1. Hatchery

       In his debut book, The Birth of Tragedy, 1872, Nietzsche tells us that Dionysus is the god of the non-figured art of music, while Apollo, god of shaping powers, governs not only the plastic arts, but also a part of poetry. Everything that can be called artistic production is symbolically under the influence of these two Greek gods.

       In this dialectic, Apollo, in addition to being the god of configuring powers, is also what reigns in the appearance of the world of dreams. And how superior, both for the plastic artist and for the poet, is the truth of this dream world, compared with that of the world that the man of no philosophical inclination calls real! In his De Rerum Natura, Lucrécio tells us that Greek painters, sculptors and poets first glimpsed the images of the Olympic gods in dreams and only later began to represent them in their verses, vases, sculptures and bas-reliefs. In the face of the dream, the artist slowly observes everything that is an image that presents itself to him in sounds and vivid colors. He watches knowing that it is all just a dream that, like all others, will soon fade away. From this observation, he is educated not only for the arts but also for life, where he seeks never to cross that delicate line, because Apollo is also the god of measure, of nothing in excess, of self-control and of knowing yourself. same. And as the characteristic of philosophical aptitude is the gift of a man, at certain moments, to regard all other men and things as mere shadows, unreal images ready to dissipate like clouds in the wind, so also the artist-philosopher behaves in face of the reality of the dream world. He knows that there are others beyond that, and he remains calm in the contemplation, pregnant with that measured limitation, that freedom in the face of the wildest instincts and emotions. If the eye of the shaping god is wise and peaceful, the eye of his disciple, both in dream and in life, must also be solar, since the divinity of light works precisely by drawing boundary lines between individuals. To him and his minions, such limits are the most sacred laws in this world.

       In Dionysian transports, however, this individuality disappears. Under the powers of the god of wine, man now wants to merge with his fellow men and with nature. Intoxicated and under the delirious torrent of music, we can see, in the carnivals of life, manifestations analogous to the spirit of Dionysus. We see the growing crowd, singing and dancing from place to place, as if the common and invisible background of all of us passes before our eyes. Under the effect of this magic, individuals unite, man is reconciled with his neighbor and also with nature, which, in turn, is reconciled with its prodigal son. Now there is no longer any place for distances, boundaries between people. The social straitjacket is broken, the malaise in civilization evaporates. Thanks to the gospel of universal harmony, each one feels not only unified, reconciled, merged with his neighbor, but one, as if returned to the magma of the mysterious Primordial One. Going back to the Bacchic choirs of the Greeks with their prehistory in Asia Minor to the Babylon of the orgiastic Saceans in which a slave was crowned king and sacrificed at the end of the celebration, what we find, in all these manifestations, is, at bottom, the same individuals' hiccups by dilution and mixing.

       The Apollonian dream and Dionysian intoxication are phenomena that seem to erupt from what is beyond human comprehension. Through the work of Apollo, this unfathomable, as it enters into individual and separate forms, objectifies itself in the visible multiplicity arranged in time and space. Whether in reality, in a dream or in a work of art, it appears independent of any human desires. If the dreamer is an artist, the impulse continues and, awakened, he now begins to create. It is Apollo, the god of oracles, of the sibyls and oniromancers, it is he who symbolizes this molding principle that, in the eyes of mortals, makes us see separate what is basically one thing.

       During the dream of a Greek artist, judging by the many accounts of tradition, his eyes remained endowed with a powerful plastic capacity, together with his sincere and luminous passion for color. His dreams had a logical causality, sharp lines and contours, precise colors and groups. Such were the dreams of Homer, the greatest bard of Apollonian culture and who, under the powers of the resplendent god, transmuted the world of the Titans into the luminous society of the Olympians. But why did the Greeks need these gods? How precisely did such a luminous society of superhuman beings come from? In them there is no moral elevation, sanctity, merciful glances of love, there is nothing that reminds us of asceticism. And yet everything they do is deified, whether for good or ill. Why were the Greek gods created with these characters? What is this culture based on? The answer is this: the Greek first looked at the bottom of existence, felt, in this vale of tears, the nausea of the absurd. It is the wisdom of Silenus. We mortals are part of a miserable and ephemeral race, we are children of chance, torment and pain. If the best thing for us would be not to have been born, the best thing now would be for us to die as soon as possible. Here the magical mountain of Olympus opens up to us and its roots are shown to us. The Greek felt the tremors and horrors of being, the impact of the grim assertions of Silenus, the drunken old demigod of the forests. And in order not to deny this existence, not to despise it and along with it his own body, he created that kind of gods before whose behavior his own and his life would be justified. Faced with the titanic powers of nature, against Moira, against the fate that reigns over men and gods, against that vulture gnawing the liver of the great friend of men, against the curse on the Atridian race, against all this, through impulse Apollonian of beauty, the Greek creates that luminous society that appears like roses blooming from a thicket of thorns. Their gods legitimize the human life of a people so attached to the sensitive, so impetuous in desire, and justify it by the fact that they themselves also live it. And what is the biggest symbol of this affirmation, this attachment, this unmeasured love for life? Achilles lamenting that he was not an immortal and saying that he would rather live forever, even as a slave.

