|
5555excerptsandaphorismsfromtheapologoumena
|
5555excerptsandaphorismsfromtheapologoumena
Ascolo Parodites
Verily, do I walk unto the teachers of salvation as coarse husks around the seed of man.
This is the dreadful thing for mine eye, that I find these teachers as the wall around the garden of human fruits and flowers. Yet this do I ask of ye: Is the wall around a garden of any help when the soil is parched?
And when mine eye fleeth from today into the future it findeth the same: corn-stalks and the husks of seeds. The future on earth - that is what I find most intolerable. And I should not know how to live, if I were not an oracle of what once was.
An oracle, a remembering one, an interpreter, a parched soil, and a pot for collecting the rain from heaven. All these things am I.
To deafness-persuaded ears a song is what springeth forth plainly and purely.
Too long I hath sat unto music; there I unlearned my deafness. Too long I hath sat unto silence; there I unlearned my patience.
He who would save man must bear many ugly things, and likely shall be sickened and poisoned with his burden; and he that would save man is thereby like unto a whore for me. I do not like to drink even from their waters. Alas, that I have endured for so long amid their laughter and their tears, which are alike as noise unto me. Alone! Here with me do the songs of being and instruments of songs of being spring up plainly and purely. All becoming longeth here to become song, all being longeth for the lust of my instrument.
But down there, unto man all speech is in vain. There whoredom and the consultation of physicians are the best wisdom. Let folk proclaim their wisdom by heeding their sicknesses, let them ring the bells of physicians -- the physicians in the apothecary will outring them with the clanging of their pennies.
Life is a sea of terrible things. But all seas are terrible for he that speaketh out of a mouth bitter with wormwood, the mother of dumb hopes and great vanity. Courage - that is lust unto him who hath the charity of fig-trees.
There is the cup; that of rescuing and holy poison. But no one of you dare to sup of that lethal draught, which perhaps is the way unto great nothingness. For you the mind invents new slavery, and the day of creation renews itself in the theft of your soul -- and this you call weariness unto the world. Fallen in love with thy own slavery, do I comprehend thy lust unto weariness. For thou wouldest get thy soul back again, thou wouldest take revenge unto the day of creation. Not in vain thy eye lookest upwards. A great earthly desire yet shameth it to look upon! And in the eye - doth there not burn even as sand that unforgotten lust?
I wouldst not take revenge upon the day of creation, and therefor my life is long in languishing for my soul. That I should become an adulterer, that is the law above me; through it the thought of my former love for the woman should become all the more sacred. In my lust's expressiveness my former love should even intensify, and it shall never forfeit what is beautiful in it in my many sons and my many daughters, which are my creations. Verily, the beauty of my adultery is as a a woman's lower half, bearing pleasure and fruit alike. My love must be a man's love, for my love must seek, before all, creation. Thy mother's womb groweth tired with my burden, yet my love is a creating-love and must pursue the womb of the earth which eternally creates all things anew; and in eternity all creating-loves, all man-loves, must be regarded as lusts: mule-lusts made of dumb strength and kisses. Let us therefor trust in our star-adultery even if we must be earth-lovers.
My love for you, as all of my loves - these are hopes; but what will you see in them when you have not experienced lust and rubato in your own heart? I can only remind you that I love you, no more can I do. To turn women into streams - is that what you desire of me? Oh, if you are as yet a timid little stream, you have better look for your Alpheus first! And no! My adultery hath not defiled thee! Thy virginity, unbruised, penetrates my memory, and fathometh my lust.
Love, as you teach it, is neither longing or desire; marriage is not impleading for something yet in the end attained. Only one who romanticized among the shadows of his love may, intimating, repay the longanimity with which his adultery was endured. Only one who has made a Penelope of his lover, and has shared a poppy with her in death will never lose again the slightest trace of fidelity.
To delight in blindness, that is a womanly knowledge.
Immortal is the anxiety when I produced in myself what is impossible in man. For the sake of this what is impossible in man I endure this anxiety.
My formula for greatness in the human being is amore abundas: that one seeks after the contingences in all things; that one makes the fields of Eternity into plains of Lethe, that one lets Prudence guide ones self to drink only that measure of water 'Carelessness.'
