Winter XXVI. Relativity of time + Fog of War + Memory + Music + Tale of Two Engines

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Winter XXV. The virtue of being self-centered

Impatient for the light of spring, I have slept lately with my blind drawn up, so that at waking, I have the sky in view. This morning, I awoke just before sunrise. The air was still; a faint flush of rose to westward told me that the east made fair promise. I could see no cloud, and there before me, dropping to the horizon, glistened the horned moon.

The promise held good. After breakfast, I could not sit down by the fireside; indeed, a fire was scarce necessary; the sun drew me forth, and I walked all the morning about the moist lanes, delighting myself with the scent of earth.

On my way home, I saw the first celandine.

So, once more, the year has come full circle. And how quickly; alas, how quickly! Can it be a whole twelvemonth since the last spring? Because I am so content with life, must life slip away? Time was when a year drew its slow length of toil and anxiety and ever frustrate waiting. Further away, the year of childhood seemed endless. It is familiarity with life that makes time speed quickly. When every day is a step in the unknown, as for children, the days are long with gathering of experience; the week gone by is already far in retrospect of things learnt, and that to come, especially if it foretell some joy, lingers in remoteness. Past mid-life, one learns little and expects little. To-day is like unto yesterday, and to that which shall be the morrow. Only torment of mind or body serves to delay the indistinguishable hours. Enjoy the day, and, behold, it shrinks to a moment.

I could wish for many another year; yet, if I knew that not one more awaited me, I should not grumble. When I was ill at ease in the world, it would have been hard to die; I had lived to no purpose, that I could discover; the end would have seemed abrupt and meaningless. Now, my life is rounded; it began with the natural irreflective happiness of childhood, it will close in the reasoned tranquility of the mature mind. How many a time, after long labour on some piece of writing, brought at length to its conclusion, have I laid down the pen with a sigh of thankfulness; the work was full of faults, but I had wrought sincerely, had done what time and circumstance and my own nature permitted. Even so may it be with me in my last hour. May I look back on life as a long task duly completed -- a piece of biography; faulty enough, but good as I could make it -- and, with no thought but one of contentment, welcome the repose to follow when I have breathed the word “Finis.”

Alpha.

Amen to that.

This has turned out to be a bigger project than I imagined at the outset, Blogger tells me there are now 153 posts (and you will be surprised to learn that I haven't even published everything I've written, since I simply couldn't find a place for some of my topics). But this has also been more satisfying, and thought provoking, than I had expected.

I'm especially fond of my section titles -- Gissing simply numbered the sections -- and "Relativity of time" is a natural enough title given the text, but it has, for me, an additional virtue. Gissing completed The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft in 1901 and it was published in 1903. In 1905 Albert Einstein published his Annus Mirabilis papers including the papers on special relativity -- the equivalence of matter and energy (E = mc²) -- plus a paper contributing to quantum theory. Time would continue to be experienced as relative, just as Ryecroft describes it but, within just two years of Gissing's death, our understanding of time and light and the very substance of reality would shift forever. With that in mind, Ryecroft above is saying “Finis” to more than just an entertaining book or life. This is “Finis” to an entire way of viewing the world.

Before we reach my final indulgence, I want to report on the literary ads that follow the Index in my old edition of The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. One page lists Modern Biographies for Tolstoy, Verlaine, Lafcadio Hearn, J.M. Synge, W.E. Henley, Mahommed, and Paul Bouget. The next page features Philosophies Ancient and Modern including Early Greek Philosophy, Stoicism, Plato, Scholasticism, Hobbes, Locke, Nietzsche, Berkeley, Epicurus, and "Manicheeism." The following page covers Religions like Hinduism, Early Buddhism, Magic and Fetishism, The Psychological Origin and Nature of Religion, Pantheism, Early Christianity, and Islam. Then comes The Works of George Meredith; Mary Johnston's Romances; and Pocket Editions of Famous Books (Ryecroft is the only title I recognize here). The penultimate page flogs Constables' Sixpenny Novels including titles by Bernard Shaw, Tolstoy, Gissing, and Upton Sinclair. And finally there are the Works of Bernard Shaw.