       The Apollonian culture of forms fell like a veil over that misshapen and ugly world of titanomachy, of the primitive theogony of horrors. The impulse of beauty that engenders the visionary's dream made Homer configure, in epic poetry, this splendid level of things. The Hellene placed before him a mirror on whose surface he saw himself luminous and transfigured. Of course, first overcoming monsters, titans, horror and suffering, and then, through dreamlike images, but without ever forgetting the horrendous aspects of existence, standing out victorious over a negating consideration of life. But not only the Hellene as a human artist, the Will also wanted to contemplate itself transfigured in the artist's creation and, in order to glorify itself, the artist's dreams and his work of art needed to be worthy of glorification, as both aspired to see himself in a sphere even higher than that seen in the world of dreams. They needed to aim at a world of gods without imperatives or censorship, in a higher realm of art, and this world could only be presented to us in the work of an artist like Homer, the naïve poet par excellence. It is the wisdom of suffering, that of tragic pessimism, not the pessimism of the pestilent, rancorous and resentful breath of those who hate life. Is man a contingent being? Is existence absurd and the only ones besides that are those of Hades and Tartarus? And? In this best of all possible worlds, everything that is born needs to be ready for a painful sunset.

       The naive artist who arrives at this point of view on existence and decides to affirm it with all his might is impelled by a kind of sacred fire. It is this fire that spurs him on, that forges the attainable goal in the work he was urged to produce. He is barely aware of the target at which he aims, he dreams knowing that he dreams and does not want to wake up, for he takes a deep pleasure in the consideration, in the pleasurable enjoyment, even at the risk of madness of later coming to consider the waking reality as the mere illusion of a delusion.

       This background common to all of us, the thing itself, the Will, is objectified on three levels: that of reality, that of the dream and that of the work of art. Your appetite to enter one of these three formal levels is inexhaustible. The level most desired by him is that of reality, while the most highly satisfying for the artist is first that of the dream, followed by that of the work of art, which is nothing more than these potentiated dream images. That is why we feel that indescribable pleasure in the work of an excellent poet, of those who are surrounded by figures who live and act before him and into whose innermost being his gaze penetrates. For this breed of creators, which incessantly glimpses a living game and is continually surrounded by hosts of spirits, metaphor is not a simple figure of speech, but a substitutive image that it makes hover in front of us instead of what it was for. visualized.

       A poet who can be placed alongside Homer as a counterpoint to his objectivity is Archilochus. He was the first lyricist who introduced folk song to Hellas. This popular song, the melody with the lyrics, is one of those moments in which the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses also appeared paired. The Dionysian musical current is the substrate and presupposition of this popular song. Its melody, which refers to the One, is the first and most universal, being able to receive multiple objectifications in multiple texts in its strophic formula, so that in this lyrical poetry it is the lyrics that try to imitate the music, try to objectify it in images. Here the imagery needs the music, it tries to imitate it, but the music does not need the image and it can never be explained in concepts. But this lyrical artist cannot be called subjective, as opposed to Homer, the epic, objective par excellence. Every artist, insofar as he is subjective, can only be a bad artist, insofar as his contemplation of the dream is not disinterested, insofar as he, knowing that he is dreaming, takes advantage of it to satisfy carnal desires beyond his reach in the waking world. As long as his interests are related to the world of mere phenomena, to his body, to his feelings, as long as the creator is not the pure subject of knowledge and his cosmic eye, there is no truly artistic production. The true lyricist speaks at heart of what is unaffected by death. It is his musical disposition that gives us that illusion that he speaks of mean, low human feelings, and our aesthetes, alluding to the principle of authority, tend to reproduce Aristotle's erroneous assertion, that music imitates the human soul. The longing, the pain, the nostalgia in which the music that comes from the deepest depths appears is the artist unconsciously lamenting his shattering.

