The Loss of the Compensatory Primacy of the Tragic Instinct

Ah the turns a mind makes. I am moving towards a radical reversal of sorts, back to the place I was at in April! Comedy + tragedy = satirical art. This is my rationale: the unconscious itself is pure sexuality which combines both peaceful instincts and hostile instincts. "Love" as we popularly know it is really "peace," the bond that ties families, friends, colleagues, and lovers. But among the lovers, within the expressly sexual component of their bond, the opposites of this so-called 'love' are combined. Love is the combination of war and peace. I keep thinking about my book idea, Love and War. 

The reversal of succession is integration, and the integrative movement, however, is not the sort of merely de-succeeding process I have previously characterized it as, but more like a dialectic, but a non-successive dialectic, as in, not a synthesis that occurs over and over again in family trees. The transcendent function is actually an integrative function, which connects the entire self together, rather than moderates between conscious and unconscious as Jung describes. The "unconscious" as the fundament is really the container of what becomes "conscious" and "subconscious." In the unconscious the opposites are one, says Jung, and yet we enact the transcendent function outside of it, producing the ego-- this is insensible. Rather, the reason our ego is unstable and different from our self is just because we are predisposed towards pain avoidance, and towards the suppression of unconscious hostility in the name of the peace principle. This is both socially and psychologically enforced, and means that this ego/self division is only a matter of seeing one side of the self at one time. 

Comedy is what I connect with 'consciousness,' as separate from 'subconsciousness,' so-called because of the subjugated relationship. Comedy is 'conscious' and has, as Freud said, a relation to the unconscious-- it is at its expense-- and relates to economization, to equilibrium, to homeostasis, to the peace principle, to the conversion of threat to unreality, which is repression. It also manifests its own hostility, in the form of the detachment into unreality of objects surrounding us, including the hearers of a comedy performance, though this is a muted hostility, and repressed hostility-- comedy shows the concealment of hostility, which is subversive, but serves the interest of separating, rather than unifying, the experiences of peace and war. It is dominant-- the comic expression has more social cachet than the tragic expression, simply because of the desire to avoid pain and to maintain social bonds which it follows in obeying the peace principle. So it gives vent to hostile desires, but as the main agent of their suppression, of their conversion into unreality, which establishes our 'comic consciousness,' our joke science. 

Rage is the heart of the war instinct, which emerges as social anxiety in 'comic consciousness,' which affords material for self-effacement, for a neurotic displacement of rage. People who are funny sell the image of someone who does not take themselves seriously, and in truth they do not, for they suppress their hostile impulses from mental expression, and make a goof of their suffering. Maria Bamford, who I admire, is a key example of someone with significant, and serious, mental issues who has misspent her abilities in her devotion to comedy, who draws the figure of the angry woman who constantly apologizes for her anger, who displaces it into adorable neurotic tics and self-deprecation. Under the surface of her shtick, what is very easy, and captivating, to detect, is how unapologetically furious she is with the world around her, and how much her desire to love others and be loved by them has tortured her into the manufacture of a charismatic presentation of her derision. She is a charming, affectionate speaker, who surprises you with unspeakably grim interior images associated with her comedy. The comedy permits her to give vent to these dark images, and in so doing denies them power. Yet in doing so she denies herself power, she denies her own sexuality. My contention is that she missed her calling and should have been an actress, and might have been one of the best who ever lived, and that she has had mental problems following her success as a comedian precisely because the social milieu continues to force her to suppress the reality of her existence. She is not a shallow person, but is skilled at acting like one. She is unlike all other comedians I can think of who I would say are shallow in a way she is not. Her depths of suffering are the depths of an actress, not a comedian, who like an actress, like say Barbara Stanwyck, can juggle humor and pathos in an ambivalent blend. 

