As the economy rolls along like a marble on a pebble beach and the stock market continues its own bumpy road to recovery, apocalyptic thought is again on the rise. It is when times are bad that apocalyptic comes in most useful. Individuals who feel that this world has run out of possibilities generally look to a new future world where things will be radically different. That’s why people flock to movies like 2012 and dream of a new day, a new era.

That’s the way it has always been. Jews being tortured to death under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid tyrant, looked for that day when Michael would take on the “Prince of Persia” and the new world would gush in and overtake this one. Almost two centuries later the early Christian movement, suffering at the hands of Roman emperors such as Nero and Diocletian, reveled in the visions of Revelation — the new world coming. Rental property is free in the New Jerusalem! The earliest exemplars of apocalyptic thinking appear to go back to the ancient Zoroastrians. This early Iranian religion (which may have originated in Afghanistan) took comfort in a dualistic world where good and evil constantly struggled until a cosmic conflict would result in the ultimate destruction of evil. It helped to explain why things could be so bad for good people in the here-and-now.

2012, however, derives from concerns that the Mayan calendar seems to have run out of space at that time slot just over three years from now. Otherwise intelligent people panic; this is an apocalypse of the secular kind! Experts on the Maya (among which I am not) explain that the Mayans use(d) many calendars (there are still Mayans around). Their large-scale, 5000 year calendar may run out on December 21, 2012, but that doesn’t mean the end of the world. In fact, that calendar only began on August 11, 3114 BCE, about 4.5 billion years after the creation of the earth. It was not meant as a road-map to the cosmos. The real apocalypse is in the minds of those suffering from their own private ills in this world. Ever since Zarathustra spoke, people have had an alternative, better future to anticipate.

In my last post I drew attention to the Collapse journal and its role in disseminating the so-called Speculative Realist ‘movement’. The proposed sixth issue promises much to those working on progressive ecocritical and ecophilosophical projects without necessarily cementing the journal’s relationship to Graham Harman et al. Having recently spoken with editor Robin Mackay about the new volume, I can confirm that it is still in preparation, but an announcement will be made soon and advance orders will be possible at that time. Arriving in December, “late contributors and general perfectionism have held up publication…” Perhaps more interestingly, Mackay expressed concern over the journal’s affiliation with the latest philosophical trend, stating that “it’s not really centred on ‘SR/OOO’, indeed I’d be happy to distance Collapse from this apparent new orthodoxy!”

Following Collapse V’s inquiry into the legacy of Copernicus’ deposing of Earth from its central position in the cosmos, Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy will pose the question: Is there nevertheless an enduring bond between philosophical thought and its terrestrial support, or conversely, is philosophy’s task to escape the planetary horizon, to abjure ‘everything that makes us scurry about blindly on the desolate surface of the earth’ (Badiou)?

Following early-modern geophilosophical experiments in utopia, geographies and cartographies real and imaginary have played a double role in philosophy, serving both as governing metaphor and as an ultimate grounding for philosophical thought. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant draws a direct line of correspondence between the spherical shape of the Earth as a planetary model for the horizon of thinking and the nature of transcendental idealism, so as to establish and determine the boundaries in which human thinking should and may occur – the spherical shape of the Earth as an unequivocal model for ‘the limits of all possible geography’. However, if Kant grants the Earth a direct determinative sovereignty in regard to thought, Nietzsche subverts the gravitational horizon of the Earth so as to bring about the possibility of the Great Politics and ‘Overman as the meaning of earth’. Thus Zarathustra begins his journey by exhorting to the people of the city, ‘Be faithful to the Earth’. Yet as his journey is prolonged, Zarathustra’s faith for the Earth turns into a longing for the ‘fresh air’, his will to remain faithful to the Earth is only nurtured by a ‘weightless affirmation’ of it. Schelling, on the other hand, thinks the earth as depth, inflecting Nietzsche’s weightless affirmation toward a profound, productive earth with a geological history: an earth turned inside-out, whose destiny is determined by its churning depths rather than by its surface inhabitants.

It is this enigmatic passage between the Earth as a geographical determination and the possibility of a weightless identification of the Earth that conditions Deleuze and Guattari’s discovery of a new ground for Geophilosophy – a philosophy that grasps thinking in relation to territory and earth.

Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy begins with the provisional premise that the Earth does not square elements of thought but rather rounds them up into a continuous spatial and geographical horizon. Geophilosophy is thus not necessarily the philosophy of the earth as a round object of thought but rather the philosophy of all that can be rounded as ‘an’ (or ‘the’) earth. But in that case, what is the connection between the empirical earth, the contingent material support of human thinking, and the abstract ‘world’ that is the condition for a ‘whole’ of thought?

Urgent contemporary concerns introduce new dimensions to this problem: The complicity of Capitalism and Science concomitant with the nomadic remobilization of global Capital has caused mutations in the field of the territorial, shifting and scrambling the determinations that subtended modern conceptions of the nation-state and territorial formations. And scientific predictions present us with the possibility of a planet contemplating itself without humans, or of an abyssal cosmos that abides without Earth – these are the vectors of relative and absolute deterritorialization which nourish the twenty-first century apocalyptic imagination. Obviously, no geophilosophy can remain oblivious to the unilateral nature of such un-earthing processes. Furthermore, the rise of so-called rogue states which sabotage their own territorial formation in order to militantly withstand the proliferation of global capitalism calls for an extensive renegotiation of geophilosophical concepts in regard to territorializing forces and the State. Can traditions of geophilosophical thought provide an analysis that escapes the often flawed, sentimental or cryptoreligious fashions in which popular discourse casts these catastrophic developments?

Collapse VI: Geo/philosophy will bring together philosophers, theorists, eco-critics, leading scientific experts in climate change, and artists whose work interrogates the link between philosophical thought, geography and cartography, in order to create a portrait of the present state of ‘planetary thought’.

…wäre dabei aller wahrscheinlichkeit nach “Starchild” von Wintersun entstanden; wobei zarathustra – bzw. nietzsche – eher zu vergleichen mit flora & fauna gegriffen hätte statt zu solchen mit weltall & sterne. die philosophische grundaussage des stücks aber – unter besonderer berücksichtigung des kapitels “Von den drei Verwandlungen” – weist sehr viele parallelen zu nietzsche’s zarathustra auf. ob die inspiration tatsächlich von nietzsche’s hauptwerk kam, weiss ich leider nicht.

das kapitel aus “Also sprach Zarathustra” kann man hier lesen.