While putting this together, I just discovered yet another online version of this book in a very nice format. See here. And now for some final topics that I couldn't fit in elsewhere:

Fog of War.

I’ve mentioned Karl von Clausewitz before, I believe with reference to the cholera epidemics of the mid-nineteenth century. Most people have probably heard his name and, as with Quantum Mechanics, most people have probably heard one idea connected with Clausewitz -- the Fog of War. Briefly stated, this is the notion that the commander never knows, because of the chaos of the battlefield, all the facts he would wish to know before making command decisions. In every other field, the person in charge hopes to have all the facts in hand before making his decision. Often this decision maker actually knows less than they think they know, but this is the ideal. On a battlefield, Clausewitz noticed, and taught in his book (sadly only a draft of a book as cholera finished him before he finished the book), the commander never knows all the facts. Much is concealed from him by literal or figurative smoke and, even worse, some of what he thinks he knows is almost certainly false. And yet he has to make a decision, and he has to make it right now. To dither is almost always the worst possible option (of course there are exceptions).

I titled this section “The Fog of War” and not “von Clausewitz” because I was determined to limit myself to just this one crucial concept -- that, alone, would be a sufficient support for the man’s reputation. But, alas, talking about this leads inexorably into a discussion of what makes a good commander. It was the opinion of Clausewitz, that a good commander shouldn’t be too intelligent. Intelligent people tend to be analytical and want to make their decisions based on the facts, precisely what the battlefield commander can’t do. The successful commander is more likely to have an intuitive sense of what to do, which is very much like saying that he has good luck. We are left here with the option of seeing the commander as a lucky gambler -- the crass alternative -- or as a kind of mystic, able to intuit the true state of affairs on the battlefield and know how to respond to it. Clausewitz's book is titled On War, but, as I tend to favor the second, more mystical interpretation, I would rather he had titled it “The Art of War” -- because it is, in this sense, less a science and more of an art... but then that title had already been taken by Sun Tzu thousands of years earlier.

Memory.

The subject of memory has come up quite a number of times in this blog, but I’m going to talk about it once more. There is an interesting use of the term “memory” to describe the way a traffic slowdown, on a freeway for example, radiates back in space and forward in time -- so that cars often will come to a near standstill miles behind an accident that has already been cleared away. If you are in a car approaching this “wave” of congestion there is no way to “see” the cause of it. It is simply a remnant of an earlier event.

I’ve long speculated that there is a kind of memory event in a neighborhood -- I’m thinking of the kind of suburban neighborhood where I grew up, but I imagine this to be a universal phenomenon -- in which information is passed on, year by year and generation by generation, in a static process. Mostly this concerns children’s games (though “game” here should be defined in the most generous way). The slightly older children pass on lore -- rules or secrets or something -- to the younger children who then, a few years later, pass that information on to still younger children. Where in the traffic example the memory wave moved backwards up the roadway and forward in time, this wave is fixed in place and at a certain age (or age differential) of children.

Undoubtedly there are similar standing wave patterns relating to young adults moving into a neighborhood and buying and learning to maintain houses. Or to elderly people making the transition into a compromised state of decrepitude and dependence (in a retirement home or nursing home, for example.)

There was probably something else I wanted to add to this, but I forget.

In the end, music.

To play us out, I will introduce you to a game we used to play in my online community: What are the next 10 songs played by your iPod on shuffle? I thought of this some time ago and recorded the first 10 songs my iPod played. I thought I might do that a couple times and then choose the best of the bunch, but I'm really pleased with the original batch, so here they are. Rather than fill the page with YouTube windows, I'll let you click the song title to go to a song if you so choose: Iris Dement, “The Way I Should” ; James Taylor, “Carolina In My Mind” ; John Lee Hooker, “Annie Mae” ; Alison Krauss and Union Station, “Bright Sunny South” ; Nat King Cole Quartet, “Sweet Lorraine” ; Evanescence, “Going Under” ; Natalie Merchant, “It Makes a Change” ; Patsy Cline, “She’s Got You” ; Eddie Harris & Les McCann, “Kathleen’s Theme” ; The Cranberries, “Zombie”.