If there is so much comedy in dramatic films, why is there comedy? There is comedy because it is essentially a religious fantasy that some may indulge that life can be completely interpreted from the comedic perspective, which is essentially that of detachment and disavowal. Some glow on unreality to life makes life endurable, some way of translating it into jokey light-heartedness goes hand-in-hand with sentimental platitudes. But what I have come to realize is that this is an old lesson for me, which I am merely refining the expression of, and making more militant. It is now time to talk about Phase D, which occurred in 2014, and which is most signified by the album called Moksha-- and not perhaps Before and After Joke Science, which has a division which might but express the divided push/pull towards Phase C, marked by the arrival of Joke Science, that has lately emerged at that time. Moksha fully shows the commitment to tragedy, to elegy, Rilke, poetry that has occurred, and it's prefigured by BAAJS and it follows afterwards into O Vocoder. What O Vocoder, by way of The Exterminating Angels, largely adds to this commitment to full emotional authenticity, to essentially a compensation of the repression of the comedy consciousness, the peace instinct, with the naked expression of the war instinct-- and perhaps the more I think of it, there is nothing so War Instinct as O Vocoder, not Moksha. BAAJS and Moksha demonstrate the turning of the wheel towards total instinctual violence, towards all the suppressed primal impulses. BAAJS and Moksha seem to show the progressive corrosion of comedy, like a plastic burned in a fire, and O Vocoder is the wild blaze. I got off track but what I was meaning to say was that O Vocoder takes the invitation to "drama" (which is going by the name of poetry to myself at this point, poetry v. comedy) further than Moksha because the whole album, like TEA, is a cinematic vista, a spaghetti western musical. It has a happy ending but one that does not negate its violence. And this happy ending I believe is the integration of the suppressed hostility with the comedy consciousness, and thus it points the way forward to future work, and towards the most integrative stage of my art-making, its earliest stage, which then falls into a succession which illustrates the construction of normal psychic divisions.

Love and hate begin in For Everyone in a relatively stable equivalence. In PDA and the Residents-influenced work of a few years later, this equivalence is split apart into Delusional Adam and The Garden of Irrelevance. The idea of a split has always been very core to PDA and, later, BAAJS, whereas the idea of a fusion has always been very core to Laffer Curve. Yet the fusion of Laffer Curve is, I fear, like the way the joke vents hostile impulses only to invalidate them. This is not integration, but the peace principle diminishing the authenticity of the war principle, which continues to dispute it, and the corrosion begins from that point on. Really Laffer Curve is the first step of decline from the Pasadena comedy peak, the death of that repressive, isolated consciousness and the step into the aggressive unconscious, and this takes further disordered steps towards O Vocoder as it goes. If O Vocoder is the secret side of something, it is the secret side of "Existence Music," which so-titled, using my initials, is also a sort of detachment, a sort of emptying out of my own songwriting, and then an emptying out of the true emotional resonance the songs have for me into a hypnotizing metaphysical landscape. What is unique about Existence Music and the surrounding music and video work I did then in 2007, is that I am focusing on comedy but also translating it into my music work as others wouldn't be able to, because comedy is competing as a principle with the 'erotic' nature of songwriting, representing but one side of it, and causing a situation where its other side must get more 'screen time' later on to even the scales. So what we have in that period that is so interesting is the sort of abstraction of comic detachment into a very weird, almost poisonous, musical landscape, in which 'imperfect' aesthetic beauty is being made of pain without acknowledging the pain, the first of the two fantasies-- I am detached, and I am involved. The second fantasy is less of a fantasy because anything may be projected upon, but comedy works against this projection, towards detachment. In the sense that this fantasy is empathic and connects us to something and allows us to mirror ourselves in it, and the first fantasy is isolation, an isolation which means peacefulness because it is an isolation from the need the other object proposes.

