Empyrean (Part Five)
Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2024 10:05 pm
Douglas Mercer
December 18 2024
Continued from Empyrean (Part Four)
SPIRIT
The essence of the universe, at first concealed and closed off, does not have the power to offer resistance to the unremitting courage of cognition; it (the essence of the universe) after a long and tortuous process of showing and then hiding, will open itself before him (the philosophical thinker) and lay in its completeness directly before his eyes and for his pleasure–Hegel, October 28 1816, Heidelberg
The German Spirit (geist) is the most noble subject there is; for all of our Warrior Ethos we have always been as much Athens as Sparta, perhaps even more; it was Wincklemann who revived the Greek spirit for us and the interwoven connection between the Hellenes and the Germans was established forever. And for all of our conquering of the world we have always been a people given over to immateriality; indeed, our reputation in this regard has fluctuated over time. To Tacitus we were warriors; to Heine and then Lawrence in the 1920s we were the face painted berserkers probably high on some drug who were the predatory wolves of the world. But in between, at the nadir of our political power, we were viewed quite differently; as seers or wizards and as an inward people, the dreamy ones with our head in the clouds given over excessively to poetry and thinking and creative abstraction; from what they thought we might one day be so self-preoccupied that in our vagrant wandering we would collectively wander into a well.
Kierkegaard traveled to Berlin to listen to Hegel; he said that the truth is subjective—which is the same as to say what Hegel said—that the world is spirit, a spirit unfolding itself in time and over time and a spirit that is conscious and independent of human beings but is actualizing itself through human beings. This is when human beings become conscious of themselves and learn who they are and when they begin to create and will. When the spirit has realized itself—that is become real—Hegel uses the metaphor of the Owl flying in the twilight. As for Kierkegaard he was a German man who gave himself over to Jewish fantasies---but he said a very Un-Jewish thing when he said that the fact that god had created beings which are to one day become independent of it is the abyss into which thinking always finds itself. You won’t find that in any theological textbook. What he is saying is that it is then and only then that we shall become the gods, the creators, the ones who do the bidding, that is we shall have become pure German spirit---Geist. That Geist is a cognate of ghost in our sister language of English is telling in this regard.
It was of course Heidegger who put nearly the finishing touches on philosophy but he was—and I told him as much—always too reluctant about the will, as if there was some kind of ritual reticence about seeing the truth that Hegel promised us. And when we heard that he had said only a god will save us those of the younger generation were truly dismayed. He died four years ago now and unfortunately will never get to see in the flesh that we are going to save ourselves—or create ourselves if you will---and though language here falls short of what we mean—you get the world picture. For indeed what we are headed toward is the triumph of the will—the will of man, the German Man---once we banish the ghost that created us—and we become the peers of the immortals. German song, as always, agree with this.
***
In the late nineteenth century every middle-class German home had its own family orchestra, and every member of the family played an instrument and sang. In each town on a given night the community would meet in the various houses and listen to music. These musical nights continued on through the interwar years until the advent of radio rendered them obsolete. And so our people began to be passive consumers of culture rather than creating it organically. In one of his most stirring speeches Adolf Hitler (a man who signed the guest book at Bayreuth as artist/writer) said that his most serious objection to the culture of the Weimar period was that that the people no longer participated. And when the people don’t participate in culture, when the creators are separate from or mock the people you don’t have a culture, you have the conditions for revolution.
The Germans have always been a musical people. We think and we write and we play and we sing---we are the artistic people par excellence. No one represents this musical gift of our people better than Bach---when he was born to the city musician his family already could boast of several composers in the lineage. Bach enriched German music by his unparalleled mastery of counterpoint and harmony—and the fugue. For the most part he was valued as an organist, that instrument of the swelling spheres. He excelled at modulation and pushed the limits in terms of strange tones in his music, giving it that haunted quality for which he is so well known. Indeed his music has become emblematic of the ghostly and the wraithlike, and more than one Poe story could be set to his music. Indeed, when I began to write this I realized that my studies in the German Arts had been almost exclusively in the Word; and though like everyone I had a thorough if basic understanding of our music I knew from my own studies that it is the shade and the nuance that is most important, for when one delves into a subject what at first seems rather clear becomes confusing and hopeless until one pushes through and sees the deeper pattern. Yet as a teacher of mine once said to our class if we have good memories and can see what is before us everything will be transparent by and by.
