DIONYSUS :
Brekekekex koax koax—
from you I’m catching your disease!
-Aristophanes, The Frogs
In the realm of ancient
comedy, where the essential vision remains to be reversibility, or the absence
of absolute order in the universe, a god like Dionysius and a slave like
Xanthias can exchange identities, even if for a moment, and divine speech can
intersect with, or become one with animal language.
Nonsensical noise, yet still
maintaining a simulacrum of order, even over the level of art and music, the
amphibian chorus nevertheless remains, and cannot be less than, an embodiment
of divine logos. Here, nature itself, and its kingdom of inhuman sound, in
surpassing human speech, is enclosed in an art form that represents in patterns
of rhythmic lines that which we can hear but cannot comprehend .
Today, beyond the confines of
art, and within a newer realm of writing, even this last envelop of order is
abandoned, for a simulation of chaos, the multiple, and the unreadable.
However, we no longer have
nature nor the sacred as its indecipherable secret component, since we already
discarded the nostalgia for any mysticism or romanticism of the esoteric. What
we are left with is the simple mechanism of a surface burdened with historical
and political overdeterminations, and a culture captivated by its own semantic
weight.
To remimic the
indecipherable, by some parodic use of valorized cultural forms, and to return
it cold and resisting, by short-circuiting the patterns of hardened meanings,
beyond the confines of themes, rhetoric, and imagery, and into the matter of
language itself, is to renew a link with ancient comedy, and remember the
reverse, or perverse, double of the sign.
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