       This music, this Dionysian disposition does not become visible to us at all in the poet's images, but the strength of these images can very well point us to their origin and tell us that they themselves are nothing more than the vague figural and conceptual reflection of the abysses of Being. The self of the true lyrical poet therefore sounds from there, and not from individual passions that arouse selfish desires, it comes from the universal genius, from the spirit of the earth for the poet and his primordial suffering at the sight of the splinters. When he is poetizing, Archilochus is no longer himself, but a medium through which the nameless celebrates its redemption in appearance through the work of art of this other great naive artist. The work does not exist because of him, he does not do it consciously, nor does he aim at any kind of moral edification of third parties or anything similar. Our artistic knowledge is illusory, and what is at the bottom is a single spectator of this comedy of art, which, with it, with the dreams of artists and with reality, prepares for itself an eternal and joyful enjoyment. Then, when we look at the finished work, then we are also participants in that same fruition. In fact, we ourselves, for the true creator of this world, are nothing more than pure images and artistic projections, and that is where our supreme dignity lies, that of being, with the world, works of art of the great creator.

       As in lyric poetry, in Attic tragedy we now have another moment, the most important moment, when the two impulses appear together again, and in both cases Dionysian music is the upper stratum. This is because, in its beginnings, tragedy was just the dithyrambic chorus and nothing else. But this early choir was not, as Schlegel asserted, a kind of ideal spectator. Nor did it represent the people in the face of a supposed princely region of the scene. The early sources of the tragedy were purely religious, and there was no idea of a contrast between nobility, prince and people. Nor was the choir one of the actors, as Aristotle wanted. An ideal spectator or audience is one who knows that he has before him an artistic spectacle, and not a reality, whereas the tragic choir recognized living existences on the stage. The oceanid choir, for example, did not see an actor, but Prometheus himself. So, how to consider the choir an ideal spectator? Schiller, who fought against realism in art, gives us a clue to look at the issue in greater depth. He said that the primitive chorus was like a living wall that tragedy extended around itself in order to isolate itself from the real world and to safeguard its ideal ground and its poetic freedom for itself. In Greek drama, even in the later one, just before his death, everything is ideal, even the language, which is metrified. It was only after the death of tragedy that poetry was forced into a painful slavish retraction of reality. But this ideality in tragedy is not a world arbitrarily inserted by fantasy between heaven and earth, but a world with the same credibility as Olympus for the believing Greek. In the primitive choir, the satyr lives in a reality recognized in religious terms under the sanction of myth and cult. It is to civilized man what Dionysian music is to Apollonian. By the music of the choir, this civility is suspended, as the light of a lamp is suspended by the light of day. Even in the most advanced tragedy, from that primitive stage when it was just a chorus, the civilized Greek felt suspended before the tragic chorus. The state, civil society, everything was suspended. Its effect was a kind of metaphysical consolation: behind passing, incessant becoming, generation and corruption, misfortune and death, behind all this there is this indestructible, powerful thing, of which we are a part. The choir lifts us up and points to what is perennial in the midst of the incessant metamorphosis of the things of this world. This is the main effect of tragedy. The two gods, after walking apart from each other, most of the times even in open conflict, now more than ever intertwine to send the spectator back to that supreme state of grace. In looking at the bottom of existence, the Greek, like everyone else, ran the risk of falling into a Buddhist denial of life. But he was saved by art, and through art his life was saved.

       Here it is also a question of a renunciation of the individual through his entrance into a strange and as if bewitched nature that made him able to walk around surrounded by hosts of spirits. He now shared the mood of the satyr himself in the primitive dithyramb choir, which was a choir of the transformed, unlike any other, from the processional chant of virgins, for example, who maintained their civil identities. In tragedy, the chorus is the substratum of Apollonian imagery and is even more important than the action itself, for it pronounces sentences of oracle, of wisdom, and the world of the night is unveiled, and a new world, clearer and more moving, comes to us. unveils.