The saint fails sainthood; in the end he acts ethically, and must ascend the ladder of the Law.
The internal relations of man would be for us the highest form of beauty if we could intuit them in one act of Will.
When man, through an obscure premonition, is laid bare unto himself, in all the stages of his gradual becoming as though already complete; then and only in a moment such as this, can an act of will be said to precede moral being, having developed from a totality of strengths, such that it elevates man above himself, and rounds out the circle of life and of deeds.
No humanity remains for he that would, as a good Thersites, measure man.
Even in the midst of nature, wherein the animal takes life on account of mere hunger or self-defense, the empathy which afflicts the consciousness at the sight of a suffering animal is present. This empathy is at the heart of our very conception of morality because it serves to intimate the terror of the natural world, out of which, according to Ricoeur, the moral consciousness itself is to arise.
The human mind can not remember the reign of Saturn.
If all men were united as one pair of brothers the enmity between Saturn and Jupiter were at an end.
On the intuition of Ricoeur's ethical dread: A good morality is self-correcting in the terror of which it must give an account of.
The revelation of the human predicament and of the catastrophe of world history; its meaning, deciphered, is precisely what Cephalus calls 'the hopefullness of the passing away of things,' the vultus lumine. [in Manso's Erocallia.]
Holderlin writes of the emptiness of this transfiguration: 'And yet with holy night the father will veil our eyes, that still we may not perish. Power expands but cannot suborn heaven.'
My heart! Do you not walk upon truth to yourself as men even raise up knohl? But what wouldst thou keep clean? Untruth to thy self.
To live--that is to bestrew, that is to thrash corn stalk; to live- -that is to burn oneself and yet to dwell in ashes, and freeze in time of winter seasons. Cypria damna fugas, si sua tela fugis. [Odilo Schreger in Studiosus jovialis, seu auxilia ad jocose & honeste discurrendum. P. 47.]
I will try the temper of my heart upon my memories until it is as steel; I will exercise myself upon them until I am invincible. I hold my hand in those freezing waters until I am assured that I might bear fire.
What strange jurisprudence is bounded by a vintage? Holderlin's notion of Divine Infidelity is no better expressed then in earthly providence. In earthly providence the god, in order that the monitions and sanctions of the course of the world which he does not comprehend do not exhaust the memory of the heavenly orders, expresses himself in infidelity; -- the ancestral curse which binds together the world, and from which the world is waiting to be released. For just as the soul must receive divine justice in this life, because there will be no second opportunity for it to do so in Orkus, so it is best to retain and recall divine infidelity. Hence, as Algazel says in the Ihia, Heaven shall complete the presence of God in experience.
Silence is a swift poison, and swiftest spreading of all poisons. Hence the aphorism in Henricus Bebelius, non omnes stertentes dormiunt; all things in sleep do not lie dormant.
My hands are an adulterer's hands, - too smoothly do I caress for cranes. And even more irresistible are my hands for all serpents and hermit crabs!
My feet, they are a thieves' feet, - upon them I carry lovers from lovers, that they may excuse the adultery of my hands!
My love, - that is a deep charlatanry. For my love can pronounce the innocence of cranes and silky rabbits, but the innocence of serpents and lions, this innocence my love knows only to call 'heartlessness.'
My Eros, -- even thy Seraph's ear hath a craving to hear wonders which everyone whose ear hath not been pierced with awl hears always around him. Yet thou canst not bear it when a fly desires to croon! Thy cherub's eye even desires to see miracles, as the courage of a lamb, though thou couldst not bear it! What couldst the courage of a lamb be for thee? but vanity. What couldst the chastity of a beetle be for thee? but indigence. What couldst the charity of a fig-tree be for thee? but exuberance.
Foolish Eros! Cast but thy pure Phorkyad's eye into the well of my love! How should the lutulence of that well thereby blind you? Verily, shall my own Phorkyad's eye laugh back to you with it's purity, for this is psuche pasa.
Thy wormwood is too bitter a food for the impure to be fellow-partakers of! Yet knowest thou anything other than the courageous teeth of the impure; knowest thou other than their Hope, awful Eros? and therefor is thy wisdom emptiness and great vanity?
