Jeff Koons: Apollo (The Golden Boy of American Art Meets the Golden God of the Greeks)

Jeff Koons: Apollo Kithara (2019-22) [1]  

Jeff Koons on Instagram

I. 

 

Apollo is the golden boy of ancient Greek mythology: the god of sunlight, music, poetry, and healing; the perfect embodiment of the Hellenic ideal of καλοκαγαθίᾱ [kalokagathia], that is to say, of reason, beauty, and virtue. 

 

Almost too good to be true, it's no wonder Nietzsche seemed to hate him and to privilege the more mysterious (and more troubling) son of Zeus, Dionysus; the god of wine and dance, irrationality and chaos, representing the emotional-instinctive forces. 

 

Only, of course, that's not quite true and the Apollonian/Dionsyian distinction is not so black and white, even in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), where Nietzsche develops (but does not invent) these philosophical and literary concepts [2]. 

 

Placing the two gods in dialectical opposition, Nietzsche advances the argument that tragic art is the result of a fusion (or synthesis) of the Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. But he does not wish for one to be valued more than the other (although in his later writings he will proudly declare himself as a disciple of the latter).

 

For Nietzsche, the tragic hero or thinker is one who struggles (ultimately in vain) to impose order and meaning upon a chaotic world of fate. Without the Apollonian, the Dionysian lacks form and structure, and without the Dionysian, the Apollonian lacks the necessary vitality and passion. And thus, for Nietzsche, the attempt to make art and philosophy an optimistic affair of moral reason, i.e., exclusively Apollonian in nature, was profoundly mistaken [3].

 

 

II.

 

But I digress: this post was simply intended to notify readers to the fact that Jeff Koons has a new exhibition on the Greek island of Hydra, honouring Apollo, including the animatronic sculpture shown above, in which the god not only holds a kithara (the seven-stringed version of a lyre), but has to contend with a massive snake flicking its forked-tongue out [4].

 

For those - like me - who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing we like; whereas, on the other hand, for those - like Byung-Chul Han - who hate everything Koons does and represents, then this piece of Apollonian kitsch will just be another reason to damn him. But I think that's a shame. 

 

The fact that Koons has returned to antiquity is no real surprise; all artists, writers, and philosophers look back to the Greeks and Romans at some point. The trick is to find a way to recontextualise ideas and put a contemporary spin on the myths and images from the ancient world, thereby liberating us in a certain sense from the disadvantages identified by Nietzsche in both antiquarian and monumental models of history [5].

 

In a recent interview Koons spoke of trying to play metaphysically with time and in his new show I think we can see what he means by this. Koons gives us a vision of Apollo that is an amusing mix of pagan and postmodern, then, now, never was and might be tomorrow.

 

Inspired by a sculpture from the Hellenistic period that Koons viewed in the British Museum, Apollo Kithara has precisely the smooth, digital look that Byung-Chul Han objects to, though one might have thought he would at least acknowledge the amount of time and care that Koons puts into each of his works. 

         

At any rate, that's what I admire: Koons may, like Keats [6], appear to be a blank idiot when wearing Apollo's famous laurel wreath, but he isn't. 

 

As for all his talk of universal humanity and shared meanings - his insistence that we and the peoples of the past feel the same things and have similar thoughts and values - well, that's the sort of regrettable idealism that many artists like to believe and why, ultimately, as Herbert Grönemeyer, once said: Trust art, but never trust an artist ...

 

Jeff Koons 

Apollo Windspinner (2020-22)     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Koons's Apollo Kithara is an animatronic sculpture featured within the exhibition Jeff Koons: Apollo, at the Slaughterhouse, Hydra, Greece, in association with the DESTE Foundation  (21 June - 31 Oct 2022). For more details, click here. 

 

[2] In his Preface to the 1886 edition of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche makes it clear that he finds the book questionable to say the least; a Romantic work born of an overheated sensibility; "badly written, clumsy and embarrassing, its images frenzied and confused [...] lacking in any desire for logical purity, and even suspicious of the propriety of proof, a book for initates [...] an arrogant and fanatical book that [...] has a strange knack of seeking out its fellow-revellers and enticing them on to new and secret paths and dancing-places." 

      In other words, too much Dionysian frenzy and not enough Apollonian calm. It is, by some margin, my least favourite of Nietzsche's books, although, it is perhaps his best known and most widely read text outside of philosophical circles, with the exception of Zarathustra. 

