Redemption through Art 103here and there and piles the sand up high, only to smash it down once
again" (1,153; BT§ 24).
Spectators at a tragedy or a music drama identify with the tragic
hero—Siegfried, for example—but see him as a surface phenomenon, a
"bright light" on the dark background of Dionysian life. From this focal
point, as a "bright light" in the night, life appears "at the bottom of all
things indestructably mighty and pleasurable despite any change in
appearances" (1,56; BT§ 7). The dark background of Dionysian life
resounds in music. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche coined the term
"musical ecstasy" (1,134; BT% 21). He felt music, especially Wagnerian
music, so strongly that he saw the action on the stage of the music drama
and the myths staged there not only as a "bright light," but also as a
shield against the devouring force of pure, absolute music That "other
existence" (1,134), into which music has the power to pull us, would be
almost unbearable. Alleviating intermediaries must intervene. These
intermediaries are the embellishments and scenery from events on the
stage and in society, particularly the stage settings, artistic vanities, inter-
pretations, and conventions of taste—in other words, the whole range
of the culture industry. When all of this does not predominate, it creates
a situation in which we can listen to the siren song of music without los-
ing our senses. The necessary distance is then provided, enabling the
sensible enthusiast to listen "as though the innermost abyss of things
were speaking to him perceptibly" (1,135; BT§ 21).
Dionysian consciousness, for which art prepares us, is a sanctification
of life, an emphatic affirmation despite, or precisely because of, the
vision it provides of the dark abysses that yawned open for Nietzsche
under two aspects: the "terrible destructiveness of so-called wodd his-
tory and the cruelty of nature" (1,56; BT§ 7). Dionysian consciousness
gets involved in the uncanny mystery of life with the understanding,
facilitated by the artistic intermediary, that there is no earthly solution to
the great dissonance of life. Life will always be unjust to the individual,
whose only hope lies in mitigating communion with the process of life
as a whole. For Nietzsche, that is the "metaphysical solace" (1,56)