That my life experience has me connect psychosis and comedy since they introduced themselves at around the same time is not accidental, for the psychosis arose out of drug-assisted repression of rage, a drug which also aided the unsustainable maintenance of the comic mood. Psychosis is an expectation that in the end is disappointed with the surprise of nothing, and so is comedy. Psychosis is the joke that makes you cry after the punchline. And it may be strange to talk about this in light of the 'peace principle,' but the desire for social homeostasis encourages illusion, illusion works such to maintain bonds between people and suppress hostile impulses, and avoid contemplating our own hostility to maximize pleasure, and this supports a comic consciousness, bright and innocent, where the only croaks of alarm are coming from jokes which reframe personal suffering as unreality. 

Not that this picture is really ever a perfect one, and not that hostility doesn't rear its head. I remember a song I wrote which was attacking someone in 2007, in Pasadena, and then I started to make fun of the gesture of the hatred in the song, and make it into a joke, satisfying my aesthetic principles. I certainly did make my hatred into an illusion, manufacturing my later psychosis. I longed for the glib attitude which I would violently lose and which I would see marked all of my friends' social attitudes after I no longer shared it, and was only desperately manifesting it. After and during what was inarguably a devastating personal tragedy, my so-called friends continually made remarks that were reductive to the reality of my extreme suffering or, possibly, insults, either way showed great and staggering passive-aggression as a routine mode of communication no matter how bad my life was going, which was bad most of the time, and confronting them with how their remarks made me feel accomplished nothing, only initiated a bureaucratic exchange with ironist bureaucrats. They were the co-creators of my defense mechanism as an artist, and it having failed me only meant I had failed them and they had failed me. What I thought at the time was that I was smoking weed, tapping into the unconscious, following a magical trail, and actually, with a bizarre clarity and efficiency, I was actually internalizing the social principle, the peace principle and creating a whole artistic system, called Joke Science, which was devoted to the maintenance of the social principle and the society which had flavored my relationships with friends and with my lover. Which, although I counterposed this world against the world of family, more and more seems but an extension of the essentially inhuman and repressive nature of my family. And I do not consider my experience unique, but what is unique about it is that through the passionately artistic process by which I developed this psychological system of repression, and then of compensation--

1) Repression

2) Compensation

3) Integration

--very Jungian, that, but with some caveats-- but anyway, by virtue of having internalized all of this so intimately and deeply using artistry and drugs, I believe I catalyzed the catastrophe that awaits the entire social world which I once belonged to, and everything it is connected to culturally. PDA and BAAJS are both images of a "split," because they show a crossroads, a median point in which one pole is moving to the other. For Everyone's love/hate becomes Delusional Adam's self-extinction in the Garden of Irrelevance, which is successive, and which initiates a second successive layer, like so. The sex-instinct divides into peace-instinct and war-instinct here, in PDA, and the peace instinct is negotiated as the natural world which is more complicated than all human dramas, which are all irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, and hence we keep learning about the greater scheme and getting our mind blown, and our human drama keeps diminishing.  This is sort of true for me in terms of what leads me to "Existence Music." There, I really feel as if the textures I am drawing are like the alien fascination I found the trees to have during the PDA acid trip(s), and the self-punishing, hippie-religious mentality I have at this time directs me to like, consider it Narcissus to be fixated on your hang-ups, dude. So the album of PDA is simultaneous catharsis of personal rage and detachment from it, and this is the segregative nature of succession, which announces the subconscious and conscious division, but also, internalizes it as a fact of psychology-- is sort of reactionary-- because it makes into a religious principle the subjugation of all dramatic expression! Joke Science is like a church of comedy. The comic god is the alien fractals, which are so beyond our consciousness, a higher consciousness, which continually shows our dramas to be small and narrow views of a vaster field of nature and reality. It eggs us on not to integrate with ourselves and our feelings, but to look at the world, and see ourselves from the perspective of the alien fractals, as a character living in a movie of our own psychological design, a typical new age cliché--you actually want your suffering!! 

