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Goethe's Faust
On the Upper Peneios
p 425-426 - “...In Goethe’s drama... the Sirens have a positive function, above all through the musical medium of their choral song... the Sirens appear to symbolize music itself as artistic medium and song as a privileged vehicle of celebration... they bring the entire ‘Classical Walpurgis Night’ to its climactic conclusion, when they celebrate Eros, ‘who engendered it all!’... opening the choral voice of the festival to the cosmos in the very last verses...”
On the Lower Peneios
p 428 - “...Manto, as seer or Sybil...resides motionless, indeed dreaming... and thus asleep -- within the temple of Apollo, which she serves as priestess. The descent to the underworld that she offers Faust, because she applauds his boundless longing for Helena, his striving beyond the limits of the possible (7488) consists primarily in a journey inward, as if to the realm of the unconscious....”
Cassandra, Helen's sister in law, is also a priestess of Apollo, but I don't see how that is relevant. Still, why did Goethe throw this in? The man is devious.
Rocky Inlets of the Aegean Sea
p 433 - “...The mythical festival of life and love, procreation and organic evolution, at the shores of the Aegean Sea includes the fulfillment of Homunculus’s quest for being, achieved when he shatters his glass against the shell of Aphrodite, which is being ridden by the nymph Galatea, whom this diminutive spirit chases out to sea in an erotic frenzy. This act of self-sacrifice and self-engendering in the sea serves as an analogy, if also a contrast, to the union of Faust and Helena in the act that follows: an analogy, insofar as the erotic desire of Homunculus resembles the striving of the Faustian will for ideal beauty; a contrast, insofar as the transformation and reaction of Homunculus demonstrates nature’s own process of generation and evolution, which contrasts with Faust’s experience in his marriage to ideal beauty...”
p 437-438 - “...The interaction of these deities and their linear ascent is understood by Schelling to signify a process of spiritual and cultural growth or the creation of consciousness, proceeding from the primal urge of nature through erotic union toward complete consciousness and intelligence. The final stage in this development consists of a recapitulation of the process of ascent at a higher level of intelligence in the Olympian realm... The entire event is preeminently Faustian, despite the absence of Faust himself, in its essential and pervasive striving toward re-creation and self-fulfilment...”
The Helena Act
Before the Palace of Menelaus at Sparta
p 441 - “...Helena embodies the ideal of classical beauty just as Faust represents the Germanic or Romantic spirit of infinite striving, and the offspring of their union, Euphorion, who was described by Goethe as the spirit of poetry, may be called the Byronic spirit of ‘modern’ poetry. The historical scope and structure of the Helena, as Goethe emphasized... extends across three thousand years of Western cultural tradition, from the fall of Troy... to the battle of Missolonghi in 1824 , when Byron died of fever... The Helena must thus be understood as a mythical-poetic recapitulation or re-creation of that cultural history, a theatrical event in symbolic terms: the marriage of Faust and Helena to produce the self-consuming spirit of modern poetry as the synthesis of the ancient and the medieval, the union of classicism and Romanticism.”
p 442 - “Also important and difficult to follow through the Helena is the developing thematic self-awareness of this phantasmagoria as a mythic reality. The advance of dramatic action is more than a recapitulation of cultural history; a corresponding development of reflective understanding accompanies this action as a perspective or implied response imposed upon characters and audience alike. At the outset, for instance, Helena assumes that she really exists, as if she were arriving home from Troy to Sparta in historical truth. Only gradually, above all through the dialogue exchange with Phorcyas-Mephisto, does she become aware that she is only a spirit from the underworld, an ideal (however powerful her role as ideal), an Idol (line 8879; here translated as ‘myth’)... His [Phorcyas-Mephisto as stage manager] presence in the Helena provides a constant reminder -- or it should do so -- that the entire sequence is no more than a poetic or theatrical event, a phantasmagoria upon a stage, constructed and directed by the devil and populated with spirits. Our task as audience is to maintain a conscious awareness that this vast panoramic spectacle is no more than that. We submit to the illusion of this theater only at the peril of our understanding. What it means for us as it unfolds in and advances is essentially the same, so Goethe implies, as the meaning of our cultural tradition itself, insofar as it is accessible to us through the experience of art... The result for him, [Faust] as always, in this greatest instance of striving for the moment of ideal fulfillment, is error and failure. The meaning of all this for us, who only observe it as audience, need not constitute perhaps a corresponding error and failure. That question is left open, however, by the silence of Mephistopheles at the end (after line 10038), when he removes his mask and costume as if ‘to provide in an epilogue such comment on the play as might be necessary.’”
The Graiae as models for the devouring crones in the Snow dream? line 7970.
It is also worth noting how much Goethe is trotting out the latest science of his times -- either his own work or the work of his contemporaries -- in a fictional/poetic form. And while I'm not reproducing this for you, know that it includes most all of the sciences then assuming their modern form in German universities. This includes both the life and physical sciences. I can’t really think of an analogy for this in more recent times. Maybe Brave New World.
