Why Democracy and Lyrics?
To say that painting, poetry and music are all forms art is not incorrect, although I think this unification overshadows important and fundamental distinctions within art and ultimatly the human character. There is a natural tendency to fortify psychological manifolds such that a person can be more logical and mathematical, or more artistic and creative. These classifications blur when great logical insight requires immense creativity.
An interesting observation, or postulate is that maybe there is an essential difference between the art of music and poetry. For me the art of poetry is an perspective of the world from the eyes of this ancient Platonic belief that with knowledge and reasoning as our luminous guides manking can not only know existance, but also correct it. It is a pure manifestation of the will and ego, glowing with the conviction that this will and ego are the creators of our world. Poetry attains beauty like a warrior, by shear force no matter how subtle or disguised. And this beauty belongs to mankind, becoming his virtue, his noble frontier. For this warrior, his primary weapon is his passion, a passion elevated beyond any imaginable limits reaching a pinnacle of its endeavor when one is willing to die for it. Hence the image of the dying Socrates is rendered onto the pillar of science and the blissful belief in this will, ego and the impending intellect. Next arrives great suffering. For what greatness can be achieved without suffering?
The art of music, or at least what it should be is all together different. I can imagine a music whose most precious magic would consist in its no longer knowing anything of good and evil, only now and then some nostalgia, some golden shadows and delicate weaknesses would pass over it - a music that from a great distance would behold, fleeing toward it, the colors of a world that has almost become unitelligible. A music that is constantly arriving and constantly receding, but always fading deeper into blissful intoxication. Can you imagine?
But you avoid this pathological estrangement into solitude, and perhaps without knowing, you fear this solitude, you despise it. For you it is an ultimate surrender, a weakness. It signifies letting go of one’s will and therefore one’s single claim to power. But isn’t all existence a will for power? So you would ask.
Herein comes democracy. What a beautiful veil. For surely you of all people, you don’t truly believe that everyone is created equal or ever becomes equal, or has equal potential. Instead, in a breathtaking contrast, you bifurcate this world into masters and slaves. These slaves are those whom life offers nothing but their innocence, this innocence for which they journey all their lives, through suffering and self mutilations. They are the devout Christians, those whose greatest pride becomes self-denial, those who learn to love manking for the sake of their master. They are the beholders of good and evil, of heaven and hell. Their entire mentality emanates from the conviction that their existence is a means for their master. Though, underneath this holy fable and disguiese lies the most painful case of martyrdom. It is the martyrdom of knowledge about love, the innocent, a desirous heart, demanding love, to be loved and nothing else, with insanity.
You off course, are a master, living in a place beyond good and evil. What you behold is perhaps the greatest orchestration of the belief in masters and slaves - democracy. What beautiful, and poetic illusion is this principle of equality of rights, of freedom, of self government. What better lie to offer a slave than the idea that he is at last his own master? And so this illusion becomes the most powerful narcotic that with every facet of its idealogy shouts the final victory of master over the slave.
You are as much a master as your are a Socratic warrior, armed with knowledge and democracy. You seek, together with the conviction that you can and should, to conquer the world. You see the same sublime design in the verses of a poem as you do in the constitution of a government. What can be admired more? Than Napoleon? Than Alexander the Great? Than Einstein? And ultimatly the victory of mankind over nature?
You are a fearless psychologist, an inevitable unriddler of souls. Fearless because you do not suffocate from pity - for the corruption, the ruination of the higher men, of the souls of a stranger type, is the undeniable rule. The discovery of this eternal hopelessness of the higher man - you stare directly in the eye. You see a conquest and you see a victory.
Yet after all, nothing is clear, for if we become the thinkers in whom all stars move in cyclic orbits we cease being the most profound, the most free. We must look into ourselves as into vast space and see the galaxies, and know how uncertain they are, how they lead into the chaos of existence.