       Yes, the Apollonian in tragedy is just the surface, the dialogue, the language, the speech of the heroes in their precision and clarity. Let us penetrate through him to the Dionysian background through the music of the choir that evokes Dionysus in the figure of an Oedipus, that most painful figure on the Greek stage, who, however, exerts a magical power around him, protecting and blessing even after his death. Despite his wisdom, or because of it, Oedipus was destined for error and suffering as he untied, loop by loop, the procedural knot whose unraveling would lead him to complete doom. But in Colono we already find him transfigured, a saint, pure resignation under the vision of eternal life. Sophocles, as a poet, insofar as he is also a religious thinker, shows us Oedipus hit by an excess of misfortunes, abandoned as a pure sufferer who no longer suffers. In his perfectly passive behavior he achieved supreme activity, while the conscious pursuit that impelled him to activity led to disaster. In Colono, he is that image at one with nature. He knows that wisdom is really a crime against it, a sin that must be atoned for. This is also what Aeschylus allows us to foresee with his Prometheus in action, although going a little further, for Aeschylus also makes us foresee, through the hero's impiety, the divine indigence, the beginning of a twilight of the gods, and then we also see the Moira reigning over the immortals, immovably firm, showing the reciprocal dependence between Olympus and the skeptical man, symbolized in the figure of Prometheus, titanic artist of rough pride and his creation to defy any and all misfortunes. He finds in himself the bold belief that he can also create human beings, thanks to his superior wisdom that he, like Oedipus, who unravels the Sphinx's riddle, will also be forced to atone for. But deep down the only scenic hero was always Dionysus. All the figures on the Greek stage are really just his masks. Individuals as individuals are comic rather than tragic. The Greeks could not bear individuals in the tragic scene. The only truly real that appears torn apart in a multiplicity of masks is the same fighting god, entangled in an individual who errs, yearns and suffers, Dionysus seen in pieces in similar dreamlike images, with epic clarity, by influx of Apollo. Through these heroes, we sense the presence of the god in all its fullness. Though torn apart and devoured by the Titans, his heart is saved by Pallas. The initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries spreads a ray of joy and hope in this shattered world where everyone fights against everyone, for he knows that Dionysus will be reborn from that heart. Your hope is part of that insight, that mystical enlightenment. It is not the denying, resigned, optimistic hope of another life in a better world than this one. Demeter, immersed in sadness, rejoices when she learns that she will be able to give birth to Dionysus again. This is the mysteriosophical doctrine, the teaching that tragedy wants to convey through the drama that refers to the myth. Deep consideration of the world, tells us of the unity behind the becoming that never is, tells us of the rebirth of all that dies. It is not by chance that spring is the season in which we see the passage of Dionysus' chariot, covered with flowers and wreaths, having the tiger and the panther under his yoke, impregnating all nature with joy. Hence tragedy was born, and, by the loss of such a point of view on the part of the decadent Greek, his death was decreed.

2. Death

       Tragedy died because the reference to myth also died in it when it began to drag itself in the narrowness of a historical reality, of a pragmatic, scientific, utilitarian conception of existence. This is one of the reasons a religion begins to die. It is when its mythical assumptions start to be systematized, transformed into doctrines under the severe and rational eyes of orthodoxy, when rigidity in the interpretation of myths is defended, resisting the natural possibility that they continue to live and proliferate. With Euripides, the spectator was taken to skene. Now he was no longer a mythical, ideal hero, like those of Aeschylus and Sophocles, but the faithful mask of reality. The man of everyday life made his way to the stage, and what you saw then was no longer the grandiose and audacious features. Now it was bourgeois mediocrity, the common life and activity known to all, the aspects on which everyone is qualified to give an opinion. The Hellene here renounced his own belief in immortality. Not only the belief in a past, but also in an ideal future. At this stage, man no longer wants to take responsibility for anything serious, nor aspire to anything great, to value anything from the past or the future, but only from the present. This flight from what is serious, this coward letting himself be content with comfortable enjoyment, this is what seemed despicable to the Greeks of the best phase.

       With the death of tragedy, poetry itself died, and what emerged was a huge emptiness of anything that had any value. There was no longer the myth. Dionysus then takes refuge in the mystical tide of a secret cult. In place of an instinctive poetry, philosophical thought superimposes itself and constrains art to cling to the trunk of dialectics. In the schematism of the counterpoint between the two impulses, only the Apollonian crystallized. Now, in addition to the tragedy of Euripides, devoid of the Dionysian element, Socrates appears, the dialectical hero of the Platonic drama, who needs to defend his positions with reasons and counter-arguments.

