tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70578493875106315582024-02-19T15:58:36.365+00:00Discotheque ZarathustraDiscotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.comBlogger41125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-14525147502442033832020-12-08T11:31:00.004+00:002020-12-08T11:31:44.567+00:00Zarathustra vs The Smashing Pumpkins<p><b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – Second Part – Chapter 5: ‘On the Virtuous’<br />vs “Cyr” The Smashing Pumpkins (<i>Cyr</i>, 2020)</b><br /><br />Gentle laughter: <i>Are you awake? Have you woke?</i> Each night we sleep, and each morning we must awaken. Each night a passing away. Every morning a new awakening.<br /><br />Some people rarely or never sleep, are always sleepy, sleepwalkers walking through the night, walking right through the day as if it were the night. For them Zarathustra would need to shout and scream, ‘thunder’ and ‘fireworks’ would be needed, though they just drag their slack bodies away moaning and groaning ‘you have failed… fail… fail…’?<br /><br />You – however – have slept, have slept well. And as you wake, Zarathustra approaches and lies beside you and speaks softly as the dawn dapples the room with light. Gentle laughter for ‘the most awakened souls’: <i>You are awake! You have woke! </i>So Zarathustra asks something of you. He does not ask you which of your acts are virtuous? For questions such as this require something to be answered first, and are for another morning. There is a more essentail, a more fundamental question. <i>What grounds your virtues? </i><br /><br />Is it one of them there thousand gods? One of the ones that still survive? Is it the promise of that god, of an old musty book, ancient words, incantations of the henchmen? Be virtuous and you will go to this heaven! Be virtuous or you will go to that hell! Payment and fear. Fear and payment – is that why you are virtuous? Is being virtuous its own reward? A warm glow? Something to allude to? Do you feel ripped about being virtuous? Talk about it? Shout? Confront others with your virtues? Look at fucking me! Condemn others with your virtues? Or are you just following the law? You have all the books! You can discuss cases, and precedents, even loopholes! Perhaps it is punishment that scares you? And justice too! Police. Courts. Prisons. Maybe you see virtues as simply actions that yield good consequences? Maybe you see virtues as duties? The good and the right are transcendent! They are mathematic, equations, geometric, eternal, and give birth to universes with a bang! Rather than the illusory laws of an absent god, virtue is hardcoded into us, pseudo-science reigns and evolutionary theories are hijacked for objective ethical certainty.</p><p>You <i>are</i> virtuous! But -<br />Are your virtues ‘a spasm under the whip’?<br />Are your virtues aroused when ‘vices grow lazy’?<br />Are your virtues just you putting the ‘breaks’ on your vices? <br />Are your virtues merely habits, ‘regular clocks that have been wound up’?<br />You <i>are</i> virtuous! But, whispers Zarathustra in your ear, ‘like the snout of a boar shall my words tear open the ground of your soul…’ and ‘the secrets of your ground shall come to light’. You now ‘lie churned and broken up in the sun’. If Zarathustra’s words unground these grounds, bring to light the illusions of these presuppositions, how is virtue possible? Authority becomes shadowy. Idols are toppled, facture, become fragments. Your master slowly dies, is dead: you have killed your master.<br /><br />We can see such a Nietzschean teaching in ‘Cyr’ (2020). ‘Fragments form the minds / Shadows hold the mist / Fractured as this wish’. So sings Billy Corgan, vocalist, songwriter, programmer, and producer of this re-incarnation of The Smashing Pumpkins. Our minds are formed from fragments of given laws, rules, edicts, commandments. Mere shadows of authority, idols, and gods justify our virtues, or at least – in desperation – this is our wish, but these wishes too are fragments. As Nietzsche writes in <i>Beyond Good and Evil</i>, his commentary on <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i>: the human being is a ‘social structure of many “souls”’ (BGE: 19); and we possess a soul that is a ‘social structure’ of ‘instincts and passions’ (BGE: 12). When we come to see these authorities, idols, and gods as illusory (as passions and instincts) this is the moment when – as Corgan sings – we are shattered… ‘Shattered I resign’. Nihilism! All meaning is lost. Yet in this shattering of grounds, in our soul lying broken in the sunlight, ‘we're on the verge’ of something new, we are ‘on the verge / Of sacred dawning’.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dw1-hiz4FBOsz0EnDwNbZ2kRogtNiBOMzfKxIooQ3587CVDSoYbjDBFWGyUfegAbzV9V4crCwpYGvhvfeRoKw' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></p>Or another image: ‘Tangents vex the whorl / The void arrives, then
leaves / Returning, returning a kiss’. The absence of authorities,
idols, and gods confront the hurricane of our virtues with the void, but
this void stares back at you, and is also a promise. We’re on the
verge… ‘Cyr’ is a glorious electronic synth pop tune, beautiful and
dark, full of dangers and the promise of future awakenings. Cyr – after
all – is a strange neologism, and pronounced seer. Someone who sees. The
band have used beats and toyed with electronica before, no doubt, but
on <i>Cyr</i> synth and beats come to the fore in a joyous neo-new wave
sound. ‘Cyr’ is a stunningly beguiling and haunting tune, with strange
and seemingly opaque lyrics sung with Corgan’s compulsive voice,
accompanied by the backing vocals of Katie Cole and Sierra Swan. And
come the doubled chorus you can see Zarathustra dancing to this song.
Singing along to the mantra: ‘Say, I done told you / Say how I tried,
too / Where you've wrought from creation's crown / Say, dire warning /
Stare down your masters / With the promise of one and what you are’.<br /><br /><i>Stare down your masters! </i>- this is the clarion call.<br />A
song for discovering the true ground of your virtuousness. Zarathustra
has told you, has been trying to tell you, it is you who shape your
virtues. ‘Your virtue should be your self and not a foreign thing, a
skin, a cloaking: that is the truth from the ground of your soul, you
virtuous!’ This is the warning: your smashing of gods, idols,
authorities is a treacherous act, risking nihilism, loss of meaning,
confusion. But if you do stare down your masters, there is the promise
of a new awakening. As Nietzsche writes in the first book of the Free
Spirit series, <i>Human, All Too Human</i>: ‘now he dares to ask it
aloud and hears in reply something like an answer. “You shall become
master over yourself, master also over your virtues. Formerly they were
your masters”’ (HH: 6). <br /><br />Groundless, except for what you own as your own responsibility, your own ground. In <i>The Gay Science</i> (the final book of the Free Spirit series, and the text that immediately precedes as well as encompasses <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra </i>and<i> Beyond Good and Evil</i>)
Nietzsche writes of the dire warning, with which it seems perhaps best
to conclude, for now: ‘Virtue gives happiness and a type of blessedness
only to those who have not lost faith in their virtue - not to those
subtler souls whose virtue consists of a deep mistrust of themselves and
of all virtue’ (GS: 214). Now, time to get up!<p></p>Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-7332370348011950772020-10-11T14:38:00.008+00:002020-12-08T11:37:16.250+00:00Zarathustra vs The Damned<div style="text-align: left;"><b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – Second Part – Chapter 4: ‘On the Priests’<br />vs “Anti-Pope” The Damned (<i>Machine Gun Etiquette</i>, 1979)</b></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">What is the sign Zarathustra makes as he and his companions approach a procession of priests?</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Is it a finger-over-lips gesture? Are his words – his opening words – uttered in a shushed voice? The priests are ‘enemies’, sure… but perhaps it is better not to engage with them, leave them be. After all, as the rather more modern saying has it (and which we get a version of here): ‘never wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty and the pig likes it’. So, whispers Zarathustra, ‘pass them by quietly and with a sleeping sword!’</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">This reminds me of an aphorism from <i>Daybreak</i> (1881): ‘to act against one's better judgment when it comes to questions of custom; to give way in practice while keeping one's reservations to oneself; to do as everyone does and thus to show them consideration […] many tolerably freeminded people regard this, not merely as unobjectionable, but as “honest”, “humane”, “tolerant”, “not being pedantic”, and whatever else those pretty words may be’ (§149). However, Nietzsche, believes such an approach is to sanction irrational traditions, a cowardly affirmation. Nothing is worse! Accordingly, in this chapter of <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i>, Nietzsche immediately punishes the teacher: ‘when they had passed by, Zarathustra was assailed by pain’.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Now Zarathustra must have wished he had been more punk. Pointed, at the very least. Or perhaps put a middle finger up, or maybe a circling motion at the side of his head. The sign of a cross (again, slightly anachronistic I know, just couldn’t resist). Two fingers down the throat, across the throat, under the chin and… bang!? And so off he goes with his machine gun etiquette… attacking the priests for their values, their delusive words, and the effects they have on society.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Some five years later in <i>The Anti-Christ</i> (written 1888), Nietzsche really has some fun on this theme: ‘These days anyone with even the most modest claim to honesty has to know that every sentence pronounced by a theologian, a priest, a pope, is not only wrong, it is a lie […] All church concepts are known for what they are, the most malicious counterfeits that exist to devalue nature and natural values; the priests themselves are known for what they are, the most dangerous type of parasite […] just what value those uncanny inventions of the priests and the church have, how they were used to reduce humanity to such a state of self-desecration that the sight fills you with disgust – the concepts “beyond”, “Last Judgement”, “immortality of the soul”, the “soul” itself; these are instruments of torture, these are systems of cruelty that enable the priests to gain control, maintain control’ (§38).</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">It is the ‘theologian’, ‘priest’, and ‘pope’ with their concepts of ‘beyond’ and the ‘soul’ that The Damned call out in their 1979 punk classic ‘Anti-Pope’ as ‘Bollocks!’</div><p style="text-align: left;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='398' height='261' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dz6K11wh01WGsHHzZ3q8MHbVcYl2mL56EAAJzjuve_sWf9fzkdihU-GeTENH9HfjrwH3r6bEQq6y9HLXw3YbA' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">‘Anti-Pope’ has cyclic chord structures that veer off
differently in different verses merging with its non-chorus: ‘So many
people are weak in their lives / And seek guidance from the pedlars of
hope / As you know I used to go there myself / Until the day I became
anti-pope’. Here this ‘anti-pope’ captures up Nietzsche’s <i>The
Anti-Christ</i>, the almost impossibly overloaded lyrics causing vocalist
Dave Vanian to spit out the words like a machine gun. The song is having
a lot of fun… the band are like demented circus clowns and the song
ends with a laugh and the band playing a standard comedy riff a couple
of times caught just in the fade out. It tells of stealing collection
plates, spreading rumours about the priests in order to shame and
embarrass them. Boys in skirts and dresses inviting and owning the slurs
from the upstanding citizen. Turning those slurs back on the hateful
pillars of the community. This is punk: serious fun. Time to stop
laughing. A shock to thought – not letting the past lie, wearing symbols
that horrified the well-meaning, bourgeois, liberal world. Not
whispering, but screaming and shouting till the dying breath. Breaking
the silence of a world that does not want to think uncomfortable
thoughts, confront its own hypocrisy. And sex! Lots of sex. Sex upsets
them all. Get dirty, wrestle that pig, and have some fucking fun while
doing so…</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Why? Because in the
final analysis, for The Dammed: ‘Religion doesn't mean a thing / It’s
just another way of being right wing’. </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Priests are the original
cops. The original judges. The original elite. This is the crux, these
priests are fascists who run a blood cult: ‘they know no other way to
love their God than by nailing the human being to the Cross’. This is
not simply a reference to the wound, but rather to the scar. The priests
crucify their flock every day with their preaching: ‘in their
speeches,’ says Zarathustra, ‘I still smell the foul aroma of
death-chambers’. Part II Chapter 4: ‘On the Priests’ reeks of blood.