Shady Grove
p 451-452 - “The figure we are meant to recognize in the body of Euphorion is, of course, George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)... The authenticity of Byron’s genius was beyond question for Goethe; the younger English man represented, indeed embodied, the spirit of poetry that he identified with the modern, postrevolutionalry era, the period we now call Romanticism. Goethe said of him... ‘He was the greatest talent of the century,... neither ancient nor romantic but like the present day itself.’ Euphorion represents precisely the same spirit, especially within the structure of the Helena act as it surveys the entire tradition of Western literature. The death of Euphorion-Byron is the fall of modernism, if not the final collapse of the European poetic tradition. And this fall is inherent in the spirit that is destroyed, as Goethe often emphasized about Byron. His genius was magnificent but destructive, directly in opposition to the moral order of the society in which he lived and even in conflict with the spirit of the age. A magnificent description of the ‘daemonic’ force that Goethe associated with Byron and intended to demonstrate in Euphorion is provided in the final pages of Goethe’s autobiography, Poetry and Truth, Book 4, chapter 20 (written probably in 1831 and published only after the poet’s death),... ‘the daemonic element appears in this most terrifying aspect when it manifests itself predominantly in a human being. During the course of my life I have been able to observe several such men, sometimes closely, sometimes from afar. They are not always the most admirable persons, not necessarily the most intelligent nor the most gifted, and rarely are they remarkable for their goodness of heart; but an extraordinary force goes out from them, and they have an incredible power over all creatures, yes even over the elements; and who can say how far such an effect may not extend? All the moral forces banded together are powerless against them; in vain do the more enlightened among mankind strive to render them suspect either as deceivers or as deceived; they attract the masses, and they can only be vanquished by the universe itself with which they are in conflict. It is from observations of this nature that the strange and terrifying saying probably arose:... (“No one Contrary to God, unless God himself”)’”
Now this sounds a great deal like Peeperkorn. (Also, the part in bold is very similar to Clausewitz's description of a great commander.) But, doesn't this also sound like the Dionysian hero of Attic tragedy as described by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy? (And before you shout "WTF?" recall Nietzsche's interest in Byron's Manfred.) Isn't Byron a Romantic version of an Attic hero, who Nietzsche has told us is always really Dionysus himself? And isn't Dionysus, viewed in a Christian context, daemonic? And doesn't this work really well with that last bit about "God himself?"
p 452-3 - “...Spirits from the underworld who have assumed the guise of a Greek chorus willingly abandon themselves to a process of ecstatic dissolution in which they blend into and become identical with the various activities of nature. Their voices in song begin to speak with the sounds of nature, thus providing yet a further instance of that mode of poetic language in Faust where the processes of nature are expressed directly in words. An implicit irony is also included here in that the seeming loss of personality by the Chorus also achieves a degree of fusion between spirit and substance that offsets Faust's own failure to do the same with Helena in some permanent form. Where his own phantasmagoria concluded by dissipating into mists and silence, the Chorus merge with nature so perfectly that the spirit of antiquity is renewed and fulfilled within the everyday realm of natural activity. The highest and ultimately impossible goal of human striving is thus juxtaposed with a triumphant alternative as familiar as the here and now of nature....”
There is even mention of Dionysius in the final lines of this section. Nietzsche must have loved this.
Because i ran into something interesting today (12/10/15), I have to add a little something to this discussion of Euphorion. If Euphorion is the tragic result of the marriage of the classical and the romantic and represents the fall of the modern, than what does Ada Lovelace, Byron's only natural daughter represent. I have to quote just a few lines of that Wiki entry I linked to, "...was a British mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Because of this, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer."
See also Here for a very long but interesting article about Ada and Babbage. There is just enough about "working like the Devil" and her knack of seeing the potential for Babbage's invention that he himself was unaware of, to make my connection work.
Goethe was dead before she did any of this, and even if he had still been around it's asking too much to expect him to recognize the significance of her mathematical tinkering, but, with Euphorion in mind, it's hard not to see Ada as an unexpected connection between the arch-romantic -- even ‘daemonic’ Lord Byron -- and our current cyber age. A woman and math. Goethe would never have even noticed, though Mann might have been suspicious, but even he died too soon to appreciate how computers could become the most Mephistophelian of all technologies. (Nuclear energy or the oil economy are arguably worse, but they all three have convincingly awful credentials.)
Marco Scutaro
Baseball, again. Marco Scutaro, one of my favorite position players (second base) from the 2012 Giant’s Championship team, appears to be getting ready to retire as a Giant after having career ending back surgery. I’ve written before that I attribute the Giants’ recent success (three championships in five years) to their manager, Bruce Bochy. While I’m sure it’s great to show the world that you are really good at what you do (managing a baseball team), I think what would be really rewarding would be the satisfaction of knowing that you gave players like Marco Scutaro such a crowning achievement for their careers.
Scutaro’s baseball career started with the Cleveland Indians organization in 1994 (he’s from Venezuela). He first played in the major leagues for the NY Mets in 2002, then played for the Oakland Athletics, Toronto Blue Jays, Boston Red Soxs, and Colorado Rockies before being traded to the Giants in the middle of the 2012 season. He played most of the 2013 season and five games of the 2014 season before having the surgery that ended his career.
All this is pretty normal for a position player like Scutaro and would make for a typical but not at all distinguished career, but for those final months of the 2012 season. During the playoffs he was almost impossible to strike out and ended up as the MVP for the World Champions... every boy’s dream. It seems that most winning World Series teams have a player like Scutaro -- usually a small guy who plays in the infield and lacks power but is good at getting the crucial hit. Every time Scutaro came to the plate in 2012 you just knew the Tigers were in trouble. He was uncanny.
Only a handful of key players have stayed with the Giants for all three championships, which is sad in one respect, but it also means that there are lots of players out there with routine but forgettable baseball careers aside from the Championship rings they have from playing for the Giants for a few months or years. I don’t wear jewelry and I think those huge gaudy rings look ridiculous, but I appreciate what they represent and what they mean to players who have devoted their lives to a game that often leaves them with little more than regrets and injuries. No wonder they jump around and hug like a bunch of tween girls when they win these things.
Here's the last Wiki has about Marco: On January 28, 2015, Scutaro was released by the Giants.[25] The Giants re-signed Scutaro to a major league contract on June 17 and placed him on the 60-day disabled list. He will continue to rehabilitate his injury with the Giants, not with the intention of playing, but “in hopes of maintaining a quality of life and be pain-free with his family,” according to the Giants.[26]
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