Friedrich Nietzsche - The Birth of Tragedy (Chap. 23) lyrics

Anyone who wants an accurate test for himself to see how closely related he is to the truly aesthetic listener or how much he belongs with the Socratic-critical community could sincerely ask himself about the feeling with which he receives some miracle presented on stage. In that situation, for example, does he feel offended in his historical sense, which organizes itself on strict psychological causality, or does he, in a spirit of generosity, as it were, make a concession to the miracle as something comprehensible in childhood but foreign to him, or does he suffer anything else at all in that process? For in doing this he will be able to measure how far, in general, he is capable of understanding the myth, the concentrated world picture, which, as an abbreviation of appearance, cannot work without the miracle. However, it's likely that almost everyone in a strict test would feel himself so thoroughly corrupted by the critical-historical spirit of our culture that he could make the previous existence of the myth credible only with something scholarly, with some mediating abstractions. However, without myth every culture forfeits its healthy creative natural power: only a horizon surrounded with myth completes the unity of an entire cultural movement. Only through myth are all the powers of the imagination and of Apollonian dream rescued from their random wandering around. The images of myth must be the unseen, omnipresent, daemonic sentries under whose care the young soul matures and by whose signs a man interprets for himself his life and his struggles. Even the state knows no more powerful unwritten laws than the mythical foundation which guarantees its own connection to religion, its growth out of mythic ideas. Alongside that let's now place abstract people, those who are led around without myths, and abstract education, abstract customs, abstract law, the abstract state. Let's remember the disorderly roaming of the artistic imagination which is not restrained by any secret myth. Let's imagine a culture which has no fixed and sacred primordial seat but which is condemned to exhaust all possibilities and to subsist on a meagre diet from all cultures — and there we have the present, the result of that Socratism whose aim is to destroy myth. And now the man without myth stands there, eternally hungry, in the midst of all past ages, rummaging around and digging as he looks for roots, even if he has to shovel for them in the most remote ancient times. What is revealed in the immense historical need of this dissatisfied modern culture, the gathering up of countless other cultures, the consuming desire to know, if not the loss of myth, the loss of the mythic homeland, of the mythic maternal womb? Let's ask ourselves whether the feverish and strange agitation of this culture is something other than a starving man's greedy snatch-and-grab for food — and who would still want to give such a culture anything, when nothing which it gobbles down satisfies it and when, at its touch, the most powerful and healthiest nourishment habitually changes into “history and criticism”? We would even have to experience painful despair over our German being, if it were already inextricably intermixed in a similar way with its culture, or, indeed, if they had become a single unit, as we can observe, to our horror, with civilized France. What for a long time constituted the great merit of France and the cause of its huge superiority — that very unity of being in people and culture — should make us, when we look at it, praise our good luck that such a questionable culture as ours has had nothing in common up to this point with the noble core of our people's character. Instead of that, all our hopes are reaching out yearningly towards the awareness that under this restless cultural life and cultural convulsions twitching here and there lies hidden a glorious, innerly healthy, and age-old power, which naturally only begins to stir into powerful motion at tremendous moments and then goes on dreaming once again about a future awakening. Out of this abyss the German Reformation arose: in its choral music there rang out for the first time the future style of German music. This choral music of Luther's sounded as profound, courageous, and spiritual, as exuberantly good and tender, as the first Dionysian call rising up out of the thickly growing bushes at the approach of spring. In answer to it came the competing echo of that solemn exuberant procession of Dionysian throngs, whom we have to thank for German music — and whom we will thank for the rebirth of the German myth! I know that now I have to take the sympathetic friend who is following me up to a lofty place for lonely contemplation, where he will have only a few travelling companions. By way of encouragement I call out to him that we have to keep hold of those leaders who illuminate the way for us, the Greeks. Up to now, in order to purify our aesthetic awareness, we have borrowed from them both of those images of the gods, each of whom rules over his own specific artistic realm, and by considering Greek tragedy, we came to an awareness of their mutual contact and intensification. To us the downfall of Greek tragedy must appear to have occurred through a remarkable tearing apart of both of these primordial artistic drives, an event which was accompanied by a degeneration and transformation of the character of the Greek people — something which demands from us some serious reflection about how necessarily and closely art and people, myth and custom, tragedy and the state are fundamentally intertwined. That downfall of tragedy was at the same time the downfall of myth. Up to that point the Greeks were instinctively compelled to tie everything they lived through immediately to their myths — in fact, to understand that experience only through this link. In that process, even the most recent present had to appear to them at once sub specie aeterni [under the eye of eternity] and thus, in a certain sense, to be timeless. In this stream of the timeless, however, the state and art both plunged equally, in order to find in it rest from the weight and greed of the moment. And a people — as well as a person, by the way — is only valuable to the extent that it can stamp upon its experiences the mark of the eternal, for in that way it is, as it were, relieved of the burden of the world and demonstrates its unconscious inner conviction of the relativity of time and of the true, that is, of the metaphysical meaning of life. Something quite different from this happens when a people begins to understand itself historically and to smash up the mythic bastions standing around it. Tied in with this development is usually a decisive secularization, a breach with the unconscious metaphysics of its earlier existence, along with all ethical consequences. Greek art and especially Greek tragedy above all checked the destruction of myth; people had to destroy them in order to be able to live detached from their home soil, unrestrained in a wilderness of thought, custom, and action. But now that metaphysical drive still tries to create, even if in a toned down form, a transfiguration for itself, in the Socratism of science which pushes forward into life. But on the lower steps this very drive led only to a feverish search, which gradually lost itself in a pandemonium of myths and superstitions from all over the place, all piled up together, in the middle of which, nonetheless, the Hellene sat with an unquenched heart, until he understood to mask that fever with Greek cheerfulness and Greek negligence, in the form of Graeculus, or to plunge completely into some stupefying oriental superstition or other. In the most obvious way, since the reawakening of Alexandrian- Roman antiquity in the fifteenth century, after a long and difficult to describe interval, we have come closer to this condition. Up on the heights this same abundant desire for knowledge, the same insatiable happiness in discovery, the same immense secularization, alongside a homeless wandering around, a greedy thronging at foreign tables, a reckless idolizing of the present, or an apathetic, numbed turning away, with everything sub specie saeculi [under the eye of the secular] , of the “present age”; these same symptoms lead us to suspect the same lack at the heart of this culture, the destruction of myth. It seems hardly possible that grafting on a foreign myth would have any lasting success, without in the process irreparably damaging the tree. Perhaps it is at some point strong and healthy enough to slice out that foreign element again with a dreadful struggle, but usually it must waste away infirm and faded or live on in a morbid state. We have such a high regard for the pure and powerful core of the German being that we dare to expect from it, in particular, that elimination of powerfully grafted foreign elements and consider it possible that the German spirit will come back into an awareness of itself on its own. Perhaps some people will think that spirit would have to start its struggle with the elimination of the Romantic, and for that he could recognize an external preparation and encouragement in the victorious courage and bloody glory of the recent war. But the internal necessity must be sought in the competitive striving always to be worthy of the noble pioneers on this road, including Luther just as much as our great artists and poets. But let him never believe that he can fight similar battles without his house gods, without his mythic homeland, without a “bringing back” of all things German! And if the German in his hesitation should look around him for a leader who will take him back again to his long-lost home land, whose roads and pathways he hardly knows any more — then let him only listen to the sweet, enticing call of the Dionysian bird hovering above him seeking to show him the way.