pepenator

«Sight into the unconcealed transpires first, and only, in the disclosive word. Sight looks, and is the appearing self-showing that it is, only in the disclosive domain of the word and of telling perception. Only if we recognize the original relation between the word and the essence of Being will we be capable of grasping why, for the Greeks and only for them, to the divine (τὸ ϑεῖον) must correspond the legendary (ό μῦϑος). This correspondence is indeed the primordial essence of all analogy (homology), the word “ana-logy” taken essentially and literally. Insight into this analogy, in which a dictum, a word, a legend, corresponds to Being, i.e., discloses it by speaking of it as the same in a comparison, puts us into a position to finally provide the answer to an earlier question.

In our first elucidation of the essence of μῦϑος [the legendary] as the disclosive legend in which and for which Being appears, we asserted that, in accord with the essential dignity of the word, poetizing and thinking had the highest rank for the Greeks. This claim was bound to provoke an objection, and the foregoing elucidations of δαιμόνιον [the demoniac, the extraordinary] and ϑεῖον [the divine] have lent it still more significance. For the Greeks, beings appear in their Being and in their “essence” not only in the “word” but equally in sculpture. If indeed the divine in the Greek sense, τὸ ϑεῖον, is precisely Being itself looking into the ordinary, and if the divine essence appears precisely for the Greeks in the architecture of their temples and in the sculpture of their statues, what happens then to the asserted priority of the word and accordingly to the priority of poetizing and thinking? For the Greeks, are not architecture and sculpture, exactly with regard to the divine, of a higher rank, or at least of the same rank, as poetry and thinking? Is there not a well-justified ground to our readily-adopted procedure of forming our standard “historiographical picture” of the essence of the Greek world on the basis of architecture and sculpture? Here we will only be able to raise and clarify these far-reaching questions within the limits drawn by our meditation on the essence of the δαιμόνιον [the extraordinary, the demoniac].

It is easy to see that at issue here are the relations among the “classes of art” and their rank: architecture, sculpture, poetry. We are thinking of the essence of art here, and indeed not in general and vaguely, and to be sure not as an “expression” of culture or as a “witness” to the creative potential of man. Our focus is how the work of art itself lets Being appear and brings Being into unconcealedness. This kind of questioning is far removed from metaphysical thinking about art, for the latter thinks “aesthetically.” That means the work is considered with regard to its effect on man and on his lived experience. To the extent that the work itself comes to be considered, it is looked upon as the product of a creating, a “creating” which again expresses a “lived urge.” Thus even if the work of art is considered for itself, it is taken as the “object” or “product” of a creative or imitative lived experience; that is to say, it is conceived constantly on the basis of human subjective preception (αἴσϑησις). The aesthetic consideration of art and of the work of art commences precisely (by essential necessity) with the inception of metaphysics. That means the aesthetic attitude toward art begins at the moment the essence of ἀλήϑεια [the unconcealed] is transformed into ὁμοίωσις [the correspondence], into the conformity and correctness of perceiving, presenting, and representing. This transformation starts in Plato’s metaphysics. In the time before Plato, for essential reasons, a consideration “of” art did not exist, and so in general all Western considerations of art and all explications of art and historiography of art from Plato to Nietzsche are “aesthetics.” This metaphysical basic fact of the unbroken domination of aesthetics is not changed at all, provided we keep the metaphysical in mind, if instead of a so-called cultivated and snobbish “aesthete,” we have, e.g., a peasant, with his “natural” instinct, “experience” a nude in an art exhibit. The peasant, too, is an “aesthete.”

Thinking about this unshakable fact, the suspicion must arise in us, after all we have been saying, that in our present desire to determine something about the art of the Greeks the obviousness of the aesthetic mode of consideration might in advance be burdering our approach with improper and distorting points of view.

According to the usual opinion, there are different “classes” of art. Art itself is the forming and shaping and “creating” of a work out of some matter. Architecture and sculpture use stone, wood, steel, paint; music uses tones, poetry words. One might agree that for the Greeks the poetic presentation of the essence of the gods and of their dominion was certainly essential; yet no less essential and in fact more “impressive,” because of its visibility, would be the presentation of the gods immediately in statues and temples. Architecture and sculpture use as their matter the relatively stable material of wood, stone, steel. They are independent of the fleeting breath of the quickly fading and, moreover, ambiguous word. Hence through these classes of art, architecture, sculpture, and painting, essential limits are set for poetry. The former do not need the word, while the latter does.

Now, this view is quite erroneous. Indeed architecture and sculpture do not use the word as their matter. But how could there ever be temples or statues, existing for what they are, without the word? Certainly these works have no need for the descriptions of the historiography of art. The Greeks were fortunate in not yet needing historiographers of art, or of literature, music, and philosophy, and their written history is essentially different from modern “historiography.” The Greeks had more than enough just with the tasks given them by poetry, thinking, building, and sculpturing.