      See 'Attempt at a Self-Criticism', Preface to The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (Penguin Books, 1993), pp. 5-6. 

 

[3] Interestingly, someone who advocates for the Apollonian is the American feminist writer Camille Paglia. Whilst she broadly accepts Nietzsche's definition of the Apollonian and Dionysian, she attributes all human progress to the former (associated with masculinity, reason, celibacy and/or homosexuality) in revolt against the Chthonic forces of nature (including womanhood and procreation): "Everything great in western civilization comes from the struggle against our origins."

      See Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, (Vintage Books, 1991). The line quoted is on p. 40.  

 

[4] Those familiar with Greek mythology will recall that Apollo killed a huge serpent, called Python, who, it is said, not only persecuted Apollo's mother during her pregnancy, but wished to prevent Apollo from establishing his own temple and oracle at Delphi.   

 

[5] See Nietzsche's essay 'On the Use and Abuse of History for Life' (1874), in Untimely Meditations. 

 

[6] I'm referring to the poem by Keats entitled 'Hymn to Apollo' (not to be confused with his 'Ode to Apollo', though both works were probably written in 1815). Click here to read on allpoetry.com

 

 

This post is for MLG Maria Thanassa.  

 

Amethyst: Brief Reflections on My Birthstone and Dionysian Philosophy

All things at the end of time become amethyst ...

 

Amethyst is a violet-coloured variety of quartz; i.e., a hard crystalline mineral made from silica (SiO2). It owes its beauty - as do most things - to its imperfections; namely, impurities of iron and the presence of other trace elements, including, if Remy Belleau is to be believed, a few drops of sacred wine [1].

 

It's also, according to astrologers, my birthstone. Which is somewhat awkward for a Dionysian philosopher, as the English name derives from the Hellenistic Greek term amethystos [αμέθυστος], meaning unintoxicated (a reference to the belief that wearing the semi-precious stone protected its owner from drunkenness). 

 

However, it's important to remember that even Nietzsche - the major disciple of Dionynsus in the modern world - doesn't approve of piss-heads, placing alcohol alongside Christian morality as one of the two great European narcotics and who, for the most part, drank only water, preferring as he did to keep both a clear-head and a cool-head (as I do).

 

Ultimately, whilst Nietzsche admired the transfiguring power of intoxication, he strongly recommended that all spiritual natures abstain from alcohol and he didn't sacrifice human reason in the name of a wild irrationalism. Throughout his writings, cognitive activity is itself conceived as a drive of some kind, or even a form of passion; the will to make an intrinsically chaotic world intelligible and thus a world we might inhabit with a degree of security. 

 

And, for Nietzsche, whilst not denying the ecstatic element of the Dionysian experience, the god speaks differently to him: he speaks of this world (as the only world); of love as an earthly reality and of the eternal delight of existence in all of its aspects (even the most terrible) [2].

 

 

Notes 

 

[1] In his poem L'Amethyste, ou les Amours de Bacchus et d'Amethyste, 16th-century French poet Remy Belleau invents a myth in which Bacchus - the Roman version of Dionysus - was pursuing a maiden named Amethyste, who refused his affections and called on Diana to safeguard her chastity. This the goddess did by transforming Amethyste into a pure white gemstone. Impressed by the girl's determination to remain chaste, Bacchus pours wine over her new mineral form as an offering, thereby staining the crystal purple.  

 

[2] In a note from 1888, for example, Nietzsche writes: 

 

"Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary quest for even the most detested and notorious sides of existence. [...] Such an experimental philosophy [...] wants [...] a Dionysian affirmation of the world as it is, without subtraction, exception, or selection - it wants the eternal circulation: the same things, the same logic and illogic of entanglements. The highest state a philosopher can attain: to stand in a Dionysian relationship to existence - my formula for this is amor fati."

 

See The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), Book Four, Pt. II, §1041, p. 536. 

 

 

The Gods Have Become Our Diseases

Cover image - by the author's daughter, Flavia Tower - 
to the first UK edition (Victor Gollancz, 1971)

I.

"We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases."  

- C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies (Collected Works, Vol. 13)

  

In this crucially insightful passage, Jung provides the key to understanding Daphne du Maurier's short story 'Not After Midnight' - a tragic tale of two ruined lives: by Silenian dipsomania in the case of a brutish American collector of antiquities, Mr. Stoll; and by pederastic satyrism in the case of the English schoolmaster and amateur painter Timothy Grey.