By the time of Showgirls, I believe my suffering has crossed a threshold my art is not prepared to express, and I can only catch up with it such that my work is consistently any good with The Dream Songs. This is a darker, realer world than the sublime, if horrifying world of Laffer Curve, like the maze of beautiful patterns we have made out of the picture of 9/11 on the Existence Music cover are coming undone.  But why is Laffer Curve a fusion? It is a fusion because, compared with Existence Music, it is an integrative step forward, towards the revelation of the pain. But like Laffer Curve's ending-- everything's ok, you and the world are perfect and complete, it establishes equilibrium-- it funnels the pain into that comic ending, successfully, and then falls apart immediately afterward. It is like the Plot Point A of my life story, because everything is on a straightforward trajectory to the place of Existence Music and Laffer Curve's fusion with darker material spins it around. "There's always a nasty part of your life you're avoiding." It will no longer be avoided, though it is a long and agonizing battle that is yet made before I consciously know that laughter is the worst medicine, laughter is not subversive but subjugation, but a disassociation. Six years later, I'm aware that Joke Science is dead; the situation is too grim and painful to sustain the ideal of comedy, and most importantly, my discovery is aesthetic, for it hinges on the benefit I'm getting psychologically out of sad movies and intense poetry. What I've lacked for years of dealing with funny people is any recognition of the mutilation of my soul that has just occurred, any true concern or compassion or understanding coming from a soul except for some dopey Jungian I paid money to listen to me, and who doles out love that is as cheap as they were expensive, and this inaugurates Phase D, which I believe fully announces itself with the phase of recording I call O Vocoder. This coincides with the ejection of any social influences on my music, and filmmaking, I have gone beyond all my collaborators, and chased after a kind of authenticity of tragic expression that they have all uniformly discouraged. 

And what comes out, and what shapes the landscape of my music into a barbaric, satirical spaghetti western, is just purified animal fury, and a depiction of a world of fury, a world of mindless hostility, cruelty, lust, degradation, grief, and grief mixed with hate.  It is the finished musical work I presently feel most proud of and am about to release to the world, in a sense, though I doubt anyone will hear it, but I'm putting it on streaming sites. It took six years to finish, and I wonder if the reason it took so long to achieve the proper framing, the right track listing and the right selection of songs, from the right period.  Is because it represents a movement from Phase D to Phase E, the integrative stage. I basically had to move on from it to a wholly new musical landscape, Nivin Trail/Health Violence, in order to 'contain' it, in order to see it for what it was. What I really keep trying to say here with today's post and cannot seem to get the idea out there is that I believe my life is actually indicating the loss of the compensatory primacy of the tragic instinct. The inability to sustain the pure resistance to comedy, to society, to the peace principle, coupled with the inability to re-embrace comedy as a gestalt aesthetic principle. Around the time Phase D really showed its fangs, I conferenced with a Jungian therapist who wrote a book called Tragic Beauty. 

So, I am coming back to dialectic, of sorts, just not an endless dialectic, but a singular, repeated integrative function, in that comedy was a thesis, which to begin with, divided itself from a sexuality which is both comedy and tragedy, and does so to serve the peace principle. Our own, and others' desire for emotional peace, which affirms our love/self/locality/simplicity bias, everything's okay. This "succession," the root of all the evil, announces its second succession, the other half of what was divided, and subjugated to subconsciousness by Existence Music, given the value of unreality and hence being able to generate aesthetic excitement without connection to the personal needs the dark reality involves. Eric Mayer disappears, into an O, and then re-emerges in an O Vocoder. It is an O Vocoder because it says what has not been able to be spoken-- the hatred, the betrayal, the fury. Love is an outlaw because of its integration of war. Yet what I believe I am here today to lay stress on is the necessity of re-integrating with the comic side of my sexuality, which I have been more principally directed in this writing towards resisting, with a long counter-thesis, antithesis of an antithesis. And this leads back to a personal problem of today. The fact that I need to move into a new apartment, and currently live in Pasadena, unhappily, in a shitty apartment, where I feel continually walled off from the comic past of "Existence Music." Yet I believe the move I was just prepared to make signified the embrace of the tragic unconscious, the war principle, which the agonistic encounter with the peace principle continually reinforces as a succession. I had a confrontation with an almost-lover recently which has caused me great pain, and who I reacted to in a manner which suggests that I was recapitulating her own tragic unconscious, her own grief and rage and its expression in defense, war, power, self-aggrandizement. These were my bitter words, which mirrored her back to herself, that vowed greatness as the corrective to the trifling treatment I received. And this I believe demonstrates how the Phase D direction has resulted in its own catastrophe, its own compromised sexuality, for my relationship with her also echoes my last two girlfriends', in the sense that the bond seemed to center around shared pain and bitterness, even if it was not directly stated as the case. 

