Whimsical Nightmare
a philosophy of life ? thoughts on Nietzsche, nihilism, and what is beyond good and evil.
OCT 23, 2024
“We have all no doubt eaten at tables where we did not belong; and precisely the most spiritual of us who are the most difficult to feed know that dangerous dyspepsia which comes from a sudden insight and disappointment about our food and table-companions—the after dinner nausea,” (Beyond Good and Evil: 282).
I’m sitting under a tall window that looks out to a small blip of land between this house and the neighbors at an old solid wood and solid iron dining table that my mother graciously gifted to me. My back is sore and my neck hurts because I haven’t been stretching as I should, and because I’ve been working and moving and because of all these good things (where good things often come from the cause of great pain).
I remember that Kurt Cobain said something once about smashing his guitar, and when I smashed my own, that’s what I thought of, I thought of him. It just felt right, I guess. This happened the night before I moved, and I ended up pulling a muscle in my back, so moving furniture wasn’t exactly fun, but hey! I did it! Going about releasing anger is strange because it can come out in unexpected ways and sometimes it’s quite violent. And it creeps up on you, sometimes it takes control over you, a certain occurrence of a great evil: the inability to control these primal impulses. It takes great practice to find the peace of mind, body and soul to be unbothered by the ego’s nature. To dispel the ego is to be a sovereign being. Though it may be tolerable for a while, stashing old emotions in empty bottles you might find in the deeper creases of the mind, when triggers from small things can be easy to brush aside lest they turn into outburst. Maybe if I hadn’t been triggered by the incessant buzzing of a fly, I wouldn’t have smashed my guitar. But maybe it was all meant to happen? I had been thinking about it for a long time, wanting to smash it, get rid of it, burn it, do something to get it out of my life. I hated the memories it stored, all the empty promises, empty love stories, voids of sobs. A birthday gift from my mother that once held so much hope. Hope that turned into a disease. I had to let go of it. I’m glad I did. I was holding onto this strange notion of wanting to be something that I wasn’t. And I still play music, just not in the same fashion that I had before. The guitar I have now is a classical beast of music and I call her my lyre because she takes me back to an era that feels right in my soul. Maybe it’s because of my mother, who happily played classical music for me when I was an infant. And now I don’t have to live up to any fleeting expectation, I can just express myself without limitation. Ironic, I know.
I often have dreamed of music and the pursuit of creation through music, which has brought me to many places in life, but ultimately this practice, like all the others I have explored, has told me that it doesn't matter which way you might choose to create, so long as you are still creating something. So I have become my own whimsical nightmare. Often the images of our dreams mirror our walking life, or vice versa, it’s all the same really. And I enjoy the surrealism that my mind offers me as I sleep, but so much of it as of late seems abstracted and nightmarish that it’s become challenging to really grab ahold of anything real or tangible, anything that I can interpret into something that makes sense of my waking life. The source of my issue might be hiding within my neck as it always seems to be kind of jammed, something from years of thoughts that I was negligent to express. So much so that I sometimes just want to snap it off and release myself of this bane of existence. . . or maybe I am to release myself of my inner judgments and just say what I mean, that would probably have a similar effect. But that has always been a challenge of the human existence, hasn’t it? Or is it that our society has propelled myself and the like to be distrusting of our dreams? That my dreams speak of spiritual warfare and the hideousness of society and I should interpret it as folly or meaningless, despite the reality that is apparent today. . .
When I began to read Beyond Good and Evil by the aspired philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, I was filled with a smallness of hope, the hope to prove that he wasn’t a nihilist. Let’s preface to say that nihilism is a rejection of any or all moral principles (as outlined by various spiritual or religious pursuits), and a belief that life is meaningless. I’f you’ve ever read any Nietzsche, you might see that on the surface this makes sense, and I believe that he did once say that he was in fact a nihilist. However, I disagree.
Reading what he thinks is beyond good and evil was a daunting task as is. It took me almost an entire month to get through it. It was digestible, but I have read a good deal of philosophy before, so I knew some of what I was getting into, and there was a great deal of restlessness to unpack. My main issues lay within its monotony and length, going on about his distaste for modernity and humanness that did not live up to his expectations, as well as his distaste for women and feminine independence. For such words he chose to use, I am tempted to slander him, despite my agreeance with many of the thoughts and ideas he had on spiritual liberation and a search for God through meditation and hermeticism, it was ultimately never written for a woman to read, especially not a well read young woman like myself. However, one must understand the time period, and I find the similarities within this time we live in now, for humanity is still ignorant and negligent of the essential nature of the sacred feminine, or should I say le féminin sacré.