Thus ‘their folly taught that one proves the truth with blood’. Perhaps
the central theme of is the vicious circle of
tradition, which in all forms is the ultra-conservative impulse par
excellence. This theme is introduced in the introductory drama: ‘many of
them suffered too much’ – and thus as a consequence – ‘they want to
make others suffer’. This is their delusion, and ‘into every gap they
put their delusion, their stop-gap, which they called God’ where ‘blood
is the worst witness of truth; blood poisons the purest teaching,
turning it into heart’s delusion and hate’. A river of blood is the
source of the delusion, the mainstream of religion, and the chapter is a
kind of genealogy of the priesthood, searching out the multiple
tributaries that feed the confluence. This is a tactical Nietzschean
shock to thought. This is Nietzsche the punk.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">The chapter reeks of blood, but blood also becomes a metaphor. In the opening whisper Zarathustra says ‘Yet my blood is related to theirs; and I would know that my blood is honoured even in theirs’. Perhaps this is why Zarathustra is beset by pain? Zarathustra’s diatribe thus also serves to differentiate. The priests and Zarathustra are teachers – sure. Indeed, this chapter begins by using the word ‘disciples’ for Zarathustra’s companions for the first time in Part 2, and one of only a few times in the whole book. At the end of the chapter, however, Zarathustra calls them ‘brothers’. Here is the difference. ‘Zealously and with much shouting they drove their herd over their bridge: as if to the future there were but one bridge’, while Zarathustra’s companions must be ‘redeemed’ from their teachers if they each ‘would find the way to freedom!’ Each needs to become – in their own way – anti-pope. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2020/12/zarathustra-vs-smashing-pumpkins.html">Second Part: Chapter 5 - The Smashing Pumpkins</a><br /></div></div><p></p>Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-39611941195566020332020-09-23T18:01:00.009+00:002020-10-11T14:58:12.076+00:00Zarathustra vs Cyndi Lauper<p><b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – Second Part – Chapter 3: ‘On Those Who Pity’<br />vs “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” Cyndi Lauper (<i>She's So Unusual</i>, 1983)</b><br /><br />‘Ever since there have been human beings, they have enjoyed themselves too little: that alone, my brothers, is our original sin’ – so proclaims Zarathustra. Enjoy yourself? Can this really be a centre of the teacher’s philosophy? It just seems so… simple (and, possibly, irresponsible or even dangerous). And not enjoying ourselves: that ‘alone’ is the problem for Nietzsche? The ‘original sin’?<br /><br />The doctrine of original sin was developed by the early Christians in their interpretations of what became the Old Testament. In the Genesis myth, Adam and Eve are having good times in the garden of Eden. Amongst the more prosaic foliage, is the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and God commands Adam and Eve to never eat its fruits. However, Eve is also hanging out with a serpent, who idly suggests she taste the fruit, which she then shares with Adam. God gets the hump at this and boots them out of paradise, making them mortal to really fuck them over. Enter the human race as we now know it. This expulsion is known as the fall, and for Christians such as Augustine the disobedience of Adam and Eve is inherited by their ancestors. Of course, there are as many differing interpretations of original sin as there are sects of Christianity, but the ones we have left now after the successful persecution of the outliers by their more powerful cousins, pretty much agree we are all born guilty, inclined to be disobedient to god, and our nature is touched by evil. Oh - and it's all the fault of a woman. Madness.<br /><br />Throughout chapter three, book two of <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i>, Nietzsche alludes to such consequences of the myth of the fall. ‘Shame, shame, shame’ says Zarathustra, ‘that is the history of the human’. Christianity – and religion in general, for Nietzsche – finds ways to create a culture of shaming others. No time more so than when they are enjoying themselves. And particularly for women. And it is just this culture of shame that Cyndi Lauper resists in her first hit single ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dzAll6ezhR4y4ZMSmlwqbUO5QImap34ytQ9quDKKvXHqbyxp8SOEvl0nAruJQxYDkgkgoMqBiXwuhLCW2gr4w' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe><br /></div></div><p>Written and first demoed by Robert Hazard in 1979, it was released by Lauper in 1983. Lauper’s version is a synthpop hymn to enjoyment, but – crucially – this enjoyment must be fought for against the cultural forces of shame that surround her. Out having a laugh with her girlfriends, Lauper is attacked by parental forces: ‘I come home in the morning light / My mother says when you gonna live your life right’; and, ‘The phone rings in the middle of the night / My father yells what you gonna do with your life’. Here the past and the future are evoked to shame and restrict the behaviours of this girl. And even when she escapes the repressive environment of her parents, the oppression is reasserted in relationships: ‘Some boys take a beautiful girl / And hide her away from the rest of the world’. ‘[T]hat is the history of the human’, says Zarathustra in a pre-echo of ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’: ‘Shame, shame, shame’. Lauper’s track is an anti-shaming song. It is articulated from the perspective of one who enjoys herself, and displays no ressentiment or revenge, no anger toward those who want to restrict the enjoyment of others. And this is important as it thus breaks with the logic of the history of shame. ‘Oh mother dear we're not the fortunate ones’… ‘Oh daddy dear you know you're still number one’, and ‘I want to be the one to walk in the sun’.</p><p>We have already seen Neitzsche cast the sun as bestowing pure benevolence at the very beginning of <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i>, as the very first image of the book (‘First Part: Prologue 1’). And such benevolence appears throughout Nietzsche’s books. For instance, in <i>Human, All Too Human</i> (B1 C2 §49: ‘Benevolence’) Nietzsche writes: ‘Among the little but immeasurably frequent and thus very influential things to which science ought to pay more attention than to the great, rare things, benevolence too is to be reckoned; I mean those social expressions of a friendly disposition, those smiles of the eyes, those handclasps, that comfortable manner with which almost all human action is as a rule encompassed […] especially within the narrowest circle, within the family […] Good-naturedness, friendliness, politeness of the heart are never-failing emanations of the unegoistic drive and have played a far greater role in the construction of culture than those much more celebrated expressions of it called pity, compassion and self-sacrifice.’</p><p>And thus we encounter the theme of pity. This is crucial as the chapter is entitled ‘On Those Who Pity’ and performs a genealogy of pity. ‘Pangs of conscience give people fangs’ and those who are subjected to such pity have their pride injured and become ‘vengeful’. Nietzsche is against pity. And the aphorism on benevolence in <i>Human, All Too Human</i> is followed by an aphorism titled ‘The desire to excite pity’. (B1 C2 §50). None of this means, as we have seen, that Neitzsche is against being kind, helpful, nice. Far from it. ‘Verily, I may have done this and that for sufferers: but better things it seemed I always did when I learned to enjoy myself better […] And if we enjoy ourselves better. So do we best unlearn our hurting of others and our planning hurts for them’. And it is this tone and meaning that inspires ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’.</p><p><a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2020/10/zarathustra-vs-damned.html">Second Part: Chapter 4 - The Damned </a><br /></p>Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-84307396270472743812018-11-24T15:47:00.003+00:002020-09-23T18:12:02.487+00:00Zarathustra vs XTC<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – Second Part – Chapter 2: ‘Upon the Isles of the Blest’</b><br />
<b>vs “Dear God” XTC (<i>Skylarking</i>, 1987 reissue [original 1986])</b><br />
<br />
‘The Father, Son and Holy Ghost / Is just somebody's unholy hoax’ cries Andy Partridge during the closing tirade of XTC’s unlikely folk-pop hit single of the mid-1980s. “Dear God” captures well Nietzsche’s grounding arguments of chapter two, book two of <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i>. ‘God’ writes Nietzsche, ‘is a supposition: but who could drink down all the anguish of this supposition without dying?’, ‘God is a thought that makes all that is straight crooked and all that stands twist and turn’, ‘Evil I call it and hostile to the human: all this teaching about the One and Plenum and Unmoved and Complete and Permanent!’. For Nietzsche and for Zarathustra, god is a supposition, a way of thinking, an ideology – and XTC echo such a critical philosophy.<br />
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The lyric of “Dear God” is a letter, a letter from a child to the very god they do not – and cannot – believe in. This conceit is beautifully realised by using a young girl to sing the introduction and coda, a naïve, fragile but compelling voice that bookends Partridge’s more acerbic and taunting vocal. ‘Dear God,’ sings the child, ‘hope you get the letter’… ‘all the people that you made in your image / See them starving on their feet / 'Cause they don't get enough to eat / from God’. In this way, “Dear God” presents the philosophical problem of evil to a religion that believes in an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent god. ‘I can't’, sings the child, ‘believe in you’. When Partridge’s vocal kicks in, the song expands its argument to the problem of faith and belief, here people are ‘fighting in the street / 'Cause they can't make opinions meet / about God’. These horrors, for XTC, are of human origin: ‘Did you make mankind after we made you?’ asks Partridge wryly, before growling ‘And the Devil too!’ As with god, so with the <i>Bible</i>, <i>Quran</i>, <i>Torah</i> and so on: ‘Your name is on a lot of quotes in this book / And us crazy humans wrote it’, yet people are ‘Still believing that junk is true’. XTC create a visceral diatribe against religion carried upon the catchiest of tunes, the child’s voice luring you in and, in the final moments, allowing something approaching consolation. ‘If there's one thing I don't believe in’ concludes Partridge, allowing the child to complete the thought: ‘It's you / Dear God’.<br />
