Well, earlier had posted Euripides in 4 different acts, just thought to publish the full act .. it is long, you might have to take out time.. but may be now it might just make some sense to people out there who couldn't understand / corelate to Euripides. Hope you now understand the tragic sense :)
Euripides Says:
Silenus, you call to me. . .
Through autumn's colorful mortality
You call from eternity, for all to see
That our sole consolation resounds with a dull thud.
Choir, sing our benediction:
Ice and frost will melt away, and only mud will remain,
gleaming in the sun, for all to trudge through and smell.
No more contradiction. . .
Sometimes it frustrated me that the outer world didn't conform to
my inner reality,
at other times I grew ill and claustrophobic when I realized the perfect
resonance of the two and couldn't escape.
Nevertheless, these undulations led to an indifference-- a
confusion, I suppose-- in which the God-provided beauty around us that
draws us to him, received new definition-- a negative definition-- and
indifference toward my situation in life proliferated in the margins of
my reality.
The outer world from this point was a continuum of the inner
life, and I sank into the perplexity of knowing that it was I who was
responsible. . .
Only an inner change could remove my security in indifference and
prompt an inner and outer distinction. For the outer to become
beautiful again, enjoyable again, and reflective of an inner peace, I
had to find an internal remedy.
Silenus, we've been offered seasons. . .
Hopelessly annexed to reason
no doubt, that we can despair to treason
before our sovereign and indiscriminate Lord.
But you and Christ have brought us autumn
Remedial, cloaked in dwindling beauty
Announcing death in terms of grace
I feel it: No more contradiction. . .
I had to consider the psychology of Carl Jung (conjunctions), the Dialectic of Hegel, Wesley’s emphasis of the second experience of grace, and Kierkegaard’s emphasis on subjective truth. In order to actually make sense of anxiety, one has to view life as an abstraction, for life, as most people observe, becomes less and less clear cut as one ages. We all want to know what’s right, we all want to be told that there is a distinct right or wrong, that church exists for people, and that in the end things will end up being worthwhile.
These questions alone contribute to our sense of anxiety, and serve to challenge our faith. Faith, it seems, is aligned with our sense of God and right and wrong, but faith needs the sharpening, honing edge of unfaith if anxiety is to be properly identified and directed in a positive direction. Immersion in everydayness, otherwise known as denial, naivete, or apathy -- has its benefits in the immediate sphere, but I promise that anxiety will rear its ugly head when all’s said and done.
My sweet, ofcourse you were right; every individual's essence transcends social definition and contributes nuance to the Spirit of the age.
My question is whether history is a rational process with a designed end, and if so, whether the petty concerns of an individual such as myself are applicable to those around me, or am I just an anomaly destined to go to my grave uninterpreted?
God. . . please let me be interpreted like a semiologically rich text and be embraced or abandoned.
It's the vastness of the "theatre" around me that I find frightening. Sometimes I go out walking around dusk, and when I do I usually look for a clear night so I can watch the fading pastels wither to black, and feel the cold stare of stars in their indifferent surveillance on my head illumined by moon, and consider only process; that the sun and moon have risen and set since the dawn of time, have existed to sustain giant lizards and provide witness to epic battle, while the ground I trod on. . . while the ground I trod on preexisted the formation of a living planet. . . and it all makes me sick, to know that the world spins round and round with nobody-- not the brightest people in the world-- knowing anything really.
I stand before myself accused, accused of having no propensity to digest the sensation of realizing myself in the vastness of an abstract universe. I'm no writer.
So what can I do? I analyze my own history, and stew and brew over a damned single moment in my life that I can't get back.
It's a strange realization, really, to come to the conclusion that existence can come down to an incident-- a single point in time in an entire life span-- that outplods the plodding of a pilgrimage set on a time-line.
This incident. . . this experience. . . in a way, assumes a certain autonomous existence of its own, knits flesh around itself so to speak, so everywhere you turn or look it's there; it's there in the market, or while you're having coffee with a wonderful woman, or when you're at the beach lying back on the sand and everything seems so hazy and sedate that you swear you're in the tropics; it's there while you drive amongst other people driving, or when you're at the theatre watching a captivating film; it's always there to ensure that your vision remains misty and confusing, between reality and otherness.
It's so "there" that one cannot cease to reflect on the chimeric new self-- because, believe me, it's part of you. . . it is you-- except in the "moment" where one's personal context gets lost in the image.
