crttheoressay11 leonto Though rage befits a river, Tiber wait,' so goes Pedo Albinovanus's Consolation to Livia, as Mars continues in his praise of the simplicity of war, 'for country let the reason be revealed; what I could give, I gave, a victory gained- the workman dies, the workmanship remained.' Equally, the praise of womanly levity seems to ease the anxiety that what is fleeting for Eros, the beautiful in its multiplicity of objects, will be again reunited in the object of Eros's daemonic infatuation. It is certainly illuminating, that a hidden psychological impetus, once expressed, cannot be called repressed, even when it no longer wishes to demand an object which it does not obtain. On the other had, the analytic distinction between real satisfaction and the hallucinatory satisfaction of the wish points in the direction of the difference between satisfaction and undistorted expression. But expression, and Eros in particular, are not hallucinations. Eros belongs to the realm of appearances, to the semblances of beauty measured by the principium individuationis of the body, and would like to bypass this latter. Love, in it's subjectivity, never seeks, however, to substitute itself through the semblances of beauty in an erotic fashion, as through a symptom, in place of the body of the beloved. Eros negates the reality of the beloved, by glorifying the semblances of beauty and in holding up to the beloved what therefor does not and cannot resemble it; Invise divis Gorgoneum caput, quid machninaris tela Cyclopea, frustraque, ludis, & taducos ingeminas per inane bombos. [Nicolas Caussin in Felicitas] An aphorism in De Nugis Curialium reads, "This bride you once betrothed with the flower of your springtime; now, in your summer, she looks that you should bring forth grapes: do not in her despite marry another, lest in the time of vintage you bring foth wild grapes. I would not have you be the husband of Venus, but of Pallas." The diremption of sympathy and matrimony, which makes it possible to say, 'free and blessed are these vain little girls,' hypostatizes the historically achieved splintering of woman into subservience. This separation, even reduced to its due proportion, in comparison to the more stupendous intervals between loves, completes the disjecta membra of the critical philosophy in the classical Eros of desires. The obtrectation of social, political, and moral deductions in comparison with an infinite reason which echoes in philosophy, a reason which, as infinite, is at the same time undiscoverable by the ultimately finite subject, echoes in spite of its critical justification the De Reformatione of Zerbolt, "Homo quidam descendit de Ierusalem in Iercho." It is up philosophy to seek out the unity such as exists between sympathy and matrimony, friendship and allegiance, duties and rights, precisely in their contrast: in their political unity, viz. in marriage, in the social contract, in the categorical imperative. Praxis, as the power of a contemplation that is otherwise impotent, opposes in its being carried out what is already given, by simultaneously expressing it. The very capacity of praxis, which seals itself off from the realm of dead ends in an antiquated socio-politics, does so merely by investing itself to the unity of the given system; it does justice to the system of contemporary politics precisely by a moment of counter-pressure raised against the social pressures of an antiquated politics. The power of praxis is limited and, therefor, measured by the continued furrowing of the social and political system. Thereby, however, it is also limited by the dynamics of the older politics. Praxis, along with those very revolutions in which authorities are overcome, is the medium within which a critical politics is formed. The outdated socio-political categories are not merely an ideology imposing a limitation upon praxis; but at the same time they express its nature, the truth about it, its hope or hopelessness; and in the pressures created by those categories and in the counter-pressures raised upon them on the part of praxis itself are precipitated those in the remotest metaphysical experiences. Non omnes stertentes dormiunt: not all things dream lie silent. [Henricus Bebelius] My love for woman, 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? 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! 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 thief's feet-- upon them I carry away 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 lambs, 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, and a belly with wine over-full. 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! 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.] Between 'I love' and 'I loved' lie the whole spoil of the heroes of the ages of the world.-- 'per sublimia cum feror, nec ullum do signu, reprimens in ore covem index perspicua serenitatis, purum nuntio solis orbe caellum.' [Lauterbach in Collegium Palthenianum Aenigmata] But which is given to truth? 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. No eye is truly acquainted with beauty, without being accompanied by the timber of indifference, and well-nigh contempt for everything to which the beautiful object 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 the Phorkyad. 'It rescues in the object something of the peacefulness of its day of creation,' which in the antagonism raised upon it by the universal is otherwise eclipsed in serendi modum partim casus, ut pleraque artes; partim aves docuere. [Celestino in Innocentia Vindicata] However if this prejudice is sublated by a consciousness of the universal imposed extraneously, if the beautiful is harried, and weighed up in appropriations, then the just view of the whole makes the universal injustice, which lies in subrogation and currency, its own. Such justice turns into the guarantor of Olympia upon Helena. 