When Nietzsche mused that thought can be found in growing crystal, indeed that thought can be found everywhere there is movement, however slight, he was not glorifying thought and turning it into a tyrant of a presence, but humbling thought, bringing thought–because we must think, yes, perhaps crystal-like, to read the passage–to learn of itself, to think of itself in its slight creeping movements. The stone, what seems rigid, cold, and thoughtless compared to the glorious fire of thought, still has, in its manner of movement, its slow shifting, thoughts, character and life. There are beginnings, as there are ends, to thought that are in these slight, and for us imperceptible movements. It is to our own detriment when we forget or neglect these movements–our thought becomes more impoverished, more thoughtless thereby.
She even went so far as to say The blankets are cold, and she shivered as she spoke the trembling words, holding onto the blankets’ corners like they were a shield, defending her from some icy chimera. We had lost power a fortnight ago, suddenly, due to some attack thirty or so kilometers from here, at the coal plant, when the hooded figure of winter was just about to give us a frozen run to secure our temperatures and about to hit us hard, stealing warmness from us like a skilled, swift, and determined thief. We did best as we could to mirror what the world had been before when the furnaces were on full blast, attempting to block off the cracks and passageways of the house through which the frigid breath of the outdoors could thread themselves. Nine blankets we had found scattered throughout the rooms of the house, our poor and cracked, brittle house, and she had taken all of them. At first she had thanked me, and curled up into the blanket like a satisfied kitten. But after a few days of this hopelessness set in, a hopelessness merely translated into lack of heat, a hopelessness come to in looking out to the unlit horizon and finding no alternative to today and its powerlessness. I’m cold, she would say now, even when my body took to the covers with her and held her through the night, pressing flesh to flesh, she would complain I’m cold, and getting colder.
One morning beside her bed–I had woken early to fetch for her what nonperishable breakfast I could find for her in our cupboards; finding them was hard in the flickering of the lamps we had placed in even distances from one another throughout the house–I said to her after serving her, as she was taking her shaking hands from underneath the layers of cloth, I don’t know what else I could do, treasure of mine. Whatever you think would help, whatever you can think of that will ease the frost, that I’ll do, I said, as she reached a stiff hand towards the tray with the plates and her cold coffee, took hold of a piece of untoasted bread, brought it to her mouth and removed from the slice a crumb the size a snow-blasted bird would take from its grains and seeds. She said, dropping the toast on the tray because of her unsteadiness, I’m so cold I cannot chew. Cold myself, but with enough heat in the moment to become frustrated, I stripped myself of my sweater, then stripped myself of my longsleeve, then stripped myself of my undershirt and draped all three across my wife’s body, hardened like a crystal with unflowing geode stones for blood. A bit better, yes, thank you, honey, a bit better, she squinted up at her more-than-half-naked husband and thanked him through her chattering teeth, since she was shivering none the less. Shivering and agitated all over, over my whole surface and throughout my entire insides too, rocked by the cold and its hardness towards me, rocked by her too and her indifference to my comfort, I still loved her, for all her iciness, more than I loved the morning bitterness, and more still than the deep freeze of the night. Continued loving her, I guess, because she gave me something to do when everything else seemed stock stiff and stuck in its place. That and the warmth she gave me, that other warmed, the warmth she gave me in goading me on, to give, to give to her, like that. We followed days upon days of this, this impossible reciprocity, and endured the nights along with them, she complaining, I uncomplaining, adjusting to the habits we had to form, each in a singular fashion, to the loss of homeostasis, to the loss of the protection of fire or stove or heater when the warmth of the world had run out, when it was too cold for mere blankets.
