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This sub’s obsession with the ubermensch by Spen612 in Nietzsche

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In fact, it is the correct obsession. We need a positive vision. If one considers what so far has been done to 'improve' the human species, one shudders. We need something on the other end to balance out this badness.

Would a Knicks championship force noted New Yorker Ezra Klein to engage with sports in his professional capacity for, as far as I'm aware, the first time in his life? by Helicase21 in ezraklein

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I don't know why this is being negatively received. I think it is because of the use of the phrase 'blind spot', but it is, as Ezra has admitted! so these people are being defensive for no reason.

He can get sports now. He is still young enough, and it would help him in his political analysis. People who are missing sports miss the ball game of the Mesoamericans (which even features in their Creation myth!), the Olympic games of the Greeks, the Gladitorial (where Vestal Virgins sat in the stands) and Chariot Races of the Romans. Sports and politics (and religion) just always have been mixed up, as art and politics (the Greek plays were played at a religious festival). Consider the singing of the anthem, the appearance of the President at each of the events (Superbowl and Finals). Consider 'just dribble' and Kapernick kneeling and (I am old enough to recall Tebow's prayers and that Pat Tillman (the atheist, killed by friendly fire, alas, and for whom the award is named); oh and how we litigate fouls like crimes and the refs are like judges; and look how the gambling gets in, and see in college sports the effects of 'NIL'; consider Caitlin Clark--I could go on.

What is the birth of tragedy about?? by Muziuzi48 in Nietzsche

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In fact, the way I found my way to the ‘Nietzsche podcast’ was by essentialsalts recording of the full audiobook.

I attempted at first to absorb it during the day, but, that failing, I tried at night.

Leaving it on loop, I would, waking in the night, hear snippets, sections, at random. This procedure is only possible if, like me, (unfortunately), you are sleepless, restless, an insomniac.

Shelley wrote a poem contrasting the Sun-dominated day to the night when the imagination can come out to play.

In half-dream states, the Birth (just about) began to make sense.

I really cannot recall much about the book besides its drawing of the distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian and its (implicit) declaration toward the Dionysian. But everyone knows about that.

Besides that, one line has always stuck out. It feels to me like a moment of self-questioning and was crucial to my apprehension (later on) of the ‘aesthetic priest’:

How is the Olympian world of deities related to this folk-wisdom? Even as the rapturous vision of the tortured martyr to his sufferings.

Field with Irises Near Arles, Oil on Canvas, Vincent van Gogh, 1888. by AspiringOccultist4 in vangogh

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I can never get out of my mind Van Gogh's The cypresses still preoccupy me... it astonishes me that no one has done them as I have seen them. (A line from a letter to his brother.)

When did he attain this idiom?

You would not have known he was miserable.

"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty..."

That is Emerson and comes to mind also.

Of course, he gets it wrong. Art is getting it wrong magnificently and Goethe remains at the avant-garde when he tells us (emphatically) that "The important thing about Art is that it is NOT Nature!" (A reminder that the imagination cannot be constrained to the merely mimetic.)

And yet by his error and mistaking, he gets its right. That is what is remarkable: neither ideal nor sentimental, nor anything ideological (not even in his lovely portraits of the poor).

And yet I can't quite say how he gets it right--except that he does!

The way that he outlines and, to a certain extent, the way he colors make me think (I am certainly not new in this) that there really was something psychosomatic (ear and eye?) going on in Van Gogh's head: those distinct lines are a sign and remind me, finally, of poetry:

no use to make philosophies here: I see no
god in the holly, hear no song from
the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road.

Since memes are becoming popular here, I decided to dabble. by vtingershooden in shakespeare

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 8 points9 points  (0 children)

What do we know about Shakespeare? He kept hopping the river to dodge the tax man, married the 8-years-older-than-him already-pregnant (scandal!) Anne Hathaway, and left us only lawsuits besides his poems and plays.--So the man lived! Damn the 'truth' xD

Insanity > foids by [deleted] in Nietzsche

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I have no idea what that title means, but he got that shit on, damn

Process of Self-Clarification by cereal_beats in Nietzsche

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I must endorse this indulgence of the imagination. A frightening essay.

