Islands
in the Cosmos
Visions of Man
Adrift
and Apart
by Rainer J. Hanshe
Forum Gallery, New York, January 25 – March 17, 2007
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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, March 2007. Copyright © 2007 Rainer J. Hanshe and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.
Page I
O that is why his audacity drives him far
From your safe-keeping, Earth, and in vain are all
Your gifts and all your gentle fetters-
Little to him, who wants more, the wild one!
—Hölderlin, “Man”
It is by being ‘natural’ that one best recovers from one’s unnaturalness, from one’s spirituality.
—Nietzsche
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
—T. S. Eliot
Humanity is broken. Like a tree uprooted from the earth by a tornado and blown into another hemisphere, long ago, primarily through the dispossession of its infallible drives, humanity was severed from its original body, nature. Our roots have been torn from the earth and now dangle in the air—thick, gnarly, broken veins, they reach back towards the ground, struggling to return to the hollows from which they have been ripped. Since then, we have been in limbo, unmoored ships drifting on straits, in fjords, and through firths and canals; occasionally, during certain ecstatic moments, we return to our original body, we rediscover our place in nature and in the world, but it is rare, and a myriad of formidable barriers impede our returning. The most impassable or treacherous barrier of all is consciousness. We are a piece of nature, but we forget this. Our consciousness refuses this truth, even though we carry the whole of the world within us, even though the primitive, that implacable force of nature, comes to the fore again and again and drags us by our roots, knocking us to and fro, thrusting us back into the earth. Yet, it is never long enough for our roots to permanently reestablish themselves. Man remains rootless; we are like astronauts without gravity boots and cannot touch the ground.
Since the systematic decimation of the pagans, we have been violently alienated from nature and from ourselves. Our natural bodily functions, like nature itself, have been demonized, engendering phobias, neuroses, aversions and other crippling forms of unnatural self-disgust. Throughout history, we have been further and further alienated from both nature and our bodily processes; we have learnt, been conditioned to despise them by the ‘slanderers of nature,’ who have deformed every natural inclination into a sickness, into something that disfigures. We have been seduced, as Nietzsche put it, into thinking that our inclinations and instincts are evil; the slanderers of nature are “the cause of our great injustice against our nature, against all nature.” While scientists, too, through their desire to master nature are slanderers of it, alienating us from it in altogether different, more insidious ways. Yet, even if we are irreligious and not wholly subservient to or reverent of science but approach it with skepticism, the echoes of this alienation remain like scars in the body of humanity. All suffer the predicament. It is a history, an inscription which all of us have silently, unknowingly inherited—our bodies are scored with invisible hieroglyphs that are difficult to erase. It is the tattoos which we cannot see that are the most intractable. Life is the struggle of deciphering; a rewriting of the body in order to recover from our unnaturalness, to erase the text which man has written over himself in order to conceal his instincts. Do what we will, they remain, more powerful than ever, but in our separation from nature, our nerves have lost their immediate knowledge of what we are actually composed of, of the thing of which we are part, and, however much we fight to refute it, we remain inexorably bound to. It is a traumatic dissociation and whenever nature reaches towards us, or its inexorable forces shatter our human, only just human masks, that which remains opens up the wound in us, the wound of our brokenness—and nature conquers. It may “sometimes [be] overcome” as the essayist Francis Bacon said, but it is “seldom extinguished.” Struggle as we will to extinguish it, we cannot—it is us who will be extinguished in the end, never having lived in the first place. It is not only that we hardly exist at all, but that through separating ourselves from nature, we exist even less—in our brief duration, it’s imperative to struggle to exist, to, as much as is possible, bury our roots in the ground.
