The superhero comic-book medium derives its name from an inept English translation and popularization of Nietzsche's "Übermensch." From Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Übermensch means not so much Superman, as Over-Man or Beyond-Man; a man who has left Man behind, overcome him, surpassed him, in a constant act of self-overcoming, not a physically intimidating, athletically superior cop on the beat.
Despite the mistranslation, the fact that the superhero comic-book medium derives its name from the work of the father of philosophical nihilism is something we must always keep in mind. The superhero is a nihilist construct -- Man's attempt to project beyond himself; hence, a rejection of Man itself.
Today the preeminent writer of philosophically articulate yet hard-boiled comic books is Warren Ellis. He has his finger on the pulse of the nihilism that pumps through superheroism. In Karnak #1 he works with the tremendous Argentinian artist Jorge Zaffino to tell the story of the risen-from-the-dead Inhuman Karnak. Karnak is working with S.H.I.E.L.D. to reclaim NuHumans who have been abducted for nefarious purposes by A.I.M., Advanced Idea Mechanics.
In the first two scans Karnak promises to return an abducted son, who has metamorphosed into a NuHuman after exposure to the Terrigen Mists, to his distraught parents. But Karnak's price for such a service is that the parents let go of their attachment to the son. S.H.I.E.L.D. Special Agent Phil Coulson pulls Karnak out of the room in order to dress him down for his insensitivity, but ends up getting an earful of nihilism from Karnak instead:
Coulson: Why did you do that?
Karnak: A lesson. I am teacher.
Coulson: And what's the lesson you are teaching by hurting and humiliating those people?
Karnak: That humans are no more important than objects, and that both humans and objects are meaningless. They may lose their son. They may lose their favorite object. They will still be alive tomorrow. Neither thing matters to the universe.
Never forget who I am.
I am Karnak of the Inhumans. I am Magister of the Tower of Wisdom.
Love is for the less disciplined minds that need to believe in a softer world.
In the scans that follow the first two, Karnak takes out an A.I.M. double-agent. Zaffino shows off his chops.
Iron Patriot #5 was the the end of line for the series. It is too bad. Because though the story by Ales Kot never in the main rose above the level of filler, the art by Garry Brown and the colors by Jim Charalampidis jumped out at you. Brown's work on Iron Patriot was truly alive, a combination of Primitivism and classic Kirby from his Silver Age heyday. When in the future I look back on 2014 Garry Brown's five-issue run on Iron Patriot will sparkle like a Zeitgeist diamond.
Kot acknowledged in a Tweet that Iron Patriot was not his best work: "I believe Iron Patriot is my weakest work, but I managed to find a way to make it personally relevant through what I feel amounts to sheer will and a firm refusal to give up on anything I ever put out into the world."
Bravo! Very Nietzschean. And Kot strikes a Nietzschean chord that ends the series with strength and depth when a comatose Rhodey dreams of seeing his father, who just sacrificed his life to save him, as a boy. Make sure to see the last scan at the bottom of the page. The text reads:
I don't remember much of the next few days.
Just fragments of dreams.
People stopping by.
Being immersed in Tony's meditank.
I had a dream about you.
You were fishing, alone.
You were a boy.
You smiled at me.
I realized that I was myself, as I am now, and you were that boy again.
You said something but I couldn't remember what it was.
Previously I have opined that nihilism is the province of fathers and sons. The father leads the way into the abyss and the son dutifully follows along behind. In the process, a reversal takes place. The father becomes the idealized son, "the youth of eternal summers" that Van Morrison sings about in No Guru, No Method, No Teacher (1986), and which Kot and Brown capture so well. And we are back in the garden.
This is "the tain of the mirror" to the ceaseless striving and constant suffering of the eternal recurrence: We are always already -- here, now -- back in the garden.
I read philosophy while I was at the university, a practice that lasted for five years after my school days had ended. Then, while living in Texas, I shifted to reading American history. But periodically, every three or four years, I would dip back in and try to figure out what I was working on and what issues I was trying to resolve in my lost and unfinished honors thesis on the analytic a posteriori. The last time was during the Trayvon Martin shooting protests. I stopped off and did some research in the Koolhass-designed downtown public library on my way to a rally.