II.

Grey, who narrates the tale, begins by informing us that he has, in fact, recently resigned from his teaching post at a boy's prep school, "in order to forestall inevitable dismissal" [56].

The reason he gave for his resignation was ill health. But Grey doesn't specify what the nature of his sickness is, or why it should make his dismissal inevitable. He simply says that it was caused by a "wretched bug picked up on holiday in Crete" [56]. Clearly, however, it's more than a funny tummy ...

Has he, perhaps, caught some kind of sexually transmitted disease? Is that the universal complaint from which he suffers? A dose of the clap would seem to be a possibility, but Grey is keen for us to know that the bug he caught "was picked up in all innocence" and was not due to "excess of the good life" [56].     

It also seems possible that Grey is, in fact, referring indirectly to what some consider a perverse disorder; did he resign because repressed homosexual desire had manifested itself and become known to his fellow teachers and pupils? The following statement lends credence to this:

"My complaint is universal, and has been so through the ages, an excuse for jest and hilarious laughter from earliest times, until one of us oversteps the mark and becomes a menace to society." [56]

Actually, this explanation - although mistaken - is nearer the mark. But what Grey suffers from is not the flowering of an all too human sexual predisposition; his erotomania is the result, rather, of divine madness - or what Grey describes as a form of insidious evil.

In other words, he's in the process of becoming-satyr, rather than merely coming out - and that's a much more problematic proposition within modern European culture; for whilst homosexuality has been decriminalised (and is, in fact, now thought of as something to celebrate), paedophilia certainly hasn't (and isn't).

III.  

Grey's problems begin when he bumps into the physically intimidating and drunken figure of Stoll, who gives him a gift; a drinking vessel which, whilst empty of libation, was nevertheless still able to intoxicate:

"It was a small jug, reddish in colour, with a handle on either side for safe holding. [...] The body of the jug had been shaped cunningly and brilliantly into a man's face, with upstanding ears like scallop-shells, while protruding eyes and bulbous nose stood out above the leering, open mouth, the moustache drooping to the rounded beard that formed the base. At the top, between the handles, were the upright figures of three strutting men, their faces similar to that upon the jug, but here human resemblance ended, for they had neither hands nor feet but hooves, and from each of their hairy rumps extended a horse's tail." [88]

That night, Grey has queer dreams from which he struggles to awaken; dreams that "belonged to some other unknown world horribly intermingled with [his] own" [89]:

"Term had started, but the school in which I taught was on a mountain top hemmed in by forest [...] My boys, all of them familiar faces, lads I knew, wore vine-leaves in their hair, and had a strange, unearthly beauty both endearing and corrupt. They ran towards me, smiling, and I put my arms about them, and the pleasure they gave me was insidious and sweet, never before experienced, never before imagined, the man who pranced in their midst and played with them was not myself, not the self I knew, but a demon shadow emerging from a jug [...]" [89]

Grey decides the rhyton is a source of magical malevolence and that the terrible dreams which it induced were utterly foreign to his nature - but one can't help wondering about this; perhaps it simply enables one to become who one is ...

Later in the tale, we discover that Stoll has also left Grey a bottle of home-brewed drink, which, surprisingly, he agrees to try:

"It was like the barley-water my mother used to make when I was a child. And equally tasteless. And yet ... it left a sort of aftermath on the palate and the tongue. Not as sweet as honey nor as sharp as grapes, but pleasant, like the smell of raisins under the sun, curiously blended with the ears of ripening corn." [91]

He even drinks the stuff for a second time; from the demonic jug, which, on reflection - and under the influence of Stoll's home-brew -, now appeared rather beautiful:

"I don't know how it was, but somehow the leering face no longer seemed so lewd. It had a certain dignity that had escaped me before. [...] I wondered whether Socrates had looked thus when he strolled in the Athenian agora with his pupils and discoursed on life. He could have done. And his pupils may not necessarily have been the young men whom Plato said they were, but of a tenderer age, like my lads at school, like those youngsters of eleven or twelve who had smiled upon me in my dreams [...]" [97]

Grey continues:

"I felt the scalloped ears, the rounded nose, the full soft lips of the tutor Silenos upon the jar, the eyes no longer protruding but questioning, appealing, and even the naked horsemen on the top had grown in grace. It seemed to me now they were not strutting in conceit but dancing with linked hands, filled with gay abandon, a pleasing, wanton joy." [97]

