We Need Dances That Are New!

Let us dance in myriad manners,
freedom write on our art's banners,
our science shall be gay!

(from Nietzsche’s poem “To the Mistral” (more later) from “Songs of Prince Vogelfrei”)

When discussing the merit and power of “la gaya scienza” Yusef is certainly right in squeezing the equally powerful “AND” in between the adjective and the noun, but he is tilting the balance between the two on the seesaw by loading the right side with seven “somber” (that’s one them) substantivations, thus establishing a hierarchy and betraying the “AND” which, according to the Deleuze quote, is “neither a union, nor a juxtaposition”. Maybe it is to support his argument that I have misunderstood the concept, focusing too much on the left side. He writes,

Both number one and two need to be assembled, combined in order for the concept to create the difference, the flow. Certainly if one without the other is used, something still happens, but it’s not the “la gaya scienza” thing, and it is a mistake to think it is.

I agree, of course. But my (mis)understanding doesn’t ”illustrate how something problematical becomes, through a process of homogenization, unproblematic.” (At least I didn’t intend it to be). Whether it might happen through processes of homogenization or heterogenization is not in my interpretation that important. It is rather the “dynamics of interruption”, in this case meaning: the creativity of the intermezzo in the sense of dramatic pieces of intellectual “music” between the acts of a play at court festivities. Or to press down the “scienza” side: to temper the first by the second – but on an equal footing. Can we do this? Or won't the binary machine always creep up on us?

Nietzsche’s use of “la gaya scienza” is certainly worth exploring, not only etymologically, but also historically and poetically. It is uniquely European, yet in Nietzsche’s case also spiced with a distinct American twist. It originally comes from the language of Provence in France and pertains to the new European poetry of the 12th century, which was often chanted or sung. Nietzsche's use of la gaya scienza as the subtitle of his book "Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft" seems to have been drawn in part from the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who we know Nietzsche admired. In his lecture on 'The Scholar', Emerson wrote:

"I think the peculiar office of scholars in a careful and gloomy generation is to be (as the poets were called in the Middle Ages) Professors of the Joyous Science, detectors and delineators of occult symmetries and unpublished beauties, heralds of civility, nobility, learning and wisdom; affirmers of the One Law, yet as ones who should affirm it in music or dancing."

But traditionally “la gaya scienza” derives from a Provençal expression (“gai saber”) for the technical skill required for poetry-writing. Nietzsche himself comments in “Ecce Homo” about the poems in the Appendix, saying they were,

"The songs of Prince Vogelfrei, written for the most part in Sicily, are quite emphatically reminiscent of the Provençal concept of “gaya scienza” — that unity of singer, knight, and free spirit which distinguishes the wonderful early culture of the Provençals from all equivocal cultures. The very last poem above all, "To the Mistral", an exuberant dancing song in which, if I may say so, one dances right over morality, is a perfect Provençalism.”

In a similar vein, in “Beyond Good and Evil”, he writes that,

“…love as passion—which is our European speciality—was invented by the Provençal knight-poets, those magnificent and inventive human beings of the "gai saber" to whom Europe owes so many things and almost owes itself.”

In “The Gay Science” section 33, he writes "the poet makes fun of all poets in a way that may be hard to forgive."

This suggests that poetry - especially in the “meta” sense of Nietzsche's “la gaya scienza”, the gay science that merges both the poetic and the scientific in the broadest sense (“Wissenschaft” in German means something broader, e.g. "disciplinary," just as the humanities, for example, count as the “Geisteswissenschaften”, vis-a-vis the natural sciences, the “Naturwissenschaften”) - for Nietzsche is both self-reflexive and critical. Poetry can turn on itself in a kind of critique of not simply a specific poem or poetry, but poetry as such. Or is Nietzsche playing games with us (and himself) in this constant fight against academic “decorum”? Reflecting on "Die fröhliche Wissenschaft" Heidegger emphasizes that metonymically tuned as it is in conjunction with science (Wissenschaft), the word "fröhliche", happy or gay, light or joyful, evokes Leidenschaft = PASSION. In this way, Heidegger argues, Nietzsche's passionate, joyful science can be opposed to the dusty scholarship, the grey science, of his peers.

(from: "Nietzsche's "Gay" Science" by Babette E. Babich in "A Companion to Nietzsche", p. 97 ff) - available online here (and I might add: highly recommended):

Apart from Heidegger’s semantic tricks, however stimulating they are, is the whole concept of “la gaya scienza” also an attempt at transcending the binary machine to arrive at the pluralism of thinking.

Deleuze uses an interesting metaphor in his book “Nietzsche and Philosophy” (1962),

It is true, Nietzsche says, that philosophers today have become COMETS. But, from Lucretius to the philosophers of the 18th century we must observe these comets, follow them, if possible, rediscover their fantastic paths. The philosopher-comets knew how to make pluralism an art of thinking, a critical art. They knew how to tell men what their bad conscience and the ressentiment concealed. They knew how to oppose established powers and values, though with only the image of the free man. After Lucretius how is it still possible to ask: what use is philosophy?

It is possible to ask this because the image of the philosopher is constantly obscured. He is turned into a sage, he who is only the friend of wisdom, friend in an ambiguous sense, that is to say, an anti-sage, he who must be masked with wisdom in order to survive. (p. 106f.)

Finally, let Nietzsche himself have the last words in his (let's admit: heavy-handed and pompous) poem “To the Mistral”,

A DANCING SONG (November, 22 1884)

Mistral wind, you rain cloud leaper,
sadness killer, heaven sweeper,
how I love you when you roar!
Were we two not generated
in one womb, predestinated
for one lot for evermore?

Here on slippery rocky traces
I dance into your embraces,
dancing as you sing and whistle:
you that, shipless, do not halt,
freedom's freest brother, vault
over raging seas, a missile.

Barely waked, I heard you calling,
stormed to where the rocks are sprawling,
to the gold wall by the sea—
when you came like swiftly dashing
river rapids, diamond-splashing,
from the peaks triumphantly.

Through the heavens' threshing basin
I could see your horses hasten,
saw the carriage you commanded,
saw your hand yourself attack
when upon the horses' back
lightning-like your scourge descended.

From your carriage of disaster
leaping to bear down yet faster,
I saw you in arrow form
vertically downward plunging,
like a golden sunbeam lunging
through the roses of the dawn.

Dance on myriad backs a season,
billows' backs and billows' treason—
we need dances that are new!
Let us dance in myriad manners,
freedom write on our art's banners,
our science shall be gay!

Let us break from every flower
one fine blossom for our power
and two leaves to wind a wreath!
Let us dance like troubadours
between holy men and whores,
between god and world beneath!

Who thinks tempests dance too quickly,
all the bandaged and the sickly,
crippled, old, and overnice,
if you fear the wind might hurt you,
honor-fools and geese of virtue—
out of our paradise!

Let us whirl the dusty hazes
right into the sick men's noses,
flush the sick brood everywhere!
Let us free the coast together
from the wilted bosoms' blether,
from the eyes that never dare!

Let us chase the shadow lovers,
world defamers, rain-cloud shovers—
let us brighten up the sky!
All free spirits' spirit, let you
and me thunder; since I met you,
like a tempest roars my joy.

And forever to attest
such great joy, take its bequest,
take this wreath with you up there!
Toss it higher, further, gladder,
storm up on the heavens' ladder,
hang it up—upon a star.
___________
Painting: "Olive Trees in the Mistral" by David Napp 2005