Enough! Enough! I am afraid that the ugly truth is only too obvious under my cheerful lines - a picture of decay in art, also of decay in artists.
-Nietzsche
Wheels of Being
In Zarathustra, Nietzsche proclaims:
Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of Being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of Being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of Being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, Being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.
Imitating Nature
"We will have achieved much for the study of aesthetics when we come, not merely to a logical understanding, but also to the immediately certain apprehension of the fact that the further development of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, just as reproduction depends upon the duality of the sexes, their continuing strife and only periodically occurring reconciliation. We take these names from the Greeks who gave a clear voice to the profound secret teachings of their contemplative art, not in ideas, but in the powerfully clear forms of their divine world."
"With those two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we link our recognition that in the Greek world there exists a huge contrast, in origins and purposes, between visual (plastic) arts, the Apollonian, and the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian. Both very different drives go hand in hand, for the most part in open conflict with each other and simultaneously provoking each other all the time to new and more powerful offspring, in order to perpetuate for themselves the contest of opposites which the common word 'Art' only seems to bridge, until they finally, through a marvelous metaphysical act, seem to pair up with each other and, as this pair, produce Attic tragedy, just as much a Dionysian as an Apollonian work of art."
"In order to get closer to these two instinctual drives, let us think of them next as the separate artistic worlds of dreams and of intoxication, physiological phenomena between which we can observe an opposition corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian."
(Friedrich Nietzsche, excerpt from The Birth of Tragedy)
Bells of Eternal Recurrence
In "Before Sunrise" segment of Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche writes:
A blesser have I become and a Yea-sayer: and therefore strove I long and was a striver, that I might one day get my hands free for blessing.
This, however, is my blessing: to stand above everything as its own heaven, its round roof, its azure bell and eternal security: and blessed is he who thus blesseth!
Yes, I realize that this color is not azure!
For all things are baptized at the font of eternity, and beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves, however, are but fugitive shadows and damp afflictions and passing clouds.
Der Wächter des Seins
Recently promising myself to sketch fairly regularly, I never imagined that I'd feel the need to illustrate certain concepts intrinsic to the historical-philosophical destiny of the West (specifically, its conclusion). Yet, a number of photo illustrations later (here and here), I've decided to conflate two related concepts--the night watchman from Nietzsche and the guardian of Being from Heidegger--into a single conté sketch. A personification, of course.
"I had turned my back on all life, thus I dreamed. I had become a night watchman and a guardian of tombs upon the lonely mountain castle of death. Up there I guarded his coffins: the musty vaults were full of such marks of triumph. Life that had been overcome looked at me out of glass coffins."
(Nietzsche describing Zarathustra's dream)
Can you guess who was the source for this image?