One night–perhaps a week of nights had passed since that morning I had stripped myself of my best clothing to give my perpetually shaking lover–the lights turned on at once throughout the house, as though all directed to do so at the same time, flicked on by a merciful hand, the lights came on and the furnace downstairs kicked on too, with a little tender prodding from me, it started breathing tenderly again. Come upstairs after a few minutes of tinkering with the cylinder in the basement, the house already losing its bite and sting and losing it more, softening and warming steadily, I returned to the room to rejoice with my wife. Still in covers, still covered up nine times over and unreasonably, I shook my head as I walked closer up to her. Tell you what, treasure of mine, I think you can take off those blankets. But, warm as it was–I even began to sweat and feel uncomfortable in my change of clothes–she didn’t reply with so much as a Yeah or Uh-huh, not so much as a I noticed to, a loving gesture of removing just one blanket from the nine-folds of her shield. Tess, I called out her name, bent down and held her cheek in the palm of my hand: cold, gone away to the cold, lost to the cold. It was sad, and I cried and cried for days before I could manage to move, cried warm tears soaking through all nine layers of her envelope. At the same time, though, it was not surprising, and the death, horrible as it was, seemed fitting, the world as cold as it was then, and remained, and remains–monstrously cold.
What is the world doing right now? What power does it serve? Who are you within it? Is the world a person, or made up of persons? Does the world have a heart, or any blood? Save the wasted-unanswered blood of ignored flesh? Does the world care about flesh, or have any flesh? Has the world become a deadened artefact? Should we laugh at the world, despair at it? Laugh in despair? Triumphant despair? Defeated despair? Is it time to become otherworldly, condemn the world again? Should this world be destroyed before it gulps us, before it mutes us, before it erases us? Does the world have a voice, does the world care about the lack of voice? Does the world have ears? Does it hear the unheard-of tear the voiceless' screams make through all things? Is the world a thing, or is it a person? Is it made of souls or some humiliating cheap material? Does it have a heart?
Their faces never looked worse Than when they were lost, Reading the prompts like letters from god But no god there, Not in these thunderstorm worries Of death here or loss and death there No, the god still laughs and dances Over our faithlessness, laughs In the smallest things, in the invisible, Tells the lame to walk, Laughs in the facelessness of viruses.
They were all afraid and angry; the sun followed them in fear, anger turning a dark red before setting for good for better For worse things have happened he said trying to console them but no one knew how to respond to the angry, fearful sun, its rays were not the same old rays showering them with inspiration to praise the day no, they were murksome and taught them to be murksome, fearsome too, burning like fire does, unforgiving leaving a mark on everything, even water, which it marks as mist, sending it up up up, maybe, if thirsty life is lucky, sending it back down to replenish what has been left as a desert. So they burned and burned away, they learned, they learned-- nothing of the scorched lands surrounding them, and it was too late, so everything burned, sense itself turned into a fine white-gray-black dust, they didn’t know what they were saying anymore, the sensible trust in one-after-another was lost, there would instead flare up, suddenly, sporadically like the pain and pleasure of a baby small and deadly large fires, everyone’s feet were hungry for the cool places under shade, or for those places where the water sprays and stays, like a parade where the water’s used and used up to no one’s care because there’s plenty, or like a swimming pool, that honorarium of wastefulness and luxury, or for any place where the pads of the feet could not feel seared, but no, fire is what we got and more fire, as though we were to learn what is ever behind our gadgetry-- for we have become a veritable terrarium of the far-reaching life of technology-- fire and ever fire, old tales of fire and conquests and fires sealing the elements with its power, fires helping us shape metals and stone until it burns us in turn, burns us first down to the bone, then, again--always--down to the fine powder, the powder one leans down to and rubs between his thumb and fingers, unaware that there was once, at this very spot, this meager plot of land-- perhaps it is his backyard, or the edge of a parking lot-- someone fought a good fight, not for the good but for something, something that ignited them, turned those powder kegs into the dust and terrible bits always left behind after an explosion.
Sarcasm, deadly serious. Thank you, capitalism and its proponents, for squandering generation after generation of the human future. Surely, we could have conceived of nothing better!
I looked behind sleep and heard a collective gasp, felt a collective shudder and rumble, saw the collective tears running.
There I saw the celebrations, the shameful, shameless, earth-rattling celebrations, the confused, cacophonous celebration.
I even saw the defeated one cry as though she had relation with the truly defeated, dear, sincere tears.
The man became a giant, at his feet were cunning, or dismayed men and women scrambling for that old sense.