Were I to pick the songs, instead of letting my iPod decide, I wouldn't have chosen some of these artists. And, given these artists, I wouldn't have picked these particular songs. But I love this mix of artists (including at least two I've mentioned before: Nat King Cole and Eddie Harris & Les McCann.) And even the songs I would never have selected myself are perfect in their own way. These ten songs cover 1990s folk, 1960s folk rock, blues, traditional bluegrass, 1940s jazz, 2000s gothic metal, 2000s hard to define, 1950s crossover country, 1960s jazz, 1990s rock. I am a little surprised there's nothing from the 1970s or 1980s, but there are several songs from just before and one from just after.

A Tale of Two Engines.

This should have come before the music section, but I'm so certain of my losing any audience (that has even made it this far) with this final indulgence, that I wanted the music to have some chance of being seen.

When I used to workout in the early afternoon, it seemed there were always History Channel documentaries about WW2 on at least one screen at my gym. Regardless of the particular subject of the documentary, there was always footage of the Battle of Stalingrad. There are, in fact, endless interesting stories you can tell about that battle, but modern wars are actually won by more prosaic things -- like very high octane aviation gasoline and superior aircraft engines.

The U.S. Army Air Force began the war with a bunch of sleek, planes (the P-38, P-39, P-40, and P-51) all powered by the same V-12, liquid-cooled engine, the Allison V-1710. Only the P-38, with two turbo supercharged engines, had adequate power for competing with enemy fighters. The P-39 and P-40 were either used in secondary theaters of the war or given to desperate allies. The P-51 Mustang originally found a home with the British, desperate for anything that could fly, who thought to replace the Allison engine with a Rolls-Royce Merlin. The Merlin, which powered the Spitfire, Hurricane, and the Mosquito, produced over 1,000 horsepower on 100 octane fuel near the start of the war and by the end of the war Merlins were generating over 2,500 HP on 150 octane fuel in tests. Also by the end of the war, P-51s were supplied with a Packard built version of the Merlin which, along with drop tanks (made of paper) to extend range and a new bubble cockpit (to improve visibility), made the P-51 arguably the best pure fighter of the war.

But what I want to talk about is the Pratt & Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp. This was an old-school, air cooled 18 cylinder radial that started with 2,000 hp and worked up to 2,400 late in the war -- and this was routine use rather than just in tests. The Double Wasp powered the USAAF P-47 and the U.S. Navy F4U Corsair and F6F Hellcat (plus a bunch of two-engined types). These are not pretty aircraft (though the Corsair is at least distinctive) but they were, for the time, powerful and rugged -- air cooled engines are much more forgiving of damage than are liquid cooled engines. You can shoot up a Double Wasp, even destroy a cylinder or two, and the thing will keep flying. Poke a single hole in the cooling tubes of a Merlin or Alison and the engine will quickly freeze up.

The Corsair, and especially the Hellcat, won the air war in the Pacific, while the P-47, with eight (rather than the usual six) .50 caliber machine guns in its wings, was the most feared fighter-bomber in either theater. I read a story about an RAF squadron that was switched from Spitfires to P-47s late in the war. The pilots were depressed when they first saw their new mounts -- no one ever called the P-47 Thunderbolt, nicknamed the “Jug”, a pretty aircraft -- but they were quickly won over. While lacking the grace and beauty of the Spitfire, the Thunderbolt could perform tasks -- like bombing and strafing -- that a Spitfire either couldn’t or shouldn’t perform. And when pressed into aerial combat, they could hold their own against the best (piston powered) planes the Germans could field. And in WW2, if tanks had become the new heavy cavalry, fighter-bombers like the P-47 had become the new light cavalry -- making quick and devastating strikes hundreds of miles behind enemy lines.

