S.H.A.Z.A.M.!

I was moved to say, "Shazam!" today in a certain instance as it used to be one of my favorite interjections growing up in Kentucky, and what kid didn't want to be either Isis or Captain Marvel, seriously? They were the bomb. (I think that is clearly evinced by the popularity of the either real name or nickname of many women today across all races in America, that being Isis.)

Yet, like with many things, looking at things we knew in childhood can mean something quite different as adults. For me, the great challenge is to find the balance between the wonder of that little boy in Kentucky who wants to be Captain Marvel merely by shouting out "Shazam!" and the middle-aged man in Belgium who says it out of nostalgia, but had to go to Wikipedia to refresh his memory about the show, namely, what the hell does, "Shazam!" mean?

For many, it is a freakishly adept application out of an Orwell or Huxley novel that can "read" music on the radio and tell you what it is. I cannot even begin to fathom that one.

However, the original usage in the show was an acronym for S.olomon, H.ercules. Atlas. Z.eus. Achilles. and M.ercury. Whoah, now that is some power. These were the elders whom Billy Batson would invoke when he needed some extra star power to get the job done as Captain Marvel.

What got me thinking though, was, which "elders" would we call upon today? I am intrigued by the ones who were chosen then:

S.olomon, a wise and judicious lawgiver
H.ercules, a demi-God who had to prove himself through 12 Labors, (though ultimately went berserk and killed his wife,...not in the Disney version, but pretty status quo for a Greek Hero)
A.tlas, the metaphor for ultimate punishment of Duty
Z.eus, all-powerful sleaze bag
A.chilles, demi-God who begrudges his Duty in battle, til it becomes personal, then goes berserk and desecrates Hector's body, who, BTW is waaaaayyy cooler than Achilles
M.ercury, the messenger God, who lives between the Gods and Mortals, aka Hermes

Pretty interesting Rogue Gallery there, ranging from Justice to Injustice, Gods to Human, Power to Defeated, and fallen heroes.

So, whom would America pick now from the Pantheon of Gods and Demi-Gods? What qualities would we value above others? Which would we call upon in our Time of need?

More importantly, perhaps, would we use that council and experience to help others, or to help ourselves? How often do people call out to the Gods for the sake of others, without asking for something for themselves? I wonder. Does that go contrary to the very grain of who we are as Humans?

Since I am stuck in the 70s and 80s today it seems, one of my favorite LPs (Long-Playing, for you young'ins) was Rush's Hemispheres. Being a typical Rush concept album, it tells the story of the emergence of Cygnus X-1, which is the name of a massive black hole, as a New God within the Pantheon. There is a battle amongst the Gods and Goddesses, and the narrator, who becomes Cygnus X-1, watches on in horror and dismay at the dissolution of the Universe. The two main fighters are Apollo and Dionysos, which is clearly a nod to Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy.

Apollo, the God of Reason and Music, and Light battles with Dionysos, the God of Intoxication, Decadence, and Darkness, a thinly veiled metaphor of the individual soul, much like Plato's well-known allegory of the Soul as a charioteer trying to harness the power of a Light and a Dark horse to keep an even balance.

Ultimately, a new God is needed, Cygnus, who becomes "knighted" as the God of Balance, a perfect sphere of Light and Dark, much like the Chinese concept of Yin and Yang , something Light and something Dark. For Nietzsche, the clash of the titanic Gods of Apollo and Dionysos, the result was Art, forged out of a mixture of passion/intoxication and reason/restraint, Rausch und Rede.

I'll go with that. In essence, that is what Shazam! then is: a mixture of Reason, Passion, Strength, Failure, Success, Mediation, and Mitigation.

Not quite the Super Hero qualities that we see today, though paints a pretty good picture of the complexion of humanity, bringing the full spectrum of our qualities, the Good and the Bad into one, single phrase.

Shazam!

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?

From the Ashes

I know exactly where I was on this date ten years ago. Much like Kennedy's Assassination and the Space Shuttle explosions , Americans remember where they were on those days. After finishing this post and having come to the Internet Cafe to post it, I received an email from a friend who had been discussing this very issue with her children. These are days to be remembered.

I was a young Instructor and Student Advisor at The University of Texas at Austin for the Liberal Arts Honors Programs and Humanities. I was teaching a Tuesday-Thursday 11:00-12:30 class called, “The Curse of Socrates.”