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Zarathustra similarly centres his speech in chapter two, book two, on the problems of evil and faith. Here, these arguments are exploited to reground his teaching as coming in the wake of the death of god. In this way, the chapter begins as is a kind of thematic recap, like a short montage sequence at the beginning of a new boxset season. We begin in media res, Zarathustra is now on the Isles of the Blest, an elliptic leap forward after his decision to leave his cave in the previous chapter. He is wandering around with his refound friends, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells of this garden paradise. It is late summer, the trees are fecund with ripe fruits, and Zarathustra is likewise overflowing with new thoughts he wishes to share with those he has been away from for so long. First, however, he must re-establish the ground and consequence of his teaching. Turning his gaze from the beauty of the trees to the promises of the ocean he proclaims: ‘Once one said “God” when one looked upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say: Overhuman’. Foregrounding the overhuman in the wake of the death of god was the central task of book one, the idea that humanity was ‘human, all too human’, and needed to reject the metaphysical junk of ages for new philosophies orientated toward the future, to new ideas, new possibilities, new vistas, new kinds of being in the world. Early in book one, Zarathustra had left his mountain home and encountered a mystic dude worshiping god in the forest, and Zarathustra seemed quite content to let the believer believe. In book two, however, we encounter a far more vehement Zarathustra. His attitude toward god and religion has evolved during the process of the first book, and is now one reflecting his transformation into a ‘lion’ roaring ‘wild wisdom’. Book two, while a narrative recurrence of book one, has a certain take on the nature of any repetition: difference.<br />
<br />
And it is in this way we begin to see the emergence of Zarathustra’s new thoughts. Zarathustra’s teachings are still necessarily grounded in the death of god, and still propose the overhuman as the new way of being in the world. Yet the question is – how to become the overhuman? Responses, if not answers, to these questions, will emerge during book two and three of <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i>. In this chapter we see the hints of these emergent teachings – as yet unnamed. ‘[M]uch bitter dying must there be in your lives, you creators’ – says Zarathustra. Life must embrace change, movement, transformation: rebirths – and multiple deaths of the self-that-was. This is embedded in the narrative structure with Zarathustra’s repeated return from the mountains (and will be named and explored as eternal recurrence in book three). However, it is the teaching of the will that emerges most strongly here, and will become the central investigation of book two (eventually zeroing in on the will to power). Zarathustra is still trying to figure this will, naming it ‘my creating will’; and saying ‘my willing always comes to me as my liberator and joy-bringer’. ‘Willing liberates’, and accordingly ‘that is the true teaching of will and freedom – thus does Zarathustra teach it to you’.<br />
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God – the creator – is dead. The overhuman is now the creator and created, the will to power creates the overhuman, and the continual rebirths of the overhuman powers the will that liberates the free spirit, the overhuman. This is the trefoil knot of teachings in <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i>, made possible by an encounter with the death of god. ‘For the creator to be himself the child that is newly born, he must also want to be the birth-giver and the pain of the birth-giver’, says Zarathustra; and thus is revealed the singular importance of using the young girl’s vocal to begin and end XTC’s “Dear God”.<br />
<div>
<br /></div><div><a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2020/09/zarathustra-vs-cyndi-lauper.html">Second Part: Chapter 2 - Cyndi Lauper</a><br /></div>
Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-29686972808335109412018-11-17T18:48:00.003+00:002020-10-11T15:19:23.614+00:00Zarathustra vs Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – Second Part – Chapter 1: ‘The Child With the Mirror’</b><br />
<b>vs “Almost Cut My Hair” Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (<i>Déjà Vu</i>, 1970)</b><br />
<br />
Zarathustra awakes ‘shaken’ after a nightmare. During his sleep he dreamt of a child visiting him with a mirror, inviting him to look upon himself. Gazing into the mirror – however – he sees not himself but ‘a Devil’s grimace and mocking laughter’. Zarathustra immediately interprets the dream as an ‘omen and admonition’. Thus ‘my teaching is in danger’ and ‘enemies… have distorted the image of my teaching. Such that my dearest ones must be ashamed’.<br />
<br />
We find Zarathustra – at the beginning of book two – once again living in his cave in the mountains. In book one, Zarathustra had left his precipitous home for the vales and valleys of the countryside below, ultimately settling in a town and becoming a teacher, collecting around him a select circle of disciples to explore the meaning of the death of god and the possibilities of the overhuman. However, in the end, Zarathustra knew he must allow his students to go their own way, to grow in their own time, and so had left them to their own travels while he returned to the mountains and to his solitary life. And so the years did pass…<br />
<br />
Yet Zarathustra becomes restless. He has new thoughts, and wants to share them with his friends. Over the years he has felt the desire to return to the world many times, but has resisted. On the one hand, he felt he should wait for his teaching to flourish; on the other, he felt lost without teaching. Zarathustra is conflicted. Things come to a head after a dark night of the soul, with the teacher waking from his nightmare to contemplate the meaning of the vision he had experienced while asleep. But then something odd happens. Zarathustra – Nietzsche tells us – ‘sprang up, but not like one who is anxious and gasps for air, but rather like a seer and singer who is overtaken by the spirit’. This change in aspect surprises not only the eagle and the serpent, but also Zarathustra, who asks ‘What has happened to me, my animals?... Am I not transformed!’<br />
<br />
It is this moment of transformation that is the central puzzle of chapter one of book two: why does Zarathustra’s mood suddenly transform from anxiety to affirmation? We see something comparable in the laidback hippy anthem ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Written by David Crosby, who takes on solo lead vocals, the track is an electric guitar driven jam with a fierce lyric exploring giving up and selling out. ‘Almost cut my hair’, sings Crosby in the first verse, ‘It happened just the other day / It was gettin' kind of long / Coulda said it was in my way’. Yet immediately, as we enter the pre-chorus (to a song which effectively has no chorus), Crosby tells us ‘But I didn't and I wonder why’. Here we encounter a moment of transformation analogous to that of Zarathustra’s, a moment of doubt that is overcome…<br />
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How does such an overcoming come about? In ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ Crosby’s cracked and angry voice explains: ‘I feel like letting my freak flag fly’ and – a little later – ‘I'm not giving in an inch to fear’. Clara Bingham, in <i>Witness to the Revolution</i>, writes ‘The song describes a real-life dilemma faced by many hippies: whether to cut one's hair to a more practical length, or leave it long as a symbol of rebellion’ (p. 108). Accordingly, what may appear at first to be a light-hearted reverie becomes a countercultural hymn of resistance – resistance to doubt, to uncertainty, to ‘paranoia’ – ‘like’, sings Crosby ‘looking in my mirror and seeing a police car’.<br />
<br />
And so ‘Almost Cut My Hair’ – just like chapter one book two of <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – uses the symbol of a mirror to confront the dreamer with anxiety and disquiet. The image of the mirror and the mirror-image recurs many times throughout the latter half of Book Two of <i>Zarathustra</i>. We see the spirit become a mirror, and a ‘hundredfold mirror’ used capture the multiplicity of life (chapter 12); we see the mirror used in a mediation on the sublime (chapter 13); we see ‘fifty mirrors’ surrounding those that need flattery (chapter 14); we see impotent scholars become ‘mirror[s] with a hundred eyes’ (chapter 15). There are other mentions of mirrors in Books One, Three and Four, but what is clear is that the image of the mirror is contextual. Here we cannot ignore that it is held by a child; which at the beginning of Book One was seen as the final moment in a chain of transformations. Camel can become lion, and lion can become child, from bearing the weight of the world, to raging at the world, to seeing the world as a site of play and rebirth (Book One, chapter 1). And in this chapter, the transformation that occurs seems to be that of becoming the lion.<br />
<br />
Nietzsche tells us how Zarathustra decides once again to leave his mountain home, to head out into the world, to share his teachings and new insights: saying ‘you… will be terrified, my friends, by my Wild Wisdom; and perhaps you will flee from her along with my enemies… my lioness Wisdom’. And so Zarathustra leaves his cave for warmer climes, seeking his friends on the Isles of the Blest’, just like Crosby: ‘I'm gonna get down in that sunny southern weather’.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2018/11/zarathustra-vs-xtc.html">Second Part: Chapter 2 - XTC</a><br />
<br />Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-21959367420661862472018-03-13T16:42:00.000+00:002018-11-17T18:54:47.756+00:00Zarathustra vs The Stranglers<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra </i>– First Part – Chapter 22: ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ III</b><br />
<b>vs “No More Heroes” The Stranglers (<i>No More Heroes</i>, 1977)</b><br />
<br />
Zarathustra wants no believers (tho’ the lure is there). Zarathustra wants no disciples (tho’ the lure is there). And Zarathustra don’t even want followers (tho’ again, the lure is there). The final section of the final chapter of Book One of <i>Zarathustra</i> is like that wonderful scene in <i>Monty Python’s Life of Brian</i> (1979) – the Pythons were arch-Nietzscheans. Our fake messiah, hiding in a hermit’s grotto, tells his nascent adherents: ‘Now, fuck off’ (without – we hope – the confused rejoinder: ‘How shall we fuck off, O Lord?’).<br />
<br />
‘You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what does Zarathustra matter? You are my believers: but what do any believers matter?’ <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> concerns the death of belief in god, of gods, of all kinds of idols: the state, the market, leaders, teachers. All appeals to authority should be seen as suspect and be treated with suspicion and scepticism. It is exactly such a sentiment as this that inspires The Stranglers punk classic ‘No More Heroes’.<br />
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A bastard of a bassline. A heavy, distorted bastard of a bassline. Keyboards – so not punk they are so punk. And Hugh Cornwell’s belligerent rhetorical question: ‘Whatever happened to the heroes?’ Is it that these heroes are all dead? Trotsky with the ice pick. Or is that there never really were any heroes, that having heroes is a problem? In life, and in death through personality cults, fake artifacts like the works of the great forger Elmyr de Hory. Far better the scepticism and suspicion in the critical comedy of Lenny Bruce, or the sanchismos (irony and parodies) of Cervantes. When Brian claims: ‘I'm not the Messiah!’, Arthur responds: ‘I say you are, Lord, and I should know, I've followed a few’. This is not the way Zarathustra wants to roll…<br />
<br />
Hang on – what about Nietzsche’s heroes? Wagner, Schopenhauer? Simply this: ‘One repays a teacher poorly if one always remains a student’.<br />
<br />
And with that we conclude the First Book of <i>Zarathustra</i>. Nietzsche published this book early in 1883, while working on the second. He sold very few copies in his lifetime.<br />
<br />
So, as Mandy – Brian’s mum – would say: 'Now, piss off!'<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2018/11/zarathustra-vs-crosby-stills-nash-young.html">Second Part: Chapter 1 - Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young</a><br />