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. Sex is perpetually above Hymenaeus; just as pain is perpetually above the moral. Aphrodite may bless all the earth, only not the Beautiful; for Aphrodite is the same as Seilenos. The nature of that to which we ascribe beauty, which may be extrapolated only by recourse to the universal, to the daily and lived experience in which it is presented to us, 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 universality as the very essence of her beauty. The imminent awakening of the lover, Zariadres et Odatidis, [Ptolemaei Eordaei, Aristobuli Cassandrensis et Charetis Mytilenaei reliquiae] 'is poised, like the wooden horse of the Greeks, in his Troy of dreams. 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. 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. ' 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. Sebastianus Corradus speaks of this in terms of the poetic imagination of death "Nam de jure civili caute, de totius orbis & coeli regionibus, ac gentium moribus perite, de poetica divinitus, de philosophia sapienter, atque de religione pie respondebat. Quod si quis eum ut de rebus historiam, vel ad rhetoricam pertinentibus loqueretur, rogasset, id ille sic libenter, sic humaniter, sic ornate, sic copiose saciebat, ut vere Lydus, quod aiunt, in campum videretur esse provacatus." 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. "Nunct vibi vera latent, scrutatus scrinia caecis e latebris vellit, quid verum semper idemque semper erit in falsum: nec corpus corpore plures tenditur in partes nec haren in maius harenam partibus excedit, nunc pessum figit acumen grammatice cuivus & vocum circuit apta foederamensus ubi gemium construction rectum transitione ligat, ficut contraria recto obliquum ration sine transitione maritat." [Archithrenius] 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 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. The saint is never abandoned by himself; he may always elevate himself as far beyond himself as he wishes. He alone may, upon the ladder of the law, fall upward as well as downward. The latter is prevented by ataraxia, the flexible spirit, the former by the weight that lies in the tranquil presence of mind. The capacity for the Saint to remain moral, that is, subject to the 'victorious powers of life,' requires both strict inner discipline and unscrupulous external action; in the words of Paulus Melissus, servata in isto celibatu virginitas mihi tum perennis. This practice brought to the world a Zaddik, a spiritual sovereignty matched in its ambiguity only by that fierce aspiration of the 'will to power.' Such a perfect conception of conduct on the part of the Zaddik awakens a mood of mourning in the creature stripped of all naive impulses. And it is precisely this mood which obtains to the paradoxical demand for saintliness on the part of the Zaddik. The disillusioned insight of the saint is just as a profound source of woe to him as it is for others, due to the use of which he can make of it at any time, as it is expressed in Gabriel Rollenhagius in the Musæo coelatorio Crispiani Passæi, "Esse pius cupis hunc saltem adspice quisuit oli tu quod es, et, quod eris, mox erit ipse, cinis." In this woe do we have the true Posidonian pathetikai kineseis. This quite simply figurative transformation of saintliness to the 'victorious powers of life' opens the point of departure for the unlimited compromise with the world which is characteristic of the Zaddik, his infinite mourning towards his peoples, and his forsaking the devekut. However, inspiration is probably the best tranquility and presence of mind for the saint, if it is authentic, clear, and strong. It is the spirit's bridle and spur. As poetic inspiration, ataraxia was a quieting force, akin to the Socratic virtue of sophrosune. Hence, even prophetic dream, as the hallmark of the inspired saint, is to be seen as descending from astromantic slumber in the temple of the ages, and not as sacred or even sublime inspiration. For all the wisdom of the saint is subject to the amalgmata; it is secured by immersion in the nyx of creaturely things, and it hears only of a destiny as ineluctable as the seaward tethys, and nothing of the voice of revelation. -- Numinibus gentes pulvinos sternere vanis sunt foliti, sed cur? ut bene forte cubent: en se deplumant Aquilae, pennasque saggitis Arctous curbo detrahit ungue LEO: his mollem PACI gaudent consternere lectum, candida sed perflant lilia odore thorum. Hinc Asmodaei valeat procul ira nefandi, ne porro thalami pignora turbet eris. [Triumphus Pacis Osnabruggensis Et Noribergensis : Heroico carmine ut plurimum adumbratus by Johann Ebermaier.] The saturnine nature is borne down into the depths of the Earth and, for the saint, the wisdom of a certain Triptolemus is preserved. For the saint the astromantic inspirations of mother Earth dawn from the night of contemplation like John Scottus Eriugena's tenebrosa substantia, as treasures from the very interior of the earth; the lightning-flash of intuition is unknown to him. What is the beautiful? Ut lyra Threiicio concessit carmina vati. [Operis Kluepfeliani De vita et scriptis Conradi Celtis Protucii ] The Thracian's promise of blindness. Though Grotius would attempt to present the tragedy of Christian man in the Greek style, and show that the Senecan tragedy is reducible to comedy in light of God's grace, it is neither in humor nor tragedy that beauty can be grasped verbally. Neither guilt nor innocence, neither nature nor the divine, can be strictly differentiated for beauty. The tears of emotion, in which the beautiful is veiled, are at the same time the genuine veil of beauty