lacrime e santi

Ah, this black and sorrowful sea beneath me! Ah, this pregnant night-like moroseness! Ah, fate and sea! To you must I now climb DOWN! Before my highest mountain I stand and before my longest wandering: therefore I must first descend deeper than I have ever done before: — deeper into pain than I have ever descended, even into its blackest flood! Thus my fate wills it. Well then! I am prepared. Where do the highest mountains come from? I once asked. Then I learned that they come from out of the sea. The evidence is inscribed in their stone and in the walls of their summits. It is from the deepest that the highest must come to its height. — Thus spoke Zarathustra on the peak of the mountain, where it was cold; but when he drew near to the sea and stood at last alone beneath the cliffs, he had grown weary on the way and fuller of yearning than ever before. Everything is still asleep now, he said. Even the sea is asleep. Drunk with sleep and strangely its eye regards me. But its breath is warm; that I feel. And I also feel that it is dreaming. In its dreams it writhes upon hard pillows. Hark! Hark! How it groans from evil memories! Or from evil expectations? Ah, I am sad along with you, you dark monster, and even angry at myself for your sake. Alas, that my hand has insufficient strength! Verily, I would dearly like to redeem you from your evil dreams! — And as Zarathustra spoke thus, he laughed at himself with bitterness and a heavy heart. What, Zarathustra! he said. Would you even sing consolation to the sea? Ah, you loving fool, Zarathustra, over-blissful in your trusting! But thus you have always been: you have always approached trustingly all that is terrible. You have always wanted to caress every monster. A puff of warm breath, a soft tuft on the paw — and at once you were ready to love and to lure it. For LOVE is the danger of the loneliest, love of anything IF ONLY IT IS ALIVE! Laughable, verily, are my folly and my modesty in love!

/…/ the seraphic is often a counterforce to sadism, and a means — as with the Christian cross — of combining darker impulses with light ones, and channelling such forces into creative energy; perhaps the succession of seraphic themes in Britten’s work has facilitated his powerful and authentic depictions of evil and sadism — counterbalanced by seraphic forces. It is such an integration of good and evil which Knight has relentlessly expounded throughout all his work — particularly in CHRIST AND NIETZSCHE (1948) and The CHRISTIAN RENAISSANCE. In these works Knight pleads for an acceptance of ‘dark’ instincts, rather than a rejection which causes division and persecution; all man’s instincts must be accepted and integrated, despite the pressure of society to alienate and purge: "Somehow the feared instincts must not only be accepted but LOVED, enjoyed and used, according to the doctrine of Pope’s ESSAY ON MAN." In Nietzsche’s ZARATHUSTRA (1883–92) Knight finds his integration process at work: “Within yourself you can transmute vices by a process of integration involving a steady assimilation of all psychic and physical-sexual energies /…/ Man’s innocence is thus not lost but rather purified by co-operation with the deeper faculties; though the value realised may not correspond to conventional judgements.”

There are cities one won’t see again. The sun throws its gold at their frozen windows. But all the same there is no entry, no proper sum. There are always six bridges spanning the sluggish river. There are places where lips touched lips for the first time ever, or pen pressed paper with real fervor. There are arcades, colonnades, iron idols that blur your lens. There the streetcar’s multitudes, jostling, dense, speak in the tongue of a man who’s departed thence.

On winter evenings the sea, welled by a contrary easterly, fills every canal to the brim like a bathtub, and at times overflows them. Nobody runs up from downstairs crying, "The pipes!" as there is no downstairs. The city stands ankle-deep in water, and boats, "hitched like animals to the walls," to quote Cassiodorus, prance. The pilgrim's shoe, having tested the water, is drying atop his hotel room's radiator; the native dives into his closet to fish out his pair of rubber boots. "ACQUA ALTA," says a voice over the radio, and human traffic subsides. Streets empty; stores, bars, restaurants and trattorias close. Only their signs continue burning, finally getting a piece of the narcissistic action as the pavement briefly, superficially, catches up with the canals. Churches, however, remain open, but then treading uponwater is no news to either clergy or parishioners; neither to music, water's twin.

