[Note that this post was written before my “LETTER TO ZOOT ALLURES”.]
I’ve asked myself whether I shouldn’t identify with Rudra instead of Shiva–the unhallowed form of Shiva. For identifying with Shiva tends to tempt me into a kind of compassion for myself. Rudra on the other hand spurns any pet names and tender love. Tender love tends to be delicate and dainty, but strong passion goes too deep to touch the surface like that. Thus divinity often picks Harpocrates rather than Horus, silence before such overloudness.
Self-awareness is required rewriting for those who presume being able to understand a real other. I mean, all beings are such beings-able–this is of the essence of Fixed Cross’s “self-valuing logic”, a.k.a. Value Ontology–; but increasingly few beings are on ever-increasingly high planes thereof. Thus those who have the honour and the duty of trying and fully actualizing that universal potential have always been desperate, unless it be in that most fortunate case in which such an other was actually present (Socrates and Plato? The old real real man and the young, the lover of wisdom and of the lover of wisdom and the lover of the lover of wisdom and of wisdom…). Most philosophers in recorded history had to resort to books, had to be grateful that such books had even survived in the first place!–and much more than survived: the Ancient and Moorish worlds, secretly based on that transmission… (The Ancient and Medieval Judeo-Islamic world, I should perhaps say; but then definitely “Medieval”, as I for one don’t know any Jews or Muslims who manifest that tradition in person. (Of course I know of the ancient Hebrew Scripture and Maimonides’ (the Rambam’s) Guide for the Perplexed thereto, but even that only since I was at least thirty, and by happenstance. It is therefore–and this parenthesis has hereby stepped outside of its brackets–necessary for me to conclude that Nietzsche is still right about the Modern tradition, our still Machiavellian-Cartesian Age (the age of the mechanistic, if quantum-mechanistic conquest of nature).
Quantum-Mechanistic Post-Modernity is the third or superlative crisis of modernity. It is the Nietzschean phase of modernity–but not yet the Nietzschean phase of true post-modernity, of a world beyond modernity, the proto-Classical phase, laying the first stones of a foundation for a project of building the most Classical and thereby the highest culture there may ever have been on earth: Nietzsche’s Antichrist says that Classical Antiquity was only a beginning, only a successful initial stage or stages!
Nietzsche’s Antichrist, or his Zarathustra–that is his desperate but at the same time perfectly certain attempt at a successful call for such a project. My most personal theory–a theory I didn’t so much think of, by the way, as was the first to think through thus far–is that he was an Ariadne who dreamed up that Dionysus, who then in turn carved her out in reality… The reason I could no longer stand even Nico and her passion of the death of the death of passion was, in a simile I’ve used several times before, that the eroding waves of emotion had already hollowed out my heart from within, and it could now only be tempered from without (this last part is new, actually).
I once heard the claim that Dutch men are known to need things like listening to the Johannes-Passion on Christmas Day in order to weep out all their pent-up emotions. Well, I started not much later than age 6, not with that, but with a song which, even when it was first released, was apparently widely considered oversentimental. I probably shouldn’t refer you to it now. I probably shouldn’t even listen to it now. Especially now, after I improved my French enough, with Carmen, to be able to follow the French text (there’s also an Italian version). How fateful a thing for my then-best friend’s parents to do, give me a record player and that single! They also gave me other singles, but this was the one I liked by far the best (back then).
What a way to spoil a child… And without knowing it, I grew up to be a bit of a Gigi, with my dreams of conquering the world as the next Jim Morrison! I even “broke through” into a small circle of friends not far south of Naples… That was 18 years ago, and those people haven’t heard from me, still haven’t heard me on the radio yet. I wrote my “Natural High” there. But I have turned–well, bent, if not broken–against that fatalism and sentimentality in the meantime. Now I indulge in it only in order to push myself away from it, up out of it, back to the surface… Yet I may need to go through all that in order to pull others up with me, to allow them to grab on to me…
In Qabalistic terms: Kether may be the highest, but someone has to go down to Tiphareth, right? Nay, not just one; may more goats/sheep follow me! The Christ has turned out to be a disaster, there must be many Anti-Christs! (Song attached, which came shuffling by.)
I had meant to say Gigi is also a bit of a Krishna figure. Ah, by what strange byways did I approach what I am now! The “passionate spirit” Tool sings about–Rousseau’s opera, Le Devin de Village, inspired me to the term “Philosophical Supremacism”, which I then in turn came to associate with the Mediaeval Baebes “Undrentide” (song).
Can an esoteric love of life, of life as Eros or Will, exist without an exoteric front? That is the question of Nietzschean political philosophy. In fact, now that I mention it, I’d already started to refer to it as “Nietzschean religious philosophy”. A further question, then, is whether such a religion can be a religion of love. Well, wouldn’t it have to be? Wouldn’t it have to appeal to North-European boors who are at best the grandsons of rats? (“rats” not in the sense of tattle-tales, but of wandering Walloons born not far from the gutter.)
So unlikely was my path that I had to look for my fellow “free-spirits” or companions among girls… (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is like Plato’s Socrates in more ways than one.) But that appears to be a phantasm (hierarchically probably the third girl, after my girlfriend and you, has had a sex-change operation, not into a male but into a breastless female, a “sexless” person of sorts). Amour-passionnel boy that I am, I may at best write to idealised girls with the hindthought that it be for other men like me–like us, Nietzsche and his precursors as well. Would a woman not have to be completely emancipated from gender roles, would she not have to be basically a man in order to fulfill that function for me in real life?
This mail is probably already too long. I unattached that song again, by the way. I don’t think you would like it, though in structure at least it’s somewhat akin to Nico’s “The End”–which Moody Lawless preferred above any version by The Doors that he knew, by the way. I’ll attach a song that reminded me of you when I encountered it in a “various medieval” album I’d downloaded, and which I haven’t had the nerve to delete yet. It’s called “Enae Volare” and–on second thought, now that I started listening to it, I will delete it!
I can cut sweet corrosives out of my life. And if you are to be in it, you will have to follow me, at least in some respects. I guess I should just send you my favourite music.
Two of my favourite groups are the ensembles De Organographia and Micrologus. Another is Les Musiciens de Provence. Nietzsche I still like, too (it was his music that made me look to Rousseau, then to Lully and then to pre-Baroque music). I also really like Atrium Musicae de Madrid.
Another group I like quite a bit from is La Reverdie. That Nico-structured song is by them. But I will need to “favourite” tracks I come across in shuffle mode on my mp3-player. I’ll attach the only song for which I did that thus far (which doesn’t mean that much, as I only recently started doing that, and then forgot about it). [This song is Ensemble Micrologus’ “Pançe La Bella Iguana”.]