This is What Friedrich Told me Today to the Best of my Understanding

1. Meekness is Weakness.

2. Lamenting over past deeds is a waste of time, it is detrimental to oneself, and it is degradation. It is one thing to acknowledge one's wrongs and subsequently to learn from them. It is quite another to dwell on those wrongs and make them obstacles.

3. Never compromise oneself. To compromise the self demonstrates a lack of will, and a lack of any conviction. There can be no leniency toward one's own weaknesses. The only other possibility is to change or cast off convictions.

4. Objectivity does not exist. Beauty and goodness exist only as they are determined to benefit the individual. The ugly and the evil are the signs and symptoms of all that is detrimental, damaging, cankerous, and corrupt. Whether anything is beneficial or detrimental is determined by the goal, or the will, to which it applies.

Under consideration: 5. Life is art and art, life. All creation is an art, is art. Art stimulates life, inspires life, and expresses life. In this case, what am I to make of destruction as creation?

An excerpt from The Twilight of the Idols by Friedrich Nietzsche

MORALITY AS ANTI-NATURE

	1. All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity — and a later, very much later phase when they wed the spirit, when they "spiritualize" themselves. Formerly, in view of the element of stupidity in passion, war was declared on passion itself, its destruction was plotted; all the old moral monsters are agreed on this: il faut tuer les passions. The most famous formula for this is to be found in the New Testament, in that Sermon on the Mount, where, incidentally, things are by no means looked at from a height. There it is said, for example, with particular reference to sexuality: "If thy eye offend thee, pluck it out." Fortunately, no Christian acts in accordance with this precept. Destroying the passions and cravings, merely as a preventive measure against their stupidity and the unpleasant consequences of this stupidity — today this itself strikes us as merely another acute form of stupidity. We no longer admire dentists who "pluck out" teeth so that they will not hurt any more.
	To be fair, it should be admitted, however, that on the ground out of which Christianity grew, the concept of the "spiritualization of passion" could never have been formed. After all, the first church, as is well known, fought against the "intelligent" in favor of the "poor in spirit." How could one expect from it an intelligent war against passion? The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its "cure," is castratism. It never asks: "How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?" It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of the lust to rule, of avarice, of vengefulness). But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the church is hostile to life.
	2. The same means in the fight against a craving — castration, extirpation — is instinctively chosen by those who are too weak-willed, too degenerate, to be able to impose moderation on themselves; by those who are so constituted that they require La Trappe, to use a figure of speech, or (without any figure of speech) some kind of definitive declaration of hostility, a cleft between themselves and the passion. Radical means are indispensable only for the degenerate; the weakness of the will — or, to speak more definitely, the inability not to respond to a stimulus — is itself merely another form of degeneration. The radical hostility, the deadly hostility against sensuality, is always a symptom to reflect on: it entitles us to suppositions concerning the total state of one who is excessive in this manner.
	This hostility, this hatred, by the way, reaches its climax only when such types lack even the firmness for this radical cure, for this renunciation of their "devil." One should survey the whole history of the priests and philosophers, including the artists: the most poisonous things against the senses have been said not by the impotent, nor by ascetics, but by the impossible ascetics, by those who really were in dire need of being ascetics.
	3. The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it represents a great triumph over Christianity. Another triumph is our spiritualization of hostility. It consists in a profound appreciation of the value of having enemies: in short, it means acting and thinking in the opposite way from that which has been the rule. The church always wanted the destruction of its enemies; we, we immoralists and Antichristians, find our advantage in this, that the church exists. In the political realm too, hostility has now become more spiritual — much more sensible, much more thoughtful, much more considerate. Almost every party understands how it is in the interest of its own self-preservation that the opposition should not lose all strength; the same is true of power politics. A new creation in particular — the new Reich, for example — needs enemies more than friends: in opposition alone does it feel itself necessary, in opposition alone does it become necessary.
	Our attitude to the "internal enemy" is no different: here too we have spiritualized hostility; here too we have come to appreciate its value. The price of fruitfulness is to be rich in internal opposition; one remains young only as long as the soul does not stretch itself and desire peace. Nothing has become more alien to us than that desideratum of former times, "peace of soul," the Christian desideratum; there is nothing we envy less than the moralistic cow and the fat happiness of the good conscience. One has renounced the great life when one renounces war.
	In many cases, to be sure, "peace of soul" is merely a misunderstanding — something else, which lacks only a more honest name. Without further ado or prejudice, a few examples. "Peace of soul" can be, for one, the gentle radiation of a rich animality into the moral (or religious) sphere. Or the beginning of weariness, the first shadow of evening, of any kind of evening. Or a sign that the air is humid, that south winds are approaching. Or unrecognized gratitude for a good digestion (sometimes called "love of man"). Or the attainment of calm by a convalescent who feels a new relish in all things and waits. Or the state which follows a thorough satisfaction of our dominant passion, the well-being of a rare repletion. Or the senile weakness of our will, our cravings, our vices. Or laziness, persuaded by vanity to give itself moral airs. Or the emergence of certainty, even a dreadful certainty, after long tension and torture by uncertainty. Or the expression of maturity and mastery in the midst of doing, creating, working, and willing — calm breathing, attained "freedom of the will." Twilight of the Idols — who knows? perhaps also only a kind of "peace of soul."
	I reduce a principle to a formula. Every naturalism in morality — that is, every healthy morality — is dominated by an instinct of life, some commandment of life is fulfilled by a determinate canon of "shalt" and "shalt not"; some inhibition and hostile element on the path of life is thus removed. Anti-natural morality — that is, almost every morality which has so far been taught, revered, and preached — turns, conversely, against the instincts of life: it is condemnation of these instincts, now secret, now outspoken and impudent. When it says, "God looks at the heart," it says No to both the lowest and the highest desires of life, and posits God as the enemy of life. The saint in whom God delights is the ideal eunuch. Life has come to an end where the "kingdom of God" begins.