Taking a quick look this morning at some of the big philosophy/theory journals -- Mind, Synthese, October, Representations -- from when I was a toiler in the groves of Academe, nothing much seems to have changed in the last 30 years. The offerings in October -- articles on Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt -- and Representations -- an issue devoted to how online search tools and big data are affecting research in the humanities and social sciences -- at least seem interesting.
Philosophy takes more time and energy to read than history, politics, or fiction. So it falls to the wayside if you are a worker running the rat race to earn a living.
The letter below is addressed to my friend Shale who is now a professor at a state university in the Midwest. I spent part of the 1988 Xmas holiday with him and his roommate Steve, who were both political science graduate students at UCLA. Other friends would stop over in what turned out to be a four-day bacchanal punctuated by brutal two-on-two basketball games at a backyard garage hoop; also, drunken, competitive ping pong matches.
The letter ends on a note of regret that we didn't keep the party going as I continued my Christmas travels north up I-5 to San Francisco, and from there on up into Southern Oregon. That winter was a particularly cold one for the West Coast. As it turned out it was the dividing line between my years at -- and my friends from -- the university. Life would not be the same; there would be no bacchanals together in the future. I realized that the next time I was out on the West Coast, the spring of 1990, which marks the end of this collection of letters.
Speaking of which, I did the audit of the number of these missives that remain. There are little more than 20 left. If this project is to be completed by the end of the regular NFL season, I'm going to have to start posting two a week. If I stretch the deadline to the Super Bowl in February, I can stick to a single post on Sunday, shifting to a Saturday-and-Sunday schedule in December.
Winter 1989
You know what philosophers are? They're comic book heroes. Plato might as well be Superman; Aristotle, Batman. Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Hume are the Fantastic Four. Spider-Man is Kant. Being a little bit away from the academy and that bitch Philosophia, as I have been now for close to 9 months, helped me come to this while I was pissing just a second ago.
I heard the other day when I called up Mark and Niall (Mark had left a message on the here machine in NYC saying that his car had been stolen), that the sadomasochistic love trinity didn't quite make it, that the Belgian waffle didn't get cooked up. Niall did relate to me though the story of Steve puking on -- as I envision it -- the trunk of your body. Whew! You guys are shattering all records and putting together quite a storehouse of memorabilia. I'm glad I was around for a spell to feel a little of that LA effervescence.
But back to the philosophy thing. I read an essay by Derrida yesterday, and it was damn good. He was writing about the whole humanist existential turn-on in France after WWII; you know, about how the Sartre behemoth was spawned; that a lot of the shit boiled down to a systematic misreading of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger; that Hegel's PHENOMENOLOGY was read only in light of Kojeve, who taught it as a kind of textbook for a philosophical anthropology and who thereby overlooked Hegel's own architectonic as set forth in the ENCYCLOPEDIA: Phenomenology of Spirit followsAnthropology; that Hegel's Anthropology concludes with the general form of consciousness, "sensuous certitude," which begins the PHENOMENOLOGY.
Oh, what the fuck am I doing? I don't have the stamina to finish this explanation. Anyway, I read Rorty's intro to the THE LINGUISTIC TURN today -- all about Ideal versus Ordinary Language philosophy. It stank like shit compared to Derrida, and I've done my reading on Ideal Language philosophy (Urmson is the guy to read here; he's sweet and clear). I guess what I wanted to say about Jacques Derrida is that I think he is one damn-ass fine historian of philosophy. Now, if you read him as some serious methodologist, a la your hero Weber, you're just gonna be disappointed. But as someone who gives you a good sense of all the important issues at stake in reading Heidegger, or Husserl, or even Nietzsche (who he creatively rehabilitates from all the low-minded snipes of "last metaphysician" cunts), I don't think there is anyone better today.
