Page 21 - GALIET EMBERS & SAPPHIRE: Milton IV

This is why music is equivalent to universalia ante rem, plastic arts to universalia in re, and science to universalia post rem.28 Music, having given birth to myth and the tragic chorus, absorbs the individual, and for brief moments, he dwells in primordial self or being. Lady Virtue reveals in her song an echo of Echo as Echoness. Comus becomes an echo of her song, responding as if a nymph, transforming song, song that enspells his soul ‘through the empty vaulted night’ (250): Aeolian lute and poetic interlude. Silent syllable, stirring stillness, stirring his breath 3⁄4 just as in Helikon as in Cythaereon 3⁄4 towards a new Parnassus: self-echo of Beauty.
Only beauty attracts beauty; only the same lures the same. This Comus grasps intuitively. Wishing her to alter, turning her heavenward gaze earthward, he becomes Eros seeking his lady Psyche: Eros desiring beauty’s spirit. In his yearning for the other, just as he experiences himself as a sublimated Eros, Apollonian being 3⁄4 round, circular, he dreams of Lady Chastity 3⁄4 agape 3⁄4 to return to Eros as Dionysian being 3⁄4 bliss, ecstasy. In this communion of the erotic-sublime, seeing, feeling and hearing are immanent and in-dwelling experiences of the heavenly and earthly, spiritual and erotic, innocence and sin; in oneness blossoming. His desire to transform the other is motivated by his desire to experience himself in Dionysian sameness: Eros with Eros, nature with nature, blossom with
28 Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy. Trans. Clifton P. Fadiman. New York: Dover Publications, 1995. Chapter 16.
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