The very fact that it is now possible to have TEACHERS such as Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, who preach love of suffering and proclaim that the best people must perish, in as much as things will become ever worse and worse for them, shows that the rosy hopes of the positivists, materialists, and idealists were mere childish dreams. No social changes whatsoever will banish tragedy from life; therefore, the time has evidently come, not to deny suffering as a kind of fictitious reality from which a person can deliver himself by the magic words “it must not be,” as he delivers himself from the devil by the sign of the cross, but by accepting it, by acknowledging it, and perhaps, finally, by understanding it. Hitherto, our science has only been able to turn away from all that is horrible in life, as if it were completely nonexistent, and to oppose it with ideals, as if ideals were the true reality.

We must let the man speak in his own way. Forgive him all his sins beforehand — just let him tell the truth. Perhaps — who knows — perhaps this truth, which is so obnoxious at first sight, contains something far better than the charm of the most ostentatious lie. Perhaps the full force of sorrow and despair should not at all be directed toward the preparation of doctrines and ideals suitable for man’s everyday life, as the teachers of mankind have hitherto done, while always zealously concealing their own doubts and misfortunes from the eyes of outsiders. Perhaps we should abandon pride, the beauty of dying, and all external embellishments and again try to catch sight of the much-slandered truth?

In any event, the philosophy of tragedy is, in principle, hostile to the philosophy of commonplaceness. In those instances when commonplaceness says “the end” and turns away, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche see the beginning and start to seek. In THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, there is THE STORY OF “THE UGLIEST MAN,” which symbolically depicts Nietzsche’s own terrible life. It is too long for me to quote more than a few excerpts here, and I advise those readers who are interested in Nietzsche’s philosophy to read it all, if possible in the original. “Suddenly the landscape changed, and Zarathustra entered a realm of death. Black and red cliffs rose rigidly; there was no grass, no tree, no bird’s voice. For it was a valley that all animals avoided, even beasts of prey; only a species of ugly, fat green snakes came here to die when they grew old. Therefore the shepherds called this valley "Snakes’ Death.” Zarathustra, however, sank into gloomy reminiscence, for he felt as if he had stood in this valley once before. And much that was grave weighed on his mind; he walked slowly, and still more slowly, and finally stood still. But when he opened his eyes, he saw something sitting by the wayside, shaped like a human being, yet scarcely like a human being — something inexpressible.“ It is the "ugliest man,” who has withdrawn from people and come to the gloomy valley of “Snakes’ Death.” Why has he withdrawn from people? “They [people] persecute me,” says the ugly man to Zarathustra. “Now YOU are my last refuge. They persecute me, not with their hatred, NOT with their soldiers: I would mock such persecution and be proud and glad of it! Has not all success hitherto been with the well-persecuted? And whoever persecutes well, learns readily how to FOLLOW; for he is used to going after somebody else. But it is their PITY — it is their pity that I flee, fleeing to you. Oh, Zarathustra, protect me, you my last refuge, the only one who has understood me.” Such people, inhabitants of “Snakes’ Death,” come seeking hope from Zarathustra. And what do they want? Listen further. The ugliest man says: “Everyone else would have thrown me his alms, his pity, in look and speech. But for that, I am not beggar enough, as you guessed; for that, I am too RICH, rich in what is great, in what is terrible, in what is ugliest, in what is most inexpressible. Your shame, Zarathustra, honored me! With difficulty, I escaped the throng of the pitying, to find the only one today who teaches, ‘Pity is obtrusive’ — you, Oh, Zarathustra. Whether it be a god’s pity or man’s — pity offends the sense of shame. And to be unwilling to help can be nobler than that virtue that jumps to help. But today, pity is called virtue by all the little people: they have no respect for great misfortune, great ugliness, for great failure.” THEY HAVE NO RESPECT for great misfortune, great ugliness, for great failure! This is the final word of the philosophy of tragedy. Not to transfer all the horrors of life into the realm of the DING AN SICH, outside the bounds of synthetic A PRIORI judgments, but to respect them! Can idealism or positivism respond in this way to “ugliness”? When Gogol burned the manuscript of the second volume of DEAD SOULS, he was declared insane — otherwise, it would have been impossible to rescue ideals. But Gogol was more correct when he burned his precious manuscript (which could have provided immortality on earth to a whole score of “sane” critics) than he was when he wrote it. This is something idealists will never tolerate; they need “Gogol’s works,” but they are unconcerned with Gogol himself, with his “great misfortune, great ugliness, and great failure.” So let them abandon the realm of philosophy forever! And why do they need it? Are their services insufficiently justified if one refers to railroads, telegraphs, telephones, co-operative societies, and even the first volume of DEAD SOULS, in so far as it contributes to progress? But philosophy is a PHILOSOPHY OF TRAGEDY. Dostoevsky’s novels and Nietzsche’s books speak only of the “ugliest” people and their problems. Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and also Gogol were extremely ugly people themselves, and they had none of the commonplace hopes. They tried to find their refuge where no one ever seeks, where, as is generally believed, there is not, and cannot be, anything but eternal chaos and darkness, where even Mill admits the possibility of effect without cause. There, perhaps, every underground man means as much as the whole world; there, perhaps, people of tragedy will indeed find what they have been seeking. People of commonplaceness will not wish to cross the fatal boundary in pursuit of such an incredible “perhaps.” But, after all, no one asks them to. Hence, the poet’s question: “AIMES-TU LES DAMNÉS? DIS-MOI, CONNAIS-TU L’IRRÉMISSIBLE?”