Just to finish up the poor-man's recapitulation of the essay I read -- Derrida was simply saying that the supposedly metaphysically-free existentialism of the '50s did not escape traditional metaphysics. "Man" was baldly yet deceptively substituted for "consciousness," ontology for phenomenology. Please remember, this is a gross oversimplification, and I really do miss the point, I think. I fail altogether to capture the persuasiveness and subtlety of argument. He whips in a little Nietzsche at the end; you know, the bit in ZARATHUSTRA about high noon and the difference between the superior man and the superman (ouch! that high noon shit is good -- the superman who turns his back on the camera, his tracks disappearing as he walks away). And mind you, Derrida is not one of these poststructuralist sloppy types, the kind who don't footnote, who engage in constant speculation. Derrida always exhaustively footnotes, always entertains all the published secondary, in many languages.
Anyway, enough of the tirade.
I had a lot of fun cruising the Grapevine. I had never done it before. I did 35 mph a lot of the way up the thing, but it was perfectly fucking incredible coming down out of it and seeing those Bakersfield stretches straight as a ruler. Pushed the old bus hard at 65-plus the whole day, no stops. But I couldn't help feeling a twinge of regret leaving the dudes behind like that. Shit, I felt like all of us should have just piled into the old beast, bought a couple cases of the Banquet Beer, had the boom box spitting, and then cruised north. There would have been pillows and sleeping bags back there for you guys, Steve, Colum, you, Jeff to lounge on. I would have been at the wheel, beer nestled in crotch area; empties could have been thrown anywhere; and there was a hole in the floor, about a foot behind the driver's seat where the sink (for camping) used to be, where you guys could have pissed out without even requiring us to stop.
But you and Steve were doing something, Colum was doing something, Jeff was doing the same, and so was I. So we'll chalk it up to "could've been" and look forward to the future.
Returning home from several days out of state, I played back the messages recorded on my answering machine. One was from my grocery store alerting me that some almond butter I had purchased recently was being recalled because of salmonella. One was inviting me to be a particpant in a poll on a politcal matter. And the last was from my ex-wife, a woman who divorced me approximately 25 years ago, calling to wish me a happy birthday. She was heading off to Burning Man, something, I am under the impression, that she does every year.
In recent years, the competition for who in the tech world could outdo who evolved from a need for more luxurious sleeping quarters. People went from spending the night in tents, to renting R.V.s, to building actual structures.
“We used to have R.V.s and precooked meals,” said a man who attends Burning Man with a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. (He asked not to be named so as not to jeopardize those relationships.) “Now, we have the craziest chefs in the world and people who build yurts for us that have beds and air-conditioning.” He added with a sense of amazement, “Yes, air-conditioning in the middle of the desert!”
His camp includes about 100 people from the Valley and Hollywood start-ups, as well as several venture capital firms. And while dues for most non-tech camps run about $300 a person, he said his camp’s fees this year were $25,000 a person. A few people, mostly female models flown in from New York, get to go free, but when all is told, the weekend accommodations will collectively cost the partygoers over $2 million.
This is drastically different from the way most people experience the event. When I attended Burning Man a few years ago, we slept in tents and a U-Haul moving van. We lived on cereal and beef jerky for a week. And while Burning Man was one of the best experiences of my life, using the public Porta-Potty toilets was certainly one of the most revolting experiences thus far. But that’s what makes Burning Man so great: at least you’re all experiencing those gross toilets together.
That is, until recently. Now the rich are spending thousands of dollars to get their own luxury restroom trailers, just like those used on movie sets.
“Anyone who has been going to Burning Man for the last five years is now seeing things on a level of expense or flash that didn’t exist before,” said Brian Doherty, author of the book “This Is Burning Man.” “It does have this feeling that, ‘Oh, look, the rich people have moved into my neighborhood.’ It’s gentrifying.”
For those with even more money to squander, there are camps that come with “Sherpas,” who are essentially paid help.
Tyler Hanson, who started going to Burning Man in 1995, decided a couple of years ago to try working as a paid Sherpa at one of these luxury camps. He described the experience this way: Lavish R.V.s are driven in and connected together to create a private forted area, ensuring that no outsiders can get in. The rich are flown in on private planes, then picked up at the Burning Man airport, driven to their camp and served like kings and queens for a week. (Their meals are prepared by teams of chefs, which can include sushi, lobster boils and steak tartare — yes, in the middle of 110-degree heat.)
