2a1) In the spirit of Nietzsche–the textual experience being user defined–here are three recent artifacts that share common threads. Honestly, I sense the golden thread more than I can articulate at the time of this post. Conclusions belong to the future, waiting to coalesce. But with the intent of marking the path in spacetime, here are some white stones to follow.
2a2) Among the forms of “moralistic mendaciousness” that Nietzsche attacked, none repulsed him more than the “ascetic ideal,” the pursuit of “poverty, humility, chastity.” Asceticism was “the harmful ideal par excellence,” for it justified suffering, turning it into a ritualized practice. In Nietzsche’s writing, the aristocratic priests with their “quack-cures” preached asceticism to channel the ressentiment of the dispossessed away from revolt. Asceticism enters “Heaven” through Kojima. We learn that the cheap clothes and humble appearance that mark her for suffering—“my signs,” she calls them—are, unlike the narrator’s eye, entirely self-willed. She has a rich stepfather, whom she despises; her poverty is affected, in solidarity with her biological father, who is virtually destitute and incapable of doing anything about it. Desperate to internalize his “beautiful weakness” as her own, she becomes obsessed with purity and self-abnegation. The narrator watches as she adds new “signs”: she stops eating and bathes less and less, turning into an uncanny, priestly figure, half saint, half monster. She is distraught when the narrator considers corrective surgery for his eye, arguing that he must learn to submit to his bullying:
We’re not just obeying, not anymore. We’re letting it happen. We know exactly what’s going on. We see it, and we let it happen. I don’t think that’s weakness at all. It’s more like strength.
Kojima’s preaching is parried by the bully Momose, the raging spirit of Nietzschean nihilism, ready to dismiss everything Kojima says as “total bullshit.” Good and bad, he tells the narrator, are values determined by the powerful. There is “no beautiful world where everyone thinks the same way,” no God or higher authority to redeem suffering as meaningful:
It’s just that some people can do things, and others can’t. There are things that they want to do and things that they don’t. Everyone has their own likes and dislikes. It couldn’t be any simpler. People do what they can get away with.
Blunt statements like these may come off as juvenile, but a certain immaturity is latent in Kawakami’s source material. “Altered is Zarathustra; a child has Zarathustra become,” Nietzsche writes approvingly, of the prophet’s manner of thought and speech. Like a child, he can think about ideas with divine frankness and unguarded simplicity. Untutored in self-deception, undisciplined by lifelong coercion and punishment in what Nietzsche calls “the morality of custom,” the child remains open to many different meanings of being good. Like the narrator’s eye, the figure of the child is a brilliant device, allowing Kawakami to get away with dissolving elemental ideas into the confusion of adolescent relationships.
2a3) To the extent that the powerless—however defined—are treated as deserving of greater advantage than the powerful, it seems natural that many will claim and aspire to be powerless. We should expect a commensurate increase in mental health cases amongst the young (who come of age under the principle of “equity”). Since mental health is, in part, a function of what we believe, it is inaccurate to say that an uptick in those claiming to suffer from mental health issues is an expression of fraud or self-deception. Rather, it is accurate to say that a society that grants glory to the inhibited will produce members who compete, paradoxically, for the glory of being incapable of achieving glory.Zohar Atkins – What is Power?
2a4) The power of mind is much greater than the power of body. Much, much greater. Our inner realm is a much vaster set of possibilities...and the realm of other human minds is a vaster set of possibilities than even other human bodies.
2a5a) The effect of Taraza’s words startled Odrade. She correctly interpreted the threat but fear left her, spilling out as though it were water poured from a jug. For the first time in her life, Odrade recognized the precise moment of crossing a dividing line. This was a line whose existence she thought few of her Sisters suspected. As she crossed it, she realized that she had always known it was there: a place where she could enter the void and float free. She no longer was vulnerable. She could be killed but she could not be defeated.
Frank Herbert – Heretics of Dune
2a5b) This is obviously
out of context if you're not familiar with Herbert's work. Suffice it to say this is one of my favorite passages in the Dune series. Saturated, as I am with Nietzsche as melange, I have a hard time distinguishing what was intentionally Nietzschean in Herbert's work, and what was merely just him tuning into the same wavelength. Which I suppose is the very point of this post. The glass of experience is foggy, filtered, opaque. What matters if we agree on specifics of tone if the harmonic resonance puts us in chorus? All that matters is that like
Darwi Odrade above, we seek until we are released into that void where we suffer death, but never defeat.
