Another shooting. Another popping gasket in the machine.
There's great pain in being separated from the ones we love. Especially with the understanding they're not coming back.
I wonder how it feels to get shot. Pain itself must be the subjective experience of a community within us separating. A spear of metal wedges apart cells and they shout an electric "no" upon being divided, their peers removed from a collective living vessel of animated matter. Each of us a civilization consisting of civilizations. And we gather as individuals in civilizations to survive.
This one is old and weak. Each mass murderer a slow motion thread tearing in the fabric, removing other threads in the wake of its destruction...a loss of clustered integrity.
The Greeks knew their tragedy through their plays. We sense ours when we turn on the TV...if vaguely.
The curious thing about the tragedy as an art form was that certain thinkers saw it as both an end and a beginning...perhaps that strange paradoxical point at which the snake eats its tail. Nietzsche saw it as the offspring of the Apollonian and Dionysian forces: the forces of light, form, and reason versus the forces of darkness, intoxication, and the primordial origin respectively. The work of art itself was an attempt to create and shape a controlled process of destruction, perhaps to come to terms with it.
Hegel saw a hyper-concentration of contradictory forces in which a thesis is met with an antithesis and after a certain threshold of countervailing forces, a new synthesis was formed which was to become the new thesis, a process whose zenith (or nadir, depending on how you look at it) could be construed to be tragedy.
So tragedy is quite horrific at first glance, but one take-away could be that to come to terms with it and move on, we must as a collective learn to go with the flow, even if it means plunging ourselves back into the primordial unknown after taking one last glance at the crumbling order.
The only problem is that after each great crisis many thinkers feel certain the end and the resulting new beginning is to come, only for the old system to recover and reconstitute itself with new symbols, postponing a genuine revolution.
Is there even such a thing as revolution? Or is it all simply a never-ending rollercoaster of waxing and waning waves of energy, their wavelengths oscillating across history into eternity?