“Your food, your drugs, your costumes are all handled for you, so all you have to do is show up,” Mr. Hanson said. “In the camp where I was working, there were about 30 Sherpas for 12 attendees.”
Mr. Hanson said he won’t be going back to Burning Man anytime soon. The Sherpas, the money, the blockaded camps and the tech elite were too much for him. “The tech start-ups now go to Burning Man and eat drugs in search of the next greatest app,” he said. “Burning Man is no longer a counterculture revolution. It’s now become a mirror of society.”
Speaking of "a mirror of society," one of the things I do every year when I make the trip to Southern Oregon to visit my mother is I get us tickets to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. OSF commissions new work, and I always try to see these plays. Year before last it was the tremendous Party People. This year was the even better Family Album. Gray Lady theater critic Charles Isherwood pans the second act of the play. But the second act was the best thing I have ever seen in my life. The cultural references came so fast and furious, the music was so vital and true, I was transported to a transcendent place of organic perfection -- the kind of artistic experience you only read about in books as a schoolboy.
And what was the second act about? The enslavement of all things creative and familial to the Internet. An enslavement of our lives to getting "hits," which as every blogger knows is essentially fickle and arbitrary. Yet this is how we live our lives now. We know what we are doing. We know that it is artificial and random. Yet we keep on doing it.
Isherwood had a problem with the second act's avalanche of things"going viral." But the raising up of hyperreality was the whole point; it is how the characters achieve their emancipation. I hope playwrights Stew and Heidi Rodewald are right. I hope dialectically we can work our way clear of our present digital addiction and graduate ourselves to some sort of higher unity.
As I was trying to go to sleep last night in my Super 8 Motel room I was thinking about how the "good man" is necessary for society. (I say "good man" because it is still a man's world. The millennia of civilization have been overwhelming patriarchal.) There needs to be somebody who is good in order that others might aspire to something other than being bad. This is the priest. The celibate. This is who I have become. And we know what Nietzsche thought of the "good man." This is aphorism number 356 (1887-1888) from the TheWill to Power(1901): "Modest, industrious, benevolent, temperate: is that how you would have men? good men? But to me that seems only the ideal slave, the slave of future."
While travel is burdensome, costly and exhausting, it is something that has to be done, if only to upturn the patterns that become so entrenched a person tends to forget that he has an identity independent of his everyday routines. I savored sitting on the bed alone in my motel room and watching the Seahawks preseason game against the Bears. I enjoyed running on the all-weather track of my high school in the cool morning sunshine, after which I walked the campus quad, transporting myself back to Carter- and Reagan-time. The Iranian Revolution and Bobby Sands' hunger strike in H-Block Long Kesh.
When last we left off, with Nihilism #6, I had mentioned that a perfectly succinct formulation of nihilism could be found in a movie, The Couselor (2013), written by Cormac McCarthy:
"You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist."
But I have been thinking about this, and I should retract "perfect" as a distinction for this statement as a formulation of nihilism.
The founding father of nihilism as a school of philosophy and not just a label (Friedrich Jacobi coined the neologism, seeing it pejoratively as the Enlightenment's strange fruit) is Friedrich Nietzsche. And for Nietzsche the crowning achievement of his philosophy is the doctrine of Eternal Recurrence, the idea that what we do in the here and now will replay itself infinitely.
In other words, this world that we have created will not cease to exist because our existence is forever present.
When I broke up with my last girlfriend I decided to wake up early every morning, around 3 AM, and read from Nietzsche's last work, the posthumously published The Will to Power (1901).
I needed an emetic to cure me of my debilitating addiction to romantic love. I thought at least one page a day of the sagacious bachelor who famously wrote, "You go to women? Do not forget the whip!" (Derrida wrote a book, Spurs (1979) about this line.)