Igniting the effigy, churning mountains of smoke scorch my corneas, surge into my mind and asphyxiate my memory. I try to feel gratitude.

We will never be here again.

Ralph Angel

Breaking and Entering
by Ralph Angel

Many setups. At least as many falls.
Winter is paralyzing the country, but not here.
Here, the boys are impersonating songs of indigenous
wildlife. Mockingbird on the roof of the Gun Shop,
scrub jay behind the Clear Lake Saloon.
And when she darts into a drugstore for a chocolate-covered
almond bar, sparrow hawks get the picture
and drive off in her car.
Easy as 8th & Spring Street,
a five-course meal the size of a dime.
Easy as vistas admired only from great distance,
explain away the mystery
and another thatched village is cluster-bombed.
Everyone gets what he wants nowadays.
Anything you can think of is probably true.
And so, nothing. Heaven on earth. The ruse
of answers. A couple-three-times around the block
and ignorance is no longer a good excuse.
There were none. Only moods
arranged like magazines and bones, a Coke bottle
full of roses, the dark, rickety tables about the room.
And whenever it happens, well, it’s whatever it takes,
a personality that is not who you are
but a system of habitual reactions to another
light turning green, the free flow of
traffic at the center of the universe where shops
are always open and it’s a complete
surprise each time you’re told that minding your own business
has betrayed your best friend. But that’s over,
that’s history, the kind of story that tends to have an ending,
the code inside your haunted head.
Easy as guilt. As waking and sleeping, sitting down
to stand up, sitting down to go out walking,
closing our eyes to see in the nocturnal
light of day. “Treblinka
was a primitive but proficient
production line of death,” says a former SS Untersharfurer
to the black sharecropper-grandchild of slavery
who may never get over
the banality of where we look.
Only two people
survived the Warsaw uprising, and the one
whose eyes are paths inward, down into the soft grass,
into his skeleton,
who chain-smokes and drinks, is camera shy,
wears short-sleeved shirts, manages to mumble,
“If you could lick my heart, it would poison you.”

"Herodotus uses the past to provide illustrations of situations and characters for use in his present time. He does this because he sees time as circular: history revolving around and around, with the same themes and problems arising again and again. The events that take place in his Histories are often caused by flaws in character, but behind these flaws lies the circular wheel of fate, which raises up and pulls down cities and people in equal measure..."1

William de Brailles 1235

The concept of the wheel of fortune persisted along side the six Ages of Man, which posited time moved from the Creation to the Apocalypse. Mankind had entered the sixth age and awaited the Second Coming and the end of all time.

Crowned Fate sits turning the wheel.
"I am borne again to the stars;

I exalt on high;

Reduced, I descend;

Lowest, I am ground by the wheel"

The Ages of Man are represented within.

1. John H. Arnold, History: A Very Short Introduction

Firsts (Redo)

Your tined proposal glides over her teeth,
cattle prods a smile,
then slithers through the gritting.
Over the threshold,
dust bowl bedroom
tumble weeds
fold in Minerva's curse to turn
a temple to a tomb.
Blood caked on sand dunes,
the platelets pile in the cracks
of your lips like bitter berry juice,
belly warm violet
dries to a sticky sweet stain;
the permanent mark
of this grotesque
imitation of intimacy.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Babi Yar

No monument stands over Babi Yar.

A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.

I am afraid.

Today I am as old in years

as all the Jewish people.

Now I seem to be

a Jew.

Here I plod through ancient Egypt.

Here I perish crucified, on the cross,

and to this day I bear the scars of nails.

I seem to be

Dreyfus.

The Philistine

is both informer and judge.

I am behind bars.

Beset on every side.

Hounded,

spat on,

slandered.

Squealing, dainty ladies in flounced Brussels lace

stick their parasols into my face.

I seem to be then

a young boy in Byelostok.

Blood runs, spilling over the floors.

The barroom rabble-rousers

give off a stench of vodka and onion.

A boot kicks me aside, helpless.

In vain I plead with these pogrom bullies.

While they jeer and shout,

"Beat the Yids. Save Russia!"

some grain-marketeer beats up my mother.

0 my Russian people!

I know

you

are international to the core.

But those with unclean hands

have often made a jingle of your purest name.

I know the goodness of my land.

How vile these anti-Semites-

without a qualm

they pompously called themselves

the Union of the Russian People!

I seem to be

Anne Frank

transparent

as a branch in April.

And I love.

And have no need of phrases.

My need

is that we gaze into each other.

How little we can see

or smell!

We are denied the leaves,

we are denied the sky.

Yet we can do so much --

tenderly

embrace each other in a darkened room.

They're coming here?

Be not afraid. Those are the booming

sounds of spring:

spring is coming here.

Come then to me.

Quick, give me your lips.

Are they smashing down the door?

No, it's the ice breaking ...

The wild grasses rustle over Babi Yar.

The trees look ominous,

like judges.

Here all things scream silently,

and, baring my head,

slowly I feel myself

turning gray.

And I myself

am one massive, soundless scream

above the thousand thousand buried here.

I am

each old man

here shot dead.

I am

every child

here shot dead.

Nothing in me

shall ever forget!

The "Internationale," let it

thunder

when the last anti-Semite on earth

is buried forever.

In my blood there is no Jewish blood.

In their callous rage, all anti-Semites

must hate me now as a Jew.

For that reason

I am a true Russian!