Sweeter than thy wormwood is my Pride, the only true source of wealth and of wisdom! and the sweetness wherewith it is sweetened, that is Hope!
Of high vanity you will endeavor o my heart, while here on Earth, to cast off truth to thyself, as space and time - these are deep truths thou keepest to thy self; 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, to cast off by labor Space and Time in moments only, whereby to renew the senses of an hour.
Equally, be it of small consequence to trample the Earth under thine two horse's feet, as the Good Zeno taught thee, for thou art sadly engulfed upon the billows of Time, and burnt up in the pother of matter, yet to await in peace and love of the Earth a greater then Zeno is needed.
Who shall speak or sing of Eternity and Silence, to which altars may yet be risen by Men. Nocturna Dei tempora sunt, atque diurna. [Scaliger's Epidorpides]
Of things contrary to Man's nature are still Nature; Original Sin, the most venerable of Palamdeses, or the silliest of Augustinisms, hath a touch of her genius.
Throughout Nature there is something impish, by which we, as a good Melampus, are led ever onward. The human being can hold no faith to the observance of Nature, insofar as he conceives her to require, besides what has revealed itself to him as a cause, influences that have been hidden from him to bring forth her varieties. Modesty is an inevitable consequence of attentiveness to creation according to Sulzer (in his theory of nature.)
Nature has always thought and always thinks; though not as a man, construing History from her own hopes and dreams, but as Nature.
The spectacle of Nature is always new, for humanity withers and grows sear, matures and flowers at the same time, with it's hands extended in gestures out of the dreams of men, as She renews her spectators.
If in this sudden bereavement, in the matter of Antheia the flower-goddess, is talked of as a real Revelations and Dissolution in Nature, in which the philosopher doubtless appears in silence, the commandments he has already pronounced are not extinguished thereby, but rather, as the poison, is spread faster.
We are withheld, as by Anathema Maran-atha, by the God-given mandate Work thou in Well-doing, which lies written in Delphic characters upon our hearts, and urges us ever to, under persons, seek God without rest.
Not so easily can the Old Adam, haunting us ante Vulcanum since our births, be dispossessed in sub Prometheo.
Whilst the God-given mandate leaves us without rest, til it's Gospel be deciphered and obeyed, it must have competition with the living kerugma of our clay, namely, to eat and be filled.
The moral sensibility, as the body, is attuned to experience of such an order that it bears some relation to itself; as the body bears relation to itself by virtue of the intuition of physical pain, so the moral sensibility has its own intuition which is of the order of terror.
If the object of this experience grows out of proportion to the individual, he no longer really experiences it at all, but registers it directly, in concepts divorced from the intuition of ethical terror, as something incommensurable and extrinsic, for which he has the same indifference as this moral catastrophe has for him.
Evil is derived not from the principle of finitude in itself, but from the dark and selfish principle that has been brought into intimacy with it as the Heraclitean ' pride without measure;' and this intimation is furthermore possible only insofar as one has been divorced from the intuition of ethical terror.
Although the consciousness of defilement seems to be a memory inaccessible to any re-enactment in the imagination or sympathy, a moment that has been abolished by the progress of moral consciousness itself, it nevertheless contains in germ all possible moments of the life and future of the moral consciousness, even as 'the heart has its own order,' because it conceals within itself the secret of its own passing, which is of the 'order of intellect.'
Through our corporeality, indeed through our own lived body and the course which our existence has conferred upon us, we are in the most immediate way imbricated in the world of perception. Nevertheless, we are blind and for the most part incapable of separating the lived body through habituation as a function of time and in sin from our moral being, according to the measure of the consciousness of defilement, by which this sin can only be conceived of in terms of a temporary retardation of the lived body.
For another matter is it, if your symbol has intrinsic meaning rather than merely extrinsic; the Greek Herkules had no peremptory Duty, but a choice - and for the Greeks he was no balance of pleasures and pains, but a needs betraying weaknesses - but if thou wilst conceive of how far the human mind has carried a Symbol, then look upon Jesus of Nazareth.
In short, the world of ethical terror holds in germ an entire repressive history which makes moral sensibility incomprehensible. The consternation at Golgotha is not just an emblem for the desolation of human existence, it is the ethical vision of the world.
