There exists above the most ‘righteous’ of peoples a yet higher class of freedom- Cereris iustissima pondera vendi. [Helius Eobanus] For was not Ceres ever the true goddess of justice? But if it is freedom; the thought, feeling for, and aestheticism of freedom which is, as it were, the bough that holds a living Aeneas unto death and pushes him forward even into life, then perhaps the desire, the very need to assert and continually to assert that we are free; that we as a peoples are free, that we as a time are free- is quite churlish, and betrays the deepest and as such most dangerous seeds of vengeance, covetousness, and ambition. If one is free this freedom really does not require one to exercise any right, nor does one generally acquire a consciousness of his freedom to valorize it without first being duped by the artifices of marketplaces and ‘high society’ which cleave responsibility from right and as such offer to us mere privileges, in picturam parietis, behind freedom’s forsaken bust;[/i] inconsequent, petty, and empty in their mere hedonisms-. All ‘true’ rights are by necessity unacknowledged, inaudibly and moreover healthily at work-- just as all of the innumerable processes of our stomachs. Consequently all ‘inalienable’ rights.
Because of freedom’s tremendous sanctity, so it is the Perseum movit Olympo [Petrus Stratenus in Venus Zeelanda Page 74] for every one of us, and also the very light in which great events and all the footwear of Theramenes; disasters as well as blessings, marriages as well as tyrannies, become limpid, no longer limited and distorted by mere salience. And yet the most insignificant sacrifice, if only it is not traduced and infringed upon, and inspires sacrifice, is incomparably a more supreme sacrifice than the greatest of them which comes only in some historical episode, as it were, like a shifting mood in this our world theater, as a fantastic interlude between tyranny, prosperity, and unspeakable dearth.
The desire on the other hand to trumpet our freedom is a desire that is quite possibly the most insidious poison and malformity in the human heart. It represents that snakeish absconing in a compromised form out of oneself in crises and miscarriages- as is the case for that old Jewish moral instinct; in oppression and isolation; of renewing and reliving all which has passed and re-affirming what is extraneous to ones self; of over-straining oneself so as to open old wound, because one has eventually learned through such enduring sicknesses to be pleased with salting them and in mere restitution of health, and consequently has lost all consciousness of his health; of fancifully indemnifying what has been lost, and in the Maccabeen restitution of all the petty embers and slightest murmurings of oneself. Thus the most haggard and terrible of life’s contretemps and injuries and even the most severe, most Apollonian of retributions against our own malefaction often fail to truly wound us; the conscience grows old quickly in every one of us, as beauty for the body so she is for the soul, and only for a few moments does life rouse her from her torpors.
The Philosopher, non quid Marculus, aut Thraso bilinguis, nec quid praepediet procax venenum humani labii, nec Atrocopta, sucks from the wound of knowledge all the poison of human affairs. The philosopher is desirous of truth, not in that form of hopeless, anti-utilitarian knowledge-- contra Boetheium, but in that of a Themis upon whose scales the truth might be realized- not as an egoic possession of the individual, neither as gold or silver, but as the Alensisian communis omnium possessio and sacred right to apprise and re-apprise the whole inventory of personal experiences.
- The unlucky scale.
What if, when you perished, Rhadamanthus would set every noble act, every love, every pleasant moment in your life and every rosy fingered dawn upon one side of his scale- and every evil, every displeasure, every sufferance on the other… assuming, if your miseries and wrong-doings outweighed your joys and deeds, that you were condemned to eternally relive all of your misery as a punishment, and then again out of your own meager powers of consolation you were to thus recall the sweetness of your few joys, may they be as indelible as they like in contrast to your new-found torment… would this make your suffering endurable? And if your magnanimity and graciousness outweighed your misery, your isolation, your pangs of conscience, would you imagine that having to bear the memory of all these terrible things, even as you were granted the highest gift that can anywise be granted- to re-live innumerably and forever every one of your life’s flowers and joys… would you imagine that this would nonetheless constitute a ‘heaven?’ No, and no again: if you will only be honest with yourself.
