Nietzsche
is chemical.

Nietzsche believes that tragedy, as it developed with the Greeks, was a dialectic clash of the Dionysian and Apollinian strains of human nature.  Nietzsche holds a rather expansive view of human nature.  It seems that for Nietzsche, humans are an extension of nature as a whole.  Humanity is the most expressive element of nature (reality), through which she focuses herself, but humans have no separate essence of their own.  Alternately, it seems at times that Nietzsche considers Nature to be an extension of human consciousness, and that all of reality is simply the reality of the human condition.  His conception of people/world is that the world is a vast, meaningless grounds of suffering that cannot be altered.  Nietzsche explains the Dionysian experience as one of ecstasy that brings with it a certain form of wisdom, or knowledge.

In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint.

The Dionysian state is not an ecstasy of pure rapture, for always upon ecstatic "enlightenment" arrives an understanding of the horror of our existence.

Greek Tragedy Oxidizes.

Opposite the Dionysian wisdom is posited a "primordial desire for mere appearance" which Nietzsche associates with Apollo.  For Nietzsche, Apollo is the god of illusion.  The Apollinian realm includes the sun, the plastic arts and the oracles, as well as the logos concept.  All of these elements are part of illusion.  However, when we speak of illusion, we must be aware of the vast parameters that Nietzsche assigns it.

The primary level of "illusory phenomenon" is the empirical world as such.  We normally see a dream as insubstantial, with the life of reality laying beneath it.  The philosophical view considers empirical reality to be itself a dream or phantom image, with another level beneath it.  The veil of Maya is of course not a new concept, but it takes on a different meaning with Nietzsche.  He speaks of dreams and art as exactly the sort of illusion which Nature cries out for. 

For the more clearly I perceive in nature those omnipotent art impulses, and in them an ardent longing for illusion, for redemption through illusion, the more I feel myself impelled to the metaphysical assumption that the truly existent primal unity, eternally suffering and contradictory, also needs the rapturous vision, the pleasurable illusion, for its continuous redemption.

Life, against the reality of the void, lives only in vigorous illusion.

The Twelfth Floor

Sue is the AA down the hall.  She is efficient, tight-strung, motherly and Very Interested in her job.  The location of bagels, tchotchke items, the disposition of someone or other who works with her boss.  All very concerning issues.  Thus it was that I was enlisted in a mission to retrieve coffee mugs left over from the give-away at some early morning conflagration of people with Elaborate Scheduling Management Issues (executives).  Really, my operational role in the Mission was to carry a cardboard box, but I didn't understand this until the mission was done.  Sue, approaching the task with such urgency and controlled, intense Efficiency, led me to believe we were doing some kind of politically dicey Corporate Navigation and Procedural Execution.  I suppose we were, but I was looking for something more confrontational than the furtive retrieval of coffee mugs.

The 12th floor, just below the PentHouse, is a reception and entertainment area.  Very cool blonde wood reception desks and accent tables.  Sitting areas with gratis phones and multi-bank TV installations (also in blonde wood).  Frosted Glass Walls.  Meeting rooms of all different sizes, trying very hard not to look like meeting rooms, but like Modernist Salons of Commerce.  Incandescent Lighting.  Wide Open spaces without a hint of cubicle infestation.  Black leather chairs.

The coffee mugs were collected.  I was handed a box and thus parted company with the other operatives.  On my way back to the elevators (which you can't operate without a magnetic badge) I spied the other Wonder of the 12th Floor.  In stark contrast to the Entertainment and Impressiveness wing, was the Computer Gadgetry and Impressiveness Wing.  Behind long smoked glass walls (Smoked, not Frosted in this area) there were banks and banks of computer circuitry, occasional monitors showing status graphs or screen-savers, blinking green and red lights.  Little white engraved placards with black sans-serif letters saying:  KPMG epayment link #2  :  line bank control #1 & #3  :  Online Switching  :  and a smattering of other similar signs.  The whole thing looked exactly like all the computer banks in the movies, from the 80s WarGames and Short Circuit, all the way through the CIA headquarters in Keanu Mission Impossible.

Upon reflection, I decided that this massive array of Connectivity was designed, like the rest of the floor, to impress first, and function second.  I got the feeling that the glass wall was a dump for necessary and low-maintenance hardware that ran, blinked and whirred stolidly, and which rarely needed attention.  This way, the Smoke Glass Display Case would not be tainted by repair work or the messier type of actual technological progress that might need to take place.

Nonetheless, I was impressed.  Especially because I was, myself, on a Very Important Mission involving the Relocation of Sensitive Materials, and thus the Mission Impossible Computer Depot imparted a grand sweep to my travels back to the Southeast Corner of Floor Six.  Later, back at home in my sixth floor cubicle, I was awarded with a leftover bagel.


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