What this means is that the conjunction of defense mechanisms only goes so far sexually, as does the mutuality of detachment. The 'comic' side of myself seemed continually thwarted by these sexual relationships, as it did in the direction I was taking. When I returned home from Naropa, I went back to an abusive, but funny friend, and left behind a sympathetic, but self-absorbed world, lover, friend, and so on, and as I said in "Unquestionable"-- "I'm in neither place, I'm in both places." The fact that I returned to this friend and yet was repulsed by them sums up the same position I'm in now. The comic peace principle is capable of being interpreted by Freud as anti-individual and anti-pleasure because of this detachment-- since the tragic unconscious is what the comic conscious "wrongs" in detaching from it. Comedy feels liberated, detached from self, like many spiritual doctrines prescribe, and tragedy feels ravaged, like a sexuality which has been fragmented, so we live in this state of unconscious grief and rage directly because of our avoidance of pain.  We avoid pain and so enhance its unconscious existence, and clamor for a comic worldview and social connection to others. The pattern is: Repression, Compensation, and Integration (RCI). And the goal of repression is-- paradoxically, attachment through detachment. Detachment from self ("I am always the soul who is learning how they are wrong") so to be attached to others ("Never say goodbye"), and to avoid recognition of the negative judgments which alienate us from these others lastingly. Much like myself and my would-be lover, Compensation mirrors in an internal revenge the non-vengeful tyranny of the comic instinct. The tragic unconscious is Hamlet, a vengeful usurper with a point, and like my version of Hamlet, called H., Dionysus is beyond tragedy and comedy, beyond good and evil. The comic conscious is the one who "started it," Claudius, the warm and fuzzy tyrant, who can smile and yet be a villain. Yet Hamlet dies, as H. survives. The tragic unconscious would take back the throne of the conscious, and does so, subjugating in the Compensation Stage a new "comic unconscious." This draws the image of the wound and the bow, the power which originates in personal horror, rather than mere greed and lust for comfort. Nietzsche is a lot like Hamlet, and his destiny is quite similarly horrific. The will-to-power is the climax of his grief, the apotheosis of the total ventilation of his hostile impulses. He is felled by mental illness-- throwing his arms around a horse who is being whipped. The pity he discouraged himself out of, came back, through a gesture suggestive of empathy. The master is no longer so confident before the slave. He falls therefore within a philosophical system that, perhaps like myself with Laffer Curve, cannot catch up quick enough to what has transpired. His mind is walled off because it has built a militant edifice devoted to the interest of the tragic unconscious, what the comic consciousness of religion has tyrannized. He has made it conscious, he has made his life's work The Birth of Tragedy, and his final public act is its death. He is the apotheosis of tragedy, his whole ego is the image of this unconscious, of its hatred, lack of pity, commitment to ambition and conflict. He disappears into catatonia because what he feels now cannot hope to identify with the mind he created, and not even by being a total contradiction. 

