/lit/ - Literature

>>16389281
My reference point is again Diomedes. In wounding Aphrodite he threatens a return of the gods to the moment of creation, and it is in this that we see the total violence of a law which threatens the gods themselves. In the Iliad we already see Pindar's fragment on the utmost violence of law which is equal in its reign over mortals and immortals. Diomedes threatens a great incursion into the world of the gods, one which may bring the gods to a state of civil war. This is the risk entailed in the greatest cities, their foundation entails the judgement of the gods as well as their potential conflict. Holderlin's Themis, the great sanctuary of No Man's Land where Diomedes and Glaucus meet. It is equal to the divine law of the city, but appears at the threshold of another world. Where the oath is broken both man and god come face to face with the absolute counsel of violence.

I read another of Holderlin's fragments this morning, on the divinity of wine formed as a river. This is similar to Proteus in Goethe's plants, an entire world metamorphosed within the smallest part of nature. We see in nature its violence against itself, but also a simplicity which is its perfection. A form of total violence which only strengthens, bloodless figures which rise from other worlds. Where the river returns against itself, as in the tidal bore, there is an incredible force, a return to its origins, meandering along wooded banks. There is a great peace in it, all of the debris of a storm that goes on for days returning through calm.

This was how the Greeks understood fate, a severity within which one must not become caught up in the debris, but as the peace as in death and returning to other worlds. Such humility before fate is not weakness, it is simply the necessity of a type of enduring which knows it must give way to the violence of greater laws. This is a strengthening factor, rather than the hardness espoused in the nature of the early conservatives of the modern era. Hardness ensures only greater destruction once enough force is applied. A tool must be tempered correctly for its use, and there is no perspective that may overcome the violence of such laws.

Nietzsche was the type of figure, like Zeus towards his end, that would devour all of his enemies, turn their power into his own hardening against time. It is this side of Zeus that is subject to fate, he does not escape the laws of his genealogy, instead he turns the violence of time into an eternal recurrence - an absolute war in which all will submit or he will stand alone. We see the beginning of his disappearance in Prometheus Bound, a necessity of power, but one which, if it fails, is the beginning of the end of his reign.