<br />Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-86287479576819987932018-03-12T21:13:00.000+00:002018-03-13T16:55:38.307+00:00Zarathustra vs Björk<br />
<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 22: ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ II</b><br />
<b>vs “Human Behaviour” Björk (<i>Debut</i>, 1993)</b><br />
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Here – in Section II of the final chapter of Book One – Zarathustra
explicitly reveals the ground (or ontology) of his philosophy. Naturalism. Our
bodies are of the earth, and thus should ‘[s]tay true to the earth’, ‘serve the
sense of the earth’. The body, its drives and its spirit emerge from the
natural world. We are products of deep history, human, animal, plant and
mineral; and it is the disciplines of the natural sciences (from cosmology to
evolution through physics, chemistry and biology) that should inform our
philosophical understanding of the world and its bodies. Accordingly, proclaims
Zarathustra, ‘the human has been an experiment’. Evolution is a continuous
experiment, driven by the forces of the world, of which the human itself is
merely one amongst an almost infinite multitude. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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There is thus, of course, a wee revelation here – one
that those who believe in science as the end of philosophy must deny. While the
natural sciences depend upon the reflection of a rational subject, such
rationality is constructed upon a fundamental irrationality. A tower built upon
sand. The irrational is the flux of drives which surge through our bodies, the
ur-thought of life prior to development and differentiation into animal consciousness
and the human spirit. In this way: ‘[n]ot only the reason of millennia – but
also their madness breaks out in us’. Such an irrationality as the ground of
the body is captured in Björk’s glorious ‘Human Behaviour’.</div>
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Trip-hop beats with a timpani lay out an organic dance
track which Bjork sets about disturbing through disjunctive scansion and
ungrounding rhyme. Nonetheless, while it is experimental art-pop, ‘Human
Behaviour’ is a hot tune, catchy, hummable, memorable. Almost a nursery rhyme.
‘If you ever get close to a human / And human behaviour / Be ready, be ready to
get confused’ for ‘There's definitely, definitely, definitely no logic’. This
is the crucial aspect: ‘there's no map / And a compass wouldn't help at all’. Everything
is chance, as Zarathustra reminds us. Because of this, the future is open: ‘A
thousand paths there are that have never yet been trodden… unexhausted and
undiscovered are the human and human earth even now’.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Because of this, the human and human behaviour are –
accordingly to in Björk – ‘irresistible’. Chance and change are at the heart of
such experience. ‘To get involved in the exchange / Of human emotions / Is ever
so, ever so satisfying’.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But of course, Björk reminds us once again, ‘there is no
map’. We thus discover with Björk an unanswerable question that lies at the
heart of Nietzsche’s naturalism. As Nietzsche writes in <i>Daybreak</i>: ‘the question itself remains unanswered
whether one is of more use to another by immediately leaping to his side and
helping him – which help can in any case be only superficial where it does not
become a tyrannical seizing and transforming – or by creating something out of
oneself that the other can behold with pleasure: a beautiful, restful,
self-enclosed garden perhaps, with high walls against storms and the dust of
the highway but also a hospitable gate’ (D 174).<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2018/03/zarathustra-vs-stranglers.html"><br /></a>
<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2018/03/zarathustra-vs-stranglers.html">First Part: Chapter 22.3 - The Stranglers</a>Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-31077141590094014762017-10-29T18:20:00.005+00:002018-03-12T21:23:01.859+00:00Zarathustra vs Underworld<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 22: ‘On the Bestowing Virtue’ I</b><br />
<b>vs “Cowgirl” Underworld (<i>Dubnobasswithmyheadman</i>, 1994)</b><br />
<br />
Such bestowing as Zarathustra’s reminds us of the experience of an encounter with Underworld’s ‘Cowgirl’, with its refrain of: ‘I want to give you everything / I want to give you energy / Want to give a good thing / To give you everything’ – ‘Everything everything everything everything’…<br />
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<br />
And so, here in chapter 22 – the finale of the first book of <i>Zarathustra</i> – Nietzsche has the teacher leaving the town of The Motley Cow. His departure has been presaged, there has been a sense of an ending in the way Nietzsche has organised the narration. In the previous two chapters, Zarathustra has initiated discussions on birth and then death. And if these two subjects are not the most important, they are at the very least the essential givens of life, which – of course – has been the focus of all Zarathustra’s speeches. Indeed, birth and death, rebirth and many deaths – such is the experience and opportunity of everyday life. Everything ends, and then something new begins. Why is Zarathustra leaving? Perhaps the teacher feels he has done as much as he can to ‘lure many away from the herd’ (see Prologue 9) – which was, after all, the reason for his sojourn in the town at the opening of book one. And this final chapter mirrors that first chapter – the latter exploring three transformations; the former divided into three sections, each division marked by the teacher’s voice being ‘transformed’. And there are other mirrorings…<br />
<br />
The first section of chapter 22 sees Zarathustra escorted to the outskirts of the town by his companions (those ‘who called themselves his disciples’). As a parting gift, they have given him a new walking staff. Set upon the staff is a golden haft fashioned in the image of sun, and around the sun, a coiled serpent. We have already met the serpent (I.19), and will so again. Indeed, one of Zarathustra’s animals – along with an eagle – is a snake; and these animals appear in the opening of the Prologue. And it was in this opening of the Prologue where the rising sun was the inspiration for Zarathustra to leave his cave. The image of the serpent and the sun come together as the circle, but a circle of movement, of endings and beginnings.<br />
<br />
The gift encourages Zarathustra to create an on-the-spot allegory: ‘how did gold assume the highest value? Because it is uncommon and of no use and luminous and mild in its lustre; it always bestows itself’. Gold – in this way – is itself an allegory of what Zarathustra sees as ‘the highest virtue’. We must remember – of course – Nietzsche’s conception of the relation between allegory and truth in ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’. Truth is ‘[a] movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions – they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.’ Zarathustra’s allegory captures up the value of gold, the circles of the serpent and the sun, as well as his and the disciples relations in respect to the past and the future.<br />
<br />
This highest value and virtue is that of bestowing. Giving: like the sun. Gifting wisdom, the wisdom you have; your hard-won wisdom, such as it is. Giving of yourself. Such a way of life engenders energy: ‘[e]levated is your body then and resurrected: with its rapture it delights the spirit, so that it becomes creator and elevator and lover and benefactor of all things’. Such bestowing reminds us of the experience of an encounter with Underworld’s ‘Cowgirl’, with its refrain of: ‘I want to give you everything / I want to give you energy / Want to give a good thing / To give you everything’ – ‘Everything everything everything everything’…<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2018/03/zarathustra-vs-bjork.html">First Part: Chapter 22.2 - Björk</a><br />
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Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-5597202389824783132017-05-20T21:13:00.002+00:002018-03-12T21:21:25.014+00:00Zarathustra vs Neil Young & Crazy Horse<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 21: ‘On Free Death’</b><br />
<b>vs “My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue) / Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)”, Neil Young & Crazy Horse (<i>Rust Never Sleeps</i>, 1979)<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></b><br />
<br />
If Chapter 20 of <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> was an exploration of the conditions for birth, then Chapter 21 is reciprocal in that it takes a similar approach to the conditions for Death. And here is Zarathustra’s advice (which he admits ‘sounds strange’): ‘Die at the right time!’ Some die too soon! We know that. But this is not all. Some live too long!<br />
<br />
Neil Young – in the opening and closing cuts of his 1979 album <i>Rust Never Sleeps</i> – explores, in his own way, such a polarity. My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue) and Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black) are the same song in two versions. My My is a beautiful, melancholy acoustic track accompanied on the mouth organ; while Hey Hey is a full band electric beast, a joyous bone-crunching epic of distorted guitars.<br />
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<br />
It may appear that both songs tell the same story: ‘It's better to burn out / Than to fade away’ and ‘It's better to burn out / 'cause rust never sleeps’. However, such a reading is nominal, and immediately superseded once we move beyond a consideration of the lyrics to the way in which each track is presented. ‘There's more to the picture / Than meets the eye.’ It’s all in the performance. Folk > Punk. The melancholy acoustic track is an elegy to a young life that was vital, revealed in the reality of an early death. The electric track is a Dionysian celebration of a life lived well, and a death welcomed with open arms before degradation and disintegration. ‘Once you're gone / you can never come back’ and ‘The king is gone / but he's not forgotten’. Death is death but you can die a good death: don’t go too soon, but don’t leave it too late.<br />
<br />
Zarathustra considers a series of theoretical and hypothetical exemplars of dying too soon and living too long – after all, ending your own life may be seen as religious heresy; but it is not. Your death can be yours to command. And if death appears to be stalking you – don’t go out without fighting, even if that fight is with yourself.<br />
<br />
To conclude, the teacher gives us two specific, controversial and very funny examples. For dying too soon there is Jesus Christ. Imagine how he may have mellowed out and not taken things so seriously if he’d hung around a little longer and not – as the story goes – jumped up there on that cross! And of living too long – hilariously – there appears Zarathustra himself! Make of that what you will.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2017/10/zarathustra-vs-underworld.html">First Part: Chapter 22.1 - Underworld</a><br />
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Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-639882701892173662017-05-16T17:43:00.002+00:002017-05-20T21:35:52.010+00:00Zarathustra vs Louis Armstrong<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 20: ‘On Children and Marriage’</b><br />