Wanderer of Time (Part I)

So mysterious is your world,
concealed beyond the stars
Far away from the earth,
it flows one with time and dark as the night
Million shapes and colours
are storming inside your mind
Creating endless dimensions
Forming universes without walls
Let go! of the stars, the stars that fell into the sea
Let go! of your thoughts and dreams,
what can you see now
You cannot save them anymore
Wanderer of time
It’s too late now
Creator of Dimensions
Destroy the walls of time
Hands of the blind are holding your fate
Tides of life will take you away, will take you away
Starchild!
Visions are born from the unknown force
It dominates the way of time
The dream only ends, when the worlds come to an end
Starchild!
You cannot escape to the dark streams of the sea,
to suppress your dreams
Nothing can keep you away from the need to create
cause your path is free

Burning Star (Part II)

I’ve hold the fire within myself
Years I’ve walked in the coldest winds
Through the deserts of sand and snow
The time is passing and I know
that I’m wasting my life, destroying my dreams
I’m diving into the bottomless sea
From sorrow and pain I find my strenght
the more pain I feel, the more I see
Now I’m watching my life flowing in the dark
like streams of fear running through my heart
And it’s wearing me down until I’m gone
Soon I’ll join the endless whirls of stars
And I fall deeper into the unknown voids
Something is dying, yet something is born
And I fall into infinity like a burning star
When will I find my silent dawn
I fall like a burning star!

The Creation (Part III)

The curtains of mist are fading
and the veils of star clouds are revealed
Storms of new energy
flows in the depths of my mind
New constellations are born
in total harmony of perfection
And the dissonant unbalance was broken
as the colours fell straight from the light

The Sea of Stars (Part IV)

I’m floating in the sea of stars,
I’m drifting away from the shore
I will be lost in the dream when the dark days come
But I will make the time run backwards and
I’ll make the stars shine again
I will light up the sky to a bright crimson nights
And they’ll shine together forever
With brilliant silver colours they’ll shine forever

Finale (Part V)

The whirls of stars takes you now far away
away from the cold nightmare
Let go of you thoughts and dreams
and you will feel the warmth once again
Starchild! in the Sea of Stars you fall
You fall like a burning star!
Starchild! in the Sea of Stars you fall
But there is no end to creation

One of the oldest political adages going is ‘if people were angels then we wouldn’t need government’.  Today it is more like ‘if people weren’t so ADD, then we wouldn’t need anti-texting laws’.

Sadly, Ontario’s new anti-texting law doesn’t get to the heart of the issue, which is distracted driving.  The simple matter is that it can’t, because to do so would expose a great contradiction in our society.  We are told, rightly so, to pay attention when we are behind the wheel, but at the same time we are exposed to a seemingly infinite amount of distraction.  We are distracted inside our cars with stereo systems, GPS devices, and the like; we are distracted outside with an infinite amount of signage advertising the very crap you are using inside your car.

Remember the good old days when the only distraction you faced on the road was just plain old masturbating? There was no technology to get between you and the one you loved the most.

It would be simple if we could just have a ‘Distracted Driving’ law.  But how could one possibly enforce it? With drunk driving, we have breathalysers, but how would you measure how distracted someone is? The only qualitative analyses we have are individual police officers making the call.  That’s a lot of power to put in the hands of the police.

Plus, the second that language like ‘distracting’ enters into legislation, the existence of the multitude of televisual signs that drivers motor past every day on roadways like the Gardiner will come into question.  Sony and Toyota, and whoever else has a vested interest in keeping those mini-movie theatres up in drivers’ faces, might just have something to say about that.

Freedom of expression, one of the greatest ideas that humankind has ever got behind, has become ‘freedom to inundate everyone with as much crap as possible’.  Just make sure it blinks.

I’m not trying to absolve the individual of their responsibility to pay attention while on the road.  Hurling a half-ton of steel (or fibreglass) on top of a thin strip of tar at 100kph is a pretty big responsibility, and one should not be taken lightly.  All I want is for people to realize that it’s not drunk driving or talking on your cell phone that is the problem: it’s being distracted from what you should be doing.  You would think that something so general in nature as the law would be able to deal with that.  But it of course is the product of us poor frail humans, and it’s tough to come up with good laws, especially while driving, eating that bowl of cereal, reading the newspaper, shaving and especially belting out that Journey tune.

I can already hear the naysayers among you clucking in unison: “Well, can you come up with something better?” Well frankly, no, I really can’t.  One day perhaps, a great legislator, a Solon or a Zarathustra living in the mountains – far removed from this ADD-soaked world – will come to give us a distracted driving law, with sensible language and provisions to actually enforce it.

Until that day, buckle up, lay off the booze, put the phone away, and take the time to discover your old forgotten friends in your trousers.

Texto: Augusto Isla. La Jornada Semanal. Domingo 25 de octubre de 2009. Num: 764.

Ya se sabe que antes de hundirse en las sombras de la megalomanía y verse como el más incomprendido de los hombres, como el crucificado, Nietszche se conformaba con unos cuantos lectores selectos: Jacob Burckhardt, Hyppolyte Taine, Richard Wagner… Uno de ellos, poco conocido pero brillante y certero, fue Georg Brandes (1842-1927). Este intelectual danés fue no sólo un lector del genio alemán, sino también su interlocutor; con él, sostuvo una amistad epistolar, amén de haber asumido con rara modestia el desempeño de difusor de su obra en Dinamarca. Y digo con modestia porque Brandes no era un cualquiera; contaba con un prestigio como estudioso del movimiento romántico y atrayente conferencista. Escribía en danés y en alemán, disertaba en francés. Pero sobre todo pensaba críticamente en los asuntos humanos que entonces estaban en el centro de los debates: el matrimonio, la propiedad, la monarquía, la Iglesia; instituciones éstas que, a su parecer, había que cambiar para respirar libremente. Como Nietszche, era un solitario, pero poseía un sentido del equilibrio que lo ponía a salvo de los vendavales furiosos que azotaban el alma del autor de Zaratustra: “Usted no se parece a mí, es otro y tan otro que no me siento tranquilo en su presencia”, le dice en una de sus cartas. Nietszche lo inquieta, pero no lo seduce; lo admira, pero toma su distancia: está a su altura. La correspondencia entre ellos discurre en un tú por tú; disienten pero se respetan: comparten el espacio de la élite de una Europa que pronto estallaría.