I stuck with it for for a month or two before moving on to something else. But this morning I returned to The Will to Power thinking about this issue of the Eternal Return of the Same.
The last section of The Will to Power is devoted to Eternal Recurrence. This from Note #1058:
Everything becomes and recurs eternally-- escape is impossible!-- Supposing we could judge value, what follows? The idea of recurrence as a selective principle, in the service of strength (and barbarism!!).
Ripeness of man for this idea.
I always thought of the Eternal Return as a regulative concept, the palm at the end of the Western mind, a final refutation of all opposites, something that says the mental world and the physical world are one and all is possible.
Nietzsche solves the riddle of time-past and time-future, much like T.S. Eliot in Four Quartets (1943), by saying both are eternally present. There is a great deal of power to be tapped here. (Next nihilism post, an exploration of barbarism.)
BURNT NORTON
(No. 1 of 'Four Quartets')
T.S. Eliot
I
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
One of the benefits of being a bachelor is that it is possible to wake up on a Sunday morning and turn on the television unimpeded by spousal complaints and watch the French Open finals from Roland-Garros, the sporting event that -- seeing all that orange-red clay on the TV screen -- always reminds me of the high school year coming to a close and 17-year-old Mats Wilander -- a guy my age -- winning the 1982 tournament.
Normally, I would be out on the road. June is a great month to hit it early. The weather is mild and the light ample; it is possible to get in a long run before 8 AM. But I'm nursing a bad foot. So I'm studio bound. What better time to return to the topic of nihilism?
What I've been driving at in these nihilism posts is some sort of understanding, grounded in everyday experience, of what it is. A common description of nihilism is Nietzsche's "God is dead." Nietzsche, writing in the second half of the 19th century, thought that he lived during a time heralded by the "cockcrow of positivism," stage four out of six in his "History of an Error" from Twilight of the Idols (1889):
4. The true world -- unattainable? At any rate, unattained, and being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us?
(Gray morning, The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
Stage five moves us toward stage six, what Nietzsche called, "Noon: moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA." Stage five is a deepening of nihilism; it is a rejection of the idea of a "true" world. Stage six is the realization of nihilism; it is a rejection of the "apparent" world along with the "true" world, leaving us as merely beings in the world, what Heidegger calls Dasein, or what a Zen Buddhist calls satori.
The problem is that we've been caught up in the cockcrow of positivism stage of nihilism, with all its various democratic capitalist permutations, for the last two-hundred-plus years. The 20th century saw the rise of social democracy. And in the last 35 years that has been rolled back to its 19th century predatory antecedents in laissez-faire capitalism. God is dead but the acquisitive self is king. It is a barbarous bloodthirsty world in which we live today. Nature is under assault. The state exists to produce lies. The paradigm is fractured but keeps functioning because, apparently, we are very attached to it.
I was carrying a large cheese pizza in a takeout box up the front stoop stairs to my apartment building when one of my neighbors opened the door for me. He is a nice guy, quiet, I would guess in his 30s; he looks Udallesque, tall and exuding decency. He has lived in the building several years. I have run into him in the laundry room numerous times.
After he opened the door for me, he said something I couldn't quite make out. I think it was, "Wow! Thanks for the pizza."
"Thank you," I replied. Then I noticed that he wasn't wearing any shoes. He had on a pair of spotless, brilliant white socks, tube socks, like the ones that were so coveted when I was an adolescent athlete.
"I like your socks," I told him. Then I turned away to open my mail box.
This guy used to be a loner bachelor like myself. But for the last year, maybe more, whenever I see him he is the company of a woman. She is a big woman, stout. They are seemingly attached at the hip. I think they might even be living together. Whereas before, this guy, when he was alone, had a edge to him, a vibrancy, a formidable quality, now it is all softness and subdued tones. Which made me say to myself, "I'm sure the sex is great, but at what cost?"
Which got me thinking further, about the Hippies and that period in the early 1970s when the music became so heavy and bloated with hero worship, the ascension of Led Zeppelin's "cock rock" or "ass rock." Most of the Hippies left behind their aspirations to transform society and settled for sex, drugs and rock'n'roll -- right at the time of the Powell Memo counter-revolution.
