The Edda tells of fire and ice, the worlds of Muspelheim and Niflheim. They rub against each other and bring out the first living being, the giant Ymir. It feeds on the milk of the cow Auðhumbla, which licks Búri, the father of the three first gods, including Odin, from a salty rock. The three kill Ymir and shape the seas out of his blood, the mountains out of his bones, they weave their hair into forests, the clouds are wrested from the brain, his skull becomes a celestial shell. The three gods find two tree trunks on the beach. From them they create Ask and Embla, the first humans. They literally come from nature. Gods and people are understood as potentials of a landscape, as parts of a whole.
According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, myth follows a logic based on experience, a logic of the concrete.
The course of the sun, for example, is explained from the sensual experience when Eos steers her sun-bearing chariot across the sky.
The fact that the earth moves around the sun remains hidden from the senses.
In the mythological system, completely different elements can be related simply because they have identical characteristics.
Association instead of abstraction unites perception and interpretation.
The myth is closer to the human experience of nature than the complex calculations of modern science.
The aloof person
The myths have the sensual immediacy in common with the wilderness. Lévi-Strauss calls it “wild thinking”. While enlightened thinking seeks the truth, wild thinking strives for wholeness. A whole that, like the philosopher Corine Pelluchon, asks what we live on.
Climate change reveals the influence of humans on nature. At least in industry-dominated societies, untouched nature degenerates into a landscape prospect or serves as a compensation to compensate for everyday life. Nature only gains meaning through a symbolic culture, through its integration into a well-organized world. It does not take on meaning at the level of a direct encounter. The symbols animate the landscape, not the experience. The interpretation replaces the perception. The nature we come from and the culture we cultivate separate.
According to Pelluchon, it is not the question of how we live but the question of what we live on that can help to abolish this dualism and to bring ecology and existence back together again.
You have to think of people as a living being in their environment, not as one that stands out from it.
The claim to understand people from within their ecosystem can, to a certain extent, also be redeemed by music.
Nature in music
Music surrounds its listeners like a landscape. It lies there as a non-conceptual expanse, formed in the course of its sounds. This is particularly true of Gustav Mahler's symphonies. His music depicts a nature of irrepressible power, elevated above humans, overwhelming, incomprehensible, dangerous. He thus ties in with a romantic image of nature in which nature has a value in itself. Mahler regards the experience of nature as a basic condition of artistic creation. Art has a communication function. While people rush through streets and alleys, absorbed in everyday life, they are denied the natural voice. The artist translates this voice for you in his art.
Friedrich Nietzsche traces the beginning of music back to ancient tragedy, the content of which lies in the myths of its time. "There are two states in which art itself appears as a force of nature in humans, on the one hand as a compulsion to vision and on the other hand as a compulsion to orgasm," writes Nietzsche. These states are the Apollonian principle, which is realized in the urge to plan and design, its medium is language, and the Dionysian principle, which is found in instinctual nudity and noisy exaggeration, its medium is music.
Mahler's concept of nature puts Dionysus first. Mahler composed his third symphony against the backdrop of the Höllengebirge. The mountain range looked menacingly across the Attersee into his composing house. Surrounded by four barren walls, the composer was alone with himself and the landscape, which he processed as an expression of a natural voice. “My music is always and everywhere only natural sound,” he said.