Rather, as Jung seemed to understand, he has gone so far over to one side, there is a "Compensation." Yet what Jung misses in his illustration of Compensatory dynamics is that for only one side of the dichotomy is this movement compensatory. This division is not arbitrary, as Freud is closer to saying, and there is an inborn bias rather than a multifarious collection of various psychological types. So when a compensation follows a compensation, it is not a compensation but an integration. For Repression is the beginning of Compensation, and during and after Compensation, repression cannot be returned to. The tragic unconscious does not usurp comic consciousness without their being a significant pain, a pain which is huge, and not normative, singling out great criminals and artists, the famous people who go the limit. The norm is the maintenance of the repression of the comic consciousness, which Nietzsche would overturn like a mystic, but he has clearly not succeeded, and nor has Wagner helped. The tragic view flared up in German art and philosophy and then dissipated, as it will. It is like one person who divides into two people, and one of them is Cain who slays Abel, and then Abel comes back and slays Cain. The tragic unconscious-- Nietzsche-- is, sadly, the good guy, the tragic victim, Oedipus, Hamlet, the one who gets screwed and then fights for tragic consciousness, whose honesty and persecution serve them nothing but a bitter end, yet this bitter end is not the restitution of the comic consciousness. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? None-- but instead the understanding of a monolithic sexuality that has segmented itself because of the dominance of the pleasure, or peace, principle, and subjugated its own experiences of trauma and pain. 

My own story as of late-- and perhaps we have been telling an offhand, overwrought, biography of our thought and art, much as recently we have been assembling chronologies of our film and music so to understand better the work we do and have done and should do in the future-- but this story has seemed on the surface to be furthering me into tragic consciousness. This is because in the disastrous events of the end of the summer, and with my would-be lover, and in the catastrophic emotions I felt afterward, and how I directed those emotions, I had found the apotheosis of the tragic consciousness, the fullness of the compensation, the betrayal, essentially, by tragic consciousness being the betrayal I felt from my would-be lover. Because her mentality was I believe a more entrenched form of what had been progressively taking shape in my bitterness, and the ambivalence and indifference with which I felt used by her flippant affections, mirrored perhaps what was to come afterwards for myself, with regards to her. The opposite of the peace principle is the war principle, and so lovers may come together in its name also, but this represents a weakness of sexuality also, an alienation from the comic side of sexuality. The bond is rage and pain, not true affection or peace with the other, not an affirmative celebration of the pleasure of detachment, of play, of comedy, of unreality, the dreamy disconnection of life from the ego and of the ego (since we isolate ourselves from others' pain and our own pain simultaneously), but a negative celebration of the motivating force of pain towards work, power, success, and revenge.

And the power of this negative celebration is the power of drama, of intense emotional catharsis, of sympathy and clarity, too-- since the tragic unconscious more correctly appraises the nature of other people, and behaves expediently towards them. Like I've said, I disagree with Freud, it's the reality principle that is subjugated by life, by way of the attraction to animal pleasure, which is yet less than sexual pleasure which combines the angst of the reality principle with the affectionate indifference of the pleasure principle, with pain avoidance. Yet this vision of life leads one place, to a loveless devotion to power, as the subjugated reality-principle-- the will to power stemming from the helplessness we feel as we come up under the censorship of our pain. I have had to remind myself recently-- the things I am devoted to that I say are pure will-to-power, they yet express my love do they not? Haven't I been swayed by a cultural bias that treats art and music as elitist pursuits? Aren't politics more elitist? And so on. But in reality, they do express will-to-power, and this is the challenge-- the integration into unconscious sexuality, which will relate to our own chronology since it comes undone during the 'successive' course of a life in which we are adapted to the desire for our sexuality which in itself divides it against itself. Will-to-power as the aggression towards the enemy is present in sexual experience, in the aesthetic experience, but will-to-playfulness as the affection towards the friend is also present. Power and Play combine into Love, or re-combine. Yet after the stage of Compensation, the Integration must take the form of a rapprochement with comedy, an integration with comedy of the tragic consciousness. Again my musical play "H." -- just as well as "The Dream of Interpretation" -- has been indicating this -- tragedy, drama, horror -- directed towards the one who smiles and is yet a villain -- which falls short of revenge. 