La correspondencia entre Brandes y Nietzsche, constituida por veintidós cartas, abarca poco más de un año, entre noviembre de 1887 hasta enero de 1889. Y transcurre en diferentes niveles: afectivo e intelectual; el primero nos revela a dos seres humanos interesados el uno por el otro: intercambian saludos corteses, buenos deseos, retratos; el segundo se despliega en una dialéctica concisa en la que uno y otro intentan autodefinirse y también definir cada uno a su interlocutor, ambos inscritos en “una época crítica para los valores morales”, con reacciones paralelas y al propio tiempo distantes entre sí. Brandes se antoja más abierto y generoso; el alemán, más cerrado, con la mirada más fija en su camino, más obstinado en su rebeldía, levemente desdeñoso pese a su provincianismo germano – Brandes es para Niezsche un “buen europeo y misionero de la cultura”. El danés, en cambio, busca puentes comunes: cesarismo, odio a los pedantes y a la pedantería; a veces pregunta sin obtener respuesta, pero ese silencio no obsta para que, en reconocimiento sincero del genio, lo difunda por los medios a su alcance –artículos, conferencias – en una Escandinavia que nada sabe acerca del exótico alemán.

Tal vez para asimilar lo que hasta entonces había bebido de las fuentes del genio, escribe un hermoso texto: Nietszche, un ensayo sobre el radicalismo aristocrático, que a Federico le agrada desde el título mismo, pues “es lo más fuerte que de mí se ha dicho”. Dos temas llaman la atención de quien fue apasionado adversario de todo “misionero moralizante”: la historia y la moral. Y su presentación del gigante transcurre más o menos así: la historia y, por ende, las civilizaciones que fragua, es obra de las grandes personalidades; son ellas las que le imprimen sus rasgos esenciales, su “unidad de estilo”, las que logran vencer el filisteísmo intelectual, ese yugo forjado por la doxa impersonal, guía de las masas, que no son sino copias defectuosas de los hombres sobresalientes, ánforas de resentimiento con respecto a todo lo que es genial. Por eso, la educación histórica no sólo es estéril, sino peligrosa, pues amén de consagrar la inerte mediocridad, es la ruina de las fuerzas creadoras, aunque no deja de ayudar a quien busca en el pasado ejemplos deslumbrantes que alientan la energía del hombre.

En consecuencia, la tarea de la humanidad no es atender la felicidad de los más u ocuparse del destino del rebaño, sino producir grandes hombres, abonar el terreno para la creación de personalidades donde habiten la bondad y la pureza, pues solamente ellas se constituirán en fermento de la elevación humana. Vástago de Schopenhauer, el autor de Ecce hommo se aleja de él tan pronto descubre que en el corazón de su ethos está la piedad cristiana, un ethos para esclavos, para quienes se suman al cúmulo del sufrimiento humano; por el contrario, los amos viven en libertad y en alegría: escriben su propia moral. Brandes asocia a Nietszche con Renan, con su esperanza en una nobleza intelectual, enemiga del populacho.

Brandes presenta a Nietszche con su propia visión crítica. En su ensayo destaca la importancia de Así habló Zaratustra; sin embargo, no comparte la opinión del autor en cuanto a valorarla como su obra maestra, pues le parece que no tiene la suficiente plasticidad; es monótono su discurso, aunque su estilo es sonoro; si algo admira en él es ese entreveramiento de logos y poesía. Es un libro claro por su alegría, pero oscuro por su lenguaje enigmático; un libro para temerarios, para “escaladores de montañas morales”.

No tenemos por qué dudar del buen juicio de Brandes, pero Zaratustra señala un momento decisivo en el pensamiento de Nietzsche: el de “sí” a la vida, a ésta y a ninguna otra, a lo que ofrece como posibilidad, como inventiva, allende la moral con su tumulto asfixiante de deberes; a la vida que irrumpe con su alegría, sus horrores, en las convenciones sepulcrales, en la rutina de un vivir con sus falsas certezas.

¿Qué atrajo a Brandes de la obra nietzscheana? Me atrevo a afirmar que su aliento romántico, pues, a despecho de su crítica al romanticismo, el discurso del alemán fluye dentro de esa gran corriente espiritual, aunque, como lo apunta Safransky, “Nietzsche de ninguna manera era un romántico en el sentido de un retorno al cristianismo, pero lo era por la forma en que entendía lo dionisíaco como centro de incitación de lo real. Lo mismo que los románticos, empeña su lanza contra la somnolencia de la moral convencional […] se siente impulsado también por la aspiración romántica de lo salvaje, a lo monstruoso […] no va en la dirección de la gran quietud, sino que se dirige a la aventura…”

¿Qué agradecerle a Brandes? Su lectura inteligente y serena que nos abre la puerta de la casa de los enigmas nietszcheanos, hecha de razón y sinrazón, de poesía y profecía; casa habitada por un Nietszche desgarrado en su aislamiento, en una misantropía de la que emana, paradójicamente, su grande amor a la humanidad, a ratos despectivo respecto de la plebe y de lo plebeyo, pero obstinado en su confianza de que la humana criatura sabrá, con su inmenso potencial, alcanzar otros horizontes, los del superhombre, no en un sentido biológico, sino moral, semilla de una civilización postcristiana, que, siendo futuro, a la par regresa a la comarca donde rigen los ideales de Dionisos, a ese reino de los sueños de su amada Grecia, la suya, pues que no hay una sola Grecia, sino tantas como las que cada quien elabora en su imaginación, aunque siempre sensual, alegre, trágica, la Grecia de los inconformes con una Europa que prepara sus armas para el sacrificio más cruento de la historia.

Y también hemos de agradecerle a Brandes haber dado pie a que Niezsche se mostrara de cuerpo entero, humano, en toda su grandeza y con sus debilidades, enfermizo, inseguro, pero también afable, agradecido, sencillo, capaz de dialogar, aunque sólo hasta cierto punto, con alguien que, en muchos aspectos, se perfila como superior a él, más cosmopolita, dispuesto siempre a aprender de los demás; un Nietzsche cuya lucidez se extravía en la noche de su propio desorden interior y llega a creer que pronto “el mundo se estremecerá convulsionado ante la gran debacle de la que soy factótum”, después de haberse definido a sí mismo como vir oscurissimus, como “bestia valiente” que navega a contracorriente, ignorado justamente porque intenta no sólo comprender, con pasión y angustia, una cultura enferma, decadente y, sin embargo, segura de sí misma, del progreso que representa.

Progreso falso, pues, dice Brandes, para él, “la magnitud de un progreso se mide por la importancia de los sacrificios que exige. Una higiene que mantiene vivos a millones de seres débiles e inútiles que hubieron debido morir, no es un progreso verdadero”.

La empresa editorial Sexto Piso ha puesto a nuestra disposición, en castellano, el ensayo de Brandes, las veintidós cartas que testimonian la amistad entre el erudito danés y el genio alemán, amén de un artículo necrológico de Brandes, fechado en 1900, año de la muerte de Niezsche, y una nota aclaratoria sobre los síntomas de los desvaríos nietzscheanos: defensa contra quienes pretendían ofuscar la gloria del genio y lamento: “¡Era terriblemente triste ver cómo en algunas semanas se había apagado la última chispa de su razón, y observar la manera en que un hombre genial, que no tiene semejante, se ha transformado en una pobre y lastimosa criatura”.