Maybe it was better in German. . . ?
If we can remember the renaissance, a time when the sacred feminine was exalted as it was rediscovered by strong minds—minds with the ability to grasp its beginnings—we might see this time as a high point in humanity. There were grounds for morality, grounds for divinity, grounds for human potential. This has happened many times throughout history, but there has always been a lurking presence of evil, or the devil, something sadistic and grotesque. Something that despises this sacredness. This is apparent in our society today, and like philosophers past, I too am hoping that we might try to discover this sacredness again.
Morality is a symptom of the human condition, and we must define ourselves by our moralities. To be without any morality is to be inhumane, to be evil, I suppose. And it might only become “good” when one defines oneself by one’s own morality, when it becomes metaphysical, not by any means of the systems of society or religion. Our society obviously lacks a necessary bound of morality, maybe because of our predisposition to ignore our own. In our fall from heaven, our fall from divinity, our division from God, we find these “bad” or “evil” things in life, and we judge the world as lacking meaning. When anything is preaching that is has the answers or knows anything, it should be a higher importance to be skeptical, for it only becomes more apparent, the more we seek, the less we know. This is something often found when one delves into self study, when one decides to be a hermit, something or other. Today, this is not uncommon, though it is often preached that to be alone in such a way is “dangerous” and can result in illness, which could not be farther from the truth. This is a teaching of fear, indoctrinated into so many levels of our society. Further, so much of our population is lazy and encourages this submission to be something they are not, to ignore their authenticity. To be with the flock of braindead sheep is awarded standing ovation, they do not want to grasp upon their own mental perimeters of morality. Nihilism, both in ancient and modern cultures, are the ills Nietzsche sought out to cure in humankind. It is his entire philosophical thrust to combat these thoughts and ways of being. To assume his philosophy as nihilistic, may be because of his declaration that “God is dead,” which proves his ideology. Most people assume that meaning in life must be derived from belief, faith and trust in something beyond our physical existence, and to proclaim that this idea is dead brings upon the assumption of nihilism, that life has no meaning and that all is permitted. Which may be true in some cases, but certainly not all, and this is essentially a surface viewpoint of a much deeper aspect of human existence. It is simply that we have failed insofar to find something to replace this God with something secular, and Nietzsche decided to give it the ol’ college try.
It is apparent, especially now, that human morality is on the crux of apocalyptic disaster, as I’m sure it seemed to be so in the 1800s. Our ancient civilizations and ancestors left a legacy for us, clues for us, and we still fight against the obvious righteous ways of their livelihood. Most of this distaste for divinity is ironically at the root of most religious pursuits, or dare I say all of them. We have been taught wrongful ways of what it means to be human and have divided ourselves between immoral ideas of good and evil. Where it becomes obvious to the hermit that this division matters not for any reason, I believe it is beyond this line of reason that one tries to grasp at when it means to see between the lines. The death of God by means of religion, or better yet Christianity, has pushed this to be so. It has despised humanity and relishes in its war, hardship, suffering and despair. And humanity endures it because it seems “right” or is justified by the lunacy of organized thoughts of spirit, that one day we will all die and celebrate in the beyond, among the clouds in the sky. But our ancients taught us that the spirit is doomed if it is not free, and it will only be free if we learn to all be free. Why can we not celebrate this life now!?
Thereafter, Nietzsche is not a nihilist. He was simply searching for a way to prove that God is still real, but that our human attempts at organizing are futile and should be put to rest. If he had no morality and denied the pursuit of God, denied himself of any meaning, he would have not sought to write anything. Our society may be nihilistic, as it is deeply rooted in something so evil that it cannot be anything but this. This evil in itself is a pursuit of something otherworldly, something that has no moral bounds. At least Nietzsche had some sense of what it means to be a good human, better yet, beyond the bounds of both good and evil, beyond this existence of a whimsical nightmare.
I have given myself grounds to exist beyond this plane of lowly existence, to allow myself the divinity that is already within. I do not seek external god, for I know these external natures of divinity are not sacred, for I know that sacredness is found within. There is great truth to the teachings from our predecessors, and often they are hidden in plain sight. One must allow the body the ears and eyes to find them. Or else it will be lost to our negligence, lost to the past, lost for the future.
“That which divides two people most profoundly is a differing sense and degree of cleanliness.
. . . The melancholy of everything finished,” (Beyond Good and Evil: 271, 277).
