An inkling of tragedy

Black Hole asked me if I was deathly allergic to cats. I am mildly irritated for a week, and then I develop immunity. This is my experience with Pots. My ex had two cats, Laxmi and Rilo, and a bunny. Both cats outlived her. What a strange concatenation of words. It is almost too big to hold in my head, it slips in and out languidly, never staying in one place for too long, but neither am I keen to pin it down.

I started reading the Birth of Tragedy, because I had not an inkling of what tragedy meant, and this is good enough reason for me to try. The art of pessimism, he says, whatever that means. However, I am beginning to understand the duality between Apollonian and Dionysian impulses. Individuation against primordial unity. In salsa I feel close to the primordial unity, this wild union of people in song and dance. The reckless intoxication, I miss it. In the German middle ages, singing an dancing crowds, ever growing in number, whirled themselves from place to place under the Dionysian impulse. In Babylonian festivals, the slave became a free man, all the rigid hostile barriers that lie fixed between man and man were broken down. Structure tells me I have changed since the salsa days, become less innocent, more introspective. These days I feel highly individuated, the sculptor endlessly carving with the restrained calm that is necessary to good work. There are moments when calm is not necessary, not wanted, is abandoned. When the veil is lifted, I embrace the second element of the primordial unity - the union of man with nature. Such moments are precious few and cannot by themselves sustain. Am I to learn life lessons from a dead man? Why not. Does he not write beautifully, piercingly? What is this marriage of Apollonian and Dionysian art that he speaks - the Attic tragedy?