The moral of the front-door encounter with my Udallesque neighbor is don't settle for sex. Something of which the Hippies -- the Punks, too -- should have been mindful. I hope my neighbor gets his mojo back.
I had picked up the large cheese at my neighbor pizza parlor. Right as I was ordering the mayor of the Emerald City blew in with his entourage for a quick slice. It was like something out of the movies. You had all these young men in ties and button-up shirts and several other men in dark blazers with round lapel pins signifying that they were part of the security detail. And then there was the mayor sheepishly greeting well-wishers. He lives in the neighborhood.
We are so used to these campus shooting gun deaths that they hardly register anymore (Jill Lepore's "Battleground America," though over two-years old, is still a great place for an overview of the mass-shooting epidemic in American culture). Brutality is the hallmark of our age.
I began these nihilism posts, even though it was in the form of "The Colt 45 Chronicle," by mentioning Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men. McCarthy's latest exploration of nihilism is the The Counselor (2013), a movie directed by the great Ridley Scott. It is a film devoted to the savagery and wealth-worship that rules the present age. The final scene has Cameron Diaz's character delivering a prediction that, "The slaughter to come is probably beyond our imagining." I think that is about right. Then at the end of the trailer below you will find the perfectly succinct formulation of nihilism from the Rubén Blades character:
"You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist."
I think it is worth mentioning -- actually, it is something that I wanted to note last week when I relaunched these posts on work, with the intention of sticking to it this time and recording my observations at least once a week -- that my coworkers despise each other.
It makes for parlous moments. I'll be discussing something with one coworker when another coworker approaches. Suddenly there is the cold electric current of hatred and hostility and I'm stuck right in the middle, absorbing it. Generally, I try to tie up the conversation quickly and be on my way.
The situation is the result of people working together for many, many years. Most of the people are women. And while it would be convenient to make it a gender thing and dismiss it as women being catty, it is not. Men -- some of the business agents -- practice the chilly burn and malevolent stare as well; they are just more low-key about it.
People work together for years, decades, and wrongs, perceived and real, accumulate. Finally a decision is made to cease all but the most necessary and perfunctory communication.
For me, since I have been at this particular work site for less than three years now, I have not accumulated a reservoir of ill will similar to my coworkers, many of whom have been working together for 15 years or more. I only have the unfortunate situation of the one woman, who tends to the bipolar, with whom I have fell afoul. So for the most part I have the luxury of moving comfortably between and communicating freely with everyone on the job.
This is not without its burdens since I am often used as a tacit go-between for coworkers who are so nauseated at the prospect of dealing with one another they would rather angle a third party into doing it for them.
Then something happened that made every mouth dumb and every eye rigid. For meanwhile the tightrope walker had begun his performance: he had stepped out of a small door and was walking over the rope, stretched between two towers and suspended over the market place and the people. When he had reached the exact middle of his course the small door opened once more and a fellow in motley clothes, looking like a jester, jumped out and followed the first one with quick steps.
"Forward, lamefoot!" he shouted in an awe-inspiring voice. "Forward, lazybones, smuggler, pale-face, or I shall tickle you with my heel! What are you doing here between towers? The tower is where you belong. You ought to be locked up; you block the way for one better than yourself." And with every word he came closer and closer; but when he was but one step behind, the dreadful thing happened which made every mouth dumb and every eye rigid: he uttered a devilish cry and jumped over the man who stood in his way.
This man, however, seeing his rival win, lost his head and the rope, tossed away his pole, and plunged into the depth even faster, a whirlpool of arms and legs. The market place became as the sea when a tempest pierces it: the people rushed apart and over one another, especially at the place where the body must hit the ground.
Zarathustra, however, did not move; and it was right next to him that the body fell, badly maimed and disfigured, but not yet dead. After a while the shattered man recovered consciousness and saw Zarathustra kneeling beside him. "What are you doing here?" he asked at last. 'I have long known that the devil would trip me. Now he will drag me to hell. Would you prevent him?"
