# 28. Nietzsche Who?

Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box; Religion is the smile on a dog. In other words, never look a gift horse in the mouth.

Art Cris Tosik / Le Document

God is dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?

- The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882.

A young communist sympathiser I met at a party a very long time ago said they preferred ‘Nietzsche Who?’ people over the other kind. (Nietzsche Who? people, I was told, said ‘Who?’ when you said, ‘Nietzsche’. The other kind, as I was yet to learn, said ‘God is Dead’.)

All I knew then was that Nietzsche was a Very Important Philosopher with a big moustache and an unspellable, unpronounceable name. (Neat-ché? Neh-chee? नीचे?). I wasn’t sure if this made me a Nietzsche Who? person or a God is Dead person, and I am still not sure.

But what I am sure of now is that I don’t care so much anymore. As Popeye The Sailor Man (my Existentialist of choice), said: “I yam what I yam!”. Back then though, feeling stupid, and for fear I’d encounter the communist sympathiser again, I went home and opened a book. And thus spake Zarathustra:

There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.

- Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1883.

What a relief! Nietzsche himself with his big brain understood that the intellect would only get me that far. I didn’t have to read all those books! I could skip a few pages. Or chapters. I could live a life! Which is what have I done. But the question has remained with me: With Him dead, what - if anything - can fill the god-shaped hole? That nauseating sense that life had no meaning? That the world was a hoax?

Nietzsche, for all his effort, eventually went mad and died himself. Some say from too much empathy, others say from syphilis. To add insult to injury, Elisabeth, his Nazi sister took over his estate and Hitler stole his Übermensch. If all that could happen to Friedrich, what hope in Hell is there for the rest of us?

Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

- Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886.

Never look a gift horse in the mouth? Nietzsche and the flogged Turin Horse that supposedly brought on his final psychic break. Art by Mitchell Nolte

Now, Older Budweiser, I think I may have a part answer: A few years ago I discovered that with a little effort, I could hold my thoughts and feelings at arm’s length - like a crystal ball. If I looked at them (the annoying, the unwanted, the ugly, the frightening) with curiosity, with compassion, off they would go to wherever they came from. And in their place would come… Nothing.

If this was ‘detachment’ and detachment was nihilistic, pessimistic, ‘bad’… why did it feel so good? Why did I come out feeling… well, divine? In the gap I was ‘under no obligation to be the same person I was five minutes ago’, said Alan Watts. So I was no one. I was everyone. Maybe I was ‘One With Everything’! Maybe I had stumbled upon the god-shaped hole!

In the hole, the gap, the abyss - or rose by any other name - however fleetingly, it is (sometimes) possible to be free from Tweedledum and Tweedledee, those bumbling idiots - Thoughts and Feelings. In the gap, everything becomes illuminated. When it does (which it doesn’t always), we can come back to the world less fragmented, more whole.

What if Nietzsche had been taught this trick under a bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya, instead of viewing it through Schopenhauer’s lens in the libraries of Leipzig? What if he had found wisdom ‘in his body’ before he collapsed in Turin from his mind’s despair? What if he had seen that when Science murdered god, perhaps it left a Whole, not a Hole? And what if he told Freud, Satre and his other fans about it - would post-god Europe have found itself up shit creek with a paddle?

But, I digress…

So, what’s this post about? I think it’s about civilisation’s unfinished business with Nietzsche, and my bewilderment that the Mother of all Life Hacks - one that has been around for thousands and thousands of years - is not taught to us as children, during the ‘Education’ thrust upon us for our ‘future success’! In the madness of modern life, in this glut of information filled with half-truths and lies, why isn’t Mindfulness (or ‘Mindlessness’) on the curriculum?

Is it just because it is a slippery fish, hard to catch? It is true a momentary glimpse at the corridor between You and Me doesn’t guarantee a hall pass forever. But just knowing it is there is a kind of Salvation. So. I guess this is a public service announcement: Ego is the Enemy, but all we need to defeat it is to place a little cushion under our ass and plug into the Universe every once in a while.

What if everyone dived into the god-shaped hole? Would we stop falling off cliffs? Would we show up en masse at the lūʻau with a peace pipe to share our piece of the pie? Would it be the end of the War?! Naive? Maybe. But for those of us watching the shitshow 24X7, if the alternative is nihilism or Xanax or dying from too much empathy - somebody pass me a pillow!

Rats!

To illustrate: a few weeks ago on the beach at Mandrem, Goa, I was in a foul mood, possibly brought on by a massive crash in oestrogen - par for the course for biological females who’ve accomplished a certain number of revolutions around the Sun. The said star was shining, the water was fine. Nothing to blame but my biochemistry. That and the fact that I had not been able to write for over a month. Death and despair swirled around my dying planet, mass extinction of species, an unflinching gaze on the monstrous birthplace of the King of Kings, all of it, all at once, stabbing away at everything that breathes, all the time.

I walked into the ocean. I thought about the moon pulling the tides. Was it true that menstrual and lunar cycles are synchronised? Or had that beautiful theory been debunked? I didn’t know because I didn’t read all the books. I skipped pages. Chapters, even. I was busy living a life! A life which at this moment in Time had been gifted a week by the Arabian Sea with organic rice beer, Buddha bowls with broccoli and tofu, a room with a view of paddy fields, a white-breasted kingfisher at the window, and people who loved me, whom I loved.

What had I done to deserve it? What had those others done to have not?

The water was cooler than I expected. On the shore, a three-legged dog jumped at small fish trapped in shallow tidal pools. Behind me, the woman on a surfboard finally caught a wave. I walked in deeper and held my breath as the surf closed overhead. When I emerged and turned to the beach, the dog was a dot and I was far away. From the shore, from the dog, from myself. I couldn’t find my foul mood. Maybe the water took it and tossed it at the moon. Maybe there was an ion exchange with the salty sea breeze that changed my biochemistry. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. For the moment, life was meaningless.

Life was good.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

- Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, 1988.

“…I'm not aware of too many things,
I know what I know if you know what I mean
Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box
Religion is the smile on a dog
I'm not aware of too many things
I know what I know, if you know what I mean, d-doo yeah
Choke me in the shallow water
Before I get too deep,
Choke me in the shallow water
Before I get too deep…
Don't let me get too deep
Don't let me get too deep… “

- What I am, Shooting Rubberbands At The Stars, by Edie Brickell & New Bohemians, 1988.

By way of compensating for the loss of a world that pulsed with our blood and breathed with our breath, we have developed an enthusiasm for facts—mountains of facts, far beyond any single individual’s power to survey. We have the pious hope that this incidental accumulation of facts will for a meaningful whole, but nobody is quite sure, because no human brain can possibly comprehend the gigantic sum total of this mass-produced knowledge. The facts bury us… Yet the danger that faces us today is that the whole of reality will be replaced by words. This accounts for that terrible lack of instinct in modern man, particularly the city-dweller. He lacks all contact with life and the breath of nature…

- The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life, Ed. Meredith Sabini, 2002.

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