For as long as I can remember I've longed to be lost in the surreal timelessness of the moment, where there is no past or future, where images are formed concretely and people can run their hands over their responsiveness like alacritous female bodies. Some would say that God is to be found in the moment, that the eternal is inseparable from the moment and that we can gain glimpses to the greater truth of things by living to exist in the moment.
Maybe that is why the beauty of the world sometimes sickened me.
That the world only has to offer little glimpses of the overall beauty of things in contrast to the wretchedness of situational living just seemed so ass-backwards to me that I couldn't put my mind around it. And it bothers me that some people can totally bask in the moment of a gorgeous sunset, and I cannot.
It bothers me that anxiety is the moment's nemesis in the realm of the individual.
All I wanted was that sleepy consciousness that was conducive to circumspection to return for a few hours, where I could see all angles of the "image" without the pressure of the clock. In a world without time all I had to do was observe, even when it came to me and all of my idiosyncrasies.
Earlier I said that even with a woman the world couldn't reveal itself as beautiful, and this is true, but with you the world takes on a serene "rightness" that can only be described as mocking, for as soon as you would leave my presence the world would fall back into its colorful destitution.
Euripides Says:
I find myself growing emptier and emptier by your absence. Are you aware of how much I have come to care for you?
She Says:
No
Euripides Says:
You do fear me...dont you?
She Says:
Yes I do now.
Euripides Says:
I care about you enough to say, I'll remove myself from you, so that you don't have to be oppressed by these neutral shades as well. But before I do that, do you want to know why you fear me?
She Says:
I am not sure.
Euripides Says:
When you chose to respond to life rather than create your own situation, you fell victim to the illusion of an utopian escape; you fell victim to the belief that one could become "natural" through something else, in this case materialism. But, in placing all of your hopes in redemption through something else you found yourself resisting, didn't you?
She Says:
Then the only difference between us is that you chose religion.
Euripides Says:
I dont know if thats true.
She Says:
But it is, because you have upset the balance of your life to the point that turmoil has become normal, and to disrupt this would be suicide. Your greatest moment was when your eyes peeled over the account of Socrates' death; you exalted in the concrete example of dream's annihilation, and you chose to imitate it in a manner of speaking
Euripides Says:
You're projecting meaning into nothing. Socrates never reconciled himself to life as we know it, even Plato didn't, because the physical outside of the Concept's dream was rotten, even described in the loftiest, richest poetry ever written.
Euripides Says:
Remember the last time I talked about Faith. faith is the most abstract activity of the will, corresponding to pure abstraction, what I generically label dream. Virtue must be willed, but in the end faith must be totally felt, in other words dreamed.
She Says:
To what end? We've all had dreams...
Euripides Says:
I'm not talking about night-time theatres of the mind.I'm talking about the somnambulant state of everyday life, and the move to accept everyday okayness and its moments of clarity to be symbolically significant.. Socrates says that as your own symbolic value you must freely interpret this value within the enclosed symbol of your world. . . It is from the dissatisfaction that arises-- think about it, no matter the rendering of yourself in such an enclosure, it will be profitless-- that one can truly dream spiritually. The dream I'm talking about, dialectical dream, is the one that arises from the collapsed empire of everyday dream
She Says:
I don't quite get what you're saying.
Euripides Says:
Listen. When you finally realize your life's an interpretive unfolding of experience, you know that the flow of your consciousness is led and misled by the "essential" weight of survival. If this means consciousness must distort the truth, so be it, events unfold progressively so that when self-disclosure bursts into light its met by the distorting element of doubt, or the shrinking distance between two random points in time unlikely ever to converge. Everyday dream carries on. However, when the everyday dream realizes itself, it's the existential interval of clarity that provides the push past the inert sense of emptiness to dialectical dream, what the religious call faith. In faith everyday dream is resurrected with the conviction to interpret everyday decisions as meaningful and pointing to the beyond, to otherness.
She Says:
You mean the remedy reveals itself to be the illness, and the illness the remedy.
Euripides Says:
Right. Clarity, from an existential point of view, is the most heightened of illnesses, but, at the same time, the most integral part of recovery-- the part that says I need to recover.
She Says:
But don't you see, the conscience can only take you to dream-- you've shown that to me-- but it can't lead you to religious conviction, to faith. The conscience can't dialectically dream for you, it simply can't.
Euripides Says:
Depends whether you want to be spiritually decadent; delusional; or whether you really want to be a human being. No form of dream is static, Lexia. The key, though, is to remember that those instants of clarity you feel, that challenge the dream, are to enhance the dream, and are effective as such, but if you allow such clarity to destroy your faith, your connection to beyondness, you haven't lived in reality at all.