And, just now, I noticed something I hadn’t thought of previously. Two of the Double Wasp powered aircraft I didn’t mention earlier were the B-26 and A-26. Since, later in the war, these types were used exclusively in Europe, along with the bulk of the P-47s, engine logistics within the U.S.A.A.F. were simplified by what I always assumed was a decision based on the disinclination of pilots in the Pacific to fly the B-26 and A-26. That may have been a battle the U.S.A.A.F. was only too happy to let the pilots win.

"Finis".


Though you might like to take a peek at another blog: Regieren.

Interlude XXII. Nietzsche - part 11

Music... the real idea of the world

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XXI. Nietzsche - part 10

From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche...

Sec 20 - Rebirth of tragedy (Sec 19 was about opera...)

...If heroes like Goethe and Schiller could not succeed in breaking open the enchanted gate which leads into the Hellenic magic mountain... what could the epigones of such heroes hope for -- unless, amid the mystic tones of reawakening tragic music, the gate should open for them suddenly of its own accord....

Let no one try to blight our faith in a yet-impending rebirth of Hellenic antiquity; for this alone gives us hope for a rebirth and purification of the German spirit through the fire magic of music....

Yes, my friends, believe with me in Dionysian life and the rebirth of tragedy. The age of the Socratic man is over... Only dare to be tragic men; for you are to be redeemed....

This, once again, sounds like the voice of the true Nietzsche.

Sec 21 - Music and Tragedy

[Speaking again of the Greeks,] ...It is the people of the tragic mysteries that fights the battles against the Persians; and the people that fought these wars in turn needs tragedy as a necessary potion to recover... After all, one feels in every case in which the Dionysian liberation from the fetters of the individual finds expression first of all in a diminution of, in indifference to, indeed, in hostility to, the political instincts. Just as certainly, Apollo who forms states is also the genius of the principium individuationis, and state and patriotism cannot live without an affirmation of the individual personality. [National Socialism would contradict this, I think, or rather, would see in National Socialism a middle ground perhaps] But from orgies a people can take one path only, the path to Indian Buddhism, and in order that this may be endurable at all with its yearning for the nothing, it requires these rare ecstatic states with their elevation above space, time, and the individual. These states in turn demand a philosophy that teaches men how to overcome by the force of an idea the indescribable displeasure of the states that lie between. Where the political drives are taken to be absolutely valid, it is just as necessary that a people should go the path toward the most extreme secularization whose most magnificent but also most terrifying expression may be found in the Roman imperium.

...But let us ask by means of what remedy it was possible for the Greeks during their greatest period, in spite of the extraordinary strength of their Dionysian and political instincts, not to exhaust themselves either in ecstatic brooding or in a consuming chase after worldly power and worldly honor, but rather to attain that splendid mixture which resembles a noble wine in making one feel fiery and contemplative at the same time. Here we must clearly think of the tremendous power that stimulated, purified, and discharged the whole life of the people: tragedy....

First, it’s impossible to generalize about the Hellenes as they were so different. I assume he is primarily talking about the Athenians but it wasn’t the Athenians alone who fought the Persians. Second, Athenian values were well mixed with greed and the usual failings of mankind. The democracy of Athens intrigues us because it is such a true mirror of our own vices.