Brandes era sólo dos años mayor que Nietzsche y le sobrevivió veintisiete. Con seguridad esa breve amistad, lejana pero cálida, con el portento, deja en él una profunda huella espiritual, un dolor imborrable que inferimos del tono mismo de su “artículo necrológico”, alusivo a la tragedia de Nietzsche, a la ironía de su destino, pues “llegó la felicidad ansiada, golpeó su puerta, pero el desgraciado no respondió al encontrarse preso de sus alucinaciones”. ¿Qué fue lo que más admiró Brandes? “La grandiosidad de un estilo al que dedicó toda su vida”. Pero ¿en qué consistió tal grandiosidad? Me parece que no se refiere tanto a la escritura como a algo que está más allá, a ese fuego en el que se autoinmoló aquel hombre genial en su combate imposible contra toda una civilización envenenada por el espíritu cristiano; grandiosidad que es sacrificio, tan personal que sólo un iniciado pudo asumir.

Dudo, sin embargo, que Brandes se haya dejado tocar por ese fuego. Ya en sus cartas dejó constancia de aquello que lo apartaba de su amigo. Brandes era un librepensador, anticlerical, pero no un misógino; le chocaban ciertas filípicas nietzscheanas y se rehusaba a aceptar consideraciones que apenas valoraba como hipotéticas, pero expuestas con tal fuerza que podían seducir a algunas almas ya distraídas, ya desesperadamente anhelantes de una renovación moral. Mas a despecho de sus firmes convicciones intelectuales y políticas, Brandes se dio a la tarea de comprender y difundir una presencia que merecía la atención del mundo.

En Algún Día│Friedrich Nietzsche.

“Ich will keinen Autor mehr lesen, dem man anmerkt, er wolle ein Buch machen: sondern nur jene, deren Gedanken unversehens ein Buch wurden.”

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 – 1900), dt. Dichter, Philosoph und Philologe, Verfasser u.a. von “Also sprach Zarathustra – Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen”

Zarathustra’s Children

James Luchte

Supposing truth is a woman – what then?

Are there not grounds for the suspicion

that all philosophers,

insofar as they were dogmatists,

have been very inexpert about women?

That the gruesome seriousness, the

clumsy obtrusiveness with which they

have usually approached truth so far

have been awkward and very improper

methods for winning a woman’s heart?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Women do not have as great a need for poetry

because their own essence is poetry.

Friedrich Schlegel

Beyond Dionysus and Apollo in ‘Greek’ Tragedy and Comedy

If it is the last man, the spectator who consents to the Euripidean denial of the Dionysian power of life, of the terrible truth of existence, it is the Overman (Übermensch) who is that one that can affirm this chaos of being in the world and give birth to novelty under the sun.  Yet, the Overman is not the Tragic Hero in the sense of Euripides.  It is even doubtful that Nietzsche’s Overman is ‘tragic’ at all – notably in the nostalgic senses of Sophocles or Aeschylus.

We have forgotten that devastating myriadity of this power of life in the wake of the suppression of the Dionysian in Late Tragedy.  The ‘tragic’ becomes – for a time – an epochal indifference and unwillingness to confront and master the rage and chaos of the Dionysian power of life.

Indeed, this power is erased and conscientiously ignored, suppressed in Late Tragedy.  In the early tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus, narratives that preserve an explicit reference to Homer, the tragic hero, emerging from the Dionysian musical ecstasy of the Chorus, is transported into a rapture of self-annihilation.  In the context of this Festival of the power of life, it is the Apollonian dream image that makes manifest the power that loves to hide.  The devastating tension and chaos of the Dionysian apotheosis, while made manifest in the dream image, is not suppressed or even sublimated, but is allowed to play itself out in the destruction of tragic sacrifice.

To read the entire essay, please visit: http://luchte.wordpress.com/zarathustras-children/

Why we can’t save the planet: “God’s still up there.” Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!

Time is only measured in cycles. Periodic recurrences are measured against one another–where does linearity come in? Thermodynamic irreverisbility–entropy. Conscious existence is a constant battle against entropy, consuming energy to reverse the inevitable decay. It continually pushes at the limits, to turn the spiral into a circle. And yet, invariably, even the spiral represents a certain type of circle. As the spiral conforms to the point as its end limit it approaches pure circularity, not the unit circle but the circle with radius zero, circumference zero, pi reappearing in its full undefinable glory. The true circle, then, is on the level of the fractal, where the electron does not circle–for this would result in a spiral–nor does it jump sporadically. It simply is, every possibility contained in the single monad, diffracting, unfolding, inaccessible to dull measurement, uncontainable.

Logic, measurement–these are useful tools, useful modes of being, modes of escape, even. What is useless is the unconstrained all, the void where all limits break down. This is why we love it, yearn for it, even as we build walls around it, attempt to contain it in glass domes, tetrahedrons, two dimensional molecules… It is not the struggle of sanity against insanity, merely the struggle of sanity against itself. This is sanity as it maintains its circularity. Any linear movement is insanity–a decision which cannot be retracted, the individual’s collapse into a static void. Only the circle remains open through its closure–by maintaining the inertia which constantly threatens to dissolve everything.

There is no freedom because there is no escape, but there is the illusion of freedom in our protracted ignorance. Zarathustra is ashamed of his human god, the god who loses himself in his illusions. God is dead because God is the illusion; as we are in becoming, God is in dying. I wandered through a series of rooms, once there was a need for rope and upper body strength, but now they have built an elevator. And the identity of this mysterious they? Those who can act freely, because they do not see. It is not the poets, the prophets, the philosophers who build the narrative of the mystery–it is those who can only see it incompletely. But I rode the elevator to the top, it was what I felt was necessary, the logical end of my negativity. And at the top I found my good friend, though I had expected God, but I realized again there was nothing more to find. And so too in the deepest depths, as though I could still believe up and down were absolutes. Only a mirror, that echoing laughter, that graceful shrug of the shoulders.

But these zeroes and ones have been well hidden. At the periphery they disappear altogether. What is the view that looks askance self-consciously? It avoids confronting itself by confronting the confrontation, by externalization. So we spit out the world, like the dying God coughing up blood, delivering the elixir of life to man.

