I'm back in the States, despite a brief stay in Belford Hospital in Port William. Having time on my hands in the hospital, I was able to learn a new favorite poem ("I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow"), and, of course, think through a quick defense of music such as that produced by Slipknot and Rage Against the Machine. I owe my inspiration for the following to many drugs and to Glenn Cannon(!) Arbery.
To use the words of Nietzsche, Slipknot participates in the Dionysian element of tragedy: "an assured premonition of highest pleasure through destruction and negation." [To clarify, Nietzsche says this about Dionysian music in general, not about Slipknot in particular.] To summarize elements in The Birth of Tragedy that call to mind heavy metal, the Dionysian and the Apollinian (I use Kaufman's spelling to reflect the debt I owe to his thought), "appear coupled with each other, and through this coupling ultimately generate an equally Dionysian and Apollinian form of art--Attic tragedy." For Nietzsche, the Apollinian functions through beautiful images. It has vanquished the primal order of the Titans that ruled before. It is not, however, just a "healing;" it is also a type of "illusion:" Apollinian art hides from the viewer the brutal, primal terrors and energies that are hidden under the phenomenal world.
Dionysian art, on the other hand, functions through music. "Through music," says Nietzsche, "the viewer participates in an assured premonition of highest pleasure through destruction and negation, so he feels as if the innermost abyss of things spoke to him perceptibly;" this innermost abyss has a "hidden substratum of suffering and knowledge, revealed by the Dionysian."
What kind of knowledge do we gain from seeing the Oresteia, or from watching King Lear, or from attending a Slipknot concert? We do, as Aristotle says, achieve some kind of catharsis, or purging, of unclean emotions; yes; but, I think Nietzsche advances our understanding of the knowledge of tragedy even further: "the metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the instinctive unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of images;" those who enter the Dionysian become, for a moment, "primordial being itself, feeling its raging desire for existence and joy in existence.... We are pierced by the maddening stings of these pains just when we have become, as it were, one with the joy in primordial existence, and when we anticipate, in Dionysian ecstasy, the indestructability and eternity of this joy." That is, Nietzsche doesn't say that only when fear and pity have been purged do we gain some kind of knowledge; no, "in spite of fear and pity, we are the happy living beings, not as individuals, but as the one living being, with whose creative joy we are united." This rapturous joy is something of what Dmitri lives in The Brothers Karamazov: "I'm a Karamazov. For when I do leap into the pit, I go headlong with my heels up, and am pleased to be falling in that degraded attitude, and pride myself upon it. And in the very depths of that degradation I begin a hymn of praise." I can't help but draw parallels between the Dionysian abyss and the Psalmist: "De profundis clamavi ad te Domine;" or Job, scraping his back with a potsherd; in such tragic moments, "Man, jack, joke, poor potsherd, / Patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, / Is immortal diamond."
This is all well and good and true for tragedy, but I guess I should at least try to suggest some parallels between tragedy and that things I like to listen to (sometimes).
There seems to be little of the Apollinian in metal, but the Apollinian image need not be beautiful in the way that we think of it normally: it is not "pretty." As Socrates says, sometimes, you have to tell your eyes, irresistably drawn to scenes of carnage, "All right then, fine, look and have your fill!" "Feed apace then, greedy eyes," agrees Samuel Daniel. The eyes are drawn to these images of pain and suffering, beautiful in their scenery of desctuction and begation. There are plenty of movements toward Appolinian, image-driven beauty in the music itself, and in the lyrics, of most heavy metal. To take just one example, there is that great section in the Rage song about Danny and Lisa: "They take me away from / The strangest places, / Sweet Danny and Lisa." Something translates the "strange" forces of the Dionysian abyss into sweet and Apollinian imagery. The entire song seems to suggest a translation of the primal forces of rock considered as just music (aural and Dionysian) into those forces being conveyed in a visual medium (Apollinian) as well: "Hey man, look at me rocking out: / I'm the radio; / Hey man, look at me rocking out, / I'm on the video."
For another parallel between the old tragedy of yore and the new tragedy of metal, I think of Wagner's theory of gesamptkunstwerk. Wagner wanted to combine all different mediums of art into his opera with a view towards creating true tragedy. Slipknot definitely embraces the operatic gesamptkunstwerk, shown most clearly by their live shows. They combine music enhanced by huge loudspeakers (aural art), painting in their backdrops, crazy light shows, and special effects (visual art), lyrics of a sort (poetry), and, of course, masks, drummers running all over their set, band members leaping into the mosh pit to crowd-surf, long and stringy hair thrashed to the beat of the music in the "heavy" sections of music... (theatrical, dramatic art).
The song "Psychosocial" provides an excellent example of the tragic hero as presented by the lyrics of the song. I wish I knew the lyrics to the verses so I could back this up even better, but just check the chorus: "The rain will kill us all, / We throw ourselves against the wall; / And no one else can see / The preservation of the martyr in me." Glenn Cannon says, "The tragic hero of the Dionysian [such as the character in "Psychosocial," and the members of Slipknot] is actually Dionysius himself undergoing in disguise the agony of appearing at all, having to be and act in a circumscribed and limited mode of being." Just as Nietzsche says that only the actors behind their masks truly face the tragic abyss, Slipknot acknowledges that "no one else can see the preservation of the martyr" in the characters that they assume.