Tragedy absorbs the highest ecstasies of music, so that it truly brings music, both among the Greeks and among us, to its perfection; but then it places the tragic myth and the tragic hero next to it, and he, like a powerful Titan, takes the whole Dionysian world upon his back and thus relieves us of this burden. [The Promethean/Christ thing again] On the other hand, by means of the same tragic myth, in the person of the tragic hero, it knows how to redeem us from the greedy thirst for this existence, and with an admonishing gesture it reminds us of another existence and a higher pleasure for which the struggling hero prepares himself by means of his destruction, not by means of his triumphs. [Now the Japanese are on board. Also, this does work with National Socialism, personal transcendence through sacrifice for the nation. And nothing could be more anti-bourgeois.] Between the universal validity of its music and the listener, receptive in his Dionysian state, tragedy places a sublime parable, the myth, and deceives the listener into feeling that the music is merely the highest means to bring life into the vivid world of myth. Relying on this noble deception, it may now move its limbs in dithyrambic dances and yield unhesitatingly to an ecstatic feeling of freedom in which it could not dare to wallow as pure music without this deception. The myth protects us against the music, while on the other hand it alone gives music the highest freedom. In return, music imparts to the tragic myth an intense and convincing metaphysical significance that word and image without this singular help could never have attained. And above all, it is through music that the tragic spectator is overcome by an assured premonition of a highest pleasure attained through destruction and negation, so he feels as if the innermost abyss of things spoke to him perceptibly...

That not only would be of interest to the Japanese and National Socialists but it is starting to make me think of Schubert’s Winterreise which brings us back to Hans Castorp and The Magic Mountain.

Suppose a human being has thus put his ear, as it were, to the heart chamber of the world will [by listening to the third act of Tristan and Isolde] and felt the roaring desire for existence pouring from there into all the veins of the world, as a thundering current or as the gentlest brook, dissolving into a mist -- how could he fail to break suddenly? How could he endure to perceive the echo of innumerable shouts of pleasure and woe in the ‘wide space of the world night,’ enclosed in the wretched glass capsule of the human individual, [sounds a bit like Goethe's Homunculus] without inexorably fleeing toward his primordial home, as he hears this shepherd's dance of metaphysics? But if such a work could nevertheless be perceived as a whole, without denial of individual existence; if such a creation could be created without smashing its creator -- whence do we take the solution of such a contradiction?

I’d like to skip over some of this but it seems I really can’t.

Here the tragic myth and the tragic hero intervene between our highest musical emotion and this music -- at bottom only as symbols of the most universal facts, of which only music can speak so directly. [I keep thinking back to the Cosmic Music of String Theory] But if our feelings were those of entirely Dionysian beings, myth as a symbol would remain totally ineffective and unnoticed, and would never for a moment keep us from listening to the re-echo of the universalia ante rem...” [I’m also getting insight on the Medieval virtue, as well as necessity, of copying manuscripts as I type this out. No better way to really learn them. A passage about how Apollinian factors distance us from the Dionysian reality,] ”And where, breathless, we once thought we were being extinguished in a convulsive distention of all our feelings, and little remained to tie us to our present existence, we now hear and see only the hero wounded to death, yet not yet dying, with his despairing cry: ‘Longing! Longing! In death still longing! for very longing not dying!’ ...However powerfully pity affects us, it nevertheless saves us in a way from the primordial suffering of the world, just as the symbolic image of the myth saves us from the immediate perception of the highest world idea, [So the Apollinian is what keeps us from really seeing Annie Dillard’s “Lights in the Tree.” Yes that is a bit of a stretch,] just as thought and word save us from the uninhibited effusion of the unconscious will. The glorious Apollinian illusion makes it appear as if even the tone world confronted us as a sculptural world....

Thus the Apollinian tears us out of the Dionysian universality and lets us find delight in individuals; it attaches our pity to them, and by means of them it satisfies our sense of beauty which longs for great and sublime forms; it presents images of life to us, and incites us to comprehend in thought the core of life they contain. With the immense impact of the image, the concept, the ethical teaching, and the sympathetic emotion, the Apollinian tears man from his orgiastic self-annihilation and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process, deluding him into the belief that he is seeing a single image of the world... and that, through music, he is merely supposed to see it still better and more profoundly. What can the healing magic of Apollo not accomplish when it can even create the illusion that the Dionysian is really in the service of the Apollinian and capable of enhancing its effects -- as if music were essentially the art of presenting an Apollinian content?