She Says:
You mean dialectical dream is subject to moments of sobriety as well?
Euripides Says:
Perhaps more than even the everyday dream
Euripides Says:
So now you tell me, do you want me to leave to never return or would you bear with me some more?
She Says:
I would like you to return
Euripides Says:
I was hoping for that.
Euripides Says:
Thinking about me?
She Says:
Yes.
Euripides Says:
I'm one of those strange hybrids, you know, suicidally desperate yet impassioned with life. For eg. Aurorian splendor at the grin of daybreak. . . gray, capricious sea. . . rising-falling zephyrs. . . insouciant sky. .
She Says:
Explain..
Euripides Says:
The unnaturalness of the contradiction inherent in the symbols, and what this says about the human state of affairs: how the same sky or sea or wind portrayed so beautifully can simultaneously be an auspice of victory and a sign and seal of the condemned, like the armies experienced in the Iliad or any normal day we live. It's no big leap to consider the implication. . . how what can be experienced as the infinite good no doubt reveals itself as the source of infinite evil, to no redeeming end. Aesthetically, you start your life off in this world of nymphs, dryads and satyrs-- you know, this lush, musical world-- and the next thing you know your world's collapsed into an isolated, gloomy city of insects, where even infants cry and spit up uncontrollably into the cold indifference of technology. And why, why would a person suffer this torment? So that he'll never forget that it is the very same representation of good that is dragging him to his ruin. Do u understand?
She Says:
It's to manufacture your own drugged state, live by it for so long, and then enter into life-long withdrawal, where the symptoms of withdrawal never cease and the high is always before you. How would you know so well?
Euripides Says:
My father's flirtation with religion couldn't have ended any worse.
She Says:
That's the thing we all live by -- that element of our psychology which allows us the contradiction of consciousness and emotional prosperity--some even posing as religious, but when we achieve this inevitable sobriety, we want to return to the security everyday life had to offer.
Euripides Says:
Go on.
She Says:
Don't you see, it's a mistake to think that we can go on this individualistic quest for an original emotional complacency, conjuring warm, fuzzy moments of the past and trying to re-connect ourselves to a deceased or vacated sense of rightness supposedly experienced in the past-- all this in order to experience a semblance of rightness in the present.
Euripides Says:
I know what you are doing, You're positioning to defend for that idealistic, venomous argument about the whole person again. I'm telling you, to be human is to be broken. You can be so predictable. . . mystics of the basest variety, self-deceiving liars. . . in short, "decadents."
She Says:
Wanting to achieve wholeness isn't base.
Euripides Says:
Believing in the ideal of wholeness isn't base. You're right, we're fragmented, but we'll do anything to attain wholeness, whether it's idealistic or not. But I guess that's not deception, that's the individual being the individual in any given circumstance.
Euripides Says:
I am having a drink. Would you like to toast with me?
She Says:
Sure. What to?
Euripides Says:
To spiritual vampirism.
She Says:
Is that what we are, vampires?
Euripides Says:
I can't speak for you, But I know one thing, we're both too smart to let feeling get in the way of social expectancy.
She Says:
I know it.
Euripides Says:
Nobody can help it, only some of us are more frigid.
She Says:
Exactly, we capture arcticity. . Your language is the world from which we cannot escape.
Euripides Says:
Sweet Kafka, where did the inclusive come from? I'm my own language.
She Says:
Don't be so conceited as to think that I don't know where you're writing from.
Euripides Says:
I'm positive you will judge me, but I'm not going to sit here and tell you I'm wasting my life away aspiring to fuse my will to some universal harmony and that there's a spiritual, grammatical, lexical structure behind all things influencing my perception of women. Don't tell me that if I knew every language of every culture that ever existed I'd have a better, more concise understanding of. . . of the variations of rejection.
Euripides Says:
All I'm saying is that you can't possibly understand. . . you simply can't.
She Says:
Suffering in love, I know this, doesn't make you special, or anyone for that matter.
Euripides Says:
I never said so. . What I'm talking about is my own special depravity, transgressing the laws of my personal universe. You can't deny me my sense of significance, for it's. . . all I got, and my failure with women composes a major surge of that significance.
She Says:
I won't deny you your cherished dissatisfaction, I just refuse to acknowledge your individual claim.