That old sense of decorum, of Everything-is-put-together, that sign that it’s not time to worry, rest easy, take it easy.
What we knew would not happen did not happen, he said, he attempted to calm the outcry of so many in one place.
Now they are scattered from town to city to state making their own rattle, fighting for their very lives.
Fighting for their lives with those who are playing with their lives; this adds to the unease, you see, Character matters.
And Black and brown lives matter and the lives of women matter and children, the children, the children matter and the lives of the white man.
The lives of white women and children and the women, children, men of those seeking asylum, or those whose god is brown or without image.
You see it and your seeing it matters, the flag in burnt tatters, everything that matters in tatters and a land made of blue and red cloth.
I saw the tearful, fearful, parading, quick-trading, mournful, scornful, hating demonstrating ones hurrying around confused.
Dismayed and scurrying on the quiet ground of a planet that gives us our absurdities and quickly ferments them.
Ferments them into a cocktail, perhaps the one named after Russia, perhaps a Molotov cocktail, perhaps a cocktail of cement.
A thick cocktail not everyone can stomach, the rich and with them those with enough leisure to try the latest drinks.
But the children, the children will always be there, no matter whose children unaware if just what they are being flung into.
It is a flinging, what we do with the helpless children, to think of them singing, in protest, with their own voices!
After anything that resembles a choice is stripped from them, when they are flung as far as we can fling!
They still sing, the children! After being ripped from the warm womb and thrown with haste into a tomb, they have such powerful voices!
We must learn to sing from them! These little ones are prancing around and will teach us a thing or two about dancing on fire, or over jagged stone!
They will not only see the fight, but fight the fight to the terror and bewilderment of the old makeup of the establishment.
Establishment, they’ll say and shout, some unsure just what establishment, what of the many useful and useless establishments are being shouted about.
We found out she has a lot of clout, he said as he spread his butter over the Italian loaf, but not enough to boast about.
Now we roast her, now we get her the crud comes from the spout, and it was a dream of shame a sham dream of shame.
The lame observers could find nothing, not on an earth which calls for so much, with perpetual dignity, nothing better than bicker at flickering screens.
They were so mean to her, some said with indignation, we needed the other guy, some cried out with frustration.
But the entire nation, whether in elation or a crushing sense of damnation, were tracing the steps forward and back, some fell.
Some fell and we couldn’t tell, when we would bend down close and ask them, what they were saying, what the objection was, was it the injustice, was it just a trend?
Was it another trend to follow amidst the many trends, were we sending ourselves into civil war like a lonely star sends its light?
Does anyone know, the pundits, the analysts, even the wise know what happened at that time at night when so many watched, but so many slept?
When I couldn’t sleep: I had dreamed before and had to witness what’s in store; I had to see the faces, and hear the unsure voices.
But finally I slept and woke to a world of violence, to a world of uncertainty, to a world whose children are crying, fighting.
In my dream there was a painting of striking detail: the girl, the boat sailing off into the distance, the tail of a whale pointing like a two-pronged fork into the midday sky, held by a hungry churning god who didn’t die, the canvas of golden, sparkling sand, the beach where the girl was standing and from which there also stood the bodiless eyes looking at the scene at once serene and thunderous, as they waited for that whale’s tail to clap down hard on the glassy waters, sending up shards of glitter into the air, onto the girl’s skin and the boat, into the eyes, the bodiless eyes, looking out.
The painter was there, too, she said It drew itself as she took a pen from the shelf near the wall we were observing and directed me, with the pen, from the bottom left to the top right of the canvas, a line that did no curving but was straight like a string pulled taut between two posts. This line, she said, as she tilted her head to follow the thread was the the beginning in time of the painting, and from there followed everything; from there the world followed in shades, lines, colors, perspectives.
This was incentive enough to begin a play; I borrowed her technique of starting with a line that would stretch from one corner of the drama away to the other, which I found unique. I did not require character or plot or setting, anything of the sort but one rough line; that would grant the play its time, would be the begetting of its world: from a line straight and direct, which would unfurl its actions, its plot and players. Without discovering who he or she was I set out to find what the suffering one would say, because they all suffer, that is sure, but what would the suffering say to begin and reach the end of a world, an entire play?