Flammarum non abs questus in cineres solvatur. [Elogia Mariana : Ex Lytaniis Lauretanis Deprompta Isaacus Oxoviensis. P. 265]
“Nothing is born of happy flame
that despised ashes will not claim.”
Courage has its illusions no less than fear. Since life must be our Abelmizraim in death, to be presently alive were to lay obscure in the chaos of Prae-ordination, and night of our fore-beings. Hunger, longing, and need were established for us before birth itself, to clothe our tedious being for dwelling here; for because it is a tedious being that can un-wish itself, after the malcontent of Job, and it is by accustomation to living that we are indisposed to die. All illusions, all exploiture and contentions present themselves upon this, to borrow a term out of Palligenius Stellatus, inane amplum - of high vanity you will endeavor, while here on Earth, to cast them off; as Job, humored to have so far been, so as to be entitled to continuation, in a hidden state of life, and as it were incrimination, you will at best make Alcmenas nights out of adversity-- Eppia ludum ad Pharon et Nilum famosaque moenia Lagi prodigia et mores urbis damnante Canopo, while the Canopus itself would groan under this; to cast off by labor fate and time in moments only, whereby to renew the senses of an hour. Ever natura parens unica: Fortuna noverca est, Nature is thy only mother- and Fortune tis’ thy stepmother… what they shalt tell thee, none shall macerate for thee, it cannot be taken back, miseret glocitantum, merge salubri flumine: maternos vanis cum questibus ignes flumnis excuties ope frigidioris, all complaints thereof art inane, quid domini faciant, audent cum talia fures! non ego te vidi Damonis, pessime, caprum excipere insidiis, multum latrante Lycisca, for the devices of nature art like so many theives, yet the world hath so readily separated kindred from kindred, blinded the Riphaean eye of justice, and dressed a terrible madness like it was any pleasure. Sleep hath an aurea mala, or golden jaw, like Theon saith, and singeth therewith unto us. Dreams, illusions, hopes- these are as the cocoons in which man, a worm… ha! but nonetheless a dreaming worm, dresses himself: and lo! What breaks forth from these magical, iridescent, and golden cocoons!
Therefor! What wisdom of Anacharis! That we might let wisdom drink deeply- so deeply in fact that she makes herself sick. She will awaken and perhaps vow to never drink again. The weary oxen who breathes calmly- for indeed, and this is a mark to the highest pity, he cools in labor rather than fires in it, appears benign, and allows things to go on as they might: monomachies, affairs, peace treaties, as well as floods, tyrannicides, and voyages to new lands. This typical figure, in our age of labor, and in all classes of society, thereby claims folly no less as his true province. And yet the modern man- Hesperus, whose sleep shall be as oil when flame touches it- even as Holderlin says, needs his Gythium and colored dyes, his Phaselis as well as roses. In such ages even the philosopher- and for the first time the philosopher, concedes to the fact that philosophy has a right to untempered feneration and pure, Eosphoric folly in tristis a mente procul fugatis! [Salmonii Macrini Iuliodunensis Odarum libri tres ad P. Castellanum- page 65] Pure folly restitutes wisdom… “tantum doctiosona frete scientia; sic nullo neque tempore, musae praesidium destituent suum; bruma nec medica licet terrarum getulos vadat ad ultimos.” [Leonis Aetsema Doccumani Poemata Juvenilia] And even the most sour of artists here among us is not sour enough for the work he really shuns, criticizes, and ultimately rejects out of bad taste: whereby he sweetens it.
