Klaus Schulze
X

Friedrich Nietzsche betrayed by himself. Übermensch, prophecy of reconstituted humanity, subjugated in the outline of an insufficient existence. The ongoing illness, the betrayed affections, the anguish that limits his self-sufficiency. Life as a structural antagonist of philosophy, the defeat of wisdom before existence.

"In fact, I should have a circle of deep and sweet people around me, to protect me a little from myself and who also know how to cheer me up, because for someone who thinks things like those I am forced to think, the danger of self-destruction is always very close." (F. Nietzsche, Posthumous Fragments, 1885-86, I)

It is an open war with himself, the blind struggle that wants to emancipate his own bodily misery from a philosophical view of it. Apathy. Madness. Loss of memory. Paralysis. Winners and losers. An arena in which the restless spirit of Georg Trakl cannot evade. The emotional misunderstanding with his sister Grete, deception akin to the betrayal by Rée to Friedrich in the least expected years: torment in the common sense. It is existence to which Trakl relates, fighting an unequal battle against the turmoil that subjugates him. In brevity, he realizes through the horror of war.

"Humanity lined up before mouths of fire, / drum rolls, fronts of dark warriors, / steps in the fog of blood; black iron clinks; / despair, night in sad brains: / here the shadow of Eve, hunt and red money/" (G. Trakl, Poems, 1913)

Subjugated, he yields to the life of which he loved nature while alive. A struggle for survival of which Frank Herbert becomes an investigator, the application of science to philosophy, transfiguration through which the Atreides lineage fights with human sacrifice to achieve eternity on the soil of Dune. Darwinian evolution that confronts human species: the principle of homo homini lupus giving birth to the Nietzschean Übermensch. The price is death. Prophecy in speculation. Man becomes pharmakòs of a hostile nature. The fictitious construction of art: literature and music emancipate man from his own physicality. Nietzschean contrast in Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. The legend of a dissolute life, the certainty of a Borrominian somberness. Incoherent emanation of the father, conclusion of the collapse in the foulest poverty. Existence throwing artist and man into conflict: music as sacrificial victim of ethics. Schism between morality and instinct reducing Ludwig II of Bavaria to libation for the Catholic deity, the self-imposed censorship of homosexuality. Rule transposed in the idea of an enlightened regency, patronage, governance of the monarch-poet. Perpetual aspiration fiercely clashing with the id, perpetual frustration that is simultaneously a presage of marginalization: Ludwig ghettoized by bureaucrats and himself. Existence that cannot ascend to the condition of formal balance, damnation stemming from the love of pleasure, voluptuousness that delivers into the hands of the science of psyche the critical case of a humanity joyful in forma mentis, grim de facto. It is the discord that governs the life of Heinrich von Kleist. Poetry as a cure for torment, the desperate search for stable equilibrium, plenary excitement finding its palliative in the written word. Schism between form and content. Pre-Romantic momentum toward the infinite, formal need of the full exercise of the most violent passions: the illusion of dominance of instinct. Wandering life that in the journey seeks not transition but demise, and in the journey renews the idea of an irreconcilable conflict between reason and sensitivity. Perishes an ill-fated death, entrusting the earth with his feverish affections.

"I have accomplished the utmost that human forces can achieve - attempted the impossible. I have staked all that is mine. The die that decides is cast. This is something I must understand - and that I have lost." (H. von Kleist, Penthesilea, 1808)

Now all this, and no less than this, is "X," Klaus Schulze, 1978.