"Dionysus is the river we hear flowing in the distance, and incessant booming we hear from far away; then one day it rises and floods everything, as if the normal above-water state of things, the sober delimitation of our existence, were but a brief parenthesis overwhelmed in an instant."
- The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, p. 45
Utterly and painful insignificance; a darkness that humankind as a whole carries with us, crying silently in the back of our minds. We can sugarcoat the bitter facts, we can paint on a smile with all the make-up in the world, and we can masque the scent with all of the perfume, but we cannot deny it's potency; amongst the greater world, the greater universe, the greater existence stands the one solid, lonely truth that we can verify: we are innately meaningless. Unimportant. A single grain in the sand of Time, swept away by the wind more swiftly than we arrived.
Yet, within the gloomy company of the void, Calasso offers us a torch; a single shimmering beacon of hope in the dark sea of our days. On page forty he depicts the myth of the creation of Tragedy (full-grown men dressed up like satyrs, dancing around the corpse of a recently slain goat, felled by their own hands) as "a few shabby elements that are nevertheless capable of releasing an enormous power." Myths are imperceptibly simple, yielding elementary yet profound truths. Such may yet hold true for humankind; although we might occupy a blank canvas, or a shapeless ball of clay, the canvas is ours to paint, the clay ours to mold. This existence is ours to define, and we too may hold the potential to release an enormous power.
It's right there, waiting to be rediscovered by our fingertips.
No comments:
Post a Comment