Damnosa Hereditas. Guilt, like the sacrificial venom of the bee, is a mere fortuity. Which then is the more difficult labor for the philosopher: to redeem one who is worthy of the name of sin, or to redeem one who, while he sins, has faith that he sins? Where the intense power of the psychologist’s nose can no longer discern pure feeling and a will to truth, even as a handful of pungent spices makes us cough and gasp for breath, rather than imparts its magnificent hints and hues in something that has been ever so subtly given relish by it; because this will has become too valorized, too overpowering; because it has subdued every hint and every distinction of fragrances of the moral character; because it has become an ideal, for instance, in the figure of the saint, as under the foreboding of his inhuman purity and solitude-- so man posits the realm of evil, ill-will, and deceit. O paltry Aristo! The feeling that one has entered upon the realm of malice impinges through this irritability of the psychological nose upon all of those inclinations which had been overpowered by the ideal: all of these brilliant subtleties of the moral character now become as solemn dread which arises in the naivete and aspiration for the noble virtues, high feeling-- purity, and innocence, in the defiance of all things human that is required to achieve it, and in short, idealism. For an artist to squander and revile everything which his audience believes him to be; to deprecate against his truths, he must conceive of himself as far more lowly than he really is- far less of an ideal than he really is.
Coelo adsimilis hominum fortuna videtur, nanque vices mutat, facieque est saepe serena. [Vadianus Joachim in Helvetii Aegloga] All philosophers suffer from the same deficiency, in that they think they can arrive at their goal of a genuine life by analyzing their ideals- of ‘truth,’ ‘justice,’ or beauty. Instinctively they let their ideals and little strings of Arachne’s loom vacillate before them even as a laureum baculum gesto, a proof against all dangers, and a precaution against all spiritual corruptions-- what are these, but a Theseae bracchiae longa viae lain upon the untrammeled wildernesses of thought, for which an industrious little Theseus must slay many minotaurs, many 'truths. Yet, in precisely as this holds, it will be easy enough to make out the fact- that these noble ‘analyses’ of life are mere philosophical vindications of particular ways of living, philosophical confessions to particular ways of experiencing or receiving- life: like great suns do these ideals bestow verdure and solace, and do they relieve one of his dependence upon guilt and shame, or with a noble ‘ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?’ are all mortifications and disgrace even permitted to lay down unto the summer’s flowerbeds.
To redeem these redeemers! But the first little drops of blood- we first redeemers must be also the first sinners, and husbandmen unto the trees of knowledge- for such as these do I write. After all, who is the philosopher? It seems to me more and more that the lover of wisdom, thereby necessarily a sufferer for wisdom- has always found himself, as he often must find himself, like a mad lover, in contention with his Eurydice. Now Eurydice has a still more baneful danger than her beauty, namely, her silence. She might possibly have escaped from the mere sensual ardor of some Orpheus; but her silence, certainly never did one of them find strength enough to ignore.
Romanticism and a slight passion may be formed in stillness, but true belonging and love are formed in the world’s lively tempest and Anticyre.
Mors ergo tempestiva et congrua non odii, sed summi amoris. [Cornelius Cornelli a Lapide]
Trans. “Given the immensity of the world’s tempestuousness and death, to find a way to escape the bane of odium were the summation of what we call ‘love.’”
An artist must be the hammer for the heavy anvil of our souls. Let us hear only of the artist that tries us; our lives too must be difficult, for only the difficult inspires the artistic soul. As it stands, we have ‘truth’ and often die of its wound, but of necessity to prevent our attaining the feeling of immortality in the brilliant fantasies and imaginings of art. We need only to love, to despise, to desire, to simply be overcome with this tide of sensations in aesthetic rapture- at once the spirit and ebb of our fantasy, and we descend with gaping eyes, impervious to all subterranean monsters and danger, unafraid even of all the deepest and most lutluent recesses of passion and instinct, humanity and animality, into the cisterns and springs of the fantasy; a poet among poets we fancy ourselves even before lions, birds, and vines-- me doctarum hederae praemia frontium dis miscent superis, me gelidum nemus nympharumque leves cum satyis chori secernunt populo, and without any nausea at this yawning depth all around us, as if we were born to do so. Yet, as indigent, writhen, and perverted as this life shall one day appear in the light of one thousand and one hundred thousand dawns, let that the commanding something and interior fatum, which the philosophers call ‘truth,’ that Aethon for the philosopher’s stomach, when it has been relinquished and placed in the hands of an artist, uproot this life, abnegate and reject it, and reveal it with every one of these interstices and severances.
