I have yet to identify & give full credit to the
painter of the remarkable image of Nieitzsche.
In a dream 10 years ago Nietzsche spoke to me over Sunday brunch where we drank mimosas which he thought were an "absolute delight," absolute as in "I spent my entire life in search of the Absolute without much luck but for the pursuit as an adventure of mind. A century later, a mimosa will do indeed." With several already quaffed he sparkled as did the drinks and without warning or asking he proceeded to make a long confession to me, "not you, well, yah, you but also to your century and this new one just born" and so he told me many personal things, joys, sorrows, sins most severe, and sheer moments of ecstasy in and out of the body...his heart always broken over the Death of God, the Western, Judeo-Christian one, THAT Twilight, its Star setting on the world horizon. And there was his suffering too for ancestral German gods demise, cue music off friend and enemy Richard Wagner. He also mourned for Dionysus whom he revered most of all, whose very name means "born again" - dio = twice, nysos = birth), his, Dio, being ripped/torn apart at the height of epiphany and of youthful beauty flush with passion and Eros (that cousin to Dionysus), "Little did I know that I too would be twained, my vanity too large to contain for I became identified with Dio and the Other deities and so such hubris needed to be broken and so it was I entered a broken world inner and outer and became, or was perceived to be, only a shouter, a town cryer, that "The End is near." And I was right, am right still, but what brain can sustain orientation in the face of that FACT?"
He grew silent, held the champagne flute in his hand, gazed at it, then out of a sunken but kind self said,
"History and an inaccurate interpretation of my exaggerated, sometimes effusive bombastic style of thought and writing in my work has made me sound like I was a terrible man incapable of linear logical thought and exposition, and of bad temper and arrogance but that's not true. Irreverent, yes. And bluster. Bluster counts here as disguise for I was (long pause as if struggling for the right word, then) pretty. Not handsome. Prettiness counts for much in youth, in older age it is (sadly) sacrificed for Beauty.. A necessary assault in order to grow wise. Wisdom comes from loss and blood, always of the Moon.. Even gorgeous buds must go. Nature says it so. And we can and should protest their going but in older age one loses energy to fight so gives in to what is "just so." In sorrow sore, in broken mendicant hearts, having touched tenderly and tasted the binding buds, wisdom is born."
Thus I have loved Nietzsche the man, marvel at the archetype he was and has become but his life was one of tremendous suffering in the grip not only of a personal daemon but that one of an entire aeon, it's final centuries 19th and 20th and, yes, this new one here. He was, as was Mani, Socrates, Plato, Jesus, Buddha, others, an epochal man. All these men and women who turn the wheel of a culture, an epoch, an aeon, suffer. But let us not forget Nietzche's book, Beyond Tragedy, and the gist of his oevre as a whole, this being a sketch of our table talk over brunch, his talk, rather, me the glad partaker of the grand expansive intellectual/spiritual meal being fed me; there is little of contraction in Nietzche unless it is to step one foot backward in order to leap ahead on the other, an effort catch up to the torrents flooding up from the unconscious into emotions into mind, thought, words to be quickly captured in sensation and feeling laced/infused aphorisms.
Whether sickly Nietzsche, nervous Nietzsche, or whichever symptomatic Nietzches was the ubermensch/overman, or none of these, he was certainly uber in perspective which was projective, far seeing into the next century (or three) ahead, of floods of blood and war, conflicts of mind and nations swelling up from depth into massive tidal waves of destruction and devastation. Such are not unheard of, are synchronous as the central value of a civilization and aeon begins to wane and die, in order to renew/transform into the new central value as yet unseen but showing up as hints, portentions, in dreams, hallucinations, free-floating anxiety and mania (as in the United States of Mania) via imagination via arts all kinds and, yes, harvests of mad men and women gripped by what is unseen but felt, what is building and fragmenting within fragile sensitive egos which preceed the destruction of nation, perhaps world.
