dougal, who still wants to talk about transcendence at this late stage in the day. Thank God!

God is dead.
God is dead.
God is dead

....And Man isn't feeling too well either!

Western man is stuck in 'la'. Nietzsche mistook the stepping stone for a place of rest.

'The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction'

---Susan Sontag, NYRB


Notes from Lesley Chamberlain's book and Heller's The Disinherited Mind:

'Yet he still saw the world as essentially illusory'

'How to live, then? Art and imagination as a substitute for Tradition, a way of creating one' s own world. 'The noble soul has reverence for itself'. The dissociation of faith from knowledge, faith from sensibility. If Tradition is invalid then there is only the world of absolute immanence. And after Auschwitz, the Trenches, does he still affirm?

Nietzsche: " He who no longer finds what is great in God will find it nowhere-he must either deny or create it."

Rilke's Tuscan Diary: " We need eternity; for only eternity provide space for our gestures. Yet we know that we live in narrow finiteness. thus it is our task to create infinity within these boundaries, for we no longer believe in the unbounded." We can no longer be sure we love the lovable.

'The battle in his soul with the southern light; high style against northern restlessness; pleasure and ease against a brooding, shifting inwardness. Isaiah Berlin: Verdi marks the end of naivete.

'With their [Wagner's , Schopenhaeur's] embodiment of the restless will, the creative life which enjoys wildly, gluts itself on excess and longs for metamorphosis..they offered an intoxicating vision of life which might entrance but never lead to a this-worldly, healthy, Greek kind of happiness. A rejection of the intense, glittery life but also the flat, prosaic one that required such intoxicants. The nervous excitement of the Romantics was never his style; they placed happiness outside of themselves, outside of life.

The South: self-assurance, resilience, serenity and calm joy..the willed lightness of being -as opposed to the heavy Nordic pessimism (D.H. Lawrence: the brown-eyed and the blue-eyed). ..Light feet, humour, grace and freedom; the tremor of southern light,; the smooth sea perfection.

'The collapse of benevolent certainties, the emergence of an edgy, rootless spirit..and the eventual emergence of a hypnotic and instinctual popular music ("trance" !). a music that is beyond the rational vs a music that is tunefulness, in the right key, on the right wavelength.

The divided self: 'German fascination with asceticism and mystical delivery from it' . Mass intoxication, the seduction of the spectacle, the relinquishing of the soul, of individual responsibility in favour of the Father(land).

How to live confidently after the death of God? Only with strength and courage: "Man is the creature who must constantly overcome himself to live fully." To accept one's fate and from it create a life..an art of living. But in a decadent culture, 'mankind would simply run out of energy and individuals would fail to find their own tragic strength.

A collapse of the common world, of the cultural world and its rituals, customary consciousness and norms. From now on one would have to find this strength on one's own.

'Nietzsche wanted only some kind of music to lead the modern heart back , or on, to a summer, more open..searching to lose urban nervous tension and northern formality in a glorious blaze of colour and light..and the simple life. ' [Not the only one: Van Gogh, Gaugin..Matisse: The Dance]

Neither from nor towards; at the
still point,
there the dance is
But neither arrest nor movement.
---T.S. Eliot.

Never trust a god who doesn't dance.

Demythologisation: the body is mere body, the symbol mere symbol.

A kiss is just a kiss, a smile is just a smile...

"He was most at home where there was least 'reality'-in music. The music of modern Europe is the one and only art in which it surpassed the achievement of former ages. This is no accident. It is the speechless triumph of the spirit in a world of words without deeds and deeds without words."

The sun-drenched art of the early 20th century. The new primitivism, masks. Colour replaces sense and meaning after the death of God. For Van Gogh: the sun is presence.

'The power of light to transform , and especially the moment of transformation, fascinated Claude, as it did Nietzsche.

'For something to shed its veil one requires patience and hospitality. 'The act of knowing involved an act of laughter, an act of mourning, and an act of cursing' (Spinoza).

There remains , perhaps
Some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day;
There remains for us yesterday's road...
----Rilke.

"The portraitist of this situation is Van Gogh. He painted the tree of Rilke's elegy, the sunflower, the chair and the boots that are chance receptacles of all the homeless energy of the spirit..It is a mere moment of explosion that separates Van Gogh's objects from the distorted fragments of surrealism...the absence from our lives of common accepted symbols to represent and house our deepest feelings. And so these invade the empty shells of fragmentary memories, hermit-crabs in a sea of uncertain meaning."

From now on: the life of man: 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.'