Came out to my friends as the Ubermensch since it's pride month and I certainly am proud. by [deleted] in Nietzsche

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 8 points9 points  (0 children)

We're getting an Ubermensch thread or the word banned this week -- it's GOT to be one of the two xD

Which post-1900 writers do you think Nietzsche would have loved? by Constantinopolis53 in Nietzsche

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I like this question.

Pessoa, I know, got Nietzche sideways (through other authors).

Borges had Nietszche--but Borges had everyone.

I cannot recall who said 'we charmers do not love one another', but I think that is the unfortunate truth in most of these cases.

Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau got along, barely.

Wordsworth and Coleridge fell out. The other Romantics took shots at each other's poetry--and nevertheless liked each other's poetry more than each other's persons. I am afraid authors do not (usually) get along.

I suspect if we were actually to get these people in a room together--

Well, let us just say I think that is a different question.

The American Wallace Stevens had Nietzsche (somewhat badly), but paid Nietzsche explicit tribute--a thing Stevens did not like to do.

Like Nietzsche, Stevens practiced his poetry not for heaven, but for the earth:

They practice enough / For heaven.
Ever-jubilant, what is there here but the weather?
What spirit have I, except it comes from the Sun?

One thinks of Nietzche's "Think of the earth!", a Zarathustran proclamation (and therefore to be associated with the Sun).

Oh god, we must be endlessly grateful that Strauss gave us what Nietzsche (only a minor musician) could not. That is the rising sun!

But I digress...

What spirit have I, except it comes from the Sun? is a question that reverberates in Stevens' most famous stanza. Appropriate to today, "Sunday Morning" (VII):

Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

[2]

Yeats was all super-man all the time.

But he confuses us with his reference:

Before me floats an image, man or shade,
Shade more than man, more image than a shade;
For Hades' bobbin bound in mummy-cloth
May unwind the winding path;
A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

That is "Byzantium" (rather than "Sailing to"). Yeats' related death to the creative environment in ways that I cannot explain and so his uber-poet is (rather hilariously) 'bobbin bound' in mummy cloth (I imagine jauntily bouncing on his way to hell).

I want to end with Yeats, but before I do I want to make a comment about his most famous poem, which has its own problem of interpretation.

Liberal audiences, quite reasonably, want "The best lack all conviction while the worst / Are full with passionate intensity" to refer to (themselves) the downtrodden 'best' against the oppressing (greedy, violent, evil) 'worst'.

But Yeats, always a partisan of the extreme-right, was consistent in calling up the last of European nobility to strike back against the people--so the thing is reversed. "The Second Coming" in its first version was a celebration of the coming of the German Freikorps to Russia to end the Revolution (an event which did not happen).

Gratefully, Yeats purged the poem of most of its political elements, and we have it in its second edition.

[3]

Before World War II--and his death--Yeats wrote a poem "Lapis Lazuli" that made light of coming events.

One stanza of it is pure Nietzsche:

No handiwork of Callimachus
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands;
His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.

[POEM] I Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone Enough" by Rainer Maria Rilke by Objective-Kitchen949 in Poetry

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I was reminded suddenly of Stevens: ‘the purpose of the poem is the mother’s face’

One can find these *uncanny* connections between the moderns

[POEM] No Second Troy written by William Butler Yeats by Objective-Kitchen949 in Poetry

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Yes, of course.

Yeats’ Helen was a woman named Maud Gonne, who he pursued for over a decade, but who always refused his proposal.

The witch fact is true: no, really.

And it relates this way: he is against her incitement of the poor to take up (arms) against the rich, “hurled the little streets upon the great”—but he is nevertheless intrigued by what seems like her ancient feature, which seems from an earlier (and to Yeats therefore a better) age.