<b>vs “What a Wonderful World”, Louis Armstrong (<i>What a Wonderful World</i>, 1967)</b><br />
<br />
Zarathustra taps one of his young disciples on the shoulder, pulling him to one side. There is a sense here of the teacher following up – after some thought – on an earlier hesitant inquiry or stilted conversation initiated by the student. Maybe, even, it’s the same student who had previously caught Zarathustra in the night-time streets? On his way to a secret lover, the teacher had shared ribald jokes with the young man, but there was an undercurrent of unease to the whole affair (see Z I.18). Here, the discussion is of love: focused upon marriage, and upon children. ‘I cast this question like a sounding-lead into your soul,’ says Zarathustra, ‘that I may know how deep it is’. ‘You are young and wish for a child and marriage’ – why? The teacher explores a number of reasons for ‘your love of woman, and woman’s love of man’ – to adhere to social convention, to satiate animal drives, to assuage the terror of loneliness. However, all of these reasons are suspect and will necessarily corrupt both the woman and the man, ressentiment will permeate the family, and all these unhappy families will result in a discordant community riven with lying, cheating and abuse. Rather indulge in ‘brief follies’ – for while ‘your marriage puts an end to many brief follies’, it does so only through ‘one long stupidity’.<br />
<br />
Nonetheless – Zarathustra is not against love, marriage and raising children. We can approach the teacher’s affirmation of such things through Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World’.<br />
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<br />
Armstrong was the first to cut the song, co-written by the music industry titans Bob Thiele and George David Weiss, and it is this version – despite numerous beautiful and brilliant covers – that remains the classic. A studio jazz orchestra lays down the soundscape – but it is Satchmo’s voice that dominates. Aged as oak and splintered by time, fallen, but rich and fathoms deep, the singer paints a picture in primary colours of a vital world. ‘I see trees of green,’ sings Armstrong, ‘red roses too / I see them bloom, for me and you’. Bright blue skies with pure white clouds cut through by the intensity of rainbows. This is what love is, what marriage should be – and as Satchmo takes us to the bridge we see how such relationships inspire the whole community: ‘I see friends shaking hands / Saying, “How do you do?” / They're really saying / “I love you”.’ Yet it is the final verse where we encounter the essential moment: ‘I hear babies cry/ I watch them grow / They'll learn much more / Than I'll ever know’.<br />
<br />
Zarathustra is not against love, but it need result in the convention of marriage. Don’t ruin love with a shitty marriage. And indeed – marriage is not something that need be officiated or affirmed by a religion, priest or petty official. In the end, all that matters with true love and real marriage are the children. ‘Marriage: thus I call the will of two to create the one that is more than those who created it’. As Satchmo would conclude: ‘Oh yeah’.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2017/05/zarathustra-vs-neil-young-crazy-horse.html">First Part: Chapter 21 - Neil Young & Crazy Horse</a><br />
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Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-46393300642739826652017-05-05T22:20:00.000+00:002017-05-16T17:46:01.404+00:00Zarathustra vs David Guetta featuring Sia<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 19: ‘On the Bite of the Adder’</b><br />
<b>vs “Titanium”, David Guetta featuring Sia (<i>Nothing But The Beat</i>, 2011)</b><br />
<br />
‘On the Bite of the Adder’ is a lot of fun. It begins with – what we will discover to be – a parable; and then proceeds – once the parable is revealed as such – with Zarathustra interpreting it for his ‘disciples’; finally – in the wake of the interpretation – a reversal.<br />
<br />
Zarathustra is having a doze in the quietude of a shady tree, when a snake slithers up and fangs him. The teacher, now awake, neither wreaks revenge upon the snake, nor does he seek to forgive the adder. Rather – he takes the piss (this is, after all, a talking snake). Calls himself a dragon – and says that he is impervious to the adder’s venom. Indeed, the little fellow may come to regret wasting his precious but petty malice upon Zarathustra. Feeling a bit ‘awkward’ (nice one Nietzsche), the snake sets about trying to take back his poison. Fat chance.<br />
<br />
Zarathustra – as Sia would have it in rave-maestro David Guetta’s ‘Titanium’ – is bulletproof.<br />
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An electric guitar arpeggio opens the tune, accompanied by a laconic, almost murmured vocal. But the song is there for the body to encounter an ecstasy of sound, and Sia’s vocals soar as synth kicks in, and its almost as if we have fallen into an airless vacuum: ‘I'm bulletproof, nothing to lose / Fire away, fire away / Ricochet, you take your aim / Fire away, fire away / You shoot me down but I won't fall / I am titanium’. And then the beat drops… immense.<br />
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This is a disruptive act (and neither a reaction nor a passive acceptance). The ideal Christian response would be to forgive and turn the other cheek. The ideal Old Testament reaction would be to take an eye for an eye. Sia – just like Zarathustra – has another way. And ‘On the Bite of the Adder’ is a mediation on enemies (their acts and our responses) just like ‘Titanium’. Unlike the ultra-modern soundscape of the song, however, Nietzsche employs Biblical imagery and language. The snake of the tree of the garden of Eden encounters the dragon of Revelation in the guise of the teacher of immorality. Immorality in this instance being Zarathustra’s rejection of the logical dichotomy allowed in the Biblical worldview.<br />
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What follows is a taxonomy of enemies: intellectual, criminal, social, and so on. On the one hand, and in a minor key, different enemies require different types of response. Not simply because of the enemy, but also because of the one who is attacked. Thus, in the major key and on the other hand, we have Nietzsche’s critique: justice does not acknowledge the one who is attacked. Zarathustra’s teaching: ‘How can I give to each his own! Let this suffice me: I give to each my own’. In this way, the idea of objective justice is revealed as an unobtainable ideal, another corrupt illusion. But also, Zarathustra’s is no idealisation of the conscious I, for the response comes from the ‘ground up!’ – a pre-subjective encounter with the world. Remember, Zarathustra was awoken by the snake. He wasn’t even mad about being woken up!<br />
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In <i>Daybreak</i> (aka <i>Dawn</i>), Nietzsche writes of an encounter with the laughter of another while out walking: ‘One person will absorb it like a drop of rain, another will shake it from him like an insect, another will try to pick a quarrel, another will examine his clothing to see if there is anything about it that might give rise to laughter, another will be led to reflect on the nature of laughter as such, another will be glad to have involuntarily augmented the amount of cheerfulness and sunshine in the world’ (D: II.119[76]).<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2017/05/zarathustra-vs-louis-armstrong.html">First Part: Chapter 20 - Louis Armstrong</a><br />
<br />Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-81885604437283020882017-04-30T18:23:00.000+00:002017-05-05T22:24:57.073+00:00Zarathustra vs Marina and the Diamonds<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 18: ‘On Old and Young Little Women’</b><br />
<b>vs “Sex Yeah”, Marina and the Diamonds (<i>Electra Heart</i> [Deluxe version], 2012/4)</b><br />
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‘Why do you slink so shyly through the twilight, Zarathustra?’ asks one of the teacher’s acolytes – discovering the man creeping through the night-time town, attempting to remain unperceived. ‘And what are you hiding so carefully under your cloak?’ The received wisdom is that Nietzsche is here simply echoing Plato’s <i>Phaedrus</i> (227a-8e). Phaedrus is on his way to friend’s house to deliver a speech on love (specifically, the art of gay seduction) when he encounters Socrates. The treatise was penned by a dude named Lysias, and Phaedrus tries to trick Socrates into hearing a recitation by heart, saying he has no notes, and needs the practice. But Socrates spies something tucked beneath Phaedrus’ robe. It is a copy of Lysias’ words, Phaedrus has been rumbled, but the friends laugh and sit down together to read the original.<br />
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Nietzsche – however – plays with and subverts this reference: conjuring up a far more ribald exchange. Zarathustra is on his way to a lover, most probably a prostitute. And hidden beneath Zarathustra’s cloak is an erection (only possibly metaphorical). The two men go on to swap some nasty allusions. Then – and here we get to the crux of the chapter – Zarathustra reports another encounter he had a little earlier, at dusk (seems everyone is catching him at it! – aint that always the way!). This chapter is thus very different from most in the book: reported dialogue presented within a conversation. This presentation must thus be considered significant. And this recurrence has at least three indeterminacies on three different levels. In the first place, it undermines the veracity of Zarathustra’s reportage – a conversation between him and an old woman. Did the teacher even meet this woman? Or is this some kind of false attribution, a lie to justify? Whatever the case, this conversation is infamous. For the old woman concludes their exchange with the words: ‘“You are going women? Then don’t forget the whip!”‘. As the chapter has progressed, the sexism has been ratcheted up, eventually achieving a level of explicit violent misogyny. The defence – of course – would be that these words are not spoken by Zarathustra, but by a woman. Zarathustra merely repeats. But – and here is the second indeterminacy and secondary level – such a defence intensifies the problem. For – of course – it is Nietzsche’s tactic to give these words to a female interlocutor. Is this cowardice? Nietzsche without the courage to allow the hallowed teacher to speak these words for himself? Instead, he gives them to an old woman – invoking a cliché of aged female jealousy for good measure!<br />
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As Ashley Woodward writes – ‘Nietzsche is widely regarded as an outrageous misogynist’ (<i>Nietzscheanism</i>: 135). Yet – we must ask – is it possible Nietzsche is presenting a critique of misogyny here? Through the indeterminacies of the reported speech, and Nietzsche conceiving this as reported speech, does this tactic force or allow critical reflection? <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i>, after all, does not operate in the same way as most philosophical texts but rather functions by way of allusion, paradox, hyperbole, contradiction and ellipsis. The book is a series of aphorisms composing a narration engendering a narrative. There are no bare, raw concepts. Rather, philosophy is narrativised, dramatized, performed. The book is both problematic and problematizing. Is the misogyny in <i>Zarathustra</i> – in other words – hyperbolic? Is recursion and hyperbole a tactic to confront the reader, create a visceral encounter with a corrupt and corrupting worldview? Zarathustra becomes implicated in the text (and so does the reader of <i>Zarathustra</i> who has identified with the teacher). He is on his way to a prostitute, he may or may not be lying. Is Nietzsche undermining Zarathustra? Is Nietzsche revealing the teacher’s hypocrisy? After all his high-falutin’ philosophical talk in the market place, Zarathustra is seen as human, all too human and just like – as we say – any other man.<br />
