The Fate of Ophelia

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 25 February 2015.



I'm sick right now, so l'm feeling a little doubtful about how much Apollonian ambition I can muster. A pretentious passage from Nietzsche will suffice:

For we must know that in the rapture of the Dionysian state, with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence, there is a lethargic element, wherein all personal experiences of the past are submerged. It is by this gulf of oblivion that the everyday world and the world of Dionysian reality are separated from each other. But as soon as this everyday reality rises again in consciousness, it is felt as such, and nauseates us; an ascetic will-paralysing mood is the fruit of these states. In this sense the Dionysian man may be said to resemble Hamlet: both have for once seen into the true nature of things,- -they have perceived, but they are loath to act; for their action cannot change the eternal nature of things; they regard it as shameful or ridiculous that one should require of them to set aright the time which is out of joint.   

Knowledge kills action, action requires the veil of illusion. It is this lesson which Hamlet teaches, and not the cheap wisdom of John-a-Dreams who from too much reflection, as it were from a surplus of possibilities, does not arrive at action at all. Not reflection, no! true knowledge, insight into appalling truth, preponderates over all motives inciting to action, in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man. No comfort avails any longer ... In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence, he now understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia, he now discerns the wisdom of the sylvan god Silenus: and loathing seizes him. 

Here, in this extremest danger of the will, art approaches, as a saving and healing enchantress; she alone is able to transform these nauseating reflections on the awfulness or absurdity of existence into representations wherewith it is possible to live...

I'm seeing the project more and more as Nietzsche's dammed-up lake (from The Gay Science):

There is a lake which one day refused to flow away, and threw up a dam at the place where it had hitherto discharged: since then this lake has always risen higher and higher. Perhaps the very renunciation will also furnish us with the strength with which the renunciation itself can be borne; perhaps man will ever rise higher and higher from that point onward...

Is our lake rising higher and higher as we refuse to discharge ourselves into activity? Could discharging ourselves into activities other than contemplation (and any other activities that eschew a transcendent horizon besides Heaven) be the very thing that has prevented us from achieving greatness? This is not an un-Christian concept. And it is different than quietism; the darkness of this state presupposes that we are constrained to act and make choices in spite of the darkness. Other texts like Dark Night of the Soul have observed that, in the depths of perplexity, our actions paradoxically participate in the omnipotence of God. It is only after going out over the dark, primordial waters that Hamlet is able to return and almost inadvertently purify the kingdom.

And it doesn't mean that a show will never happen, but I'm beginning to see the power in our passivity.

Here's St. Paul (2 Corinthians 12:8-10):

Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me. Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints, for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.

I've shared this one before (again from The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music):

In the Oedipus at Colonus we find the same cheerfulness, elevated, however, to an infinite transfiguration: in contrast to the aged king, subjected to an excess of misery, and exposed solely as a sufferer to all that befalls him, we have here a supermundane cheerfulness, which descends from a divine sphere and intimates to us that in his purely passive attitude the hero attains his highest activity, the influence of which extends far beyond his life, while his earlier conscious musing and striving led him only to passivity.

Probably more than you were bargaining for...!