Other than an adherence to pure chronology what especially drew me to Bach was a stray musing of a colleague of mine as we were drinking coffee in the dorms. It has after all become a kind of cottage industry and guessing or parlor game to decipher what exactly is going on up at the Fortress. Indeed, some have created a kind of pool or kitty and the one who guesses most correctly wins it all; of course we all realize that “more correct” may be a quaint manner of speaking by then and if so all in good faith will throw the pot in for some victory gifts—which in all likelihood we will anyway. Of course you can’t get ten German men to speculate on anything but the prognostications get more wild and outlandish—more off kilter. We all recall that when they were creating the Jewish Bomb the men speculated that when it ignited it might set off an atmospheric chain reaction which would destroy life on earth—which shows you what a Jew is willing to wager on to kill the Germans. Now of course we have nuclear power under an Anglo-Saxon government body and it is used for peaceful purpose, one never being to dispense with enriched uranium.
Some think this theory will win most outlandish—by my intuition tells me it might get the palm—for being correct. One night as we wiled away the hours the co-worker in question speculated that what we were about to go into was a kind of fugue state, mentioning of course that this was Bach’s specialty. He told me that in music a fugue is a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving and complex intertwining parts; and that in psychiatry it is defined as a state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity coupled with certain forms of hysteria for a brief period where weird interlinking occurs and odd and unexpected interrelations. The survivor of the fugue state generally remembers nothing of the experience. He noted that this was only a metaphor of course but that reality seemed to him to be pliable—that is it was liable to swerve or veer and that within what we call the real are powers of mind which can violate the rules of that normalcy. He said that perhaps up on the hill—the part of the complex which was raised above the other parts—our scientists were conjuring with nothing less than space and time and that when the fugue broke it would be a world of pure mind, or spirit (geist); and what the noises were were oscillations of an imperfect (as yet) art. Which of course made Bach’s melodramatic perfection of this art form---like a horn blaring in a wavering tone—so emblematic of it.
With Mozart we get to the high-water mark of balance, of melodic beauty in its formal elegance in pure harmony. Here we don’t get the profound depths but the wonderful surface—but what a surface it is! Here we are in a purely aural world of lush beauty and tempo far above the concerns of the earth—indeed, for the first time man entered into the Empyrean—the isles of the immortal and the blessed where pure art and serene repose hold sway. We note too that with Mozart we leave behind the traditional religious preoccupations and it is no coincidence that his greatest symphony was nicknamed—Jupiter. This is the music of the spheres and the music of the harmony of the old gods and a genius was given to the German people capable of returning us there. With Beethoven we enter the world of the thunder and the lightening and the dark of the forest. What is serene and exquisitely placid in Mozart becomes fire and tempest and turmoil in Beethoven and here the German spirit reaches one of its many great peaks---with the torrential hymn to Joy we get the titanic outpouring of feeling—which is the outflowing of a people in a choral arrangement which in its onrushing power has never been equaled.
Joy, bright spark of divinity,
Daughter of Elysium,
Fire-inspired we tread
Within thy sanctuary.
Here the world of the gods is heralded and consummated; here the chthonic powers return, and the Fame Wolf breaks free of its fetters, and here vista upon vista of the outrageous future is glimpsed and felt. How the audience who first heard it must have been moved to rapture upon tumultuous rapture—and how with souls cleansed by the power of it they looked upon that future for the first time with the totalizing force of the spirit in their breasts. Wagner aside music never again hit that note of pure triumphalism. The music we listen to now is in a very different key, more complex and sinuous in many respects and more beautiful I would hold, but it is an inner music of the ear not the soul, it is music that takes one on the winding labyrinth of the interior, not the majestic pinnacle of the craggy mountain top. For glorious Victory once had one settles down to the intricacies which await. And so with Beethoven we leave off the music of this most musical people, he laid down the table for the banquet feast and all that was left was to put words to the sacred hymn-even as soon I believe we will dispense them forever, their task finally complete.