"By my honor, friend," answered Zarathustra, "all that of which you speak does not exist: there is no devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead even before your body: fear nothing further."
The man looked up suspiciously. "If you speak the truth," he said, "I lose nothing when I lose my life. I am not much more than a beast that has been taught to dance by blows and a few meager morsels."
"By no means," said Zarathustra. "You have made danger your vocation; there is nothing contemptible in that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own hands."
When Zarathustra had said this, the dying man answered no more; but he moved his hand as if he sought Zarathustra's hand in thanks.
Drinking and fighting (with friends), the cruel story of youth. But this is after all the "Colt 45 Chronicle." Not a lot of pyrotechnics in this letter though, which is to my college buddy Shale. A lot about fellow Berkeley man Matt Biondi who had just won a number of gold medals at the Seoul Olympics that summer and who I gush about drunkenly (and laughably) based on a momentary glance he cast in my direction one sunny Sunday afternoon. But I catch myself mid-epistle, leaning heavily on Nietzsche in the process. Shale was a Nietzsche man all the way.
The fantasy, the palm at the end of my drunken young-man mind, that closes the communication is a recurring one -- the full house, the children asleep, etc. Now it's obvious to me that, like a lot of people from broken homes, I was trying to restore some sort of idealized lost unity; that, and, living in a high rise and working in the megalopolis, I was feeling isolated.
Autumn 1988
Oh, my God, you wrote! With tapes no less. The clouds part and a single dove descends, lighting on my brow and filling me with the Spirit -------------- Diogenes marches into Athens; the Pig spits banquet brew in a whore's face; we all dance on D. Boon's grave.
A lot of water under the bridge since we last talked, too much to recapitulate here. Suffice it to say that we rambled out of Berkeley on a Saturday afternoon and were married in Reno on a Saturday night; drove across USA and then into NY; Ashley is going to school, and I have a boring/shitty job. Terri was here when we arrived but soon went to Guatemala to see Colum. Now she's back. Colum was here for a brief time doing a story on crack with a friend of his from Columbia. The last night he was here I drank too much. Terri and I, Johnny Walker Red label and a case of ol' Adolph. We got into a fight, Colum and I that is. I don't remember what I said. I feel pretty crummy about the whole thing. I puked later on that evening. One thing's for sure, this place is plenty overrated. I'm ready to climb back into the driver's seat and rediscover the West. Biondi and all those gold medals started me thinking about Berkeley again. I used to walk by that gym every day. You had to look up. The pool was on my route to campus. Once, when I was on my way down from the fire trail during one of my seasonal displays of physical assiduity -- I had run the fire trail three days in a row, or something like that -- I had an encounter with Biondi. Harmon pool was straight ahead and I was feeling good, turning on the speed and shining that shine you can only beam after five-plus miles. Biondi shot me a look, which was simply the look of humble and beneficent respect from a colossal and world-historic athlete. I had forgotten all about this until I was watching TV. So I started rooting for him. He became Berkeley and Berkeley became him. -- Oh, man, I know, beer-tear waxing over now-jaundiced adolescence. I'm not pumping atavism, no "Use and Abuse" herds-feeding-yonder(ism) here; it's just that it beats anything else, truth-value wise, at this juncture. Anyway, I came home Friday evening after performing the 9-to-5 eternal return, and I see your package on the table. I rip it open and read the letter, and bam! I do the reverse hermeneutic and shoot into the future. You said something about a commune. So I immediately started thinking about the time when Ashley and I have the full-blown manor house, behind which is an austere chalet, the one with your name plate always polished. Ashley is at the hospital, the kids are in bed, and, tossing my head up to a big fat clock on the wall, seeing that it's a quarter 'til, I dart out the door and down the path -- to Uncle Shale's. I hit the door, but before even touching wood, the fridge case-full and the stereo speaker-loud, are calling me in. I stride in and your just slurping down your last drop of java, text still in hand. Alright! Where's the beer?
Who the fuck fights the good fight anymore? Thank God for you, man. Toadies, featherweights, that's the shit filling the box seats, let alone general admission.