Euripides Says:
What can I say to that? Is this true? Do I want to aspire to be normal, or do I want this illness to stay with me as long as I live, whispering to me in a language conjugated with pain. Does happiness have to be opposed to identity? I think that happiness is not of this world, but could only be grasped in some selfless nirvana. In my mind, this maxim of western culture-- to know and nurture myself, to live and be my own fulfillment-- dominated my daily life, tied weight to my responsibility, and it truly felt like happiness was antithetical to identity, the fruit I would never taste.
Euripides Says:
To come under the conviction that there is a moral lining to morality, a hope beyond the visible hope, is to experience the despair of ethical living. This is the despair of all despair, that moral conduct alone does not yield a satisfactory spiritual life, for one to become truly "moral" requires a reversal of the entropy of experience on human life by God himself. You know where we are now, right?
She Says:
I am not sure.
Euripides Says:
I'm now talking about what philosophers and theologians term the leap of faith, where we move from the prose of ethical living to the ballad of the trans-ethical religious community. The religious sphere implies that we take all of our despair, all of our anxiety-- and offer it up to God in exchange for insight into the dream of the Concept, which stirs all anxiety and uproots all despair, even though the Concept in its full significance escapes human understanding.
She Says:
Yes, but we must beware of the pitfalls of bad faith. . . Meaning, instead of coming to grips with your anxiety, you mark yourselves as fodder of denial, then you exist in your own anxious ecosystem, sealed up from the rest of the world-- an aquarium existence-- which in your terms, would be spiritual decadence
Euripides Says:
My feelings are clouded. Yours would be too if you realized that on a subtextual level you severed any mystical ties you had to your world.
She Says:
Obviously, you attempted to live exclusively by the voice of your conscience in your designs to assimilate yourself into your supposedly dreamless world.
Euripides Says:
Maybe, but I have no regrets. I feel nothing, just cloudy.
She Says:
Do you know what you've done? You'll forever be detached, an objective observer. Creativity is fuelled by the unconscious will of otherness, possibly sparked by the governor of the universe, the Concept itself. Observation is not creation. Creation, as I'm sure I don't have to tell you, is a mystical enterprise.
Euripides Says:
Remember when I talked about experiencing the infinite good to the infinite evil?
She Says:
Yes.
Euripides Says:
The problem is that the romantic, idealized vision, can only give way to a state of dread, and this state of dread is the individual's reaction to a growing sense of distance between himself and his romanticized world. Even when he realizes the delusion and returns to reality, it's too late to forget. . . it's just always there before him. In short, the more he comes to appreciate life, the more distanced he feels from it. No wonder an exceptionally impassioned person ends up destroying himself.
She Says:
Or he represses aesthetic pleasure forever, and chooses to live out his days sulking in darkness.
Euripides Says:
Right
Euripides Says:
Now the reaction of the person who has denied everyday dream and still perceives everyday dream-- dream being an unconscious organization of experience and symbols, as well as a mode of okayness-- is one of contradiction, for he's trying to live in a world without dream in a world where reality precludes dream. It's just an impossibility, so he finds ways to express this contradiction, whether he's conscious of it or not. It's to feel compelled to waltz with angels over sepulchres. . . or to ease up on the beverage just enough to be able to stumble home. . . or to consume the minimal amount of food to avoid rotting away. . . or to notice the beauty of the natural world enough not to die. .
She Says:
Contradiction......Aurorian splendor. . . gray, capricious sea. . . rising-falling zephyrs. . . insouciant sky. . .
Euripides Says:
Good memory. And since we have come a full circle, I shall take your leave.
Euripides Says:
But I'll let you in on a little secret: it's the cyclic relationship between faith and skepticism where meaning is found-- the point where the one sharpens and hones the other-- where the parasite consorts with the hermit and Cyclops, passing their feet through the ghost who cries, "Language cannot capture me," and all you can discern is the prominent feeling of nausea. . . dull headache. . . and the icy, white scream of the conscience into cerebral numbness. . . reminding you of the smell of wet flowers after a summer rain, cookies baking and your parents' designs for your future; your report cards and your music lessons and your driver's license and your degree. . . and all for What? for What I say?
Euripides Says:
That from the plush security of your own couch, you can dream it all your own.
Euripides Says:
Can you believe it, though? Some days start off in breathtaking tones, only to be streaked in gray until the gray becomes insurmountable, just like feeling. Some days it just doesn't matter, the world can be a canvass of autumn color yet it takes great concentration even to swallow a mouthful of cereal. How to make sense of contradiction. . .
Euripides Says:
Take care my Lexia... I would not bother you as of now... May be i wil be back again someday... Till then i am sure that you don't need me anymore. You have better creatures in your denial phase of life.
