Sassy Retellings of Some Famous Opera Storylines

Every Greek myth adapted ever: There’s a family with some serious issues, usually involving people killing each other. The gods get involved. Stuff usually gets worse before it gets better. Sometimes it never gets better at all. Usually a love plotline thrown in for good measure somewhere. Moral is to not try and live real-life Game of Thrones.

Every retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice ever (because there’s about 500 bazillion of them): Eurydice dies because she’s a lil bitch. Orpheus is sad, so he goes to the Underworld to find her again. There’s a lot of harp music and power of music junk. Persephone and Hades decide that if he’s man enough to walk back to the surface without looking back at his wife following him then she can come back to life (really, this should be easy). Spoiler: he’s unsuccessful because he looks back at her in the last second/he is also a lil bitch. I can’t remember if there’s a moral here, it’s probably don’t be a wuss.

Every retelling of Don Juan ever: Don Juan is a womanizer, and he eventually ticks off some girl’s dad and they duel because they’re both hyped up on hormones and Juan-boy kills the dad. The dad comes back as a statue when Juan-boy’s turning up and tells him to check himself. Juan-boy decides to just wreck himself instead and goes to the dad’s grave. Then a giant portal in the center of hell opens up and demons drag Juan-boy down to his fire-y fate. Moral is to check yourself before you wreck yourself.

Every retelling of the Bible: You are not worthy, you are not worthy either, you really need to check yourself, but Jesus comes anyways. Worship him and await his return please.

(Note: nowhere do you actually see a fat lady in a Viking hat.)

THE BIRTH OF THE STACH-EDY or Truth and Illusion or I Try to Pass my Finals

So I decided to write my final paper for philosophy on illusions and the fundamental truth that they hide from us in Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. I’m having quite the time. Here’s a summary of what I’m talking about.

Illusions start with dreams. They are a precondition to art, where the artist realizes that they are illusions and then applies them to their art. This takes place in two forms: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian is the statelier of the two and is often associated with epic poetry and sculptures. The Dionysian is associated with intoxication and wild music and dancing (aka your Saturday night). Both of these forces are illusions since they are dreams in art form, and are never mistaken for reality. They can give insight into the nature of the world, which will be discussed later. One difference between these forces is that the Apollonian often reinforces the conception of the individual, while the Dionysian breaks it down into the primal oneness of all beings.

One source of Apollonian illusion was the Greek gods. The Greeks created gods that were so vibrant, they hid this truth at the root of existence and gave them a reason to keep living. They provided a justification for the life of man through their gods. This was incorporated into their culture unconsciously since it wouldn’t have an effect otherwise, but the gods are still of their creation and show their tendencies to hide from the truth so they could continue living.

The relationship between the Dionysian and the truth is based on the Dionysian man’s insight into the world. The thrill of the Dionysian and breaking down the boundaries is what attracts people to it, but this leads to the truth being revealed to them. After repeatedly partaking in the intoxication and ecstasies of the Dionysian, the two worlds become separate, with reality becoming inferior to the intoxication. But there is no avoiding the real world since they must always return to it and any action that they take is futile. This is the Dionysian man’s insight: that no matter what he does he cannot change the nature of the world. Logically this would lead to nihilism, however Nietzsche considers nihilism to be an outlook on life rather than the nature of it. So life could be meaningless, but as long as one continued to embrace life then one wouldn’t be a nihilist. The Dionysian helps with this as it supplies a metaphysical consolation that life is fundamentally positive by breaking down boundaries into the primal oneness.

This Dionysian wisdom is similar to the Greek cheerfulness that permeates their society. This so-called cheerfulness also comes from the wisdom of Silenus, who in a myth told King Midas that the best thing for mankind is to not be, and the second best is to die soon. These two ideas (that actions change nothing and that it is better to be dead) constitute the essential truth at the root of life. Art alone is what can help deal with this knowledge and continue living in spite of it.

Then everything changed when Socratism came along. Socratism is the belief that one can get to know the world by knowing more about it, and equates knowledge and explicability with virtue and happiness. This is an optimistic outlook because it believes that everything in life can be fixed if we only know more about it. This scientific basis opposes the artistic Apollonian and Dionysian, and effectively destroys them in the end. As artistic forces, neither the Apollonian nor the Dionysian can be easily explained and so are seen as bad by the Socratics. Socratism also destroys myths as it tries to find a historical basis for them and disregards their value as stories to the Greek culture. However, Socratism is still an illusion that hides the truth from us just like the Apollonian and the Dionysian. It’s just that Socratics take their illusion to be reality while the others know them to be illusions. Also, Socratism only works when you limit yourself to a certain set of problems while avoiding others (like the Dionysian wisdom) so it fundamentally cannot address every aspect of life.

There are a few flaws with Socratism. At the end of Socrates’ life, he started to make music, indicating that he recognized the limits of logic. This is the result of the limits of science, since it is still an illusion. Science can really only describe objects and phenomenon, it can never really explain them. In the end, this results in a need for art instead of science to supply meaning. However, this leads to conflict as Socratism teaches to avoid art. To Nietzsche, this conflict lasted until the present day. But he is confident that through the image of the music making Socrates, society will be able to embrace art again.