We had been glued to the television all morning in the LAH office, watching the events of the morning unfold, stunned into muted horror. Vicky, our secretary, was running triage of students coming in to just have a place to sit, while Elaine and I were managing phone calls from concerned parents about what was being done on campus. When the second tower went down, minutes before 11:00, I was in shock, but I had to go to my class and see what the students were doing.

I walked into the room and a full range of emotions met my eyes: anger, terror, fear, shock, disbelief, paralysis, confusion, and despair. It was a heavy moment, them looking to me to say something, do something. Just as the bell rung, in walked Mark, a normally deadpan student, had not heard what was going on, looked around the class, and when I told him, he just said, “Whoah, I guess I should watch TV more often.”

Our reading for the day had been summing up Book Three from Plato’s Republic as well as the prologue to Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy, (Out of the Spirit of Music).” In the reading for the Republic, Socrates and co. had been discussing the necessity or not of music as part of education, and Nietzsche’s work deals with his thesis that Art is the “progeny” of the creative and destructive forces respectively of Apollo and Dionysus (also serving as the inspiration for Rush’s epic “Cygnus X-1” from Hemispheres).

How were we to talk about philosophy at such a moment? It seemed ludicrous on the surface, so I told the students, “No holds barred, tell me what you are thinking.” And, they did. The next ninety minutes was the most candid discussion that I believe I will ever experience as a teacher. They did not hold back, and they ran the gamut. Some of the boys were talking about joining the army, which one did. Some people changed majors soon after, realizing that “you never can know.”

However, at one point, the conversation turned to “Now what?” “Now what?” indeed. What do you tell twenty year-olds is important after what they had just seen and witnessed? What is important? What really matters? Reaching a point of being at a loss for what to say, I turned to Nietzsche for help.

What do we do in the face of tragedy in life? How are we able to communicate the feelings of despair, disillusionment and vulnerability when our world is just pulled out from under us, leaving us hanging on to the edge, for fear of falling into the abyss. Nietzsche’s answer was that you have to stare at the abyss and realize that that is indeed part of life. To turn away, to forget or to deny what has happened is the greatest injustice you can do. Instead, when tragedy strikes, or when we feel our world crumbling beneath our feet, there is one thing to do--create.

From that point on, the discussion turned to how people have used tragedy, terror, war, and individual suffering to be the catalyst for great art. Not to be obsessed with it, but to, as Nietzsche advised, to look at it and see it as part of our existence, the destructive force of Dionysus, faced with the creative elan of Apollo, yields great art. I was reminded of this when I recently visited the Shaivite caves on the island of Elephanta off of the coast of Mumbai. The most imposing and striking carving is the enormous Trimurti of Shiva, depicting his three faces of the creative, preserving, and destructive elements.

On that day, many of those students later said that for the first time they understood “Art” and why people make it, and how powerful it could be. I remember that Adam, one of my students, had told me how amazing that it was that he was finally able communicate with his sister, who was in the Arts, because of that awareness. At the beginning of the hour, Adam, a staunch patriot, had been one of those ready to storm out of the class and get on the next military transport to kill whomever was responsible, consequences be damned.

To wish that the world be free of violence and acts of terror is a lofty and noble goal, though unfortunately, though not pessimistically, is one that is not rooted in reality. At this point in my life, I just don’t see that as happening on this planet, which is ultimately where Socrates will get to with his ideal city. Humans are complex, and in our complexity we have a staggering capacity to harm others. Perhaps one could say that it is out of self-preservation, but I don’t really cotton to that line. I think that people are merely quite capable of doing very bad things. Period. But, what happens when those bad things, and how we respond to them, that is the creative power that is likewise as staggering in the condition of being human.

Nearly without fail, each one of my students later told me that in all of their other classes, life had gone on as usual that day, as if nothing had happened, not a word was spoken about the events. A pure nearly campus-wide tsunami of denial had engulfed the 40 Acres and the sight of the Twin Towers crumbling to heaps of ashes and molten steel mixed with flesh had proved to be too daunting to look at, the abyss too deep. I had not been not sure what I was going to do, walking from the Gebauer building to Calhoun hall, that is from the LAH office to my classroom, I really wasn’t. It was one of the longest short works that I have made in my life and a lifetime of decisions went through my head, but I will never regret my final decision to open up that conversation, for the result was truly inspired on their part, it was a collective work of art.