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.

Though Matt said, “I began to think ‘essence’ was a dirty word last semester,”
Liszt feels like fitting music for Part Four. Beautiful even if you don’t believe in a transcendental plane. (Don’t be quick to discount it altogether…)

“What does deep midnight have to say?
‘From Sleep, from sleep–
from deepest dream I made my way
The world is deep,
And deeper than the grasp of day.
Deep is pain-
Joy- deeper still than misery:
Yet all joy wants eternity,
wants deep, deep eternity.’ ” (Z, 264)

Last class tomorrow. Sad day.
I’ll be in the SLC early to help set up amplifiers, projectors, drum kits etc.

There will be pizza.

Enjoy it! And sleep.

https://anonfiles.com/file/ed41e5926dc2fe00cb1c7152e4ff7e22

“Pure Immanence” by Deleuze. Very short, very beautiful.

Luminous poetry on his theory of immanence. Relevant to our talk on the earth/body/soul.
There’s even a little biography of Nietzsche at the end…

Listen to this in its entirety.
With headphones, lights out, eyes closed.

“This is why the eternal return must be thought of as a synthesis; a synthesis of time and its dimensions…a synthesis of becoming and the being.” Deleuze, 48

Assignments for Thursday: Read part two, listen to “Sitting in a Room”, remember that we’re meeting in the Spiritual Life Center and not the Lizard Lounge.

Enjoy!

I’m imagining Zarathustra listening to “Naturals Not in it” while leaving Motley Cow. (even though good Nietzschiens believe there’s nothing outside of nature…)

“Who wants to rule anymore? Who wants to obey anymore? Both are too burdensome.”

On the New Idol

“Often mud sits on the throne..smash the windows instead and leap into the open!”
“There, where the state ends, only there begins the human being who is not superfluous.”

On the Flies of the Market Place

“Away from the market place and fame all greatness takes place.”
“They are sycophants and snivelers…they punish you for all your virtues.”
“Flee, my friend, into your solitude and where raw, strong air blows!”

Rebel power. Dig it.

“Origin of the Species”
by Ben Rivers (2008)

“Rivers is an experimental filmmaker who walks a line between documentary and fiction. Following and filming people who have in some way separated themselves from society… imagining alternative existences in marginal worlds. Rivers users near-antique cameras and hand develops 16mm film.”

Speculative Realism+ Zarathustra= this wonderful piece of video art.

Listen to that beautiful noise 14:45 in!