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There is an analogous approach by Marina & the Diamonds during her <i>Electra Heart</i> period. The album contains tracks with titles such as ‘Bubblegum Bitch’, ‘Primadonna’, ‘Homewrecker’ and ‘Valley Of The Dolls’ – cuts ranging from electro-punk to pure pop to elegiac ballads. The album is conceptual, in the sense that all the songs form a narrative web around a nexus named Electra Heart. Diamandis articulates this to <a href="https://www.popjustice.com/articles/an-interview-with-marina-the-diamonds/" target="_blank">PopJustice</a>: ‘people will think Electra Heart is an alter ego or something but she’s not, it’s kind of basically a vehicle’. In other words, Electra Heart is not a secondary, derivative and false persona to an original and core being; but rather a capturing of a fundamental existential cultural ideology that overwhelms and captures up a body in flux. ‘Like everything I’m not, that’s what I’m becoming’, continues Diamandis. Accordingly, the artist must subsume themselves, must sacrifice themselves – in order to expose the coordinates of such a worldview: ‘I’m so against it that I almost have to play the part’. Unfortunately, such a move is a little difficult for PopJustice – ‘Can you explain again, in a short sentence’; ‘Do you need to make this so complicated?’ Reviews of the album tend to adopt a similar anti-intellectual attitude: <a href="http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16579-electra-heart/" target="_blank">Pitchfork</a> is exemplary. <i>Electra Heart</i>, they ironically muse, is ‘a kind of not-quite-alter-ego/character/affectation/cinematic simulacrum’ where ‘[t]he bombardment of archetypes and clichés is exhausting’. Finally, this approach is open to attack through feminism – with accusations of internalised misogyny (at worst), or (at the very least) failing to present a positive image of women. Such indeterminacy and ambiguity is very judiciously explored by <a href="https://popmessiahblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/marina-the-diamonds-electra-heart-powerful-statement-or-another-tarnished-jewel/" target="_blank">PopMessiah</a>.<br />
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Such is the danger and risk when you explore a problem not through critical distance, as if standing on the outside (as if standing outside of the problem were anything but an illusion), above and beyond the problem. But from within the very problem. When you express the problem as a problem which is impossible to escape because it surrounds you, because it is waiting for you around every corner. It is everywhere, everyday, in the world, our ideas and in dreams. Because it is our problem. Diamandis makes her approach explicit in ‘Sex Yeah’, which was included on the deluxe version of the album some two years after the initial release. ‘Sex Yeah’ is the Rosetta Stone.<br />
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A storming bass line drives a track of 21st century electro-rock. ‘Sex Yeah’ is not only a killer pop tune with an amazing vocal performance by Diamandis, bringing her falsetto to the fore, but also has a fiercely intelligent lyric about the impossibility of standing outside of history. The history of sex: sexuality. ‘Question what the TV tells you / Question what a pop star sells you’ (the first hint of the <i>mea culpa</i> to come) – ‘Question mum and question dad / Question good and question bad’. Question the very moral coordinates of your culture and the authority figures who are necessarily embedded within that culture: ‘If women were religiously / Recognized sexually / We wouldn't have to feel the need /To show our ass/ets to feel free’. Then the full <i>mea culpa</i>: ‘Been there, done that’ – ‘Sold my soul’ – ‘And yeah the truth hurts’. This is the crux: ‘If history could set you free (from who you were supposed to be)’, but it cannot. History is the very problem. History is what must be overcome: ‘all my life I've tried to fight what history has given me’. It is history which will ‘tell a girl who she would be’ and ‘tell a guy who he should be’. This is what <i>Electra Heart</i> articulates: the problem of history and women. <a href="https://borntolearnandlead.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/a-feminist-perspective-on-sex-yeah-by-marina-and-the-diamonds/" target="_blank">BornToLearnAndLead</a> unfolds this in exemplary fashion.<br />
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Is this Nietzsche’s approach in <i>Zarathustra</i>? The immediate challenge to such an idea would be that misogyny also appears in his other books. For example, expositions in <i>Ecce Homo</i> (“Why I write such good books,” 5); and – at some length – in <i>Beyond Good and Evil</i> (232 onwards). Is this not then the real Nietzsche? Rather than his alter-ego Zarathustra? Yet we must learn from Diamandis. Zarathustra is no alter-ego; <i>Zarathustra</i> is a vehicle. Even though <i>Zarathustra</i> tends toward fiction, <i>EH</i> towards biography and bibliography, and <i>BGE</i> towards philosophy, this does not mean that Nietzsche’s method is different: allusion, paradox, hyperbole, contradiction and ellipsis. Thus, the third recurrence and indeterminacy occurs at a meta-textual level with respect to <i>Zarathustra</i>. And a section in <i>BGE</i> is essential, just like 'Sex Yeah' for Diamandis. Nietzsche presents a <i>mea culpa</i> by an appeal to historical conditions. There are no absolute values after the death of god, but that does not result in relativistic chaos because of the depth of deep history. In this way, Nietzsche exposes his own, very real prejudice. Yes – Nietzsche is a misogynist. Nietzsche does not hide his misogyny but exposes and expresses it – and he does not excuse himself. Nor should we:<br />
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‘Learning transforms us, it acts like all other forms of nourishment that do not just “preserve”–as physiologists know. But at our foundation, “at the very bottom,” there is clearly something that will not learn, a brick wall of spiritual <i>fatum</i>, of predetermined decisions and answers to selected, predetermined questions. In any cardinal problem, an immutable “that is me” speaks up. When it comes to men and women, for instance, a thinker cannot change his views but only reinforce them, only finish discovering what, to his mind, “is established.” In time, certain solutions are found to problems that inspire <i>our</i> strong beliefs in particular; perhaps they will start to be called “convictions.” Later – they come to be seen as only footsteps to self-knowledge, signposts to the problems that we <i>are</i>, – or, more accurately, to the great stupidity that we are, to our spiritual <i>fatum</i>, to that thing “at the very bottom” that <i>will not learn</i>. – On account of the abundant civility that I have just extended to myself, I will perhaps be more readily allowed to pronounce a few truths about the “woman <i>an sich</i>” [as such, in-itself] assuming that people now know from the outset the extent to which these are only – <i>my</i> truths. – ’ (BGE: 231).<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2017/05/zarathustra-vs-david-guetta-featuring.html">First Part: Chapter 19 - David Guetta featuring Sia</a></div>
Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-522699665021097542016-11-26T19:29:00.004+00:002017-04-30T18:35:36.292+00:00Zarathustra vs Kanye West<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 17: ‘On the Way of the Creator’</b><br />
<b>vs “POWER”, Kanye West (<i>My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy</i>, 2010)</b><br />
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Are you ‘a self-propelling wheel?’ And, ‘can you compel the very stars to revolve around you?’ The title of Chapter 17 is a lure and a ruse – the creator refers not to the way of some god, but to the possibility of becoming free, and to become free is to be a creator of new values. To create ‘your own evil and your own good, and hang your will over yourself as a law’. Here – in other words – we encounter some early intimations of Nietzsche’s teaching of the will to power.<br />
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And such is the ethos of Kanye West’s abrasive hip hop track ‘POWER’. Are you ‘a self-propelling wheel?’ Kanye is! ‘Can you compel the very stars to revolve around you?’ Kanye can! Can you create your own good and evil? Over bare chants: ‘I’m living in that 21st Century, doing something mean to it / Do it better than anybody you ever seen do it’.<br />
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Yet immediately, Kanye senses dangers, doubts and discordances: ‘No one man should have all that power / The clock’s ticking, I just count the hours / Stop tripping, I’m tripping off the power’. Kanye sees the dangers of such power, it is transitory and doubts it can be sustained, knows that the will to power can get captured up into something else entirely – drive coalesces into privilege, entitlement, absolutism. Such movement from affirmation to problematization is captured in the main sample of ‘POWER’, King Crimson’s ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’, the distorted vocals of Greg Lake ripping a ragged hole in the hip hop beats for the prog rock guitar of Robert Fripp to burst through. Screaming: ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’. Stunning!<br />
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And it is just this oscillation between affirmation and problematization that Nietzsche explores in ‘On the Way of the Creator’. Zarathustra is addressing one of his companions; one – it seems – who has heard Zarathustra speak of becoming a solitary (see, for instance, Chapter 12: ‘On the Flies in the Marketplace’). For seeking solitude is a necessary moment in cutting your teeth, cutting your own path. In ‘POWER’: ‘I just needed time alone with my own thoughts / Got treasures in my mind but couldn’t open up my own vault / My childlike creativity, purity and honesty / Is honestly being crowded by these grown thoughts’. This formulation by Kanye – where creativity is childlike – is pre-echoed in the first chapter of <i>Zarathustra</i>, ‘On the Three Transformations,’ where the camel transforms into the lion, and then the lion into the child: from bearing the weight of the world, to becoming a warrior, to rediscovering the joy of play and creativity. ‘POWER’ was written in the wake of the death of Kanye’s mother and then the VMA incident of 2009, the artist going on to retire to the solitude of Hawaii to work on material for a new album.<br />
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Nietzsche began <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> with the teacher achieving ten years of solitude and thus ready to return to the world. In this way, we now learn of Zarathustra’s experience of becoming and being a solitary through the warnings of the ‘Seven Devils;’ seven devils his companion will now have to confront (riffing off and twisting the idea of seven deadly sins, no doubt). For embodying and embracing the will to power is accompanied by many doubts, dangers and discordances.<br />