What line would be perfect? What line would protect the play, along with the readers, viewers, hearers from falling too quickly into disillusionment? What would keep enchantment from leaving, keep the fermentation of vision from prematurely aging, uncaging great things but patiently, slowly? I pondered such racking questions and it began to grow from me, the line he or she would pronounce at the play’s opening, and a line to keep one going on to its end. Already, when the words arrived, there came alive the same salty mist, the sky so blue at midday, the rocking setting of the play. I heard a player say: What a glorious, yet ominous day!
We are wrong when we want to shatter others’ illusions. All this means is that we have found a way to shatter others’ illusions and not our own, to shatter others but not ourselves.
Nothing to see here We ask you not to see them Based on a not seeing from long ago We all pretended in that far-off time And then our pretending became Reality all horrifying and pernicious The lack of faces, the lack of flesh Or a lack of certain faces Of certain flesh
It’s amazing, but sometimes we do not notice the worst in our lives until we are sufficiently distanced from them, until we step back from them, as it were, and give them their space. We give them their space so that they may–continue doing what they do best, doing what they have done, remaining in their rut. So it is not out of bitterness that we must take leave sometimes; it is simply, or utterly, because we have been called somewhere else, in order to give our energies there for a while, as we gave our energies formerly to our former lives, our former projects and friends, our former ambitions and ways of filling our days. But then–we look back. We look back on what we were for a time; indeed, we look back on what we are still partly carrying with us into the future, what we seem not to be able to completely shake off; we look back on it as on a faraway stage-set and we mutter to ourselves, or our heart putters with what nobility it has left in its arteries, How poor! How stupid! How could I? This life, as we have lived it and still partly live, we realize is all poverty and filth and wretched contentment, just as Nietzsche warned. He warned, but said as well that such a time is our greatest hour, the time of the great contempt. The great contempt as self-contempt blending into world-contempt, as, like any strong curse, like Job’s curse at the day he was born, it realizes the infamy of a world that breeds such contempt, or, conversely, it realizes its complicity with the world, or with the highest, what is even over in above the world, with God Godself, in relation to this infamy. The infamy is as much the world as his, as much God’s as the world’s and his, so the contempt spreads accordingly. Nietzsche, however, refused to take our commonsense leanings and proclaim such a spell of contempt the uttermost of undesirability. No, such contempt turns out to be, or can turn out to be, our greatest hour, the hour when we may turn, after looking back (or perhaps we will discover that we should not look back), to a life that, to quote Nietzsche again, justifies existence itself.
The greatest suffering teaches us to so turn in our hearts, as Job turned in his, notwithstanding, almost in defiance of, his innocence. But Job was in the mire of his suffering and right in the thick of it; as Alphonso Lingis describes suffering phenomenologically in his work, suffering is this being imprisoned in oneself and as though backed up into a corner, only able to scream or cry or curse or prostrate in helplessness in deafening silence from this vantage. We are speaking of a different phenomenon from Job’s, the different suffering that can breed contempt as wholeheartedly, the one brought by this distancing, this looking-back or at least this taking-leave, the phenomenon Nietzsche was probably more readily after in the aforementioned passage from Zarathustra or other such passages, hinting in a similar direction. What is it that has us take leave sometimes, and what is it that gives us the sense that that life from which we have taken leave is worse than the life toward which we are beckoned and are now traveling, is, perhaps, in all honesty, worst, at least worst yet? Could we be mistaken at such times and in such contempt, despite the long time it has taken us to reach this perspective, this vantage from which our lives before look meager or poor or–plain stupid?
