«In this sense the Dionysian man has similarities to Hamlet.
Both have had a real glimpse into the essence of things.
They have understood, and it now disgusts them to act, for their actions can change nothing in the eternal nature of things.
They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that it is expected of them that they should set right a world turned upside down.
The knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion.
That is what Hamlet has to teach us, not that really venal wisdom about John-a-Dreams, who cannot move himself to act because of too much reflection, too many possibilities, so to speak.
It’s not a case of reflection. No!
The true knowledge, the glimpse into the cruel truth overcomes the driving motive to act, both in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man.
Now no consolation has any effect.
His longing goes out over the world, even beyond the gods themselves, toward death.
Existence is denied, together with its blazing reflection in the gods or an immortal afterlife.
In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being; now he understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia; now he recognizes the wisdom of the forest god Silenus.
It disgusts him.
Here the will in in the highest danger.
Thus, to be saved, it comes close to the healing magician, art.
Art alone can turn those thoughts of disgust at the horror or absurdity of existence into imaginary constructs, which permit living to continue.
These constructs are the Sublime as the artistic mastering of the horrible and the Comic as the artistic release from disgust at the absurd.
The chorus of satyrs in the dithyramb is the saving fact of Greek art.
The emotional fits I have just described play themselves out by means of the world of these Dionysian attendants.»


(Friedrich Nietzsche, from "The birth of tragedy", VII)







For, if art has a first start, that is tragedy; the inability to understand; the great contemplation of beautiful absurdity; the overrun.