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The first devil: Beware the herd! Why? In becoming a solitary, in cutting your own path the herd will disavow you. You have, after all, rejected them and their way. The trouble is – of course – ‘the voice of the herd will still resound in you’. Kanye has cool advice here: ‘Screams from the haters, got a nice ring to it / I guess every superhero need his theme music’.<br />
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The second devil: Beware the ‘lustful and ambitious!’ Lustful for empty fame, ambitious with an empty voice: ‘there are so many great thoughts that do no more than a bellows’ make. Kanye reflects on just such fame and emptiness: ‘these responsibilities that they entrusted me / As I look down at my diamond encrusted piece’. And Yeezy tells us more, these moments seep in to the lyrics continuously.<br />
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The third devil: Beware giving up! Beware disavowing your own way, and crying ‘Everything is false!’ ‘There are feelings that want to kill the solitary; if they do not succeed, well, then they themselves must die!’ But are you capable of being a murderer?’ The beautiful coda at the end of ‘POWER’ has a strange duet which is explicated through this thought of Zarathustra. Kanye: ‘Now this will be a beautiful death’. Dwele: ‘I’m jumping out the window, I’m letting everything go’. Kanye: ‘You got the power to let power go?’ The idea of willing your own death, for a new self to arise occurs throughout <i>Zarathustra</i>. ‘With my tears go into your isolation, my brother,’ concludes the teacher, ‘I love him who wants to create beyond himself and thereby perishes’.<br />
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The fourth devil: Beware ‘the good and the righteous’: ‘they like to crucify those who invent their own virtue for themselves’. Those who believe themselves good and righteous believe all others are evil – and such evil must be hunted down. Kanye: ‘The system broken, the school is closed, the prison's open / We ain’t got nothing to lose, motherfucker we rolling’.<br />
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The fifth devil: Beware ‘the holy unity’. Compliance to the way, whatever that may be. ‘In this white man world,’ raps Yeezy ‘we the ones chosen’.<br />
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The sixth devil: Beware ‘the attacks of your love’. Zarathustra warns that the solitary will extend their hand in friendship too easily. Rather to some you must give ‘a slap with a paw: and I would that your paw might also have claws’. In ‘POWER’ Kanye asks rhetorically, ‘I’m an asshole? You niggas got jokes’ in response to ‘Tell them Yeezy said they can kiss my whole ass / More specifically they can kiss my asshole’. Loving the specificity there Mr West.<br />
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The seventh devil: ‘the worst enemy you can encounter will always be yourself; you lie in wait for yourself’. This devil, of course, is implicit in all the other devils. ‘And I embody every characteristic of the egotistic / He knows, he’s so fucking gifted’ – Kanye here (as he does so often) switching voice from first to third person, speaking of and about himself from different perspectives, so that the voices appear as a clamour, so that first and third person lose their co-ordinates, can no longer fully be understood as first and third person. Who is this Kanye?: ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’!<br />
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Zarathustra warns: ‘a God you would create for yourself out of your Seven Devils!’. So – be aware, and beware! Reject the becoming of this God – god is (we know) dead. Free yourself. However – and this is the most essential lesson of the way of the creator – understand what the nature of this freedom (of positive, not negative freedom) is: ‘Free, you call yourself?… Free from what? What is that to Zarathustra! Brightly shall your eye announce to me: free for what?’<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2017/04/zarathustra-vs-marina-and-diamonds.html">First Part: Chapter 18 - Marina and the Diamonds</a></div>
Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-45127526152057585702016-09-28T20:52:00.003+00:002016-11-26T19:41:19.102+00:00Zarathustra vs Lily Allen<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 16: ‘On Love of One’s Neighbour’</b><br />
<b>vs “Fuck You”, Lily Allen (<i>It's Not Me, It's You</i>, 2009)</b><br />
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Look to those around you, those nearest to you – your street, community, your town, city, your country – here is where your identity arises, is given, reflected, validated. Here are your neighbours. This is your neighbourhood, your manor, your territory. Nietzsche has something to say on this… you may not like it…<br />
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‘I counsel flight from the nearest.’ Furthermore ‘I counsel… love of the farthest!’ With those of your circle homogeneity reigns! Your coterie is your echo chamber. This is where you go when you need your foolishness to be overlooked, denied, even celebrated. Feeling bad? ‘You flee to the neighbour from yourselves and would like to make a virtue of it… you want to seduce the neighbour into love and to gild yourselves with his error’. Feeling good? ‘You invite a witness in when you want to speak well of yourselves; and when you have seduced him to think well of you, you also think well of yourself.’ This is where you go when you want your prejudices affirmed: ‘It is those farthest away who pay for your love of the neighbour’. You know it – ‘as soon as five of you are together, a sixth always has to die’.<br />
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Lily Allen’s ‘Fuck You’ captures up this teaching of Zarathustra. The sampled piano refrain that underpins the song is famously torn kicking and screaming from the eponymous named theme tune of the Australian television soap Neighbours. And it is against this evocation of the homogeneous, the nearest, the neighbour, that Allen’s lyrics rebel.<br />
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Sly, so perfect. The faux-polite, double-taking mutter of the everyday ‘Fuck you very, very much’ (the ‘fuck you’ intended to be a homonym of ‘thank you’) becomes a catchy singalong chorus celebrating everyday resistance to the homogenisers. As Allen continues: 'Cause we hate what you do / And we hate your whole crew’. Hate the haters (only a pedant would call this a paradox): ‘So you say / It's not okay to be gay / Well I think you're just evil / You're just some racist’. If you are straight don’t just hang out with straights; and mix it up with different races and cultures; are all your friends of the same gender – go play with more genders. Against what is given – actively seek out and make friends with those different, farthest from you. Seek and destroy your identity. Allen captures exactly the claustrophobic sense of homogeneity and its sad and pathetic purpose: ‘You want to be like your father / It's approval you're after / Well that's not how you find it.’<br />
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‘Love of the farthest!’ – this is Nietzsche’s counsel. This is Zarathustra’s counsel. Leave your street, community, your town, city, your country. Open up your country, your city, town, your community, your street. Toward the end of the chapter the ‘farthest’ undergoes two telling transformations which clarifies the concept. In the first place, the farthest becomes the friend. With Chapter 16 we appear to be reaching a point where many of the teachings that have come before begin to cohere, accumulate and permeate the text. In the previous chapter (‘On the Thousand Goals and One’) Zarathustra introduced the idea of the neighbour; Chapter 14 (‘On the Friend’) saw the paradoxes of friendship explored – a friend is your enemy, they challenge you; and you should show yourself as enemy to your friends.<br />
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In the second place the spatial metaphor of the farthest becomes a temporal metaphor: ‘a premonition of the Overhuman’. Similarly, Allen not only captures such temporality biologically (overcoming the father), but also historically: ‘Your point of view is medieval.’ Accordingly, the chapter concludes with an exceptionally important thought: ‘May the future and the farthest be the cause of your today: in your friend shall you love the Overhuman as your own cause’. Causality is reversed here. Just as we saw in ‘On the Thousand Goals and One’ where the ways of the farthest are transformative as opposed to the nearest; in Chapter 16 the now need not be an outcome of the preceding event; but rather, for Nietzsche, a future event can be the impetus for and transform the now.<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2016/11/zarathustra-vs-kanye-west.html">First Part: Chapter 17 - Kanye West</a>Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-73267988868039705372016-09-24T13:48:00.000+00:002016-09-28T21:01:01.482+00:00Zarathustra vs Levellers<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 15: ‘On the Thousand Goals and One’</b><br />
<b>vs “One Way”, Levellers (<i>Levelling The Land</i>, 1991)</b><br />
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‘A thousand goals there have been so far, for there have been a thousand peoples’ thus declares Zarathustra; before continuing – ‘Only the shackles for the thousand necks are still lacking: there is lacking the one goal.’ What is this talk of shackles? What is this talk of an enslaved thousand necks? What is this talk of the ‘one’ way, the one ‘goal’? Do we not encounter here Zarathustra – and (of course) Nietzsche – as proto-fascist? – or a mystic foretelling of the twentieth century authoritarianism to come? The avowal of totalitarianism, the ideological and violent enslaving of a people under the cult of a leader who in turn organises the mass and embodies their one goal, their destiny?<br />
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Such a reading, however, would be a misreading: either a willingly corruption or inattentive parsing of Nietzsche’s argument. The statement which concludes ‘On the Thousand Goals and One’ moves swiftly, so we must read slowly. And we must not believe a provocation designed to wake us from our slumber as the very opposite of what Nietzsche wishes to affirm.<br />
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To anticipate Zarathustra’s argument in Chapter 15, we can accede first to the Levellers. The travelling band transforms their folk rock through funk – driving bass and devil-may-care fiddle – producing one of the most rousing, jubilant sounds of the 1990s. ‘One Way’ – ‘There's only one way of life’ … ‘And that's your own’…<br />
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The lyrics Mark Chadwick sings tell a story; the story of a father and child, the child growing up and escaping the life of the father’s community, an escape to discover a free life. However, the devil – as always – is in the detail, and the song confronts a paradox. Alongside the chant of the celebratory chorus and undercutting the joyous music there is a tale of denial, dishonour and disillusionment. The child and father look down from a hill to the town where their family live, work and die: ‘He said this is where I come / When I want to be free / Well he never was in his lifetime / But these words stuck with me’. Thus the child sees that the compromise and paradox in the father’s words, and when grown escapes the community, but in so doing becomes ‘the family disgrace’. Paradox upon paradox: living your own way of life is seen as betrayal by others; and indeed, such freedom will come to be seen ultimately as a series of illusions (‘we choked on our dreams’), always under attack (‘the problems of the world / … won't stop coming … / By the life I've had so far’) and impotence (‘the problems of the world / Won't be solved by this guitar’). Yet to return home appears to be no solution…<br />