I strove to become the lowest common denominator–power, I wanted to have power over power. I wanted that circularity to stretch beyond infinity, into Cantor’s paradox. But I always left myself behind, and there I was, staring at the wall. There I was, chin in hand. And something was leaving me behind, was wearying itself of me. Not the expected inversion, not at all. I wanted to offer the dull challenge–torture yourself as I have tortured myself, become your own God and Devil. Now I long for a synthesis; the playful lion who will bear you on its back. But you must be ready to lead me, and not with that insipid seriousness I lost in the bucket. I want our politicians to go insane. I want the fundamentalists to realize they are nothing, that they have nothing to hope for. I want the housewives to learn to despise everything, I want the CEO’s to blow themselves up. I want to see a revolution of pure caprice.

The lesson of Christianity is that Truth is Sin. The only way to counter this overbearing grudge against existence is to declare that Sin is Love, that we sin for the sake of existence, that we kill one another, kill ourselves, for the love of life. Christ did not die for our sins, he died for his own sin. God is Sin, and this is why he had to die. But he also died through the Other’s sin, he died through the Other’s ignorance. I propose a new paradigm, a Christ who does not die for his sin, but instead kills for Sin. A Christ who kills himself, refuses to do miracles, stubbornly says ‘You are Christ, not I.’ While Zen is a slap to the face, Post-Christianity is a cold glare. It is not ironic dancing. Irony and boredom are the most disgusting attitudes. But if your disciples don’t dance you should leave them behind.

Art is stuck in dying, and this is why we must all become artists. Social relations should also be stuck in dying, life should be stuck in dying. That will justify everything, I promise.

There weren’t enough Armenians in Slough City for the town to have an Armenian church, so on odd Sundays we would go up to Fresno to attend church services and visit with Grandma and Grandpa Adroushan.

One day after church in early Autumn, Cindy and I were helping Grandpa harvest pomegranates from his garden. The fruit, like red tree ornaments, reminded Cindy and me of Christmas, which I suppose was why she announced — quite out of nowhere — that the three wise men of Christmas were in fact Armenians. Grandpa nodded and then answered, “that’s what I’ve heard”, tossing a pomegranate down to her. She caught it with his old baseball glove, smaller than modern gloves, but still far too large for her.

pomegranate arils

“… but you know that everybody hasn’t heard it,” he added.

“No,” I cut in, recalling some debates I’d had on the schoolyard.

Cindy and I had heard the story about the three Armenian wise men from Mom and Dad.

“Yes, you see,” Grandpa continued as he tossed me a pomegranate, “that was back before there were any Christians. Even Armenians weren’t Christian yet.”

“Except for the three wise men,” corrected Cindy.

“Yes, I suppose they were the first Christians,” Grandpa replied with surprise, “… the three apostles!”

Cindy and I put the pomegranates into a bucket as we caught them.

Grandpa stepped down the ladder for the last time, and grabbed a pomegranate out of the bucket. He took his shears out of his overalls and cut the stem and cap off the fruit, and said, “anyone up for a friendly game of pomeball?”

I hurried off to fetch the baseball bat.

It wasn’t long before we’d cracked it open, and we sat together in the shade of the tree, picking the red arils out of our respective shards.

Cindy looked over to Grandpa a couple times, then asked, “Grandpa, what were the wise men before they were Christians?”

“They were Magi,” I interjected in an attempt to impressed, having no idea what Magi were.

“Yes, that’s what the Bible says, Armen. They were Magi.”

Cindy asked, “is that the same as an Armenian?”

The Adoration of the Magi — Leonaert Bramer, ca. 1634.

“Not exactly,” Grandpa began, “but I hear there were many Magi in Armenia.”

I wanted to ask what these Magi were, but I was afraid to reveal my ignorance. Fortunately, Cindy asked.

“What’s a Magi?”

“I don’t know, exactly … a priest, or maybe an astrologer. At any rate, they were like our church ministers, only in that time there weren’t any churches.”

“What did they do on Sundays?,” Cindy pressed on.

“I hear that they had temples.”

Cindy paused to peel out a sheet of arils. “Is that like a church?”

“Yes, I suppose, but they had a fire on the altar, instead of a cross.”

“They didn’t have crosses back then, did they?”

“No, they sure didn’t,” Grandpa confirmed.

“But they had fire.”

“Oh, yes. The sure did.” He paused to smile. “… Your mother or father ever tell you about our name?”

“Adroushan,” Cindy answered.

“Very good, but did they ever tell you what it means?”

“I don’t think so,” I put in.

“Well, your name is a very old Armenian word that means fire temple.”

I thought that I could hazard a question. “So — our family — were they Magi, a long time ago?”

“I don’t know, Armen, but I imagine they could have been.”

Cindy ran over to the bucket to grab another ball.

A long time ago in an ancient kingdom, the young peasant decided one day to go throw rocks at the king’s castle.

As the young peasant was walking along the street with an angry look on his face, an old fellow with a big bushy mustache and a thick German accent came up to the young lad with an inquisitive look upon his face.

“And where might you be going?” asked the old man.

“I am heading to the castle to throw rocks at the king’s windows.”

“And why might you want to do that?”

“What concern of yours is it old man?” the young peasant replied.

“Ah, have you not heard of me? I am the greatest spectacle this town has ever seen. My name is Zarathustra. Many find me crazy. Many others hate me. But I hold out hope that one day someone will grasp my teachings. Until then, it is my curse to be mocked – ever since I came down the mountain to enlighten this…this…herd I have had nothing but mockery!” Zarathustra let out a frustrated laugh that made the young peasant think that this man was truly mad. “Now, let us walk to the castle to throw stones at the windows and along the way tell me why you have such a desire.”

As they walked along the path, the young peasant opened up to Zarathustra and began to tell him why he desired to throw rocks at the king’s castle. The peasant said it all began when his farm was burned to the ground five years ago. He had just inherited it from his father and was beginning to make a profit on the land when raiders from the underworld burned his crop to the ground. The king did not send an army for vengeance; in fact, the peasant theorized there was no army at all. This had happened to other farmers as well – so if there was an army, why weren’t they fighting?

The second incident that raised the ire of the young peasant was that the local town – which was supposedly under the sovereignty of the king – was left lawless. People were left to fend for themselves or to form police forces. This, however, did not stop the constant fighting, brawling, rapes, and even murders. It seemed that if the king were sovereign over such a town, certainly he would intervene to stop such lawlessness.

The third and final incident was when the young peasant passed a group of starving orphans. These children had not eaten for days, but the king’s generosity was no where to be found. The young peasant decided that the king must be responsible for these evils.

“I plan to throw a rock for each evil act I witnessed.” the young peasant said with determination.

“Ah, we shall see.” Zarathustra replied with a smile on his face.

As they walked along, the young peasant saw the gates of the castle, but did not see the tops of the castle. That is odd, he thought to himself. As they approached the gates and he peered in, he saw that there was no castle, just an empty field. What’s more is he saw there were no rocks to throw.