Nietzsche is putting a huge emphasis on art and its ability to redeem our existence here, and this is a role that it may not live up to in the end. It’s what will ultimately bring meaning into our lives after facing the knowledge that life is worth living and there is nothing we can do to change this, and science is incapable of performing this role.

Time Flies When You’re Having Fun

Here’s something that I have noticed: time really does fly when you’re having fun. (Gosh I’m profound today.) But it doesn’t just apply to an afternoon or a day, it can apply to a whole year.

I say this because my sophomore year of college is almost over, and I’m really not sure how we got to this point. But I have a theory.

See, in college I’m out doing things a lot more than I was in high school (see previous post for details). And I’ve spent a lot less time by myself doing nothing. In high school, or even over breaks, time went a lot slower, I felt like I had not that much to do frequently. In college, I’m running around trying to get everything done and therefore time is going by a lot quicker. This means that I’m checking the time less often, and just trying to keep up, which leads to the phenomenon of time going by quickly.

I haven’t run this by other people, so I’m not sure if this happens to everyone, but I’ve definitely noticed that it applies to any time where I keep myself busy versus when I don’t.

And that is how we ended up here, at the end of the year with finals approaching. And I’m not really a fan.

Don’t Pass this Line: Knowing Your Limits

So I have this kind of philosophy about life where I commit myself first, ask questions later. As you can imagine, this isn’t the healthiest decision you can make. I think I have concretely found mine this semester.

Here’s how my semester looked: a convention (wasn’t hosting it), circus show (where I performed and designed costumes), Wind Ensemble concert, spring break (which involved travelling to Florida, Vermont, and Washington DC), Jazz Ensemble concert, pit orchestra for “Cabaret”, fire circus show, dance show, and last weekend was a Jazz Ensemble concert and a senior recital I was playing in and a Wind Ensemble concert and hosting a convention. To give you a sense of how I was doing, last weekend I got so little sleep that I woke up on Saturday sick and it all went downhill from there. I got a ton of sleep that night and was fine the next morning. What I suspect happened was that I was so tired that my immune system was completely out of commission and whatever virus I got just pillaged and burned my body until I went to bed and my immune system fought it off. I had definitely hit my limit.

And here’s the thing: I thought that I found this out last spring semester. Last spring I did a similar thing to myself with the shows (but I had less concerts then) and got sick again in the middle of a tech from exhaustion. I thought I had learned my lesson then, but clearly not since I just did it to myself again.

My friend has coined a term, “emotional masochist” for people like me who bring pain on themselves for kicks basically. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I think it sums it up pretty well. When you’re pretty enthusiastic about lots of things and want to be involved in it all, you don’t care what it does to you or your body at the time. The only limit that I set on myself is usually one thing per week. Which often leads to problems, because you need a break in between things to recharge.

Moral of the story: take it easy, leave time to relax. You’ll regret it if you don’t. Your body isn’t a machine, it needs to be taken care of just like anything else.

Am I going to stop? …Probably not. Should I though? I really should. But I’ll sort that out later.

Update on Science versus Arts from Nietzche

So Friedrich Nietzche wrote a book called The Birth of Tragedy. He wrote this when he was still pretty young, so there is a lot of youthful idealism in it, and he’s a pretty big Wagner fanboy, but overall I can connect to some of his ideas. One of them has to do with the interaction between science versus arts. Overall, Nietzche is pretty against the sciences because he thinks that it is unreasonable optimistic, since a scientific outlook equates knowledge with virtue. Therefore anyone can be a good person if they just learn enough.

To illustrate this, he uses the legend of Socrates creating music right before his death. He equates the scientific movement with Socrates and his questions, and blames that for the end of art. The problem with this is that science tries to solidify and clarify all phenomenon both in the outside world and within the soul. However, once science enters the soul, it has no choice but to become art itself. In this practice, it ultimately has no choice but to fail. The music-making Socrates is the scientific world admitting its inadequacy and turning to art.

Speaking as a biology major that enjoys art, I definitely connect with this. What draws me to the two worlds is the clarity of the scientific world, but that has its limits. As I said earlier, there are elements that science cannot explain and only art can.

Later on, an older Nietzche went back and critiqued The Birth of Tragedy in “An Attempt at Self-Criticism” where he basically pulls apart his whole work. One of the more striking comments that he has is that he interpreted the world as being governed by a wholly aesthetic god that made art the highest work and value. He does present a pretty scathing review of science in BT, so I’d agree with this. Older Nietzche learned to appreciate different forms of interpreting the world, not just artistic ones.

The takeaway from this that I see is that the older Nietzche may not be wholly correct. The fact that I can see the point that the younger Nietzche is driving indicates something, so he cannot be that far off base. But also, there is merit to science, and limits to art. Both have to be acknowledged if we are to get anywhere in life.