       Socrates' influence on Euripides is seen in the optimistic element of his tragedies, even though Aristotle considers him the most tragic of poets. But what is seen in his plays is the destruction of the Dionysian element until the somersault of the bourgeois spectacle. Just imagine the consequences of the Socratic maxims: “virtue is knowledge”, “one only sins through ignorance”. Now the virtuous hero has to be dialectical, now there has to be between virtue and knowledge, belief and morals, an obligatorily visible link. Now the transcendental solution of justice is lowered to the level of reason and the principle of “poetic justice”. Now virtue will be compensated, and vice punished. The artist excises the original and omnipotent Dionysian element from his work and builds his art with a background no longer a cosmic music, but a moral one. A Socratic, not a Dionysian, view of the world. The work was no longer born of the spirit of music. The chorus, the Dionysian musical substrate of early tragedy, was no longer the vehicle for the main portion of the effect. Its domain is restricted to almost coordinated with the actors, as if raised from the orkhestra, the place of dance, a circular center in the middle of which stood the altar of the god, as if raised from there into the skene, a place through which At the doors, when the drama developed, the actors entered to act to the eyes of the spectators seated in the theatron, the place to see, bleachers in the shape of a horseshoe, usually dug into the side of a hill.

       Socrates did not understand tragedy and therefore did not esteem it. In aesthetic Socratism, everything must be intelligible to be beautiful. The Euripidean prologue is already a symptom of this. It is the rationalist method that says in advance everything that is going to happen, a renunciation of the effect of tension. The exciting relationship of a foreboding dream to a reality that will come later is absolutely not verified, the effect of the procedural knot gradually untying itself to the hero's misfortune. For Socrates, the creative faculty of the poet, insofar as it is not moral and conscious discernment, is equivalent to the aptitude of the diviner and the interpreter of dreams, as for Euripides, Aeschylus created incorrectly because he did it unconsciously. They are shallow appreciations of what it is to be a poet to see as a kind of vice the crucial virtue of the true artist. In Socratic ethics, everything must be conscious, done with rationality, with a reason for being, otherwise it will not be beautiful. Socrates, who led the people astray, atrophied instincts, questioned traditional virtues, this opponent of tragic art, abstained from attending performances and only included himself in the list of spectators when a new play by Euripides was presented. In his new and unprecedented estimation of knowledge and intelligence, an instinctive ethic was to be condemned. The daimon, the voice of reason that manifests itself at certain times and dissuades the individual from acting by instinct, for his own safety, in Socrates this voice is that of instinct, which only occasionally warns his reason. While in all truly productive people instinct is precisely the affirmative, creative force, and reason, the daimon, manifests itself in a critical and dissuasive way only at certain moments, in Socrates it is the opposite. A true monstrosity of a logical, not mystical, nature. In Socrates the graceful delirium of artistic enthusiasm never burned. He did not look with pleasure at the Dionysian abysses. He saw in tragedy something irrational, with causes without effects and with effects that seemed without causes, a variegated and multiform ensemble that would have to be repugnant to a thoughtful nature, in addition to being a dangerous bait for sensitive souls. For him, tragic art never tells the truth and is addressed to those who do not have much intelligence, not to philosophers. Like Plato, he included them among the flattering arts, those which did not represent the useful, but only the pleasant, and for this reason he demanded of his disciples a rigorous departure from such attractions, so unphilosophical, and he demanded it with such success that the young man tragic poet, Plato, burned his poems in order to become his student. His productive verve now focuses on the creation of the Dialogues, a mixture of all previous styles and forms. Platonic dialogue is the prototype of the modern novel, an infinitely intensified Aesopian fable, where poetry lives with dialectical prose in a hierarchical relationship similar to that which philosophy occupied with theology in the Middle Ages. It was the new position to which Plato, under the pressure of Socrates, dragged poetry.