Humanity believes that it never was part of the earth, that it is simply only an uprooted tree, thus it constructed separate, illusory worlds to exist in after it lost union with the world it once was part of, or was so terrified of it had to distance itself from. First, the slanderers of nature posited the body as corrupt and the soul as pure—heaven would be a safe and distant sanctuary from the corrupt body, which would finally be eliminated; then, later, for science, mind would become as pure, and nearly as holy, as soul was for the religious, thus proliferating the contempt of the body in other equally subtle and menacing ways—scientists, like many academics, are the new ascetics. Not only are we broken from nature, which is what or rather all that we are, but from ourselves. We are also separate from others and from the world: while man, as the hackneyed saying professes, is not an island, man has struggled to make himself into one. Humanity’s predominant inclination is to believe its singularity to be a truth. But the single man “is an error” as Nietzsche declared: “he does not constitute a separate entity, an atom, a ‘link in the chain,’ something merely inherited from the past.” The species, Nietzsche proclaimed, “is everything, one is always none” for “nothing exists apart from the whole.”
Despite what man may wish, he is not an originary island, but instead “constitutes the entire single line ‘man’ up to and including himself.” What is the primal source of malevolence, what gives birth to the most excruciating suffering, is actually individuation. Therefore, it is in overcoming singularity, our excessive individualism, that humanity will find its restoration and surmount its most extreme and delusional form of suffering; it is through unity that it will return to its original body, nature, and situate itself in the ground from which it came and to which it belongs. That unity is gained through forms of communion with others and, ultimately, nature, which we may reach via the multitudinous pathways of ecstasy; in reuniting with a community, which is the highest form of Becoming, we shatter the “beautiful illusion” of Apollo, which distorts the truth of the continuous sinuosity of Dionysus, making false islands of us. In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche noted that it is the emancipated spirits who stand “in the midst of the universe with a joyful and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only what is separate and individual may be rejected, that in the totality everything is redeemed and affirmed.” Such emancipated spirits no longer negate anything; they are part of the earth, not isolated figures floating above it. This kind of faith is “the highest of all possible faiths” since in its refusal to idealize the world and offer comforting hopes, which in the end are illusory and serve only to weaken those who court them, it is perhaps the most honest, the most truthful, and the most difficult faith to live up to. In that, it is, in the highest sense, tragic and only such faith can be consecrated Dionysian. And Dionysus is the one who shatters the illusion; he is the one who, after being torn to pieces as we tear ourselves away from the body from which we came, is reconfigured. In that reconfiguration is the truth of our wholeness: that we are not islands, but fragments of a continent which have been separated from their body. To unite is not to relate or to succumb to a herd, but to connect with other select individuals, like the epopts of a cult, for we do not want to and cannot connect to everyone, nor must we be governed. Those who wish to govern and control others against their will and to dictate what kinds of cults are permissible in the polis will suffer the fate of Pentheus.
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But epoch after epoch the originary island that humanity has made itself into, through, primarily, the development of a kind of ghost limb of a limb that we never had—consciousness—is becoming not only smaller and smaller and more and more distant from the other individual islands but also from its original body. While it is remotely possible that some few, very rare humans—Shakespeare, Goethe, Nietzsche (yet, these very rare human islands always cast us back to the original continent)—may, to some if not a large degree be originary islands, in general, humanity is composed of continental islands—we are pieces of land broken from their original mass, and it is only through bridging the interstices between our isolated selves and the cosmos that we will recover ourselves, through loss. Not through the loss of our continental bind, but through the loss of our illusory individuality, of the corrupt Western sickness of absolute originariness, which has swiftly infected the world, spreading through even the most remote hemispheres like an inescapable microbe. We are not islands in the cosmos, adrift and apart, but parts of the cosmos, stars coursing within its grooves—when disrupted from the furrows, we are like needles on the surface of a record that cannot produce music, only violent noises. And if we do not find our furrows, we will never be able to recover ourselves, thus we will never be able to lose ourselves, never able to unite through our erasure, and it is in erasing ourselves that we will be ‘redeemed.’ Religious redemption is not what we need, but natural redemption, to be cast back into the earth from which we have unnaturally thrust ourselves; when we are united with Nature, we give birth to music.
He is made one with Nature: there is heard
His voice in all her music, from the moan
Of thunder, to the song of night’s sweet bird.”