This is a dissolve and coagulate scenario. The two parts are fully fleshed out, and then brought back together. We commit ourselves to everything that avoids pain and brings us pleasure, and then commit ourselves to everything that is pain and attacks its sources, the source which is exactly the reflex to avoid pain, the pathetic origin of the crime. Nietzsche hugs the horse because he knows. And he cannot either return or remain. If this is correct, then the rage of O Vocoder is, in a sense, directly sent to Existence Music, a direct attack on this work and the people whom it represents. It represents artists I admired at the time, and friends and a lover I had at the time. But even over the course of O Vocoder-- The Only Ones, which is sad, understanding, but hateful towards another lover ("Jesus and Judas both"), moves into Ophelia, which is naught but grief, the lover is idealized, and it's cruelty's prize to face their suicide. It culminates -- like "H." and "The Dream of Interpretation" -- in the swerve back, not the return back, to the comedy side, reinstating a source of passion, the O Vocoder.  But how do we understand this movement back to comedy which does not go back, but integrates it?  It is not a mediation, a negotiation -- a little from column A and column B to create a new successive column C.  No, it is a total loss of the permeating wall between what is now a comic unconscious and a tragic conscious, and the integration of both into one energy, without a "subconscious" which has a predominant emotional charge. The subconscious would become a "practical subconscious" because neither the comic or the tragic worldview predominate it. Kant with Sade, Torah with Sade. The practical subconscious is merely the subjugation of sexual consciousness that is not currently in view, not the fragmentation into two attitudes which our desire for pleasure and society necessitates. If this is a historical consciousness, how does it run? The 1960's are a sexual consciousness, integrated, which is beginning to unravel. What has emerged fifty years after the summer of love is essentially a comic consciousness, which will culminate in disaster. What will come is a tragic consciousness, which will also culminate in disaster. I would hazard the guess that society on a whole is on the brink of the complete defeat of its comic consciousness, yet I am also doubtful of this hypothesis, since I believe that this exists as sort of a baseline, the horrible adaptation to life everyone makes, and what this basically means is that we are dominated by the herd, and cruel shepherds emerge from the bitterness of the subjugation of themselves to the herd, and co-exist with them, as tragic tyrants, revenging themselves upon the herd, which keeps on going with its comic consciousness, and only further inflaming the enraged will of the tyrants with the detachment, with the glibness and dehumanization, of peace. It's a beaten-horse paradox because the masters are dominated by the slaves, and the masters retaliate against them, and this keeps the status quo of Nietzsche going, in the sense that Nietzsche is just one who gives voice to an eternally recurring tendency-- his is the philosophy of this bitter ambition, as we found it everywhere before and after. It is like an archetype in this way, but I want to avoid mystifying it in this way, and wish to treat it more functionally, like Freud does, since it is not really for us to say whether life is more dream than reality, except when we are embracing comic consciousness. Archetype is the cartoon, and the instinct is the horrible reality, but the wall between them disappears, and what stands in its place is sexuality as the eternal will, fragmented into a story of succession, first fragmentation or repression, then compensation or revenge, and then integration inside which mute affection and fiery hatred are one thing, a la the episode of Star Trek when Kirk splits into his id and superego, though with a different sense to the two characters I have -- I prefer Claudius and Hamlet-- the villain with a smile, and the hero with a death wish. The two do not combine in some mix of good and evil, because good and evil are relations, and both are evil and good. The evil is but the separation and quest for dominance between the two, which begins somewhat innocently, as but the preference for good which denies the reality of evil and hence establishes evil. Then the self, the truth revenges itself, but collapses, like Stanwyck in Baby Face, thanks to music, love, sexuality, which demonstrates the eternal conjunction of peace and war in the lover. As the hero with a death wish, "wretched Queen, adieu!" is followed by the confession to Horatio.  Adieu, remember me. Hamlet is remembered by Prospero, and forgotten in his larger being. But there's a better example than Prospero of this, since that seems a bit like the denial, like the would-be absolute return to comedy that cannot be quite pulled off. We cannot "return" to comedy. We can only remove the barriers between comedy and tragedy, and let them flood together, now that they each individually have become so full.