Not that he was contesting the possibility of the realization of ideals. He did not even think of that; he did not want to. If the exalted dreams of his youth were destined to come true someday — all the worse. If the ideal of human happiness on earth were destined someday to be realized, Dostoevsky would curse it beforehand. I shall be frank: prior to Dostoevsky, no one dared to express such ideas, even with proper comment. Great despair was needed for such ideas to appear in the human mind; superhuman daring was needed for someone to appear with them in public. That is why Dostoevsky never acknowledged them as his own, and always had a reserve supply of ideals for display; the more hysterically he cried out, the more they diverged from the nature of his cherished desires, or if you will, from the desires of his entire being. Every last one of his later works is filled with this duality. The question arises — what are we to look for in them, what are we to value? The demands of his soul, which break through to the surface despite "reason and conscience," to use Tolstoy's favorite words, or the prescriptions for an elevated life, prepared more or less according to a common stereotype? On which side is truth? Hitherto, "reason and conscience" were regarded as the final judges. All that we have in the way of ideals and hopes was created by them alone. But now that a judge has been discovered over these judges, what are we to do? Heed its voice, or remain true to tradition and again reduce it to silence.

How can you be satisfied? Because everything escapes you, you know that perfectly well. You know, even if you’re in love with somebody, everything escapes you. You would want to be nearer that person — how can you cut your flesh open and join it with the other person — it is an impossibility to do — so it is with art. It is almost like a long affair with objects and images and sensations and what you can call the passions. It is very much like that. You may love somebody very much, but how near can you get to them? You’re still always unfortunately sort of strangers.

It was wanderlust, pure and simple, yet it had come upon him like a seizure and grown into a passion — no, more, an hallucination. His desire sprouted eyes, his imagination, as yet unstilled from its morning labors, conjured forth the earth’s manifold wonders and horrors in his attempt to visualize them: he saw. He saw a landscape, a tropical quagmire beneath a steamy sky — sultry, luxuriant, and monstrous — a kind of primordial wilderness of islands, marshes, and alluvial channels; saw hairy palm shafts thrusting upward, near and far, from rank clusters of bracken, from beds of thick, swollen, and bizarrely burgeoning flora; saw fantastically malformed trees plunge their roots through the air into the soil, into stagnant, shadow-green, looking-glass waters, where, amidst milk-white flowers bobbing like bowls, outlandish stoop-shouldered birds with misshapen beaks stood stock-still in the shallows, peering off to one side; saw the eyes of a crouching tiger gleam out of the knotty canes of a bamboo thicket — and felt his heart pound with terror and an enigmatic craving. Then the vision faded, and with a shake of the head Aschenbach resumed his promenade along the gravestone cutters’ fences.