It is only upon discovering the body of Stoll beneath the waves - "grotesque, inhuman [... swaying] backwards and forwards at the bidding of the current" [99] - that Grey, with understandable panic, decides to fling the jug into the sea:

"Even as I did so, I knew the gesture was in vain. It did not sink immediately but remained bobbing on the surface, then slowly filled with that green translucent sea, pale as the barley liquid laced with spruce and ivy. Not innocuous but evil, stifling conscience, dulling intellect, the hell-brew of the smiling god Dionysus, which turned his followers into drunken sots, would claim another victim [...] The eyes in the swollen face stared up at me, and they were not only those of Silenos the satyr tutor, and of the drowned Stoll, but my own as well [...] They seemed to hold all knowledge in their depths, and all despair." [100]

IV.

The point of the tale is this: becoming-Greek in a Classical sense certainly opens up a whole new way of life and a whole new world of experience, but from the moral-legal standpoint of today it spells trouble, putting you at risk of a lengthy prison sentence and of having your name added to the sex offenders register.

Those who romanticise the pre-Christian past in all its pagan splendour and think the gods of Olympus were a splendid bunch, should maybe read a bit more history and acknowledge the tragic nature of Greek mythology in which incest, rape, murder, and sodomy (in its widest sense) were the norm.*

*Note: Some readers - with knowledge of my background in Dionysian philosophy and an openly pagan past - might be surprised (even disappointed) by this conclusion. But I would remind them that even a youthful Nietzsche, writing in The Birth of Tragedy, wasn't for frenzied excess and promiscuity overriding every form of law; he warns against the savage urges of lust and cruelty and advocates for their aesthetic sublimation.  
 

See: 

C. G. Jung, The Collected Works, Vol. 13: Alchemical Studies, ed. Gerhard Adler, trans. R. F. C. Hull, (Princeton University Press, 1983), 'Commentary on "The Secret of the Golden Flower"', para. 54. 

Daphne du Maurier, 'Not After Midnight', in Don't Look Now and Other Stories, (Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 56-100. All page references given in the text refer to this edition.

Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Shaun Whiteside, (Penguin Books, 1993).

This post is for Maria Thanassa.

Dionysos Versus the Amazons

I.

One of two final (prose) poems written by D. H. Lawrence was a work inspired by a reading of Plutarch, concerning the bloody battle fought between the god Dionysos and his followers and the tribe of warrior women known by many names amongst the ancient Greeks, but most commonly remembered today as the Amazons [Ἀμαζόνες].

According to Plutarch, after an initial skirmish at the coastal city of Ephesus, the Amazons fled to the island of Samos, where they were pursued by Dionysos and slaughtered en masse. Lawrence seems to be in little doubt as to who instigated the violence. He writes:

"Oh small-breasted, brilliant Amazons, will you never leave off attacking the Bull-foot, for whom the Charities weave ivy-garlands?"

And, a little later, he notes: "the Amazons swept out of cover with bare limbs flashing and bronze spears lifted."

What Lawrence doesn't do in his reimagining of the myth, is explain why the Amazons should be so fiercely determined to resist the triumph of Dionysos. To understand that, we need to turn to the work of the 19thC theorist of ancient matriarchy, Johann Jakob Bachofen ...


II.

Bachofen is probably best remembered today (if at all) as the author of Das Mutterrecht (1861); a seminal work in which he argues that Woman in her role of sacred (earth) mother is the origin of all human religion, culture and society.

According to Bachofen's post-Hegelian perspective, human cultural evolution consists of several stages, culminating in the Apollonian age in which all traces of the Mutterecht and the matriarchal past were eradicated, and from which modern (solar-phallic) civilisation emerged.

Whilst convinced that, ultimately, there's a progressive movement from base matter to the luminous unfolding of spirit, Bachofen doesn't argue for a smooth, developmental process. He insists, rather, that each shift from one phase to the next is marked by violence and there are often long periods during which regressive forces gain the upper hand and force humanity backwards. 

As the Dionysian phase of cultural evolution was one in which earlier female traditions were either masculinised or destroyed as the phallocratic order of patriarchy slowly began to emerge and assert itself, there was, therefore, good reason for the Amazons to be pissed (as Americans like to say).

