Death and the Madman, A Tragedy of Sorts

On January 3, 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche broke down.

Living in Torino (Turin), Italy, while sitting on the Piazzo Carlo Alberto, he cracked. He had long been plagued by migraines, possibly from a suspected illness ranging from diagnoses of syphilis to manic-depression to full-blown psychosis. No consensus has been reached.

In my romanticized version, I believe it was a philosophical crisis that broke him. Since the medical field has yet to come up with a more plausible cause, I will go with that.

I was talking with a friend about this event the other day, regarding the various contradictions of his life, as Nietzsche indeed is a self-fulfilling prophecy when it comes to being misunderstood. He welcomed it as much as he shunned it.

A favorite example of mine is the phrase that Nietzsche is most famous and simultaneously infamous for, that is, “Gott ist Tot!” (God is dead!) This comes from a scene in which a madman is running into a marketplace, proclaiming this shocking news, to which he is mocked and derided for his madness. This is often picked up as “proof” that Nietzsche was indeed the Anit-Christ or that he was an atheist, or it is picked up by angry, all-too-angry young people who don’t quite get the nuance of the situation.

None of them is accurate. Nietzsche proclaimed himself to be the Anti-Christian, in much the same way that his near contemporary Kierkegaard (a staunch believer of Christ, but also Anti-Christian) was against the hypocrisy of the Christian church in Europe near the turn of the 19th Century. Nietzsche wrestled with God, but did not deny It/Him/Her. That would be too simple.

The fuller version of that familiar phase is never, like the motto of Socrates , or at least seldomly repeated, namely “Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet!” (God is dead! God remains dead! And, we have murdered him!). According to Nietzsche, the God of humans was created and murdered by humans, because we can only know what it is to be human, be-ing humans, and thus create a god in our image. Nietzsche was quite aware that there was something bigger, much bigger and more powerful than we are.

However, what he introduced is the oft-maligned, highly mis-contextualized and tragically mis-appropriated by the Nazis (Nietzsche was catatonic from 1889 until his death in 1900, long before the Nazis. His sister Elizabeth is responsible for that connection...though that is for another time...) concept of the Übermensch, or the Superman, though literally the Overman.

In short, for Nietzsche, this meant that humans could be better than what we are, but only one person at a time, and the only person who could better him or herself, was, you guessed it, yourself. No one else can make you better or worse. You are responsible for your self, and you can be better. The name comes from the idea of over-coming your weakness. For Nietzsche, the human being was a work of art in progress and the artist was the individual. He had high hopes, perhaps too high, for humans, and in January of 1889, I believe that illusion had its fatal and chronic consequences.

As the story goes, Nietzsche saw a man beating a tired and sick draught horse on the square. The horse was shrieking, but was too feeble to fight. The man continued to beat the horse mercilessly. Nobody moved to help or intervene. Not my business. Nietzsche is reported to have run to the horse, and embraced it, as it died. Although Nietzsche lived for another 11 years, he never uttered an intelligible word after that incident, and relatively soon thereafter spent his remaining life in a drooling, catatonic paralysis.

I believe that Nietzsche saw man for whom he was, just a man. It was too much. This was not the man who could over-come himself. It was a creature that would beat a dying horse to death with his bare hands while the rest of humanity walked idly by.

Yesterday, just days after having this conversation about Nietzsche’s breakdown, I saw an article in the online Belgium newspaper. It was about a video, which was included and that I watched, from US troops in Afghanistan. It is only thirty seconds. It is nauseating. An infantry man bludgeons a goat to death with an aluminum bat. You can hear each metallic clang, followed by someone saying “what the fuck?” about the damn, stubborn goat who keeps getting up, staggering, twitching and going ultimately collapsing into a seizure. Cheers from young Afghan boys fill the air and “manly” guffaws and encouragement from the Troops goads the assailant on. Finally, the goat stops twitching after several more direct blows to its skull, rounded of by a chorus raucous of cheers, high-fives and hell yeahs.