Continued at Empyrean (Part Six)
December 18 2024
Continued from Empyrean (Part Four)
SPIRIT
The essence of the universe, at first concealed and closed off, does not have the power to offer resistance to the unremitting courage of cognition; it (the essence of the universe) after a long and tortuous process of showing and then hiding, will open itself before him (the philosophical thinker) and lay in its completeness directly before his eyes and for his pleasure–Hegel, October 28 1816, Heidelberg
The German Spirit (geist) is the most noble subject there is; for all of our Warrior Ethos we have always been as much Athens as Sparta, perhaps even more; it was Wincklemann who revived the Greek spirit for us and the interwoven connection between the Hellenes and the Germans was established forever. And for all of our conquering of the world we have always been a people given over to immateriality; indeed, our reputation in this regard has fluctuated over time. To Tacitus we were warriors; to Heine and then Lawrence in the 1920s we were the face painted berserkers probably high on some drug who were the predatory wolves of the world. But in between, at the nadir of our political power, we were viewed quite differently; as seers or wizards and as an inward people, the dreamy ones with our head in the clouds given over excessively to poetry and thinking and creative abstraction; from what they thought we might one day be so self-preoccupied that in our vagrant wandering we would collectively wander into a well.
Kierkegaard traveled to Berlin to listen to Hegel; he said that the truth is subjective—which is the same as to say what Hegel said—that the world is spirit, a spirit unfolding itself in time and over time and a spirit that is conscious and independent of human beings but is actualizing itself through human beings. This is when human beings become conscious of themselves and learn who they are and when they begin to create and will. When the spirit has realized itself—that is become real—Hegel uses the metaphor of the Owl flying in the twilight. As for Kierkegaard he was a German man who gave himself over to Jewish fantasies---but he said a very Un-Jewish thing when he said that the fact that god had created beings which are to one day become independent of it is the abyss into which thinking always finds itself. You won’t find that in any theological textbook. What he is saying is that it is then and only then that we shall become the gods, the creators, the ones who do the bidding, that is we shall have become pure German spirit---Geist. That Geist is a cognate of ghost in our sister language of English is telling in this regard.
It was of course Heidegger who put nearly the finishing touches on philosophy but he was—and I told him as much—always too reluctant about the will, as if there was some kind of ritual reticence about seeing the truth that Hegel promised us. And when we heard that he had said only a god will save us those of the younger generation were truly dismayed. He died four years ago now and unfortunately will never get to see in the flesh that we are going to save ourselves—or create ourselves if you will---and though language here falls short of what we mean—you get the world picture. For indeed what we are headed toward is the triumph of the will—the will of man, the German Man---once we banish the ghost that created us—and we become the peers of the immortals. German song, as always, agree with this.
***
In the late nineteenth century every middle-class German home had its own family orchestra, and every member of the family played an instrument and sang. In each town on a given night the community would meet in the various houses and listen to music. These musical nights continued on through the interwar years until the advent of radio rendered them obsolete. And so our people began to be passive consumers of culture rather than creating it organically. In one of his most stirring speeches Adolf Hitler (a man who signed the guest book at Bayreuth as artist/writer) said that his most serious objection to the culture of the Weimar period was that that the people no longer participated. And when the people don’t participate in culture, when the creators are separate from or mock the people you don’t have a culture, you have the conditions for revolution.
The Germans have always been a musical people. We think and we write and we play and we sing---we are the artistic people par excellence. No one represents this musical gift of our people better than Bach---when he was born to the city musician his family already could boast of several composers in the lineage. Bach enriched German music by his unparalleled mastery of counterpoint and harmony—and the fugue. For the most part he was valued as an organist, that instrument of the swelling spheres. He excelled at modulation and pushed the limits in terms of strange tones in his music, giving it that haunted quality for which he is so well known. Indeed his music has become emblematic of the ghostly and the wraithlike, and more than one Poe story could be set to his music. Indeed, when I began to write this I realized that my studies in the German Arts had been almost exclusively in the Word; and though like everyone I had a thorough if basic understanding of our music I knew from my own studies that it is the shade and the nuance that is most important, for when one delves into a subject what at first seems rather clear becomes confusing and hopeless until one pushes through and sees the deeper pattern. Yet as a teacher of mine once said to our class if we have good memories and can see what is before us everything will be transparent by and by.