It should be noted, however, that Bachofen doesn't approve of their feminist uprising, dismissing it as both reactionary and perverse and decrying the Amazons as a bunch of hate-filled, homocidal, war-loving maidens [männerfeindlichen, männertötenden, kreigerischen Jungfrauen].

He celebrates their defeat by Dionysos as the restoration of the natural order; finally, says Bachofen, women can find their fulfilment (and destiny) via glad submission to the male in all his glory. 
  

III.

I suppose the question is: did Lawrence know of Bachofen and was the latter an influence of any sort?

Well, whilst I don't recall him ever mentioning Bachofen, one suspects Lawrence would have known the name, being as he was well read in German literature and philosophy and married to a woman who would have almost certainly been familiar with Bachofen's ideas.   

What's interesting is that even whilst Lawrence would have detested Bachofen's idealism, he himself frequently wrote within the terms and confines of metaphysical dualism; darkness and light, passive and active, and - most crucially - male and female.

Indeed, like Bachofen, Lawrence sometimes seems to read all human history in terms of a battle of the sexes. And, like Bachofen, whilst he declares his sympathies are with the women, Lawrence often seems deeply troubled by the thought of women who have liberated themselves from men and phallocentric culture entirely, such as Amazons and lesbians.

Thus, it's noticeable that in his poem Lawrence seems more concerned about the fate of the beasts that accompanied Dionysus into battle, than the fate of the women who were put to the sword:

"The rocks are torn with the piercing death-cries of elephants, the great and piercing cry of elephants dying at the hands of the last of the Amazons, rips the island rocks."  

Notes

D. H. Lawrence, 'The Elephants of Dionysos', The Poems, Vol. III, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1615-16. This work, along with another (untitled) prose poem, was found on a short manuscript torn from a notebook. They are believed to be the last poems Lawrence wrote, composed at the beginning of December, 1929.

W. R. Halliday, The Greek Questions of Plutarch, (Oxford, 1928); see Question 56. This is the edition that Lawrence consulted when writing his poem on Dionysos and the Amazons. 

Johann Jakob Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, trans. Ralph Manheim, (Princeton University Press, 1992).

Cynthia Eller; Gentlemen and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861-1900, (University of California Press, 2011). See Chapter 3: On the Launching Pad: J. J. Bachofen and Das Mutterrecht, which I found particularly helpful when writing this post.  

This post is for Maria.

All of My Life is All I'll Give You: Un/Holy Reflections on the Case of St. Nietzsche (A Guest Post by Símón Solomon)

Nietzsche Icon from Ryan Haecker's 
blog Transhuman Traditionalism 

I.

'How is negation of the will possible? How is the saint possible? This really seems to have been the question that started Schopenhauer off and made him into a philosopher.'

- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, §47 

In concert with these Kantian-looking questions, Nietzsche conjoins his taskmaster in tragic aesthetics, so that, guilty by association, Schopenhauer's questions become Nietzsche's questions too. That they are also two questions he collapses into one yields, in effect, a pseudo-singularity that differs from itself. To insert ourselves between them, to read Nietzsche against himself by insisting on their analytical separability, we must therefore ask:

(i) What if sainthood were not only the personification of the will's renunciation?

(ii) What if martyrdom were something other, something stranger, than the instincts' resentful atrophy?

(iii) Might the saint even be that inculpable being, incorruptibly defenceless, who is innervated by a god?


II.

'Up to now the most powerful people have still bowed reverently before the saint, as the riddle of self-conquest and of intentional final sacrifice. Why did they bow? In him they sensed - and, so to speak, behind the question mark of his fragile and lamentable appearance - the superior strength which wished to test itself in such a victory, the fortitude of the will, in which they knew how to recognise and honour their own fortitude and pleasure in mastery once more.'

- Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, §51

In this exemplary aphorism, Nietzsche bears witness to the figure of the saint as a kind of limit-figure, in which the ascetic ideal - the nadir of the slavish revolt against which he stockpiles his anti-Christian dynamite - folds back upon itself into a mystical spectacle of the will to power. We might think here of Jung's crucial insight that les extrêmes se touchent; an observation that further demands Nietzsche be received as the ground-breaking psychologist he claimed himself to be, presenting as he is an early object lesson in the psychodynamics of projection. 'They were honouring something in themselves', he discerns, 'when they venerated the saint'.