       It was Socrates, with the whip of his syllogisms, who drove the music out of Euripides' tragedies and destroyed their essence, which is the Apollonian manifestation and configuration of Dionysian states. It was no use for that despotic logician to have received a dream apparition, as he tells his friends in prison, and who said to him: “Socrates, make music”. It was the admonition voice of the daimon, of instinct in his case. And to ease his conscience, he composes a proem to Apollo and puts some of Aesop's fables into verse. The Aesopian fable, by the way, was what he liked most, precisely because it contained that old moral allegory in the story told. But art is the realm of wisdom from which logic and morals are proscribed. Its meaning, if any, is metaphysical. Such was the tragedy among the Greek art of the most fertile times, that art in the face of which every autonomous, apparently original and sincerely admirable production seems to lose color and life and shrink into an unsuccessful copy and even into a caricature. One feels an inner fury against those arrogant people who had dared to label everything alien as “barbaric”. But all the venom that envy, slander, and rancor generated within him was not enough to completely eclipse that influence. Everyone is ashamed and afraid of the Greeks, unless he esteems truth above all else, despite the negative influence of a theoretical man like Socrates, someone who thinks he is able, by the simple thread of causality, to probe the facts. deepest abysses of Being, of knowing it, foreseeing it, correcting it. It is science, the scientific, optimistic spirit that wants to make the cosmos knowable in order to justify, to give meaning to existence. But existence only acquires an adequate meaning if its consideration leads to myth as an inevitable consequence. After Socrates, like the waves of the sea, one school of philosophy follows another. It is the greed of knowledge. In the face of this theoretical optimism that governs us in current times, let us ask where to find that tragic pessimism that is affirmed in existence, where can we find a tragic art, made for a few, whose artist even despises the general public, yes, he does not accommodate himself to a power whose strength lies in number alone. What are the hopes of rebirthing an art these days against the other impulse that works against it, sure of its victory: science. This art cannot come from a single principle, but from two impulses. Through the letter of the one, the other must launch his spirit and his mystical cry of joy, so that the way to the most intimate heart of things is thus opened for us.

3. Mirages of a possible resurrection

       Schopenhauer recognized in music a different origin from all other arts. It is to him that the metaphysical aesthetic philosophy owes its discovery. Music is not a copy of copies of Ideas like other artistic manifestations, but a reflection of something totally different. As Aristotle said that music imitates the human soul, which is not entirely correct, in a way we can also say that it is as if it represented all the processes within the human being that reason throws into the broad sphere of the concept of feeling. . However, there is nothing with which the melodies can strictly be compared. It is only apparently that a feeling can be expressed through an infinite number of possible melodies. Such sounds in the background point to something much more than purely human feelings. Its language is a mystery, we hear it and our imagination is incited to shape that world of spirits of which it speaks to us, and whoever, when listening to the melodies, finds something in the visible world that compares to them, he must only despair. of his blatant non-artistic proclivity. We can only speak of music in approximate terms. From it is born the myth that alludes to eternal life. “We believe in eternal life!”, so the listener must say under the influence of the music.

       Schopenhauer and his aesthetic theory, with such deep intuitions and insights, give us a light in the midst of the dark forest in the rescue of an art that has music in its deepest substrate, because it is what forces us to enter our gaze through the horrors of existence, but that we do so without falling into the temptation of denying life through asceticism, as the cadaverous pessimism of the moral part of his philosophy recommended. May something arise that momentarily pulls us out of the gears of mutating figures and suggests to us the indomitable desire and pleasure of existing, that tells us of the necessary torments and pains in the annihilation of appearances, given the plethora of countless forms of existence pushing and compressing. in life, but without demanding the denial of life. Such was the tragedy of the Hellenes, which really sprang from the spirit of music, of the choir. There, even the action was always less important than the music, the heroes always spoke more superficially than they acted, because music never properly objectifies itself in the spoken word. The articulation of the scenes and the vivid images revealed a deeper wisdom than the poet himself could grasp in words and concepts. The same can be observed in Shakespeare. Hamlet speaks more superficially than he acts, so that it is not from mere words, but from a thorough vision and review of the whole, that the doctrine of the mysteries of our immortality must be inferred.

       The incongruity between myth and word is clear, if it is just a word. What the poet of the pure verb does not achieve, the musician achieves at all times. And how infinitely rich was that music that fought for its figurative and mythical revelation, from the beginnings of the primitive choir, through lyric to tragedy. This song died in tragedy, but lived on in mysteries. In the most marvelous metamorphoses, it never ceases to attract the most proud natures to itself. Here and there, it shines again as art out of its mystical depths, after having been forced to derail by the dialectical impulse, by the knowledge and optimism of science, the wisdom of the theoretical man that took the place of tragic consideration. of the world. But Kant, another point of light, has already demonstrated the limits of this science and its claim to universal validity, today it no longer has enough strength to prevent the artistic awakening of tragedy. Of course, his shattering critical philosophy can also be called upon here to testify against the illusion of myth. But men live on illusions and we are strengthened to the extent that we do not allow ourselves to be deceived by conceptions that degrade us, that lower us to the condition of decadents. May the myth re-emerge from the underground and may art find its ideal soil in it.