“I…I don’t understand…”

“Would you like me to explain this to you, or would you rather wallow in your disbelief?” Zarathustra asked almost triumphantly.

“Please…explain.”

“There is no king. The king is dead and we have killed him; we murderers of murderers. I do not mean that at some point the king existed, that we rounded him up and beheaded him and then burnt his castle; you see, that’s the great wonder, the king never existed!“

“But why would people say a king is there?” cried the young peasant.

“Don’t you see young fool? How many edicts have been passed in the name of the king? How many lords and dukes have become richer because of what they have done in the name of the king? How many other lords and dukes, because of how the nobility acted toward the king’s supposed edicts, have been overthrown by the peasantry?

That is why the “king” is there. The “king” exists solely for the purpose of people exerting their own wills. The people need such a justification.”

“But,” the young man sadly interjected. “Why not create a castle? Why not make a fake one?”

“For what reason? You cannot make what cannot exist. Do you see the beauty of this position? The Monarchists are hard pressed to answer how a good and sovereign king can exist, but evil persists within his borders. Yet, when you realize there is no king, the problem goes away.” Zarathusra said with a smile.

“No! It’s not that simple! Yes, it is hard to explain why a good king would allow destruction in his kingdom, but at least you still have a king to turn to! After seeing that there is no king, I have no grievances! I can throw no rocks! My anger over what I have seen means nothing! I have only a field of grass to answer to, a field of nothingness…” wept the peasant.

“How can I live like this?” the peasant asked after he had finished sobbing.

“If you do not like children starving, then take food from the glutton and give it to the famished. If you do not like barbarians raiding your farm, then kill the barbarians. If you do not like lawlessness, then kill the lawless.”

“But…I am a young man. I am no match for seasoned warriors.” said the distraught peasant.

“Then you must cunningly convince such people that your view of the world is superior and preferable to their view of the world. You must use your wits peasant!” Zarathustra said mockingly.

“I am but a poor peasant. I have never been educated! I have no wits, nor am I cunning.”

“Then you must deal with such a fate. If you cannot will to power your ethical views, then your ethical views do no matter. There is no king, there is no castle, and there are no stones. Any rage you feel toward what you perceive as an injustice has no more moral weight than your like of meat or the type of mattress you like to sleep on.”

“This is a nightmare! This can’t be reality! Such a world has no good or evil; how can such a world exist?” the peasant said, breaking into tears again.

Zarathustra grinned darkly, knowing he was to apply the final blow. “There are no nightmares. There are no dreams. There are simply states of consciousness. There is no good. There is no evil. There are simply acts.

Nature does not care for you. The fire that warms you and cooks your food, or it can take away all your possessions or burn you. Whether it harms you or helps you, it is indifferent. Such is nature – that is the world you have come to realize exists. There is no king to blame, no castle to deface, and no stones to throw. Likewise, there is no king to fix these problems, no solution to the problems, no place of shelter from the problems, and there are no legitimate grievances. These ‘problems’ simply are events that occur, they are not good, they are not bad, they simply are. This is the world without the king.”

With the great Iranian harvest festival approaching, I’ve got food on my mind.

Okay. I often have food on my mind.

But I’m not alone. Zoroastrians are religious about food, and who can blame them? There are, by name at least, seventeen feast days on the Zoroastrian calendar. Eight of these feasts are observed religiously. Imagine having eight Thanksgivings throughout the year!

A Tajik No Rooz feast

And no, they don’t fast.

After the harvest feast of September comes Mehregan, a particularly significant feast. It is also a harvest feast, by virtue of its placement on the second day of October. It is the Feast of Mehr, or Mithra. Mehr represents two things in the Iranian mind: ethically, faithfulness to contracts, and symbolically, the sun. Thinking of the crucial role the sun plays in the harvest, and thinking of agriculture as a crucial contract with the earth, one can easily see that Mehr is as good a celestial power as any to be recognized at the onset of Autumn.

Not to suggest that there aren’t other good times to throw a feast. The ancient Iranians also had a Spring feast, a feast for the rains, a Summer feast, a round-up feast (yes, like the cowboys have), a Winter fire feast, and an “All Souls Feast” at the year’s end.

Each Zoroastrian congregation celebrated these festivals by attending religious services early in the day, devoted always to Ahura Mazda, and then by gathering in joyful assemblies, with feasts at which food was eaten communally which had been blessed at the services. Rich and poor met together on these occasions, which were times of general goodwill, when quarrels were made up and friendships renewed and strengthened.

Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians

As I have mentioned more than once before, I was raised in an Iranian religion that has little regard for its pre-Islamic Iranian heritage. I never heard of these feasts as a Bahá’í. If my family had a feast day, that was Thanksgiving. I really liked Thanksgiving. Turkey Day was right up there with Halloween and Independence Day. Thanksgiving was one of those Western holidays that we were free to observe because of its lack of any strong ties to Christianity. It would have been a slippery slope. It seems harmless enough to have a Christmas dinner, but next thing you know you’re fasting for Ramadan. You have to nip these things in the bud!

I attended my first Zoroastrian New Year’s (No Rooz) celebration last Spring, and I’ve been meaning to write something down about what a pleasant experience it was. I went to the fire temple first, with no real intention of joining the festivities in the community hall. I enjoy the fire temple, and I’d go much more often if it were in a more convenient location. It’s a quiet, casual experience. One is expected to remove one’s shoes and wear a cap, but that’s not much to ask. I wouldn’t be comfortable tracking dirt in there anyway, and though the cap is a bit formal for my general liking, it gives me a comfortable sense of—how should I put it—spiritual discipline.

As for the festivities, well, I’m hesitant to jump into the fray with a lot of Iranian strangers (and thus they’ve remained strangers over the years), but once invited, I generally enjoy myself. And what’s not to like? Good food, song, dance, and conversation.

Someone’s bound to point out that Bahá’ís do have observances which they call “feasts”. The Bahá’í Calendar features nineteen meetings which they call “Nineteen Day Feasts.” These Bahá’í “feasts” may have been originally inspired by Iranian culture, but they have little in common with Zoroastrian feasts, or any other traditional feast, for that matter: Bahá’í “feasts” are not really feasts at all.

The 19-day Feast is administrative in function …

Shoghi Effendi, Directives from the Guardian

The Bahá’í feast is primarily an administrative event. It does generally include food in its “social portion” as any good committee meeting would, but the meeting is generally a rather exclusive affair, being limited to Bahá’ís who have not lost their administrative rights, hence these Bahá’í feasts tend to exclude non-Bahá’ís and Bahá’ís without said administrative rights.

