“Ancient lovers believed a kiss would literally unite their souls, because the spirit was said to be carried in one's breath”

~ Eve Gliskman

In human history, both ontogenetically (on the level of the individual), as well as phylogenetically (on the level of the human species), there is always the irreconcilable conflict between two great, primordial drives: Eros (love, creation, ‘immortality’) and Thanatos (death, destruction, time). Nietzsche conceived the idea of the ‘eternal return’, the recurrence of all sacred things, amor fati (the love of fate). Heidegger believes that we will always be with anxiety, with fear, and with dread, due to the unknown and unpredictable future, in personal, interpersonal and intercultural level. Furthermore, the end of the world may, also, be the projection of our internal catastrophe. Perhaps, the human awareness of death and the cosmic cycles within which, existence annihilates and re-emerges, is the most tragic expression of human soul’s agony towards disasters; and it is poetically expressed in Seneca's ancient tragic drama, Thyestes, when the chorus chants of the shocking fiery passage of Phaethon in his solar chariot: “This is the fear, the fear that knocks at the heart That the whole world is now to fall in the ruin Which Fate foretells; that Chaos will come again To bury the world of gods and men; that Nature A second time will wipe out all the lands That cover the earth and the seas that lie around them And all the stars that scatter their bright lights Across the Universe”…
(Laoupi, PUSHING THE LIMITS, 2016)