Goethe and the Existential Life of Modernity

Ginko Biloba, a poem by Goethe

Who are ye that thus rudely banish slumber from my eyes? What mean these vague and insolent glances? Why this fearful procession? With what dream of horror come ye to delude my half awakened soul? Goethe's Egmont, Opening lines of Act V. Scene IV. 

A play about liberty under the thumb of oppression, my preliminary inkling about the Egmont drama is that it forecasts the oppressive momentum that lives within, and supports, heroic independence. I have been contemplating the uniquely liberating present that I experience with my love. American and Vietnamese, we are from two countries whose people, not long ago, brutally killed each other. I wonder sometimes about our extended family relations. How is it possible that the same blood now joined today by love, once was spilt by hatred. As Goethe writes in the poem illustrated above, "Is it but one being single / Which as same itself divides? / Are there two which choose to mingle / So that one each other hides?"

Read my Letter to the Editor "Embracing Diversity" on BlackCoffeePoet 

& See a Collaborative Interview & Essay "Busking and Creative Ecology" by Vi An and myself on In Stereo Press

Previous Post on Goethe: To Dream in Red is to Uncover the Veil of Consciousness

________

I sat under the opaque cloudy open. A dark rain hovered in the misty atmosphere. The pressures of a battered mind fill my eyes with a salivating remorse. I've since exiled myself from a gathering in my city's core. Restless, I fill my mind with blank unease, ass wedged against the wintry pavement of a curb. This area is one of neglect and rage.

Street in Venice by John Singer Sargent

Checking my phone, I have a text. I'm to be on CBC Radio. A talk show host tells me my words are acid and wry. I'm paid. We've settled. The night lingers. I wade in thoughts of a lonely walk. I kill time, staring into the light of my phone. What's it come to? What's the noise? Why do I do this? After raising the question, I feel light enough to carry on. I stand up, and walk. I am a question.

_________

"Falling as a failed lilting feather from a broken wing

Clinging to the unforgiving cold mechanical dawn

Still dreaming an entire civilization

And how illusory, how ultimately disillusioned I am by my youth

Drained of all wicked savagery and raw earth

Into a vegetable gladness

Thawing next to a lone rock

Cracked by a lightning strike from the changeless ice age broth of sky

Almost infinitely long ago, and now rinsed, overly purified by the fresh rains

...

Fathers and mothers in my cultural upbringing
The writers, artists and musicians
Spouting intelligent insanity

From within forms called the book, record, image
All a lie before the transcendent spontaneity of creation from newfound inspiration
To be and do what feels harmonious and complete
...

Finger-pointing to stars and storm clouds
Washing away mud with a healing presence,
A profound humbling that presents power and at once feigns innocence

In departing from all with humility
Yet a fearless flesh-traded mastery over the air,
Stares eyeless into the stoned intuitive rendering"

excerpts from "Contemplation's Itch"

To Dream in Red is to Uncover the Veil of Consciousness

Judge

"Yesterday, I had a dream – I had a dream about you. You were 40 or 50 years old…and you were happy."

Student

"Do your dreams come true?"

Judge

"It’s been years since I’ve had a really pleasant dream." 

Dialogue between the two principal characters in the classic filmmaking masterpiece "Three Colors: Red" by Krzysztof Kieslowski

Along these lines of artistic development towards a pseudo-scientific theory of colour, the iconic German poet, Goethe, produced a volume entitled, "Theory of Colours". While not being received as proper theoretical discourse by the scientific community, this was Goethe's prideful involution into the realm of human experience beyond the sublimities of intellectual life. 

Should your glance on mornings lovely
Lift to drink the heaven's blue
Or when sun, veiled by sirocco,
Royal red sinks out of view –
Give to Nature praise and honor.
Blithe of heart and sound of eye,
Knowing for the world of colour
Where its broad foundations lie.
— Goethe

(Quoted from Wikipedia article, "Theory of Colours")

Also, see my previous post: Reflection on Zbigniew Preisner's "Silence, Night and Dreams"

_________

I wake with eyes closed. I won’t open. I can’t look. The bed feels dishearteningly unlike where I know myself to be in my present life, yet strangely familiar to the one bedroom I never wanted to wake in again. It’s my father’s, and stepmother’s.

Bedroom in Arles by Van Gogh

Cat litter sheets and the nauseous sky pelt the window by my ear, as I smell the cheap havoc about in tepid condensation of humidity, a feeling of being too close to home, where abuse reigns on every familial plane, as a tree bespattered with the lifeless trembling of a deadly morning earthquake.

The woman at the window by Jozef Israels

I sink deeper, and the outdoors opens as an unsheathed bronze, polished and brandished for timely wielding about the nascent plain of equal hue, enlightened by the western sun. As a beckoning from Manifest Destiny herself, I trudge through the yonder horizon with a mind for exploratory happiness, in pursuit of the ear and chaff of corn and grain, the dizzying panorama of emptied wilderness, where the Vanishing Indian now only lives as a politically corrected name.

Westward Ho! by Emanuel Leutze

I tip my hat squarely to the north with scythe in hand. I wander through the flooding dusk lit pasture, a son of the mindless hate staring me in the back, now buried in the lightless flat of night’s self-awakening. 

This and two other dream narratives (21st Century Space Race of Sustainable Housing & Mindscapes Interpenetrate Dream with Reality) feature subconscious experience surfacing amid the sensual spheres of daily waking.

_________

The western pathway to slavery lies feebly
over the chasm
         As a vile whore reminds us
         to put grace before prayer

In motionless wonder,
personifying the lush diligence of an ancient society
         Dismembered at the plan of a cursed monotony
               To stare into the black façade
               and feel dreams slip through sleep,
                         In and out

excerpt from "Blind Daemon"