itself. For emotion is precisely that transition in which the semblance - the semblance of beauty as the semblance of akrasia - once again dawns sweetest before its vanishing, cur fertur falso cythaerea profundo quod sit amans semper sudore insperus amaro, .. haec rediens caeso Melyboeus cornua ceruo aeternum posuit tolerandi infigne laboris. [Pittorio in Pictorii Sacra Et Satyrica epigrammata] It is not that emotion which delights in itself, but only that severe emotion, that furore, in which the semblance of akrasia overcomes the beautiful semblance and with it, finally, itself. That lamentation, so full of tears: that is emotion. The mourning and pain of the Saturnine, as the tears that are shed for the continual decline of all life, form tired raptures; it is the life of the cicada, which, without food or drink, sings until it dies: domici sed talia reddit donci eterno maneat hoc carmine scriptu iam crucciam patulis. [Hieronymus Vallibus in Jesuida] A questionable insight begins to surface in virtues such as the capacity to vouchsafe and enjoy the beautiful, even in what is most mundane; this insight is, namely, the significance of what is nearest, what is inside and around us. Once, in the akrasia of an effluent subjective plenitiude, emotional indifference in relation to the choice of the beautiful object, as well as the willpower to avulse meaning from the whole family of experiences belonging to it, expressed the relation to the objective world itself, a relation which confronted the subject antagonistically, but with a certain kind of antagonism, namely, that one responsible for introducing shame, in the primitive, the pseudo-erotic and pre-christian guilt, and down to all of its fragments, as it were, draping the beautiful with that veil necessary to distinguish it from that merely daemonic infatuation with the body, or with the object itself. In a phase when the subject relinquishes before the alienated theosophy of things, its readiness to vouchsafe what is everywhere beautiful, opens the way towards Theognis's ainos and Aithon, a resignation of critical capacity as much as of the interpretive imagination inseparable from such, that imagination in which the transition of the semblance of beauty as the semblance of akrasia is played out, through emotional concern, through a gaster, on behalf of the beautiful object. The semblance of beauty and the semblances of akrasia, these are the two poles of the the erotic realm, and logos, through their illusory synthesis, generates the erotic impulse in which the genuine synthesis, that of life, is imitated. However, the speculation of this consciousness, which clings to both the beautiful object and the resignation of the beautiful under the universal, intimates nothing more than the alienation of a natural morte as mythos. The Saturnine's unfaithfulness towards man is matched by a fidelity for the continual decline of all life, in which he is absorbed into those objects of his contemplative devotion. In other words, all essential decisions in relation to man, by virtue of the fact that they involve akrasia, can offend against the saturnine fidelity: for these decisions are subject to the higher laws of morality, sed Apolline verior heis sum et loquor ante rata restifica ta fide. [Melodaesia: sive epulum Musaeum in quo praeter recens apparatas, lautiores iterum apponuntur quamplurimae de fugitivis olim Columbis Poeticis : et una eduntur ludi Juveniles Martinalia & Bacchanalia : cum productione Gynaecei] Faith is only completely appropriate to the relationship of the Zaddik to the world of nature. The latter knows no higher law, and faith knows no object to which it might belong more exclusively, that is to say without involving the akratic self, then nature. Georgius Macropedius used to speak of the irredeemability of things, that churlishness of nature, which in the end allows a little worm to survive in the fruits of saints; " Caulae gregum, pecudumque, stabula plean sunt, pascua laetisima, adeo ut amplius nil postules. Nam tanta copia fructuum est, ut in horreis tuis uel apothecis recondere nequeas." 1 This persistence which is expressed in saturnine fidelity, is born of its intention towards nature. This is how we should understand that recreance which is attributed to the Zaddik, and this is how we should interpret that completely isolated dialectical contrast, that 'faithfullness in innocence,' which Giacomo Leopardi ascribes to saturnine nature, "It is not good for the innocent to search into nature's secrets; and random suffering cancels all such unripened knowledge." The saint's infidelity reveals an unscrupulousness, which is in part a consciously Pentheusian gesture, but also a dismal and melancholy submission to a supposedly unfathomable order of baleful providentia, which assumes an almost material character: in the words of Janus Dousa Filius's Carmen, Tiresiam vatem privavit lumine Pallas, at mihi tu mentem omnem eripuisti animi majus habes quanto, lux o mea, Pallade numen? Lumina tu mentis, corporis illa rapit. The kingdom is indeed ultimately property, in the sense of the drama of fate, and it is endowed with a fate, to which the saint, as the augur of this fate, is the first, through the involvement of akrasia, to submit. His unfaithfulness to man is matched by a hopeless loyalty to the creaturely, and to the law of its life. Aegidius Assisiensis too, in one of his golden aphorisms, says "The eagle which flieth very high would not fly so high if it had one of the beams of St. Peter's Church tied to each wing." O caecam providentiam, o justas Heracliti lacrimas! [Conradus Mutianus Rufus in Der Briefwechsel. P. 242.] 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. 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? 090224 what's it to you? who go blather from