But the circumstance that in a temple or in a statue of Apollo there are no words as material to be worked upon and “formed” by no means proves that these “works,” in what they are and how they are, do not still need the word in an essential way. The essence of the word does not at all consist in its vocal sound, nor in loquacity and noise, and not in its merely technical function in the communication of information. The statue and the temple stand in silent dialogue with man in the unconcealed. If there were not the silent word, then the looking god as sight of the statue and of the features of its figure could never appear. And a temple could never, without standing in the disclosive domain of the word, present itself as the house of a god. The fact that the Greeks did not describe and talk about their “works of art” “aesthetically” bears witness to the fact that these works stood well secured in the clarity of the word, without which a column would not be a column, a tympanum a tympanum, a frieze a frieze.

In an essentially unique way, through their poetizing and thinking, the Greeks experience Being in the disclosiveness of legend and word. And only therefore do their architecture and sculpture display the nobility of the built and the shaped. These “works” exist only in the medium of the word, i.e., in the medium of the essentially telling word, in the realm of the legendary, in the realm of “myth".»

John Frusciante’s mystifying musical power has been often marked out, unlike the role that poetic language plays within it. The temporality of poetry is very similar to that of music. As we know, the latter evokes a type of experience that only comes associated to a specific time and place determined by the moment in which we execute it or listen to it. Likewise, poetry appears held out of time as if it would inhabit some kind of eternal present.

The way Frusciante introduces us into his music as to a fluke of founding poetry whose function is almost sacramental, is mythological. Frusciante constantly employs myth as a resource to interpose a universe of retention —between our finitude thrown in the middle of a hostile nature blind to our hopes— where the unexplainable ends up making sense in one way or another. In God (The Empyrean, 2009), Frusciante uses myth to impound us from the horror inspired by the world that we unsuitably inhabit. God, incarnated in the voice of the musician, presents an alternative reality that stands out clearly from the ordinary world, the profane reality to which we only have access through our finite condition: «So each day would be new, I build you to sleep / that’s the idea of dying but you’ll just have to see». After this lapidating opening phrase, God presents an assorted rattle of unfolding events. These are derived from the pronominal game that Frusciante proposes insofar that its signs refer constantly to themselves, and find their determination in new relations that they establish with other signs which are present in the song and allow us to make multiple lectures.

A common attribute among Tibetan Buddhist monks, Aztec gods, some Christian saints and plenty of psychedelic substances consumers, is their unfolding capacity. Let’s say that it’s unfolded that the one whose soul leaves or projects out of the body —even remaining connected to it— always in the same spatial-temporal context. When, for example, Frusciante’s God says: «I’m each one of you», he is unfolding into his audience. From that moment, as if in the face of a mirror, each one of his listeners will be able to be and recognise itself before itself, and for so before God, as human being and as deity: «Be for me, before me» —John sings to the crowd and to himself, as a God and as a man. It is in that piousness that we can represent his poetic language to ourselves as a free flow of words that swivel upon themselves, like signs in rotation, since each one who listens to them gets involved in a game of unsettled purpose. As in the case of the English pronoun «you», which can be read as allusive to a group of entities in plural form, or to a single entity in singular form, depending on the context of its use. What Frusciante’s God proposes is to play with words in order to find alternative anothers who can be him or any of us: as deities and as human beings. For so, another possibility is that «you» can turn into the abstraction of the lover, and, God, into any of us unfolding into her or him: «You blaspheme my name / but still I love you / still I love you / I love you just the same».

Within this sacramental and amorous uncertainty, the only unquestionable thing for Frusciante’s God seems to be the immediacy of the mind between our existence and any aim to understand it: «You can do what you want or so you think / but till you stop all your thoughts / you are ties to your surroundings». Nevertheless, this reliance can be solved in a magic way if we tread into another form of unfolding suggested by God, whose mystifying power allows to reach, like in a dream, all that is unapproachable by means of reason: «When the fog spreads out in the rainy season / it comes from my insides / When the thunderous lightning strikes down / you’re seeing your real I» —sings God-Frusciante to find himself and another that like ourselves and him itself, as deity and human, as lover and now as thunder, befalls where and when the transfiguration of signs occurs; that is, at the moment when poetry comes to happen.

God operates as myth because it contemporises an implausible drama in a narrative present that is eternal and contains the experience of satisfaction itself. Within his cosmogony, Frusciante defines himself as an artificial creator of the world, and of music, by reaffirming his artistic vocation: «Creation’s not something I did / it’s something that I do» —exclaims God as he remarks his exhaustive condition within this unfinished world of his own authorship, speaking like a humble craftsman who perceives himself as an imperfect being and wails upon those who listen to him: «You know that I try to repair and repay»; for he is, after all, a very human God.