       The music that came after the death of tragedy was no longer myth-making music. In the new Attic dithyramb, it no longer expressed the inner being, but only the appearance, and insufficiently, in an intuition mediated by concepts, music from which the truly musical natures were separated. Aristophanes, another torchbearer, was right when he despised Socrates himself and his murderous tendency of tragic art, of deleterious influence on Euripides. The great comedian smelled in all these phenomena the characteristic symptoms of a degenerate culture. Through this new dithyramb, music was converted into an imitative portrait of the appearance of a battle, of a storm at sea, stripped of its myth-making force. If music seeks to excite our delight only by compelling us to look for analogies between one event in life and another and certain peculiar sounds, and if our minds must be content with the knowledge of such analogies, then we are reduced to a state of that a conception of the mythical is impossible. The myth wants to be intuitively felt as a unique example of a universality and veracity with eyes fixed on the eternal infinity. Dionysian music points us to something under an apparent shattering that means nothing in the face of the entire permanence of that something. The sound painting of the new dithyramb, on the other hand, is nothing more than descriptive music, more in line with the Socratic pleasure of knowing, the illusion of being able to heal the wound of existence through knowledge. Not that the search for knowledge is not one of the degrees of illusion reserved only for the most nobly gifted natures, those who feel, in general with the deepest displeasure, the weight of the burden of existing. The problem is that our entire culture is caught in this web. The cognitive forces of the theoretical man work exclusively at the service of science, whose prototype and main trunk is the figure of Socrates. Every other culture has to struggle painfully to rise to the occasion, all our educational methods originally have this ideal in view, the ideal of the learned man. But this modern man has long felt the decadence to which this Socratic pleasure leads and now demands another form of wisdom.  

       And it will emerge, even in our society, taken to the lowest strata by such a rational, scientistic culture, a culture that shudders little by little under effervescence and exuberant desires. Its lip service to the belief in everyone's happiness does not nullify the permanent and serious threat. The ruling classes of this culture know that they need a class of slaves to continue to exist in a lasting way, although they deny this need, knowing that deep down they are heading towards a horrifying destruction, because there is nothing more spiteful than a barbaric class of slaves who learned to consider their existence as unjust and are now willing to take revenge for themselves and for all generations. And it won't help to appeal to our pale religions, which have degenerated into learned religions in such a way that myth, the obligatory presupposition of any religion, is paralyzed, because even in religion that optimistic spirit that is the germ of destruction of present society. Modern man has long felt the misfortune that sleeps in the bosom of this culture in which there is no longer room for great natures with universal dispositions, those who use the instrument of science itself in order to expose its limits and the conditioning of knowledge in general. This illusion that, through the thread of causality, we can probe the innermost being of things still shows itself victorious with its open optimism in the essence of logic. And even so, hopes are not lost that somewhere in the West a kind of artist will emerge who will push to the place of science the wisdom that turns with a fixed gaze to the joint image of the world and apprehends, with a feeling of love, eternal suffering as its own suffering. It is the artist with the fearlessness of his gaze, with a penchant for the extraordinary, with his bold dragon-slaying step, the proud temerity with which he turns his back on all the doctrines of weakness generated by optimism, for this optimistic, modern man, now anguished, he feels that his culture built on the principle of science has to come down when this logicist culture begins to become illogical. It is well known that it is useless to try to imitate the great periods without the very spirit that animated them, so that, along with the rebirth of that tragic consideration of existence, something must also come with the seal of the new, something totally different from the current scholar. , which gathers around itself all universal art and places itself in the midst of it, among the artistic styles and artists of all times, places itself in the midst of them and begins to name them, as Adam did with the animals. This late man remains the eternal hungry, the critic, a librarian and proofreader blinded by book dust and printing errors.