God touches only for a moment the dwellings of men. Therefor at certain moments, the founders of the abyss must be consumed by the fire of what is deeply sheltered, and perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear in the light of redemption.
The destructive character of this morality knows only one watchword: tamen genio illius gratias enatavi. It knows only one activity: clearing away. Its need for fresh air is stronger than any hatred; more severe than any aims towards retribution and vengeance.
Really, only the insight into how radically the world is simplified when tested for its worthiness by destruction leads to such an Apollonian image of the destroyer. The only morality which can be responsibly practiced in face of the Destroyer is one that would contemplate all things as they would appear from the standpoint of redemption.
The Destroyer's eternal silence is frightening to me.
How many kingdoms know him not?
What, in fact, is man before his God? He is incapable of judging the nothingness from which he was born towards the infinite in Nature. This 'Holy Hypochondria,' this anxiety of the creation belongs however to a fundamentally different world from the nothingness, from the mataiotes which it apprehends. The question of whether it comprehends that which it apprehends, cannot be regarded as a criterion of its value.
Just as a mother is seen to begin to live in the fullness of her life only when the circle of her children, inspired by the feeling of her proximity, closes round her, so is the nothingness of the creation seen to be truly a concern for the living, only when the triumphs of the anxiety which it incites are gathered in spite of it.
When the God that the saint receives and suffers, liberates the mystic world from the world of Ideas, he then again and again finds himself subjected to the ‘victorious powers of life’ and, like the zodiacal creature, in which the telluric planet 'Saturn' stands, falls prey to that strong worldliness, whenever he calls out in search of his God 'non coerceri maximo, contineri tamen a minimo'.
One of the most powerful sources of this symbolism flows from myth: in the superhuman type of the Redeemer, the hero represents mankind through his work on the starry sky. The primal words of the Orphic poem apply to him: it is his amalgmata -- his star-lit sky; his nyx, the one that is as changeable as the moon; his destiny, ineluctable like the seaward tethys.
Art arose in the course of liberation from terrible nature, yet through art the utter subjugation of nature is impossible.
Song, so to speak, is Tereus' revenge.
This is to say that art, called upon to legitimate itself before the world of nature, art - a thing negating that very world - appears, from the outset, helpless. All the same, art cannot simply shy away from the responsibility of legitimating itself in the eyes of this world for no poetry, no song is innocent, insofar as it permits one's own lived experience to become an object of unnecessary conviction, for it is in this moment a mere sentiment or personal taste can become something more dangerous. The poet Giacomo Leopardi says, "It is not good for the innocent to search into nature's secrets; and random suffering cancels all such unripened knowledge."
Lingua serpentina unto ashes, and the sower soweth the word, just as Nestia cryeth and the tear is scattered. But if the seed die it bringeth forth great fruit.
Verily, it [the will] destroyeth and destroyeth in shame; and unto shame recollecteth thou destruction.
Verily, the Will knoweth well of the ways of its torment: the Will depriveth us of dying.
Verily, a deep memory and deepest of memories dwells in our will; and it hath become a curse for all that is human that this memory hath acquired to dreams and a spirit. 'The Spirit of Shame;' that hath been up to now humanity's most hopeful dream: for where there is shame there was supposed to be suspicion, and where there is suspicion there was supposed to be a healthy conscience and a course for action.
For a person comes best to understanding himself and his destiny, only when he has become untrue to himself and transgressed against his destiny through sin. One must have valedictions and brass within one's self to give birth to a destiny.
For 'Suspicion' is what 'Shame' calleth itself: with a hypocritical tongue shame dresseth itself in a good conscience.
Verily, the Soul is a barren mother; and the Will is praise unto the womb that is without child.
The Will deprivest me of perishing in my creations; and the lot of my creations fall short of the glory of my greatest work, life.
No eye is truly acquainted with beauty, without being accompanied by the timber of indifference, and well-nigh contempt for everything to which the woman, as the Phorkyad, bears no significance.
And it is solely through infatuation, the unjust closure of the eye vis-a-vis the antagonism raised by 'everything which exists, that justice is done to what exists.'
The eye which loses itself in something which is beautiful, is one of Eleusis. 'It rescues in the object something of the peacefulness of its day of creation,' which until this moment is hidden within the hatred raised against
it by the universal.