The Zoroastrian feasts are quite literally feasts; traditionally an opportunity for the fortunate to share the bounty of their good fortune with the less fortunate. The Bahá’í feast, though it generally involves food, is more often described as a feast of spiritual sustenance — in a distinctively administrative sense so characteristic of Bahá’í practice.

Further Reading

John Walbridge, The Nineteen Day Feast

The Heritage Institute: Gahambar

With the great Iranian harvest festival approaching, I’ve got food on my mind.

Okay. I often have food on my mind.

But I’m not alone. Zoroastrians are religious about food, and who can blame them? There are, by name at least, seventeen feast days on the Zoroastrian calendar. Eight of these feasts are observed religiously. Imagine having eight Thanksgivings throughout the year!

A Tajik No Rooz feast

And no, they don’t fast.

After the harvest feast of September comes Mehregan, a particularly significant feast. It is also a harvest feast, by virtue of its placement on the second day of October. It is the Feast of Mehr, or Mithra. Mehr represents two things in the Iranian mind: ethically, faithfulness to contracts, and symbolically, the sun. Thinking of the crucial role the sun plays in the harvest, and thinking of agriculture as a crucial contract with the earth, one can easily see that Mehr is as good a celestial power as any to be recognized at the onset of Autumn.

Not to suggest that there aren’t other good times to throw a feast. The ancient Iranians also had a Spring feast, a feast for the rains, a Summer feast, a round-up feast (yes, like the cowboys have), a Winter fire feast, and an “All Souls Feast” at the year’s end.

Each Zoroastrian congregation celebrated these festivals by attending religious services early in the day, devoted always to Ahura Mazda, and then by gathering in joyful assemblies, with feasts at which food was eaten communally which had been blessed at the services. Rich and poor met together on these occasions, which were times of general goodwill, when quarrels were made up and friendships renewed and strengthened.

Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians

As I have mentioned more than once before, I was raised in an Iranian religion that has little regard for its pre-Islamic Iranian heritage. I never heard of these feasts as a Bahá’í. If my family had a feast day, that was Thanksgiving. I really liked Thanksgiving. Turkey Day was right up there with Halloween and Independence Day. Thanksgiving was one of those Western holidays that we were free to observe because of its lack of any strong ties to Christianity. It would have been a slippery slope. It seems harmless enough to have a Christmas dinner, but next thing you know you’re fasting for Ramadan. You have to nip these things in the bud!

I attended my first Zoroastrian New Year’s (No Rooz) celebration last Spring, and I’ve been meaning to write something down about what a pleasant experience it was. I went to the fire temple first, with no real intention of joining the festivities in the community hall. I enjoy the fire temple, and I’d go much more often if it were in a more convenient location. It’s a quiet, casual experience. One is expected to remove one’s shoes and wear a cap, but that’s not much to ask. I wouldn’t be comfortable tracking dirt in there anyway, and though the cap is a bit formal for my general liking, it gives me a comfortable sense of—how should I put it—spiritual discipline.

As for the festivities, well, I’m hesitant to jump into the fray with a lot of Iranian strangers (and thus they’ve remained strangers over the years), but once invited, I generally enjoy myself. And what’s not to like? Good food, song, dance, and conversation.

Someone’s bound to point out that Bahá’ís do have observances which they call “feasts”. The Bahá’í Calendar features nineteen meetings which they call “Nineteen Day Feasts.” These Bahá’í “feasts” may have been originally inspired by Iranian culture, but they have little in common with Zoroastrian feasts, or any other traditional feast, for that matter: Bahá’í “feasts” are not really feasts at all.

The 19-day Feast is administrative in function …

Shoghi Effendi, Directives from the Guardian

The Bahá’í feast is primarily an administrative event. It does generally include food in its “social portion” as any good committee meeting would, but the meeting is generally a rather exclusive affair, being limited to Bahá’ís who have not lost their administrative rights, hence these Bahá’í feasts tend to exclude non-Bahá’ís and Bahá’ís without said administrative rights.

The Zoroastrian feasts are quite literally feasts; traditionally an opportunity for the fortunate to share the bounty of their good fortune with the less fortunate. The Bahá’í feast, though it generally involves food, is more often described as a feast of spiritual sustenance — in a distinctively administrative sense so characteristic of Bahá’í practice.

Further Reading

John Walbridge, The Nineteen Day Feast

The Heritage Institute: Gahambar

With the great Iranian harvest festival approaching, I’ve got food on my mind.

Okay. I often have food on my mind.

But I’m not alone. Zoroastrians are religious about food, and who can blame them? There are, by name at least, seventeen feast days on the Zoroastrian calendar. Eight of these feasts are observed religiously. Imagine having eight Thanksgivings throughout the year!

A Tajik No Rooz feast

And no, they don’t fast.

After the harvest feast of September comes Mehregan, a particularly significant feast. It is also a harvest feast, by virtue of its placement on the second day of October. It is the Feast of Mehr, or Mithra. Mehr represents two things in the Iranian mind: ethically, faithfulness to contracts, and symbolically, the sun. Thinking of the crucial role the sun plays in the harvest, and thinking of agriculture as a crucial contract with the earth, one can easily see that Mehr is as good a celestial power as any to be recognized at the onset of Autumn.

Not to suggest that there aren’t other good times to throw a feast. The ancient Iranians also had a Spring feast, a feast for the rains, a Summer feast, a round-up feast (yes, like the cowboys have), a Winter fire feast, and an “All Souls Feast” at the year’s end.

Each Zoroastrian congregation celebrated these festivals by attending religious services early in the day, devoted always to Ahura Mazda, and then by gathering in joyful assemblies, with feasts at which food was eaten communally which had been blessed at the services. Rich and poor met together on these occasions, which were times of general goodwill, when quarrels were made up and friendships renewed and strengthened.

Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians

As I have mentioned more than once before, I was raised in an Iranian religion that has little regard for its pre-Islamic Iranian heritage. I never heard of these feasts as a Bahá’í. If my family had a feast day, that was Thanksgiving. I really liked Thanksgiving. Turkey Day was right up there with Halloween and Independence Day. Thanksgiving was one of those Western holidays that we were free to observe because of its lack of any strong ties to Christianity. It would have been a slippery slope. It seems harmless enough to have a Christmas dinner, but next thing you know you’re fasting for Ramadan. You have to nip these things in the bud!

I attended my first Zoroastrian New Year’s (No Rooz) celebration last Spring, and I’ve been meaning to write something down about what a pleasant experience it was. I went to the fire temple first, with no real intention of joining the festivities in the community hall. I enjoy the fire temple, and I’d go much more often if it were in a more convenient location. It’s a quiet, casual experience. One is expected to remove one’s shoes and wear a cap, but that’s not much to ask. I wouldn’t be comfortable tracking dirt in there anyway, and though the cap is a bit formal for my general liking, it gives me a comfortable sense of—how should I put it—spiritual discipline.

