Eternal Return (Drone + A/V)

Soundcloud Link (w/ high quality download): https://soundcloud.com/alec-blockis/eternal-return

Professional quality headphones or speakers with a subwoofer are required to listen to this song.

Description (most important stuff in bold):

Friedrich Nietzsche’s metaphysical model of time and the world operates under a single core virtue: chance.  Chance is the world’s only necessity, implying that anything can occur in any way at any given time regardless of logical strictures and common sense.  Eternal return implicates a world pervaded by a perpetual and mercurial becoming absconding even the ‘one who experiences’, whom in actuality is indeed just another aspect succumbing to this perennial chance-world.

This eternal chance-world is also one of infinite experiential possibility by dint of its eternity.  Nietzsche claims that in this eternity all existence is endlessly present; acknowledgements of the past and future coexist in the present, merely referencing different moments.  The world’s perennial and mercurial becoming cannot support a past, which would imply an impossible dead moment, nor a future, which would defy the chance necessity.  In this way, everything that exists is always present to experience but what you see if what you are looking for, what you’ve been conditioned to see.

One who attempts to defy chance by formulating and unflappably adhering to concrete safety-assurance procedures (physics, sentence structure, body-image standards, logic, etc.) begins to lose connection with chance, the meaning of the world.  This fearful world-brawler will start to experience the world through his fallacious strictures and will continuously disappoint himself when the immanent chance-necessity defies him.  Nietzsche’s übermensch, among many other definitions, is the one who neither defies nor is strangled by chance, but is ensconced within Eternal Return as its wanton agent.

My sonic interpretation of Eternal Return utilizes two primary illustrative concepts: Earth and Sky.  The Earth is the primordial and catalytic chance that constitutes the world and its becoming.   The Sky is how it manifests as experience.  The Earth was depicted through a low-frequency sine-square wave and a high-frequency sawtooth wave that sporadically underwent pitch, volume, and pan modulation to intimate the meaning of the Earth, chance.  Recordings of ambient noises in my bedroom and outside of my house constituted the Sky.  As the ambient noises began to take a particular form (car driving by, steady wind, somebody talking, etc.) the sounds of the Earth would fade out.  As the sonic focus is taken away from, for instance, a particular car sound the Earth fades back in.  This flux represents the tension between a fearful world-brawler and the übermensch within the confines of Eternal Return.

Recontextualizing the übermensch through satori

Forethought:  When attempting to conceptualize Nietzsche’s übermensch you may come to find that any non-tangential or aphoristic definition fails to comprehend its totality.  D.T. Suzuki’s Zen Buddhism offers its readers a Satori experience which suffers from the same plight.  In this post I will present a slapdash comparison between Satori and the übermensch but you must remember that they are still two different ideas; Satori may help one understand the übermensch but the übermensch should still be thought of first and foremost in Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s context.

Übermensch is the overcoming of Man: “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman – a rope over an abyss,” (Aphorism 4 Part 1).  Nietzsche seems to define man not as a gender, personality trait, or human quality, but as the struggle between dualities such as ‘plant and ghost’, ‘beast and übermensch’, ‘flame and ash’, and ‘oppressor and opressed’ that can be applied wisdom, perception, life, etc.  We have discussed these dualities in class and uncovered themes that you should remember (e.g the plant possibly representing as knowledge growing unperturbed yet mindlessly and without firm truth whereas the ghost may represent concrete and inert knowledge that cannot actually touch or explicate the world as it truly may be).  Nietzsche conveys the übermensch as freedom from these dualities; “he is the lightning, he is the frenzy,” (Aphorism 3 Part 1).  This freedom is the ‘meaning of the earth’.

“I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes!  Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not.  Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go,” (Aphorism 3 Part 1).

Now what might this earth be?  It’s juxtaposition with otherworldly hopes suggests that the Earth encapsulates everything wherein otherworldly hopes attempt to expand outdoors, all the while missing the Earth that it already resides in.  Those poison mixers, whom strive for otherworldly contact, are despisers of life because they neglect their earthly cradle.  In this sense, it would be too forward of me to raise the ‘meaning of the earth’ to truth but it does liken to a oneness with a universal Will(s).  This Earth is also described as a sea in this quote: “Verily, a polluted stream is man.  One must be a sea to be able to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean.  Behold I teach you the overman: he is this sea; in him your great contempt can go under,” (Aphorism 3 Part 1).  The Earth/freedom/übermensch can now assume this sea-position from whence all otherworldly poison and duality ridden pollution remain; streams within the sea that do not deplete all of the sea’s being/will.  Might this mean that all of our words and descriptive prowess may act just as streams within the sea, never fully capable of describing the übermensch?

D.T. Suzuki’s Satori experience is veritably akin to the übermensch.  Satori is only ever hinted at (traditionally through poetry and aphorism) rather than directly explained.  It is said to be the seeing into the Nature of one’s own being.  This Nature, like the Sea, immanently pervades and subsumes every facet and moment of experience.  Just as a poison-mixer loses sight of the Earth by endeavoring for the otherworldly, Zen practitioners cannot see into their own Nature through truth-seeking logic; in both cases, when the polluted stream is taken for the sea there is no übermensch nor Satori.  Furthermore, the Satori experience is accompanied by a freedom that unyokes one from all dualities (like the ghost and the plant) and brings one into the the Sea where these dualities do indeed exist but do not define the Earth.

I hope this comparison helped.  Please comment with critiques of your own, though!  Did I miss anything or do you feel like I’ve interpreted a theme incorrectly?  I’d also like to bring attention to the italics in paragraph three (remain faithful to the earth).  I haven’t gotten a chance to read The Gay Science but I am quasi-familiar the the famous anecdote ‘God is Dead’.  Do any of you Gay Science readers think that Nietzsche’s inclusion of ‘faithful’ may change my interpretation of Earth/Sea/übermensch?

p.s. I didn’t proof read this.. SUCKASSSS!