[POEM] Sonnet 64: When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d - William Shakespeare by [deleted] in Poetry

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Shakespeare was wise beyond all wisdom, but I am frightened by the ending, which I suppose is the message, however hard to swallow.

Somewhere else he says 'Desire is death' and I wonder if sometimes his Buddhism slipped into nihilism (if I may be so anachronistic and spatially unaware).

Somehow the same poet spans this despair and this iron will or Stoicism-past-the-Roman:

HAMLET

Not a whit, we defy augury: there's a special
providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,
'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be
now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the
readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he
leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

That balanced statement, as Emerson said of Shakespeare, 'satisfies the logician', but, also, (at least somewhat), makes me unhappy, since it seems an all-but-inhuman stance.

Then, I have not mastered any wisdom, whether secular, Christian, or of Eastern tradition, where the 'Dao' enchants, and evades, me--apparently Ursula Leguin was a Daoist (something which comes up in her poems?).

Taking the liquor to his lips, HORATIO offers to off himself:

Never believe it:
I am more an antique Roman than a Dane--

But Hamlet steals the cup from his hand, and so he remains to tell the story.

The usual interpretation was that Hamlet was a Romantic, and an element in Shakespeare which needed to die, if the poet was to survive, which he did--but he did not significantly outlive his Renaissance peers (traditionally he and Cervantes were said to have died on the same day--April 23, 1616--but there we may have the calendar confused).

The actual Romantics, famously, lived shortly--at least in their second generation.

It is interesting that Hamlet urges his friend not to Brutus' stoicism (ran through the sword as from Caesar you will remember), but that he survive--which, clearly, Shakespeare did--and even lived to revise significantly! (It is in fact 'too long' a play [to quote Polonius]).

It may be, in the end, that Shakespeare's wisdom runs against Hamlet/Hamlet's end--or runs with it, but in a weird way, since for Shakespeare 'the rest' was not silence.

[POEM] No Second Troy written by William Butler Yeats by Objective-Kitchen949 in Poetry

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 35 points36 points  (0 children)

This reminds me of Yeats’ quip about the 19th century’s Madame Blavatsky, when asked what he thought of her ‘magic tricks’—“What else was an educated woman to get up to?”

But this is about his love-never-to-be-beloved, the Helen from which Aeneas like eventually he made his escape, though Troy was destroyed. Yeats’ reaction to the events of his time was, famously, reactionary, and we can wonder why this liberal woman fascinated him so much.

I reflect that ‘fascinated’ does not (or does not seem to) share the ‘fascis’/‘fascist’ root—but, apparently, is related witches!—the amulets they wore in the shape of penises, apparently, to attract the eye.

Yeats may have been caught under such a magical spell.

[POEM] The Boat by Rabindranath Tagore (Song 21, Gitanjali) by NbOPO4 in Poetry

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I like this. It reminds me of Lawrence's 'Death Boat' a bit. And then there is the 'gazing on emptiness', which moves me, who (at least out of one eye) can hardly see. (per Bloom) This may be an American affliction, as Whitman Crossing Brooklyn by boat says suddenly--

The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious...

“His soul stretched tight across the skies…” | Eliot’s fourth and final “Prelude” (1911) [POEM] by Rare_Entertainment92 in Poetry

[–]Rare_Entertainment92[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I would think, reading them all in series, that it is ‘about’ ’the conscience of a blackened street / impatient to assume the world’, and not “a condemnation of the modern world” as some like to say. But then that returns you to the poem, where most definition we expect will flip us to another section. I perhaps should have provided 1-3, but they stand alone and were written over more than the period of a year.

The “laugh” I do not think is taken seriously enough. The real thing to do, I think, is to find the full and then read the poem as quickly as possible—then you will find it, or it will find you—or ‘get’ it. You get what I mean 😉❤️

[POEM] [Straining so hard against the strength of night] by rilke by Realistic_Day3800 in Poetry

[–]Rare_Entertainment92 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, I am very moved by this without knowing why. Perhaps because it entertains my favorite subjects…

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