'However if this one-sidedness is sublated by a consciousness of the universal imposed from outside, if the particular is harried, substituted and weighed up, then the just view of the whole makes the universal injustice, which lies in exchangeablity and substitution, its own.' Such justice turns into the guarantor of Olympia upon Helena.
In the romantic self-trumpeting of our impractical expectations, as regard the beloved, lurks the intuition, that the objective Spirit is liquidating the subjective one on the stage of contemporary ethics. -- Umbras and Penumbras. The Romantics were down to earth like the mammalogical forborne, before this latter could cast off its gills and scales. Yet Romanticism is still, in all of its forms, a historico-ethical vacuum; even as De Quincey says that 'every untried path is a vast Hercynian forest, unexplored and unmapped, and where each several turn in your advance leaves you open to new anticipations of what is next to be expected, and consequently open to altered valuations of all that has been traversed.' The Romantic consciousness inscribes in all Spirit what previously Silence and the Unseen endured. Between 'I love' and 'I loved' lie the whole spoil of the heroes of the ages of the world. But which is given to truth? Love is the ability to find the similar in the dissimilar, according to Adorno. Then Expressionism is nothing but genuine Romanticism. What stimulus is to the feeling, beauty is to the understanding. The separation of stimulus and beauty, feeling and understanding, which makes it possible to say, free and blessed are these vain little girls, hypostatizes the historically achieved centrum of human endeavours in which romantic individual is made inexhaustable. Hence, Novalis says "A poem must be completely inexhaustible, like a human being or a good proverb."
Is not the tendency of philosophy to raise certain common place notions, as goodness or truth, above the practical into objects of unnecessary conviction also evident in, for example, literary theory or religious disputation?
Verily, Linnaeus might dawn the name of Homer in Ceos.
Yet this, the raising of the commonplace into objects of unnecessary conviction, -- this is precisely what ethics is not. Nothing is true in ethics save the trifling.
Hymen is perpetually above the sexual; just as pain is perpetually above the moral. The sibyl may know everything, only not the Good.
The nature of that to which we ascribe beauty, which may be disclosed only by recourse to the universal, to the daily and lived experience, in all of its triviality, in which antagonism is wrought towards it, plays the role which one would like to ascribe to the continuity of feelings designated by the word 'infatuation.'
A Cleopatra with the soul of Isis lives and works in the world.
'The foolishness of a youthful enthusiasm, by which a beautiful girl is made inaccessible, is not based upon any inhibition whatsoever, nor in too much coldness or in the cynicism of an overly repressed warmth, but because a relationship already exists between him and her, which excludes a new one, which excludes a relationship which embraces the lived experiences with the beloved as the very essence of her beauty.' And it is for this reason that the youthful enthusiasm just mentioned is no other enthusiasm than infatuation proper.
The imminent awakening of the lover 'is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in his Troy of dreams.'
Happiness, and the lover knows this, laments the time which it can never escape.
The lowliest of botanical sciences studies the lily amongst lilies, the formation of the very flower,' just as common politics studies man amongst men, in short, the formation of a state.'
'How can we be fair, kindly, and humane towards others, let our dictums be as praiseworthy as they may be,' if we can not extinguish measureless pride as we would a raging fire, and 'lack the capacity to make strange natures genuinely and truly a part of ourselves, to appropriate strange situations, to make strange feelings our own?'
Perhaps redemption has already begun the moment we begin to take kindness for others as the fitting measure of our deeds. From a patrimonium generis humani and a fiction of neutralized upbringing we are touched by the pantheon of classicism, by 'strange old lusts for deed,' by echoes of a metaphysics of the ethical that we long ago relinquished to dream: ta phainomen suzein. 3 The admonition of dreams has always been mediated by word or image, thus its greater strength has already ebbed away, the strength with which it strikes us at the heart and compels us, 'though we scarcely know how, to act in accord with it.' This moment is the Geramantian plow, beneath which fate is to be turned.
The greatest consolation in human nature is therefore, paradoxically, the smallest guarantee and Empedoclean tear.
What would righteousness be that was not measured by the immeasurable terror at what it is?
Atalante's peril is become a wedding.