To conclude, heavy metal today is actively participating in the genre of tragedy. All right, my drugs are wearing off, and I need bed.
"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. / I learn by going where I have to go."
Showing posts with label Nietzsche. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nietzsche. Show all posts
June 10, 2010
November 24, 2009
Responding to the Relativism of the Street
This is the first draft of an article I'm writing for De Rebus, an intraseminary publication on culture and politics. Yes, I'm part of the editing staff. Yes, I'll probably run it next year.
Responding to the Relativism of the Street
Joshua M. Neu
With regards to the relativism rampant in our culture, there are at root two distinct types: the relativism of the scholar and the relativism of the street. Of course, both may be divided and subdivided into their constituent doctrines and adherents, but that more or less does it. The relativism of the scholar, most prevalent in the universities, boasts a wide variety of pedants and ne’er-do-wells, from A. J. Ayer with his heady doctrine of emotivism to Friedrich Nietzsche who supposes that truth is woman whom each man must lure away, but the particularities of these views relate little to the baker, the butcher, or the newspaper delivery boy. No, the relativism of the street, that is, of the man-in-the-street, is much less thought out, and perhaps, therefore, much more honest. As it is on this man that the wheels of our day-to-day culture turn, so it is to this man that the Catholic-in-the-street must respond. With that in mind, I will tease out what it is that the man-in-the-street actually believes and offer a response, constraining myself to comment only on relativism applied to religion, rather than ethics or some other category.
The conversation between the Catholic-in-the-street and his fellow man usually runs a bit like this:
Relativist: “You cannot tell me what to believe. All truth is relative.”
Catholic: “The claim that all truth is relative is a claim about absolute truth.”
Relativist: “But some things are true for me, whereas others are true for you.”
Catholic: “Truth is not merely relative or subjective. You claim that there is a truth, namely that ‘all truth is relative,’ which is true regardless who believes it. In doing so, you both contradict your claim and show that you believe in some sort of absolute truth.”
Usually, the relativist remains unconvinced, while the Catholic walks away mumbling about the principle of non-contradiction and wondering how someone could be so obstinate. It seems that they might as well have had two different conversations. I contend that, for all practical purposes, they did.
The man-in-the-street maintains an unspoken premise, one which he may never have thought through. He believes that truths regarding religion are essentially unknowable. Since it is unknowable, religion is a way of organizing one’s experience, coping, or imparting meaning to one’s life. Therefore the man-in-the-street uses the word “truth” in two ways. The first is exactly as the Catholic means the word in the above conversation—as Aristotle says, “To say that [either] that which is is not or that which is not is, is a falsehood; and to say that that which is is and that which is not is not, is true.”[1] The second way is that a truth is a belief about that which cannot be known, for the purpose of organizing the believer’s experience, coping, or imparting meaning to the believer’s life. With this hidden distinction, the man-in-the-street can claim that truth is relative and go on unscathed by the Catholic claim that there is an absolute truth.
In a certain sense, the man-in-the-street is correct. Religious truth as such cannot be known through reason. It is known through faith, and faith is a supernatural virtue that is a gift from the personal God who reveals Himself in Jesus Christ. Faith is primarily the belief in a person, not in a set of propositions—crédere in Deum rather than crédere quod Deus sit. This, however, does not justify fideism. The propositions, such as that purgatory exists or that the universe is not founded on an infinite series of causes, are quite important, but they are only knowable through believing in Him who reveals. Were it not the case that God is Who He says He is, then the man-in-the-street would be correct about all religious truths. All would be of the second sort, wanderings through a dark wood while refusing to awaken to life’s essential tragedy.
Is it, then, the case that there is “[n]othing to be done,” as Estragon would like us to believe while he and the man-in-the-street await the arrival of Godot, whether that figure is a person or nothing at all?[2] Of course not, but although intellectual debate of nuanced propositions can be helpful for conversion, the Catholic tradition has always recognized that the Holy Spirit is the one who works, converting the soul to the person of Jesus Christ. In every age of the Church, the Holy Spirit commissions this work to witnesses, beginning with the primary witnesses, the martyrs. One has to wonder if Our Lord allowed Stephen to die just so that Paul could see it happen and have the passing thought that Christ might in fact be Who He says He is.
Augustine arrives only a few centuries later, and as Christ is the archetype for all the martyrs, Augustine may be an archetypical convert. Even Augustine, an intellectual next to Christians like Gulliver hovering over Lilliput, was inspired not by argument so much as by a witness, for example, the life of St. Anthony the Great. Through his well-tuned rhetoric, Augustine’s very Confessions encourage us to follow Christ with Augustine himself as witness.
The Catholic must demonstrate that the truth of the Catholic faith is a truth in the primary sense of the term, and that demonstration is one not of propositions but of martyrdom. The priest or religious primarily submits this proof because all aspects of his life flow from and lead toward the person of Jesus Christ. When truly all aspects of his life are so directed, no one can deny that the religious claim is one of absolute truth. Such an all-encompassing devotion cannot be confused with a belief for the purpose of organizing the believer’s experience, coping, or imparting meaning to the believer’s life. No man is celibate in order to cope. The response to relativism is what all Catholic responses essentially have been, martyrdom for the person of Jesus Christ, in whom the martyr believes as absolute truth.
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