Other than an adherence to pure chronology what especially drew me to Bach was a stray musing of a colleague of mine as we were drinking coffee in the dorms. It has after all become a kind of cottage industry and guessing or parlor game to decipher what exactly is going on up at the Fortress. Indeed, some have created a kind of pool or kitty and the one who guesses most correctly wins it all; of course we all realize that “more correct” may be a quaint manner of speaking by then and if so all in good faith will throw the pot in for some victory gifts—which in all likelihood we will anyway. Of course you can’t get ten German men to speculate on anything but the prognostications get more wild and outlandish—more off kilter. We all recall that when they were creating the Jewish Bomb the men speculated that when it ignited it might set off an atmospheric chain reaction which would destroy life on earth—which shows you what a Jew is willing to wager on to kill the Germans. Now of course we have nuclear power under an Anglo-Saxon government body and it is used for peaceful purpose, one never being to dispense with enriched uranium.
Some think this theory will win most outlandish—by my intuition tells me it might get the palm—for being correct. One night as we wiled away the hours the co-worker in question speculated that what we were about to go into was a kind of fugue state, mentioning of course that this was Bach’s specialty. He told me that in music a fugue is a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody or phrase is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving and complex intertwining parts; and that in psychiatry it is defined as a state or period of loss of awareness of one's identity coupled with certain forms of hysteria for a brief period where weird interlinking occurs and odd and unexpected interrelations. The survivor of the fugue state generally remembers nothing of the experience. He noted that this was only a metaphor of course but that reality seemed to him to be pliable—that is it was liable to swerve or veer and that within what we call the real are powers of mind which can violate the rules of that normalcy. He said that perhaps up on the hill—the part of the complex which was raised above the other parts—our scientists were conjuring with nothing less than space and time and that when the fugue broke it would be a world of pure mind, or spirit (geist); and what the noises were were oscillations of an imperfect (as yet) art. Which of course made Bach’s melodramatic perfection of this art form---like a horn blaring in a wavering tone—so emblematic of it.
With Mozart we get to the high-water mark of balance, of melodic beauty in its formal elegance in pure harmony. Here we don’t get the profound depths but the wonderful surface—but what a surface it is! Here we are in a purely aural world of lush beauty and tempo far above the concerns of the earth—indeed, for the first time man entered into the Empyrean—the isles of the immortal and the blessed where pure art and serene repose hold sway. We note too that with Mozart we leave behind the traditional religious preoccupations and it is no coincidence that his greatest symphony was nicknamed—Jupiter. This is the music of the spheres and the music of the harmony of the old gods and a genius was given to the German people capable of returning us there. With Beethoven we enter the world of the thunder and the lightening and the dark of the forest. What is serene and exquisitely placid in Mozart becomes fire and tempest and turmoil in Beethoven and here the German spirit reaches one of its many great peaks---with the torrential hymn to Joy we get the titanic outpouring of feeling—which is the outflowing of a people in a choral arrangement which in its onrushing power has never been equaled.
Joy, bright spark of divinity,
Daughter of Elysium,
Fire-inspired we tread
Within thy sanctuary.
Here the world of the gods is heralded and consummated; here the chthonic powers return, and the Fame Wolf breaks free of its fetters, and here vista upon vista of the outrageous future is glimpsed and felt. How the audience who first heard it must have been moved to rapture upon tumultuous rapture—and how with souls cleansed by the power of it they looked upon that future for the first time with the totalizing force of the spirit in their breasts. Wagner aside music never again hit that note of pure triumphalism. The music we listen to now is in a very different key, more complex and sinuous in many respects and more beautiful I would hold, but it is an inner music of the ear not the soul, it is music that takes one on the winding labyrinth of the interior, not the majestic pinnacle of the craggy mountain top. For glorious Victory once had one settles down to the intricacies which await. And so with Beethoven we leave off the music of this most musical people, he laid down the table for the banquet feast and all that was left was to put words to the sacred hymn-even as soon I believe we will dispense them forever, their task finally complete.
Continued at Empyrean (Part Six)