...music is the real idea of the world, drama is but the reflection of this idea, a single silhouette of it... Even if we agitate and enliven the figure [character] in the most visible manner, and illuminate it from within, it still remains merely a phenomenon from which no bridge leads us to true reality, into the heart of the world. But music speaks out of this heart; and though countless phenomena of the kind were to accompany this music, they could never exhaust its essence, but would always be nothing more than its externalized copies.

...In the total effect of tragedy, the Dionysian predominates once again. Tragedy closes with a sound which could never come from the realm of Apollinian art. And thus Apollinian illusion reveals itself as what it really is -- the veiling during the performance of the tragedy of the real Dionysian effect; but the latter is so powerful that it ends by forcing the Apollinian drama itself into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom and even denies itself and its Apollinian visibility. Thus the intricate relation of the Apollinian and the Dionysian in tragedy may really be symbolized by a fraternal union of the two deities: Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo, finally the language of Dionysus; and so the highest goal of tragedy and of all art is attained.

Next: Interlude XXIII. Nietzsche - part 12.

Interlude XIX. Nietzsche - part 8

Socrates the theoretical man

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: Interlude XVIII. Nietzsche - part 7

From The Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche...

Sec 15 - The theoretical man

... it is enough to recognize in him [Socrates] a type of existence unheard of before him: the type of the theoretical man whose significance and aim it is our next task to try to understand. Like the artist, the theoretical man finds an infinite delight in whatever exists, and this satisfaction protects him against the practical ethics of pessimism... the theoretical man... finds the highest object of his pleasure in the process of an ever happy uncovering that succeeds through his own efforts.

...there is... a profound illusion that first saw the light of the world in the person of Socrates: the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of logic, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it. This sublime metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct and leads science again and again to its limits at which it must turn into art -- which is really the aim of this mechanism.

[The mission of science is] ... to make existence appear comprehensible and thus justified; and if reasons do not suffice, myth has to come to their aid in the end -- myth which I have just called the necessary consequence, indeed the purpose of science...

...Socrates is the prototype of the theoretical optimist who, with his faith that the nature of things can be fathomed, ascribes to knowledge and insight the power of a panacea, while understanding error as the evil par excellence...

But science, spurred by its powerful illusion, speeds irresistibly toward its limits where its optimism, concealed in the essence of logic, suffers shipwreck... When they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail -- suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and remedy...

"Bites its own tail" sounds like Nietzsche's mature voice sneaking through in this his first book. In general, The Birth of Tragedy does not read like the confident (all too confident, at times) Nietzsche of his later books.

While I was thinking I only needed to read the first 15 sections of The Birth of Tragedy, since both Nietzsche and Kaufmann (the translator) agree that's where the book should end, I have now decided I need to read the rest since it has to do with contemporary (for Nietzsche) German art and music -- and also because Thomas Mann may have held a different view. To contradict my previous notion of studying history backward (because it is so hard to remember that things or concepts we take for granted didn’t necessarily exist in the past. “Nationalism” as it is currently understood, was invented by Hegel around 1800, for example. So that studying the past becomes a process of subtraction), I have to admit that reading Nietzsche requires a familiarity with Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and especially Schopenhauer. Nietzsche includes a two page quote from Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in section 16 that is pretty great... though Schopenhauer usually tends to make me nod off. This passage, in particular, goes well with my quote from Dr. Kaku (Interlude XIV. ) about “cosmic music”, ...“We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will; and this is the reason why music makes every painting, and indeed every scene of real life and of the world, at once appear with higher significance, certainly all the more, in proportion as its melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon...”