In ossibus ignes- it is therefor one of my most enduring fascinations with that peculiarity of the human heart… that so much guilt in the histories of peoples coexists with the general lack of conscience, the disinterest rather than impartial judgment, which every present day man displays with respect to the future. Every era has hereby-- qualiter ipse pater vitae, [Petrus Lotichius in Poemata doctrinae Eruditione, Virtute] a reactive force; all truth, all knowledge, as well as all error, is again placed upon the scales for the sake of this era, and a thousand Egerias of wisdom crawl out from their wells into its meadows, valleys, and forests. Perhaps there is no way to apprise the value of how many beautiful futures have already passed us. Perhaps even our future has already passed us by- ever are our ‘reactive’ forces slow! Impartial judgment shall always lament and wonder to see how many expediences throughout history and little graces of life; what Semiramis and hanging gardens, what city of Thebes and Phocensian triumph are lost; to set forever- and under our sun, and never to return in their integrity.
I healthily endorse that cynicism which still admits of a consolation by Eros, even as he replies ‘Let us therefor try this man or this woman in my name!’ For icy distrust of peoples is as snow; the harder it falls, the more fleetingly it dwells upon, and the more shallowly does it penetrate the distrusted. But I would hear nothing more about all the vanity, impression, and resentment that do not admit of this consolation. This is the ‘penia’ and limitation of my sense for the contempt of man; for there, sensuality has lost its right.-- Mellaque ceu mulcent hominum dulcore palata, sic animi sensus recreat… “the pangs of the heart can at times sweeten the taste of all our other pangs.” [Iacobi Micylli Argentoratensis Sylvarum Page 558.]
In the decline of its life the cicada, perched a’ top its branch with neither food or drink, sings until it dies. That were no sad thing; it is sad that, in the decline of reason, many cold, disconsolate truths would die before they sing.
Man, what a shrouded thing! And if the hydra might lose nine, man may loose his head nine times ninety times before he fathoms himself, and finally slays the serpent of self-deceit. Yet, I implore the youthful soul to look back on life, as it were, holding itself decursu lampada poscis, and with the severest oppugning humor to recall everything which it has truly loved up to now, as well as all of its greatest sufferings-- everything which has affected it most and most deeply; everything which has both relinquished and mastered it, be these things ideals, peoples, or times; its lowest plains as well as highest peaks. Place these venerations and most despised anathema before you in succession, and perhaps, as is the case for the general lot of mankind, they will merely yield unto your soul, through their complement, transfiguration, surpassing, sequence, and expansion a dizzying ebb and flow- impenetrable and traumatizing; a dazzling Ecnephia, a lying theater performance in beholding which you shall lose yourself, the Tyrrhenean sea upon which Aelous seals and puts to sleep your four winds. But it is only the attentive contemplation of these things in which the common essence which binds them into a unity, in omni fortuna eui amantissimum [Paolo Manuzio’s Epistles] may be discovered, and this essence, this fundamental law of your being is nothing less than what you are willing to suffer most for.
Men are so necessarily powerless, that to have had bestowed upon oneself both eloquence and true power would amount to another form of misinterpretation, public slandering, and powerlessness.
Sanity is often vitiated against by describing it.
Nam iracundiam & cupidenem vini, sicuti juventa irritaverat, ita senectus mitigare potusisset. –
Erycius Puteanus in Suada Attica Orationum. Page 390]
“Why should the wine of youth not sweeten with the years?”
In the end we can never possess our beloved but always only our love. Even the child-artist to whom the hand of a woman has never befallen can still cultivate in himself, as he usually does, even in remarkable phases of youth and simple childhood-- true and intense sensations of love, whose object may be however remote or imaginary; even as these stages in life may be usually reserved, not in the flowering and yielding of fruit, but in the development of the root and stalk of the tree of passion. Even more remarkable is the fact that delight in these sensations soon becomes a second nature in him, which swallows and condemns the l’ amour courtois and first nature, namely, that he take as his supreme banner of victory- a woman.