As for the festivities, well, I’m hesitant to jump into the fray with a lot of Iranian strangers (and thus they’ve remained strangers over the years), but once invited, I generally enjoy myself. And what’s not to like? Good food, song, dance, and conversation.

Someone’s bound to point out that Bahá’ís do have observances which they call “feasts”. The Bahá’í Calendar features nineteen meetings which they call “Nineteen Day Feasts.” These Bahá’í “feasts” may have been originally inspired by Iranian culture, but they have little in common with Zoroastrian feasts, or any other traditional feast, for that matter: Bahá’í “feasts” are not really feasts at all.

The 19-day Feast is administrative in function …

Shoghi Effendi, Directives from the Guardian

The Bahá’í feast is primarily an administrative event. It does generally include food in its “social portion” as any good committee meeting would, but the meeting is generally a rather exclusive affair, being limited to Bahá’ís who have not lost their administrative rights, hence these Bahá’í feasts tend to exclude non-Bahá’ís and Bahá’ís without said administrative rights.

The Zoroastrian feasts are quite literally feasts; traditionally an opportunity for the fortunate to share the bounty of their good fortune with the less fortunate. The Bahá’í feast, though it generally involves food, is more often described as a feast of spiritual sustenance — in a distinctively administrative sense so characteristic of Bahá’í practice.

Further Reading

John Walbridge, The Nineteen Day Feast

The Heritage Institute: Gahambar

Bei iranian.com schreibt Manouchehr Saadat Noury über die ältesten persischen Dichter. Es beginnt beim Avesta, dem heiligen Buch der Zoroastrier. Die Kapitel 28-53 der Yasnas, der älteste Teil des Textes, enthalten die Gathas (Gedichte und Lieder), die einzigen erhaltenen direkten Zeugnisse der von Zarathustra gelehrten Religion. Es sind 17 von ihm geschriebene Hymnen, die von den Zoroastriern getreulich überliefert wurden. Zarathustras mündlich verbreitete Lehren wurden von Generation zu Generation überliefert und in der Sassanidenzeit in mittelpersischer Sprache (Pahlavi ) aufgezeichnet.
Während der Herrschaft der Sassaniden (226-642 uZ) standen Hofdichter oder -musiker wie Baarbod, Nakissa und Raamtin in hohem Ansehen. Baarbod, der berühmteste unter ihnen, soll ein musikalisches System aus sieben königlichen Tonarten, 30 sekundären Tonarten und 360 Melodien erfunden haben. Er schrieb viele Gedichte, von denen keines überliefert ist.
In der frühislamischen Zeit gibt es noch zahlreiche Verweise auf die Lieder von Baarbod und Nakisa, und es gibt Hinweise darauf, daß Baarbods Verse damals veröffentlicht wurden. Ende des 4. oder Anfang des 5. Jahrhunderts lebte Mujladi (oder Makhlidi) Gurgani (MDG). Eins seiner Gedichte bezeugt die Bedeutung der Poesie in der Sassanidenzeit:

Unter den Freuden der Welt
die von den Sassaniden und Samaniden auf uns kamen
Sind die Gedichte Rudakis zu Lob und Ruhm
Und die Lieder Baarbods und der Kanarienvögel.*

Der Verfasser weist auch darauf hin, daß die ersten Versuche, nach der arabischen Invasion die persische Sprache und Literatur wiederzubeleben, in Gedichten erfolgten.
(* of Baarbod and canaries, ??)

“Gospel of Relaxation” admonishes us to lighten and loosen up. It does not, however, urge movement toward “Wall-e” world or anything like it, a lubberland of happiness (James calls it somewhere) in which strength and musculature have become irrelevant and otiose. The point of relaxing is not to make us softer and more comfortable, but to enhance the quality of the passing moment and shore up our store of effective force for the future.

…the environment [according to some futurists] will more and more require mental power from us, and less and less will ask for bare brute strength. Wars will cease, machines will do all our heavy work, man will become more and more a mere director of nature’s energies, and less and less an exerter of energy on his own account. So that, if the homo sapiens of the future can only digest his food and think, what need will he have of well-developed muscles at all?

…I have heard a fanciful friend make a still further advance in this ‘new-man’ direction. With our future food, he says, itself prepared in liquid form from the chemical elements of the atmosphere, pepsinated or half-digested in advance, and sucked up through a glass tube from a tin can, what need shall we have of teeth, or stomachs even? They may go, along with our muscles and our physical courage, while, challenging ever more and more our proper admiration, will grow the gigantic domes of our crania, arching over our spectacled eyes, and animating our flexible little lips to those floods of learned and ingenious talk which will constitute our most congenial occupation.

I am sure that your flesh creeps at this apocalyptic vision…

Yes. But haven’t we made significant, alarming strides in this very direction since James spoke those words in 1892? And since Nietzsche’s “last men,” blinking in bovine contentment, declared that they had found ultimate happiness? That, surely, is  not the brand of happiness we need to pursue. What, then?

We previously reflected upon the intimate, multifaceted relationship between ancient man and fire, and considered how easy it would have been for a man such as Heraclitus to conceive of the idea that fire is the fundamental constituent of all matter.

Heraclitus was, after all, a subject of the Persian Empire, a land of fire worship, and the reputed cradle of alchemy. Alchemy is a practice of transmuting matter that depends greatly upon fire. It seems to be a natural—albeit mystical—offspring of the bronze age.

Perhaps after recognizing the ubiquity of fire, Heraclitus reflected upon the nature of fire, and came to this conclusion:

Burning Man effigy, Black Rock City, Nevada

fire is hunger and satiety.

—Heraclitus

Fire is indeed a hungry phenomenon. It seems to exist exclusively to consume, though the light and heat it has provided us through the millennia make it much more than a consumer. Yet it remains an archetype of consumption. Is not combustion the primal hunger within us? Is it not our deepest physiological craving for the fuels of combustion: oxygen and carbon compounds?

But fire is obviously not equal to hunger, for as consumption, it is also the satisfaction of its hunger.

Seeing everything around us as governed by this paradox, one can easily see the function of fire in the philosophy of Heraclitus. Heraclitus taught that the world is governed by a harmony of opposites. Recognizing that harmony, he saw wisdom in the working of things, but it was a harmony of war, of hunger. Whatever equilibrium he could see was a dynamic, cyclic equilibrium under tension. To Heraclitus, fire must have seemed fundamental both literally and metaphorically.