Sec 16 - Schopenhauer

[Quoted from Schopenhauer,] ...All possible efforts, excitements, and manifestations of will, all that goes on in the heart of man and that reason includes in the wide, negative concept of feeling, may be expressed by the infinite number of possible melodies, but always in the universal, in the mere form, without the material, always to the thing-in-itself, not the phenomenon, the inmost soul, as it were, of the phenomenon without the body. This deep relation which music has to the true nature of all things also explains the fact that suitable music played to any scene, action, event, or surrounding seems to disclose to us its most secret meaning, and appears as the most accurate and distinct commentary upon it... music is distinguished from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon... but an immediate copy of the will itself, and therefore complements everything physical in the world and every phenomenon by representing what is metaphysical, the thing in itself... [to repeat] We might, therefore, just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will; and this is the reason why music makes every painting, and indeed every scene of real life and of the world, at once appear with higher significance, certainly all the more, in proportion as its melody is analogous to the inner spirit of the given phenomenon... For melodies are to a certain extent, like general concepts, an abstraction from the actual. This actual world, then, the world of particular things, affords the object of perception, the special and individual, the particular case, both to the universality of the concepts and to the universality of the melodies. But these two universalities are in a certain respect opposed to each other; for the concepts contain particulars only as the first forms abstracted from perception, as it were, the separated shell of things, thus they are, strictly speaking , abstracta: music, on the other hand, gives the inmost kernel which precedes all forms, or the heart of things... ...when the composer has been able to express in the universal language of music the stirrings of will which constitute the heart of an event, then the melody of the song... is expressive, But the analogy discovered by the composer between the two must have proceeded from the direct knowledge of the nature of the world unknown to his reason, and must not be an imitation produced with conscious intention by means of concepts, otherwise the music does not express the inner nature, the will itself, but merely gives an inadequate imitation of its phenomenon...

(Schopenhauer, Welt als Wille und Verstellung) Schopenhauer seems not to have cared much for paragraphs.

[Back to Nietzsche] ...it is only through the spirit of music that we can understand the joy involved in the annihilation of the individual. For it is only in particular examples of such annihilation that we see clearly the eternal phenomenon of Dionysian art, which gives expression to the will in its omnipotence... the eternal life beyond phenomena, and despite annihilation. The metaphysical joy in the tragic is a translation of the instinctive unconscious Dionysian wisdom into the language of images: the hero, the highest manifestation of the will, is negated for our pleasure, because he is only phenomenon, and because the eternal life of the will is not affected by his annihilation... Plastic art has an altogether different aim: here Apollo overcomes the suffering of the individual by the radiant glorification of the eternity of the phenomenon: here beauty triumphs over the suffering inherent in life; pain is obliterated by lies from the features of nature. In Dionysian art and its tragic symbolism the same nature cries to us with its true, undissembled voice: 'Be as I am! Amid the ceaseless flux of phenomena I am the eternally creative primordial mother, eternally impelling to existence, eternally finding satisfaction in this change of phenomena!'

This works well with the significance Muriel Barbery gave to music in The Elegance of the Hedgehog. On the other hand, music, as a path to the Dionysian, would seem to subvert Foucault's insistence that madness is the only access we have to the world of unreason.

From The Elegance of the Hedgehog, this is Paloma talking about a choir performance at her school:

...Everyday life vanishes into song, you are suddenly overcome with a feeling of brotherhood, of deep solidarity, even love, and it diffuses the ugliness of everyday life into a spirit of perfect communion. Even the singer's faces are transformed: it's no longer Achille Grand-Fernet that I'm looking at (he is a very fine tenor), or Deborah Lemeur or Segolene Rachet or Charles Saint-Sauveur. I see human beings, surrendering to music.

Every time, it's the same thing, I feel like crying, my throat goes all tight and I do the best I can to control myself but sometimes it gets close: I can hardly keep myself from sobbing. So when they sing a canon I look down at the ground because it's just too much emotion at once: it's too beautiful, and everyone singing together, this marvelous sharing. I'm no longer myself, I am just one part of a sublime whole, to which the others also belong, and I always wonder at such moments why this cannot be the rule of everyday life, instead of being an exceptional moment, during a choir...

Next: Interlude XX. Nietzsche - part 9.