Or, as Zarathustra declared, 'You want to create the world before which you can kneel: this is your ultimate hope and intoxication'.

Just as Rudolf Otto identified terror and fascination as the two drivers of religious awe, such overmastered reverence conceals, on Nietzsche’s diagnosis, a diabolical distrust: a hermeneutics of suspicion avant la lettre freudienne. What the men of power learned from this 'monster of denial' and unnatural contrarian was thus a new kind of dread, a new fear of power's self-overcoming.

In other words, they encountered in the saint a kind of fiend or force field, an unsurpassable adversary, atrociously empowered by 'a burning eye in a body half destroyed' [Human All Too Human, §141]. The will now bore a power that brought them, the non-saints, to a standstill. If the saint was a question mark, as Nietzsche tells us, whom they felt compelled to question, its crook sent back no echo.

In Tears and Saints, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran offers the stirring speculation that 'Nietzsche’s greatest merit is that he knew how to defend himself from saintliness. What would have become of him had he let loose his natural impulses? He would have been a Pascal with all the saints’ madnesses.'

Of course, a wholly undefended Nietzsche would still have been Nietzsche, but for Cioran a Pascal-pacified Nietzsche, the Pascal Nietzsche envisioned as 'profound, wounded and monstrous' [Beyond Good And Evil, §45] and who antedated Wagner alongside Schopenhauer as one half of the four couples who did not refuse him, the sacrificer, in his 'descent into Hades' [Human All Too Human II, §408].


III.

As to the demono-maniacal Nietzsche's infamous sign-off in Ecce Homo, 'Dionysus against the Crucified', was what defeated him what also broke his youthful Lieblingsdichter, the mad poet Hölderlin: the monotheistic cult of the Cross plunging into the imperishable circus of the Greeks that revolved around it eternally? The image of the Bacchic Jesus, the horned Christ, is a demonic thought, truly beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche may not have been a Christian, or, perhaps, was a kind of mortified Christian - 'a man whom the grace of God has not touched’ as Eric Voegelin described him - but nor was he simply a nostalgic pagan, a satyr of the wine-god: the god of ecstatic dissonance, of wine, women and tears.

As Rouven J. Steeves has noted, Nietzsche was not unambiguously 'against' Christianity, or laying siege to the Nazarene with the sorcery of Greek ecstasy. Rather, as something 'even more primordial', his agon channelled the free spirit of Luther via Pascal, mingled with his self-styled Dionysus as a creative principle of life, to become a kind of Jobian Prometheus - an anti-ass, a world-historical beast, a fire-breathing Anti-Christ.

'Dionysus against the Crucified' signals, we suggest, a kind of divine double-crossing, an impossible authorship: a Dionysus crucified; the dying Christ dionyised. The German gegen, however can also signify 'towards': Dionysus towards the Crucified. And toward the end, Nietzsche signed himself as the Crucified One ...

In the German language, weinen and wein, tears and wine, share a common root. Drinking and dying are given together for those who dare to speak with a forked tongue, before they are driven mad. Here is the close of Nietzsche’s pious and tormented 1863 schoolboy poem, 'Before the Crucifix'.


On the floor lay a coin,
corroded and minted
with the devil’s hand and blow,
what it costs eternally, in heaven and on earth,
the soul hanging on the cross,
and, sunk deep in sin and lust,
thinking itself holy
that must yet be damned.


Author's Notes

E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. I. Zarifopol-Johnston, (University of Chicago Press, 1998). 

E. Cyblulska, 'Nietzsche Contra God: A Battle Within', Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, vol. 16 (1-2 October, 2016), pp. 1–12 (online).

C. Kerényi, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, trans. R. Manheim, (Princeton University Press, 1976).

R. J. Steeves, 'Dionysus versus the Crucified: Nietzsche and Voegelin and the Search for a Truthful Order', in Eric Voegelin and the Continental Tradition, ed. L. Trepanier and S. F. McGuire (University of Missouri, 2011), pp. 108-136.

E. Voegelin, 'Nietzsche and Pascal', Nietzsche-Studien, vol. 25(1), pp.128-171. 


Editor's Notes

Símón Solomon is a poet, translator, critic and tutor. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and serves as a managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He blogs at (and can be contacted via) simonsolomon.ink

Símón appears here as part of the Torpedo the Ark Gastautoren Programm.

To read a sibling post by Stephen Alexander, on why it's preferable to have horns rather than a halo, click here.