Thus spake Nietzsche, a kind of scarer/thruster in the face of the culture of what he had powerfully felt and intuited spewing forth, spouting, proclaiming only to be merely dismissed and interpreted as a pathetic sad man defamer of Gods, of inflated calcified society and so-called Almighty Reason (all in their twilight before a new light can begin to dimly rim the Eastern horizon though Nietzsche was a part of that unwanted/rejected prescient light) - Wisdom seeks continual birth and rebirth, always new articulation, fabrication, artifice, expression, culture, beauty all kinds, to meet the tempering hammers of present mind and fashion that we humans may be satisfied with existence, with life. Or life-enough, finally foregoing demi-urges of egoic inflation and projection, anthrocentrism overruling ontic participation with all beings known and unknown.
Nietzsche spoke of fashion and fashion sense but only in the sense and tension of making, shaping, morphing thought, the language of thought, the cultural productions therefrom in order to convey some new force(s) which might bring sustained attention to what is born of creative conflict, clash, the concentration of effort to bring out the right meaning, and with such rightness, as in finding the right fit, the fit image, concept, action, expression, all the right productions of human effort,
that we humans might transcend or, if not transcend, transform enough into greater enough beings than we already are "but still, still we remain so very far from the actualization of the new man, the new woman I have clearly seen rising out of penitential fires, and by fires I mean PASSION fires which have driven, drive still, fires of mind for, what, 3000 productive years and more...yes, we have "reaped the Whirlwind" but that only reveals how far we have come from flint sparks and scratches/scrawls on torch illuminated cave walls.
Now Whirlwind is the challenge of this age and it may very well be the end of the homo sapiens Experiment, all the sound and fury from primal ancestral grunts and shouts to shofars to later symphonies; but for lack or loss of simple human sympathy for all creatures great and small we people may conclude as brutes after all. Magnificent brutes, yes. But to bring ourselves and everything else to ruin.........(shrugs)..."
Nietzsche tsk tsk tsks quietly, a pained look, a hint of anger too, "What a species we are." He slams his hand loudly upon the table, the cutlery and plates jumping, the flute glasses swaying and ringing,
"What a species!....Humility....if nothing else, humility may be our salvation. Perhaps I was a bit overwrought when I wrote of the ubermensch, the over or super man. It is precisely HE that has brought the Whirlwind into all our lapse, pun intended. And it is precisely HE who must confess that tired but persistent and violent sin of hubris, Satanic indeed. For that majestic Angel most sublime, dark and powerful wanted to run the whole show, go for broke and be God Almighty. He does so still. So down he flew, thrown down. And so here we all flounder, magnificently, makers all, such great things of power, might, sound and sight, but we must kneel here at the near end, bend the knee and take our penitient place and...and justly pathetic, confess to having too much fire for our own good, all force with little or no goal or plan but for immediate gain which when desired becomes the only absolute in town.
Have, or can, we finally understand that what we can do, what we can create is indeed innately good when adequately understood and known? So good. But we undo it by our self-obsession with transcendence for its own sake for we mistake such transcendence for power.
Whom have we served from the beginning to now (which may be the end or near) after all?
Only our sad and presumptuous selves.
We must take the knee, plead our case before Existence Itself and hopefully be successful enough in turning the inexorable Wheel, Its great momentum, of the Whirlwind another way, slow it, perhaps harnass it, whatever it may take to tame it, turn it as ourselves to the better for once and all. It is the heart, the human heart, that may do this if enough are broken open in the face, the grind, of what is overwhelming the globe."
Raising his his glass to me, gulping down the last few swallows of his mimosa, he smiled, eyes sad, kind, but then a flash of mischievousness,
"Well," he said, "let's get on with it, empty another glass and then let's you and me be all about this Ecce Homo-Ecce Whirlwind business, shall we?"
He winked at the handsome young waiter whom he fancied who seemed to magically apear at the "shall we?"
"Another last round, dear...hmmm....Adagio. Shall I call you Adagio?"
"Yes," chuckled the joven, "why, yes you can." He casually strolls away swinging his arms side to side as the ballet dancer that he is should, to the bar for our final mimosas.
Nietzsche's eyes remain upon the youth.
He says softly, but to whom, me? himself? "Ahhh-dagio...more mimosas...more...more Adagios.....of sunlight....Adagios of sunlight. Yes. That the right thing for now."
He shakes his head to break the revery, says to me,
"They" (the mimosas, Adagio), go quite well with twilight, yes?"
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Nietzsche's musical compositions may be heard here:
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