To change a threatening future into a fulfilled now, - this is the work of a bodily presence of mind, a Prometheus Vinctus and labor omnia vicit, even as 'he to whom destiny speaks loudly has the right to speak yet more loudly to destiny. '
In boredom human life becomes am instant, not by sublating duration, but by decaying to nothing, awakening to its futility in face of what Nietzsche calls the 'crooked eternity' of time, - and this is the quite Tirolean moment upon the threshold to great deeds. Hence free time, this is the dialectical antithesis to boredom. Free time, as a complement to alienated labor, and whether this free time is supposed merely to reproduce energy that has already been expended, or whether it is burdened by the extraction of alien labor as a mortgage, remains, as regards production itself, merely reflexive, and imposed heteronomously, not as a threshold, but an individuum of production, a principle of its individuation. Labor, as it does not occur in free time, can only be concentrated on survival, on physical necessity - it is in free time that labor is individuated, that is to say, is first concentrated upon affairs outside of survival and physical need.
Between horror vacui and the opiate of plenty, the ruling condition of the appetite permits no third choice.
Thus there is great wealth and much wisdom in the fact that great shamefulness and much addling is there in hope: Pride itself createth wings, and findeth out that obscurity with fountain-divining powers!
For Hope is the greatest cunning, cunning that createth; for in every hope is there valediction and brass.
It is my favorite wickedness and art that my virtue cometh upon a crane's wings, and my hopes hath learned not to betray themselves through the children of my hopefulnesses, - loss and failure, shamefulness and addling!
If my virtue is even the virtue of a barren mother; if my virtue toucheth my deepest shame and my most insolent beauty; if my wickedness is a hopeful wickedness, at home in nests of beetles and under the branches of fig-trees; - rather hath my pride taken these children of my hopefullnesses under its wing, and cared after them; nurtured and fed them even.
Thrax erat, hic Thracum domitor - this is my virtue.
Ethos anthropou daimon- this is my virtue.
I see as much addling as hope. As much pride as justice.
Verily, even as hope is the fame of thy pride, and even the wisest of thy men did not unto me appear very wise, so hath I found men's pride to be much less than the fame of it.
Thus thou leapest repeatedly at hope, but beware of flying! for prohibited to thee is flight unto hope, lest pride discovereth the sourest grapes that hath not been tasted by man! and the bitterest apples too!
Internae propter facinora commissa. -- What awful wisdom is this, my well-loved Horace?
Pride, that is weight; but at once weightmaster and scale.
Courageous teeth hath I as well, that I might ventureth my teeth unto the sourest grapes and bitterest apples; that I might fly unto my remotest hope, -- courage! 4 Into more remote hopes flyeth I with new wings, thither where Gods art ashamed of palladium! 090115
...
fuck off frrrrrrroooooooooog
toni I just had to get that out of my system 030301
...
god frooging violently towards an oubliette 040929
...
frog where_did_you_come_from
Jurisprudence
I said,
"out of the corner of your eye" 090925
...
. I said, "Part of me came from heaven and part of me came from hell." 090925
...
. your_ass
. . 101020
...
.
do_pa_poopa
s s 101020
...
s ate_ice_cream do_pa_poopa 101020
...
s ate_ice_cream do_pa_poopa specailistz 101020
...
s iateicecreamdopapoopaspecailistz 101020
...
s iateicecreamdopapoopaspecailisstz 101020
...
. your_ass 101020
what's it to you?
who go blather
from 101020
...
. your_ass
. . 101020
...
.
do_pa_poopa
s s 101020
...
s ate_ice_cream do_pa_poopa 101020
...
s ate_ice_cream do_pa_poopa specailistz 101020
...
s iateicecreamdopapoopaspecailistz 101020
...
s iateicecreamdopapoopaspecailisstz 101020
...
. your_ass 101020
what's it to you?
who go blather
from 101020
what's it to you?
who go blather
from 101020
what's it to you?
who go blather
from
I DIIIID IT HAHAHA I DID IT AL AHAHAHA DON'T FORGET IT FUCKERS 101020
what's it to you?
who go blather
from 101020
what's it to you?
who go blather
from 101020
what's it to you?
who go blather
from
|
101020
|
