In Honor of President's Day

we offer this critique of the Obama Administration by special guest columnist Friedrich Nietzsche:

Hope. Pandora brought the jar with the evils and opened it. It was the gods` gift to man, on the outside a beautiful, enticing gift, called the "lucky jar." Then all the evils, those lively, winged beings, flew out of it. Since that time, they roam around and do harm to men by day and night. One single evil had not yet slipped out of the jar. As Zeus had wished, Pandora slammed the top down and it remained inside. So now man has the lucky jar in his house forever and thinks the world of the treasure. It is at his service; he reaches for it when he fancies it. For he does not know that that jar which Pandora brought was the jar of evils, and he takes the remaining evil for the greatest worldly good--it is hope, for Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man`s torment.

--Human, All Too Human (1878) #71
(Photo by Photo by Pete Souza, whitehouse.gov)

My Friend Friedrich

Nietzsche says a lot of things, most of them vain, which is only fitting. He has more balls than Ayn Rand and when he wrote Human, All Too Human in 1878 he had not yet succumb to his disciple’s kind of crazy. He never would, dying of an all too different crazy ten years later.

Unlike Beyond Good and Evil (the one with, “the abyss gazes also”) Human spends a lot of time one “artists,” mostly writers and musicians, reaching the eventual conclusion that “We could give art up, but in doing so we would not forfeit what it has taught us to do.” In this it is much more hit and miss, and given to descend, sharply and critically, into the midst of nineteenth century bourgeoisie thinking. The next sentence reads: “Similarly, we have given up religion, but not the emotional intensification and exaltation it led to.”

Right. That’s why we “Christianized” all those savage Indians.

To be fair, Nietzsche never saw America. Would he have thought us a glorious experiment in observational evolution? Did we not carve society out of the “untrammeled wood,” imposing our will upon an entire landmass and mercilessly exterminating its natives, our rivals? Would we not exemplify all the best and worst that is his philosophy? None of Horace in Nietzsche’s talk of “artists.” None of this, “he tamed the beast within,” crap for our boy Friedrich…he would no doubt consider Art’s civilizing power a vestige of “slave morality.” No poets will form Nietzsche’s civilization. Art itself will wither and die the same death reserved for religion. After all, who ever survived with poem? Except Nietzsche.

“Soon the artist will be regarded as a wondrous relic, on whose strength and beauty the happiness of earlier times depended; honors will be shown him, such as we cannot grant to our own equals.”

The post-modernist in me fights the urge to grin as a writer criticizes other writers. In prose, no less. I snicker down at my friend Friedrich from my vaunted place atop his one hundred and seven year-old grave. I don’t to plan to go anywhere, old man, and neither do my brothers and sisters, in success or out. The world has always needed artists…as much, if not more, than it needs self-obsessed, German philosophers. Who are you, the man who would write Zarathustra, to say, “Art proceeds from man’s natural ignorance about his interior (in body and character): it is not for physicists or philosophers”?

I will admit, however, that my friend Friedrich gets some things right. He also spake, “Ostensibly [the artist] is fighting for the higher dignity and meaning of man; in truth, he does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions for his art, that is the fantastic, the mythic, uncertain, extreme, feeling for the symbolic, over estimation of the individual, belief in something miraculous about genius: thus he thinks the continuation of his manner of creating is more important than a scientific dedication to truth in every form, however plain it ay appear.”

How nice it must to live in an age that still believed in “truth,” or that it might, at the very least, actually set you free.

Prefacial

It is possible, though highly improbable, to concoct a moral system based upon the actions of superheroes. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

It is possible to set out a systematic philosophy of ethical thought, observation, and behavior using nothing more than aphorisms composed of two-sentence thought-stems. Nor is that what I want to talk about. My roommate’s co-worker notice I’m reading Human, All Too Human and asks what it’s about. I tell him, “Philosophy,” and he tells me, “I didn’t know you were a philosophizer,” dragging the word through California sand like “Ted” Theodore Logan: “phil-os-o-phizer.”

“Dude,” I wondered, “you aren’t?” To me, it’s as if someone has announce they didn’t know I breathed oxygen/nitrogen/trace element mixture. At the same time, how could he have known? It’s not as if I’ve told him. Two years ago, when my ex-wife called me a philosopher I didn’t believe her. Philosophers have systems, books and fixed beliefs. I was a fool two years ago, and believe some foolish things. Now I’ve become quite acquainted with the fluidity of all things, shook hands with relativism and discovered that the universe is an uncertain chaos; that we really cannot know and what we know we can rarely tell given that we have slaved ourselves to the techno-fetishism of language. The Word Virus marches on, ever West…until it reaches East and bites its own tail like a jargon snake.

Was that what I wanted to talk about it? Not really, no. Really, all I wanted to do was get the juices flowing, get the ol’ synapse firing, and get ready for the real Work. I must find a way to finish a story and at last leave behind this inescapable feeling that I am not doing what I am supposed to be doing.

Strange choice of words, that. “Supposed” to be. Strange. This is what happens when an impressionable writer reads William S. Burroughs. If I needed a defense, I would offer up the fact that we are both children of Missouri, and we both fled for the Big City as soon as we possibly could. Both of us found our pet addictions and enjoyed our unrequited romances…though if he weren’t dead I might feel sorry for old Bill. Alan Ginsberg sounds like a hard bastard to carry a torch for, like the kind of girl who’ll bring her new boyfriend over, the better to solicit your opinion, “as a friend.” What to do then, and remain “moral” (or, as Nietzsche might say, to remain in synch with one’s own will). My heart and love once again summed it up quite succinctly: “It’s a happy ending; just not for you.” And this is most definitely not what I wanted to talk about.

But I’ve spent the week reading Naked Lunch and last night attended my best friend’s birthday party. The month of February is falling away from itself and I’m not closer to where I believe I should be. No closer to working my will upon the universe. My mind is a fragmented haze and I must get to Work soon. No choice to be had. I must learn to finish things.