That is man.

Tragedy originally means “goat song” in ancient Greek as it represented the darkest in humanity, the saturnine, the sadistic, and the satyr.

That is the message that some of our Super-men are sending to the world.  I don’t care if it is isolated. It is part of our reality, as humans, and we need to wonder at what we see.

WTF People?

No, Mind if I Fart?

Kudos to Robert Griffin III and the Baylor Bears for “their” Hesiman Trophy win, but tonight I am thinking about another Waco person, namely the comedian Steve Martin. Although Martin was raised in California, it is somewhat comforting to know that at least he was born in a town called Wac(k)o. Martin was the definition of American comedy of the late 70s and early 80s, along with Eddie Murphy, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Robin Williams, and many others of the vintage SNL era.

And, what better line to remember Martin’s wit with than the classic response to someone who asks you if he can smoke in a restaurant, “No, mind if I fart? It’s one of my habits.”

To me, that sums up quite a bit. As I get older and crustier, something that I notice quite a bit about people is that they don’t really want “to go there” even if they initiate the conversation. I have heard many times in my life, “can I ask you a personal question?” or “can I ask a frank question?” Well, my answer is simply, “Absolutely, if you can handle a frank answer.” Most people can’t, I have learned, because I can give an answer frank-er than Sinatra...wait for it...

Like Martin, we (and, yes, I include myself in that “we”) want to initiate, but when it comes to the response, when it is something that perhaps we don’t want to hear, we become uncomfortable, we hesitate, we stall. We want to smoke, but we don’t want others to fart. To paraphrase Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men, “we can’t handle the Truth.”

I have spent the greater part of the last week having one, long, frank discussion with a very dear friend of mine whom I have recovered and re-dis-covered from the obscurity of the past. There was no mediation, no pretense, no guard. Nothing but exposure. To be frank. 

Being an American here in Belgium and recently also in India, I am somewhat exposed on a different level, whether I want to be or not. People have ideas about us and US, again, like it or not. Stereotypes exist, and we play into them, confound them, or confirm them. I also had an interview with a potential client this past week as well at a high-level international organization, in which there were certain stereotypes about being an American I felt inclined to either dispel, or at times embrace. We do have the ability to chose, to be frank, and to be honest, but most often we opt out for the softer, easier way.

That is a shame, but I’ve been there. I know the sham comfort of crawling behind platitudes of clichés and habits and hiding behind a mantle of denial and distrust, both of myself and others. But, over time, the moths eat away that mantle, exposing the frailty of the fabric we once believed to be so strong, so permanent, so real.

However, when we can release that fear of exposure, of casting off the cloaked illusion of security, we can have breakthroughs, we can learn to live again. To, in essence, be re-born, a word that my sister put into my mind, and to suggest that the word for next year be just that, a Re-naissance.

After I dropped off my friend at the airport in Brussels and had come back to Antwerp to meet my apartment, seemingly so empty and alone again, I later went to the local Buddhist “club” to listen to a guest speaker. She was to speak on “emotions” as I found out upon arrival. What she opened with, I found to be interesting is that for the most part, when we see such a title, we immediately think of our negative emotions, those that hinder, that bind, that hold us down. Instead, she wanted to talk more about those that release and free us from suffering. Although the talk went downhill from there in my eyes, that thought did stick with me. What emotions can indeed free us?

Given that I have gone through the full range of my emotional gamut in the past days, I realized that it does not really come down to the emotion at all, but rather what Martin gave us, honesty. That’s it.

Mind if I Fart?

That is about as honest as it gets, slapping us in the face with the force of one hand clapping against our skin. But, can we handle that honesty when the tables are turned? Can we hear what we have been telling ourselves, but what happens when it comes from another person?

What I have learned is that if I’m not willing to have someone fart in my general direction, then I had better not idly blow smoke in his or her eyes.

To be frank.