The strength of men is far more evident for those whom know of it than in those who know it not.
Eclecticism is that Orpheus whom must descend into the land of the dead after his little Eurydice of inspiration has been slain.
The man who does not know hot to become powerless at a whim has no power over woman.
Greek tragedy prefers ruination to precede remorse, and then remorse not to follow by replacing it with silence.
We delight only in what we fundamentally are.
- MEDEA IN SUMMA
“You would be surprised how hard it often is to translate an action into thought.” –
Karl Kraus.
Let us make this comprehensible for women:
You would be surprised how hard it often is to translate an actioninto feeling.
The amateur philosopher must often stop in the middle of a sentence to think about what he is trying to say. The profound, the dangerous philosopher often must stop to think about what he is not trying to say.
As of yet no philosophical truths have been adequately covered. They have just been been dug up.
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Remedium est patientia.– The severest poison for our little draught of love is often enough the enjoyment of love itself, as is common to the artist, and in forgetting the beloved while with cautious hands we have our good patience with the god Eros. Love punisheth the man as well as the woman’s timidity alike! Ever is it yet the greatest and most blinding love to enjoy love itself. To enjoy any particular person, that were always a little passion and a miraculous note. But for us to leave off of plucking strings and to embrace all of our most profound loves and beloveds in one chorus, then shall our voice become fuller than ever it was-- and then again our draught too!
On the Greek pharmakon.-- The surest way to poison the conscience and annul a just act is by acknowledging the act with a just reward.
Silence may be the severest justice for the philosopher, and holy temulence were it for him to become a stone, and to play the Olenus unto his truths.
All pain can be suffered in silence- but sanity.
On my sense of the word ‘fate.’
Bound up irremediably in our everyday character there is some true magnanimity of life, some genius, some capacity which is on the whole quite remarkable. Surely does it set one apart from man’s uncouth lot! But, owing to the fact that it has been so equally, so very suently distributed throughout our being in everyday experience- in the tortuous adagio of that sense for time common to every laborer and begrudging mule, it becomes the least conspicuous of all our capabilities before the eye of self knowledge- even though it is also the most participant law in every one of our acts, deeds, and thoughts. One becomes a genuine, a great artist, writer, etc. only by isolating this capacity and revealing it in its ‘purity,’ undebased by common life and experience-- vita ipsius ex affectu. [ Aloysius Sidereus in Seraphinus seu schola sancti amoris, page 108.]
Supposing, in Greek tragedy, that the restitution of man, that the surest way to elevate ourselves beyond our grief in our own faults and uglinesses, are always to be understood as the following lesson, which I have taken from out of Papinius Statius: satiare malis aegrumque dolorem libertate doma– pretend that you are guilty so that you might quell guilt: (and this certainly I do hold to be the case, at least with respect to the manner in which a self contained bourgeois is only capable of imagining the restitution of man from the perspective of a bad conscience) then what does the so called Trauspiel or bourgeois tragedy give us to understand as to the guilt and bad conscience of our own age? Its kind of restitution is undoubtedly the kind we can most easily attain, and accords to Pascal’s piece of wit: “A petty trifle consoles us, for a petty trifle distresses us.” Our distressing trifles and penny sins often become opaque for us, so that we assume they shall offer a great resistance and antagony- how throughly amazed we are to then discover, even though we cannot see through them, that we can easily go through them, as through a cloud of heavy fog- and that were surely a highest consolation.
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What faint sense of smell man has! What prevents him some smelling his own filth, in art, morals, or philosophy? He is himself filth- he makes things repugnant.
If while one slept he dreamed of falling into a dream-- he would be unable to resist succumbing to the dream. It is thus the case with all guilt. In the languors of a bad conscience one dreams of falling into the terrible nightmare of himself, and precisely because of this he is incapable of offering any resistance or of waking himself.
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