My Unwanted Fling with Dionysus

After accompanying my fiancee to work on a conversationally-contentious CTA jaunt, I rode the Red and Brown lines for a few hours, alternately napping and slowly working through Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy". Now this is a short book, and one I've skimmed before (I was supposed to actually read it for class, but you know how these things go), and Nietzsche is as gripping as philosophers get. But I was just crawling through it, maybe because of the L's lurching and leaning, or maybe because I'm trying to figure out what order looks like in my own life.

Ol' Friedrich sets up the characters of two ancient Greek gods against each other - Apollo, marked by dreams, language and order, versus Dionysus, marked by drunkenness, music and chaos.  To Nietzsche, the dreamlike Appolonian attitude pervaded Greek poetry and literature, imposing a distant, abstracted sense of order. The Greek chorus in a typical classical play reminds the audience to suspend their disbelief, a device which nevertheless reinforces the artificial nature of the onstage proceedings. Nietszche contrasts the Appolonian distance (which is still self-conscious even as it leans backwards out of subjectivity to recognize a play as a play, or to view a painting as a painting) with the Dionysian self-forgetful orgy of the many into a primal unity (which is viciously subjective in the vein of Kierkegaard's Aesthetic mode of being, yet nonetheless cedes its very individuality in the act of pursuing its id-like desires, which empties one into others like the indiscriminate hooking up at a frathouse binge party). Anyway, Nietzsche priveleges music over language, claiming that speech and text (which embody Apolloniasm)  are always a copy or shadow of the eerie primeval melodies (which convey Dionysianism). Somehow, I suspect that Derrida would disagree. The really interesting thing about this is not that Nietzsche attaches opposing metaphysical qualities to two fairly similar mediums (music and drama) pitting them against each other; instead, he subtly differentiates between them in order to present two alternate metanarratives: one grounded (or rather, "ungrounded") in chaos and random particularity, and one grounded in order and an almost ironic sense of the real. These two metanarratives have different ways of explaining each other - each assumes its own authority, and that the other is a two-bit ripoff of itself (Nietzsche himself claims that the Dionysian preceded the Appolonian, however).

Anyway, this metaphysical interpretation may not be warranted - maybe he indeed simply writing a history of Attic tragedy. But I think it's much more interesting as a way of thinking about order in my own life. If order is of the (ahem) order of language, then there are definite rules for how life is to be arranged. (I would argue that music is as equally ordered as language - both modes of 'communication' are certainly willing and able to bend or break such rules, but let's ignore that for the moment). Because Nietzsche associates language with drama (he mentions lyrics when discussing Dionysian music, but claims that music absorbs lyrics because it is more primeval, therefore any focus on language itself must be in a medium of lesser emotional power - apparently, that is how he views the stage. I think he's right - as pretentious as music can be (I read somewhere once that song is the place where we sing the kinds of things that are too cheesy to ever be spoken, not to mention that its harmonies are preconcieved), it certainly doesn't match the pretense of the stage (costumes, script, props, etc).

So, if order is a veil over an original disorder, then my attempts to live according to the Text (Scripture as the script for the good life: patterning my life after Christ's incarnational reinterpretation and fulfillment of OT law) is never more than a shadow play. Conscious attempts to live into sanctification (to say my lines and play my part with unique excellence) always exist under the clutch of a constant Ordering (a script, a director, a limited stage with designated props), yet this Ordering is always imposed (like a play setpiece) atop the stage of a prior chaotic dithyramb (dissonant melody). Order can never overturn Chaos, it can only ever cover it up. If true, thios is extremely depressing. And yet our messy world runs on the principle of Entropy: creation seems to be groaning to return not to Paradise, but a pre-BigBang nothingness. To wit: cities built atop fault lines cave back into the earth which had upheld them. With every passing medical advancement, nature seems to develop new ways to kill us (AIDS, new variants of cancer, a panoply of mutating influenza strains, etc). Even Styrofoam, the most durable of un-decomposable materials, has a half-life, and will someday turn back into the carbon chains which had congealed to form it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Perhaps most tellingly, Jacque's famed monologue from As You Like It waxes on the very themes of The Birth of Tragedy, beginning with "All the world's a stage" and commencing with the entropic return to the carbon-based chaos known as death, as evidenced by the nearly-dead antiquarian "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything". Of course, it might be argued that primal chaos is a far cry from nothingness. An old toothless man can hardly function as an active participant in a drunken orgy (although his senility certainly fits the bill of Bacchic drunken forgetfulness). But although the tones of Taps are a sullen afterthought to the life-giving nuptial strains of Pachelbel's Canon in D, it is not a stretch to think of death as a dreary Aristotelian end, in the Freudian sense of the Death-Drive.

I guess I'm really trying to find a way to deal with my own latent (and unwanted!) nihilism, and Nietzsche is raising his hand, squirming in his seat, and squealing, "Oooh! Pick me!"  At least once a week, I pray to my Savior to purge the nihilism from my soul, and I'm scared to think how deeply its dusty talons still reach into my being. I'm not talking about a (dare I say) "metaphysical" commitment to nothingness and meaninglessness. Instead, it's more of a pragmatic nihilism (how Zizek characterizes ideology): how am I actually living, despite my professed beliefs? This is a question which I'm sure will take many more posts to answer. In the meantime, beannachd dia Dhuit.