       Yes, my brethren, let us depart from the deleterious effects of a Socratic influence. And if we want to see the harm it causes in any and all art, in great music, for example, let's look at opera. This externalized music, this semi-musical genre of speech, incapable of emotion compared with the ineluctably more sublime and holiest music. Opera is the result of the taste of the theoretical man who is basically a layman when it comes to music. He is incapable of discerning the multiple melodic lines harmonizing in the polyphonic warp and, not understanding at all the divine and filigree art of contrapuntal, baptizes this sublime music of the Baroque, not without the pejorative taint of the concept. Therefore, it is not surprising that the taste for opera had spread with impetus precisely in the luxurious and distracting society of those Florentine circles when, in Florence itself, the luminous edifice of Palestinian harmonies had awakened in its entire construction. Mediterranean light. The listener was too rational. The strength of the spirit of opera is as low as the strength of our higher educational institutions is low, especially those that train journalists, people who have learned nothing about the opposition between appearance and the thing in itself, people increasingly far from understanding the true effect of a musical tragedy on a Hellene. At the sight of the myth moving before him, the Hellene felt himself elevated to a kind of omniscience and his eyes were able to penetrate, through phenomena, the ebullitions of Being, the thick current of passions with the help of music and even the most delicate mysteries of emotions. It is the summit and the summit of art, the joy in annihilation. There is a shudder in the face of the hero's actions that destroy him, but not without sensing in this destruction a superior joy and pleasure. The Dionysian impulse engulfs this whole world of appearances, and what is felt is a supreme primordial artistic joy. While other aesthetes characterize as properly tragic sometimes the hero's struggle against fate, sometimes fear and compassion, which must be propelled by serious occurrences until they cause a relieving discharge, this does not help us to get to the heart of this art. Among the ancients, the highest degree of pathetic is all aesthetic play that metaphysically gladdens and comforts him and elevates him above any moral process, for art is in the service of nothing but itself. Anyone who doesn't feel that way is the modern critic with half-moral, half-scholarly pretensions. How can Greek tragedy be reborn in the midst of such listeners, such critics? The true listener is the one enraptured by a powerful spell, while the modern esthete ties the work to contemporary politics.  When this critical moral culture comes to art, it degenerates into an object of the lowest kind. This is when it is not used as a gregarious means of a vain, dissipated, miserably selfish and devoid of originality sociability, so that art has never been so chattered about and art so little considered.

       It is necessary to understand the myth, the concentrated image of the world, not the historical-critical spirit of the present time, of the now. Without myth, every culture loses its natural and creative force. The forces of Apollonian fantasy and dream are saved only by myth, yes, a horizon of myths, hosts of spirits, the unnoticed and omnipresent guardians under whose custody the young soul grows and with whose signs man gives himself an interpretation of his life and his struggles. There is no law more powerful than the mythical foundation, which guarantees the connection with religion, its growth from mythical representations. Without myth, modern man has abstract customs, his wanderings are not guided by any artistic culture, he has no fixed and sacred originary seat, his possibilities are exhausted. This historical need of the unsatisfied modern culture lives lost from the mythical homeland in the feverish and sinister agitation of this culture, and perhaps only by looking to the Greeks, our luminous guides, will we be able to purify our aesthetic knowledge. Apollo and Dionysus, each ruling a separate aesthetic realm, we find them together in the tragedy of the best phase of the Greeks. The twilight, the death of this one happened by a remarkable dissociation of the two primordial artistic impulses, at the same time that the character of the Greek people was degenerated and transformed. Until then, the Greeks connected everything that happened to them to their myths, they only understood what they experienced from this articulation, with which the closest present always presented itself to them under the aspect of the eternal, and, in this timeless flux, they also plunged the art and the State, because a people, like a man, is worth precisely as much as it is capable of imprinting on its experiences the seal of the Eternal. The opposite of that is when you begin to conceive of yourself as historical and dilute the mythical bulwarks around you, and you become mundane, present, modern, current, until you break with metaphysics.

       Therefore, for a possible rebirth of this magnanimous tragedy, let us raise our heads to the pure sky, for there we will see the flight of the Dionysian bird showing us the direction of an art as winged and lofty as its spirit. It is this art that makes us acquire the gift of looking and going beyond looking, which operates pleasure in the vision of mythical meaning, a pleasure whose homeland is identical to that of the sensation of dissonance in music, which, when used artistically, makes us listen and go far beyond listening. Let us aspire to infinity with the shaper of this universe, who, playing like a child, builds piles of sand and then comes back to destroy them later. Let us transport ourselves, as in our dreams, to this state of mind until a vision arises of ourselves walking under high Ionic columns, in the Hellas of the golden age, having beside us, in gleaming marble, reflections of our own transfigured bodies. . Directing our focus of vision now to the point where the clouds touch the horizon line, let us kneel down in gratitude for such a divine profusion of beauty and, at last, serenely thoughtful, let us exclaim with emotion: “How much did these people have to suffer to become so beautiful!".