To begin with the second question: In such times as these, as these we have been considering, the hours of our great contempt, mistakes, failing and faltering, is the name of the game; we cannot escape the sheer possibility of being mistaken, even in our greatest commitments and turns or movements, perhaps especially there–definitely especially there. But this does not eliminate from our insight the phenomenon of growth, since growth, indeed, is perspectival and a MANNER OF MOVEMENT, a WAY OF BEING in relation to other ways of being, before anything else. It still makes sense, despite this perspectival relativization, this thorough perspectivization, of our practices and the ways we take our course through life, to speak of one course being more worthy than the other. Especially when these perspectives which can widen and shrink, which can overcome and be overcome, especially when it is their chief concern to make such judgments, and find themselves at their best. At their best, at their maximum, at the point precisely when they are ready to leave this maximum behind, for another game, for another shot at praising life, affirming life in its grandeur. For it is just this grandeur, the incredible diversity and magnitude that go to make up the fabric of life, weaving and counter-weaving with one another, that goaded him on and got him to see, when it goaded him a good enough distance, that his life, even at its high-point, was small, all-too-human, small and pathetic. To see this former life as worse, or worst, though, is again not to see it in bitterness, for the direction of this contemptful glance is for the better, the best, the unspoken future which whispers to today with challenges, yes, but also with promises and tender kisses. Partnered with life in such a way, we promise back, catapult ourselves into this tomorrow with what we have learned today and yesterday, only with what we have learned, what can be made into the best and not, as we are wont, with its sad notes and gloomy tinny singing. It is growth when we realize the turn off the road we have taken AS just such a turn, when we see the dead-end of the road we have traveled until now, or when we see that there are avenues besides the one we are treading.
But can’t it be that you turn–into disaster? That the road you leave behind was the better, and you turn, despite all your confidence, only to plummet off any ground, only to break into pieces? Because you didn’t realize why that way had been closed off to you to begin with, you didn’t read the signs with anything of perceptiveness, even though they were right before you. Again, although when put in this manner the objection gains in strength and vividness, we have approached the matter already, and have given a sufficient response: what grows is thoroughly and essentially perspectival, and these perspectives, the multiplicity of perspectives that grow and change always in relation to one another, cannot help but be valuative. Such is there direction and their way of being what they are. Mistakes are precisely not ignored; indeed, the perspectivism of existence calls for them–growth, in other words, is ridden with mistakes, sometimes of the most dreadful sort.
To approach the first question, though, of what gets us into this business of overcoming ourselves to begin with, what makes us see an avenue when we might otherwise not and go on walking our contented walk: What calls us, in other words, to this alternative life, this option for a new or different way of living? We have already seen, though we have not said it as explicitly: life itself. Life itself, its diversity and multiplicity, the way in which it is many and at the same time many of different sorts and classes and manners, this, this complexity mixed with sheer number, with quantity, has poked us in the direction of overcoming ourselves, overcoming, taking leave and surmounting, our former lives, even the former grounds of our lives (to approach, indirectly, part of the concern riddling the objection above). Why, or for what, Warum oder Wozu? Because–we must pause because it is so hard to be strict here; perhaps there are other spurs to the turn we imagine, Job’s spur to start–because of their smallness, their meagerness, their filth and self-contentment, because of how they imagine that they had arrived at final answers, at finality, when they hadn’t, when the game, the child’s game, still goes on. Contempt, therefore, as both danger, a night, and calling itself, a day, itself, as the lowest hour and the highest. Contempt itself calls us to maximize ourselves not as a better version of what we have been hitherto, but a better version in respect to a visionary sense of life, for life, for which our highest standards and achievements, our greatest practices and ways of life, are but pawns or dice-rolls, part of an adventure, but a small part, the dust beneath the hero’s feet. And the hero is life. Always life, but in this case especially.
The hero is life and life in its courage, if we may dare to continue in our anthropomorphizing, life itself all courage and no fear, it seems, as though she wishes to counter the Socratic argument, goes forth wastefully and with a grand accounting beyond reckoning and, like the God of old, only so much more explicit, with so much more bone and muscle and flesh, pushes us to become just like her, like a terrifying mother, forces us into love of her, and therefore love of ourselves, love of all things; slams the door shut on us behind us, so that we HAVE to keep going, through whatever maze lies before us, so that we HAVE to keep twisting down its corridors–and be thankful for it, no less.
Love the Dust 