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Adonais”
To unite with Nature is one thing, to unite with ourselves another, and to unite with other select people is something else altogether. First, it seems imperative that we unite with Nature, for to know Nature, to live in it and to imbibe its riches is to receive the abundant gifts it possesses and such gifts await us. If we are at war with it, it will only destroy us; if we respect and listen to Nature, it will instead speak to us—out of it, we create, out of its voices, we learn, out of its profuseness, we grow and it grows in us. In uniting with ourselves, we will become more integrated, less neurotic, stronger people capable of realizing or actualizing our greatest potentialities. It would mean acknowledging and embracing what is instinctive in us, that is, learning to operate according to and living with our instincts instead of combating them. That does not mean to obey and succumb to one’s every impulse, but to listen and to be cognizant of them, for there is wisdom in them and they tell us who and what we are. To act upon them when necessary or to sublimate and reconfigure them, but not to extirpate them and lacerate ourselves or others because of our instincts. It is a question of health and bodily sanity. To know them is to know the truth of ourselves and if we are not integrated beings, we will only destroy ourselves—that is the real road to perdition: to refuse to integrate oneself. To unite with other select people is to share the gifts which one has cultivated and to receive the gifts that others have; it is a coming together in order to build, to see, and to share, it is a necessary leave-taking of the self out of which we gain a greater ecstasy, which we can never create on our own. And it is a way of celebrating—in coming together with other select people, we can enact festive rituals, which we must. It is imperative that we celebrate our existence and create new festivals, and we cannot do that as isolated individuals, for we are not islands in the sea and even originary islands have visitors, even they celebrate their existence with others.
In The Gay Science, the announcement of the requiem aeternam deo is not only a clarion call alerting mankind to the greatest sacrifice it has unknowingly committed, it is also the beginning of the “de-deification of nature.” After asking when this event may be completed, for which no answer is given—it is more than likely an eternal task—, Nietzsche asks when it will be possible to “begin to ‘naturalize’ humanity in terms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?” The question is unanswered, left open; it is an address to the world and each of us must answer it, each of us must respond, especially if we want to belong to the making of the new, higher history. The naturalization of humanity is precisely what we are in the midst of, and have been since the madman’s announcement of the death of God. It is a demand which we must live up to, but with which we are constantly at war—our very consciousness is pitted against it, we have made an instinct of something which never was and should not be an instinct, and because of it we are not even present, we are destroying the selves we have, which barely even exist in the first place. We kill our more primary, vital instincts with a falsely developed instinct and we are hardly aware of it because we have grown deaf; it is not clear to us that the tumult which surrounds us is not music but the noise of our violent desecration of ourselves.
Despite all of our seemingly ecstatic activities, the gulfs between us continue to widen and it seems more and more difficult to bridge those interstices, if there even is a desire to do so. Whether in fact we are at all even capable of bridging them, let alone returning completely to the continent is a serious question. It is as if every one of us were like Hamlet, that is, like Nietzsche’s characterization of Hamlet as a Dionysian figure who, having gained a profound kind of knowledge of the world after looking “truly into the essence of things,” is so overcome by nausea that all action is impossible. It is a state of deep spiritual inertia and art once was for Nietzsche the “saving sorceress” who was “expert at healing” humanity of that nausea; whether humanity is actually capable of being healed of its nausea, or whether it even wants to be healed is questionable. Our relationship with art has also revealed that such healing is merely temporary, but at least it is that. Our relationship to art, our encounter with it also reveals something of our condition, and the artist is the diagnostician whose remedies we seek in order to better understand, if not overcome our conditions, if that is ever possible, while the work of the artist also serves to rejuvenate and enliven us—art is an intoxicant that increases our strength and fullness. It enriches us and we are in need of enrichment, deep, deep enrichment. It is also a scalpel and a telescope and with both instruments we peer into our veins and muscles and organs and out to the galaxies and universes afar. Now, we remain in the throes of nihilism and we must have concourse with art that addresses this condition.
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