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Zarathustra both explores Chadwick’s problematisation and provides a solution. This is the logic: a way of life belonging a people arose organically, unconsciously, instinctively over time → for this people their way of life appears divine, good, embodied in and by their gods, heroes, priests, laws, rituals → the way of life of others – neighbours – is different, and if different, evil → yet, as the world and its peoples have aged (time after time), some individuals within a people discover there are many other peoples, a thousand peoples and ways of living in the world (or rather, it is this discovery that creates the individual by cutting them away from group homogeneity) → such a discovery simultaneously reveals all values as created by peoples, not by gods → as an affirmation of the thousand ways of life, so is born (what we currently call) cultural relativism, which in essence simply means change, transformation, appropriation and influence → yet this discovery has a simultaneous correlate, the identity of a people slowly erodes, crumbles, declines and falls; and the world appears as chaos, devoid of meaning (nihilism) – this fracture of a people is the outcome of the creation of individuals → the ground of homogeneity is ungrounded, replaced by heterogeneity: and the response is either affirmation or rejection → rejection is a call for a reformation of the homogenous from the heterogeneous, cohering around the idea of a people now necessarily embodied by an individual as leader → affirmation – however – discovers the univocity of multiplicity: the pure power of continual transformation, change, becoming → what must be overcome and shackled is thus the chaos of the thousands ways that has constituted the individual, the individual now monstrous, a beast with a thousand necks, in chaos, values churning, full of guilt, riven by denial, dishonour and disillusionment → in this way the one goal, the one way, for all humanity: not a reformation but the overcoming of our humanity which creates peoples and individuals, individuals and peoples.<br />
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The affirmation of univocity and pluralism (univocity is pluralism, and pluralism is univocity): ‘There's only one way of life / And that's your own’… for all, embracing, embodying and affirming the will to power as the power of becoming. However, as Nietzsche concludes – returning us to the problem of nihilism the Levellers so beautifully articulated – ‘there is lacking the one goal… [and] if humanity still lacks a goal, does it not also still lack – itself?’<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2016/09/zarathustra-vs-lily-allen.html">First Part: Chapter 16 - Lily Allen</a></div>
Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-80375607878962771572016-07-26T21:52:00.000+00:002016-09-24T14:04:04.450+00:00Zarathustra vs Nirvana<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 14: ‘On the Friend’</b><br />
<b>vs “Come As You Are”, Nirvana (<i>Nevermind</i>, 1992)</b><br />
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1 x 1 = 1? Not for Zarathustra! Not with respect to being human. And while Nietzsche sees the human as a complex of forces in the process of endless becoming, the wee paradox that kicks off Chapter 14 rather foregrounds the ‘I and Me’ – the I and the body, or the I and Self (see P1:3; 4). The human is a contradiction of forces where the body is in dialogue with the I, the I with the self. For Zarathustra such a ‘conversation’ is ‘always too zealous’, in danger of ‘sinking into the depths’. ‘There are’ says Zarathustra ‘too many depths for all solitaries’. Here Nietzsche is challenging his own teaching of Chapter 12 which spoke of becoming a solitary in order to experience deep-thinking and slow-thought. Zarathustra’s exploration of the spaces of state and the market-place over Chapters 11 and 12 led him to explore the isolation in that latter chapter; which in turn led him to think about the problems of sex (P1:13) and now friendship. Is Zarathustra contradicting himself? Nevermind – Nietzsche’s approach is to construct a serial narration of repetitions and differences, to create contradictions, impasses, failures, problems and problematisations. For now Zarathustra sees the need for a friend; yet this friend must also be an enemy, and in your friendship you too should be an enemy.<br />
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Come ‘As a friend, as a friend / As an old enemy’. Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ has exactly the same function. ‘Come as you are, as you were / As I want you to be’. Kurt Cobain has said that the lyrics to the song ‘are really contradictory. They're kind of a rebuttal to each other’ (Berkenstadt and Cross, <i>Classic Rock Albums: Nevermind</i>, 1998:71).<br />
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This contradiction is even echoed in the music which – famously – repurposes Killing Joke’s ‘Eighties’ (1984) and The Damned’s ‘Life Goes On’ (1982). An act of friendship, the act of the enemy? For Zarathustra the formula is ‘“At least be my enemy!” – thus speaks true reverence’. ‘In one’s friend one should have one’s best enemy’ says Zarathustra. You want a friend who kowtows to you? Who will not challenge you? Who is afraid of you? An arse-licker and brown-noser? Then you are a Narcissist. If your friend challenges you on your deeply held beliefs do you feel affront? Do you sulk and cry like a baby? Then you don’t want a friend. You want a dog. Oh yes – ‘the human is something to be overcome’: both in men and women, between men and between women, between men and women. Do you not challenge your friends? Are you afraid your friend will reject you? Then let them! Challenge them, attack them, be strong. ‘Can you step up close to your friend without going over to’ them? There should be a state of war between friends (see P1.10): ‘in order to wage war, one must be able to be an enemy’. But, as Cobain screams ‘I swear that I don't have a gun’.<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2016/09/zarathustra-vs-levellers.html">First Part: Chapter 15 - Levellers</a></div>
Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-14967702457924667072016-07-24T18:51:00.000+00:002016-07-26T22:19:21.678+00:00Zarathustra vs Violent Femmes<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 13: ‘On Chastity’</b><br />
<b>vs “Add It Up”, Violent Femmes (<i>Violent Femmes</i>, 1982)</b><br />
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‘Do I speak of filthy things?’ asks Zarathustra. Zarathustra is speaking of sex. Satisfaction: wanting and getting some. Wanting some and getting none: frustration, but also – and far more ominously – repression. And even wanting none: indifference. Does Zarathustra speak of filthy things? Only to those who (consciously, unconsciously) believe – and preach to others to believe – that sex is filthy.<br />
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Humans are animals: and animals fuck. ‘Would that you were perfect at least as beasts,’ says Zarathustra, for ‘to the beast belongs innocence’. Animals fuck, animals are given to the drive to fuck, and a fuck – for the animal – is just a fuck. ‘I council you to innocence’ says Zarathustra.<br />
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Animals are given to the drive to fuck but are not enslaved to that drive: sex waxes and wanes. Humans, however, can become enslaved. ‘[J]ust look at these men here: their eye says it – they know of nothing better on earth than to lie with a woman’. Do you feel that gaze? On your body? And men – do you not feel that gaze too? ‘Is it not better,’ says Zarathustra, not without some hyperbole, ‘to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a women in heat?’ In both cases: ‘Mud is at the bottom of their soul’.<br />
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One sign of such enslavement is frustration. Another sign is repression. And has anyone captured this frustration and repression better than the Violent Femmes with ‘Add It Up’?<br />
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‘Why can't I get just one kiss?’ demands Gordon Gano over folk-country-punk acoustic thrash guitar and agile electric bass. ‘I look at your pants and I need a kiss’. ‘Why can't I get just one screw?’ Gano pleads: ‘Believe me, I know what to do / But something won't let me make love to you’. The Violent Femmes compose an anthem to frustration and repression – ‘Why can't I get just one fuck? / Why can't I get just one fuck?’ – where the desperation gives way to rage and resentment (‘Day after day, I get angry’), and the fury to violence (‘Take a look now at what your boy has done’). The Violent Femmes create a complex song of sexual complexes: exploring the failure of language (‘Words make my mouth exercise / Words all failed the magic prize’); the Oedipus situation (‘Oh, ma-mama, mo-ma, mo-ma mother / I would love to love you, lover’); fear and paranoia (‘City is restless, it's ready to pounce’); and even suicide (‘I'll take a bow and say goodnight’). ‘Add It Up’ is a febrile, sweaty, masturbatory nightmare of a song, a scream in the night-time, a glorious owning up to the filth in the human soul.<br />
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‘Do I counsel you to chastity?’ asks Zarathustra to the filthy soul. Not all – chastity is the very problem. Chastity becomes a ‘vice’ where ‘sensuality looks enviously out of everything they do’. The church and the mosque that preach chastity as a virtue are will denying and propagate repression and frustration in society engendering rage and violence – in particular towards women who are shamed and killed by their lovers, fathers, brothers; by their rapists and their repressed and frustrated sisters. Accordingly, writes Nietzsche ‘[t]hose for who chastity is difficult should be counselled against it, that it might not become their path to Hell.’<br />
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For humans are animals – and animals fuck. Animals fuck, animals are given to the drive to fuck, and a fuck – for the animal – is just a fuck. Animals are given to the drive to fuck but are not enslaved to that drive: sex waxes and wanes.<br />
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Accordingly – chastity should only be accepted when (for whatever reason) it approaches you. ‘[T]here are those who are chaste from the ground up’. Here indifference reigns. ‘They even laugh about chastity and ask: “What is chastity? Is not chastity folly? But this folly came to us and not we to it”’. Chastity is no ideal which must be attained and sustained; rather, it is contingent and temporal: ‘May it stay as long as it wants!’<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2016/07/zarathustra-vs-nirvana.html">First Part: Chapter 14 - Nirvana</a><br />
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Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-44401253103927304272016-07-18T21:21:00.004+00:002016-07-24T19:12:57.431+00:00Zarathustra vs Tame Impala<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 12: ‘On the Flies of the Market-Place’</b><br />
<b>vs “Solitude is Bliss”, Tame Impala (<i>Innerspeaker</i>, 2010)</b><br />
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‘Flee, my friend, into your solitude!’ What are we to make of this declaration which opens Chapter 12? The speeches of Zarathustra – those of Part One that are not given a specific placement (such as ‘On the Tree on the Mountainside’ [P1.8]) – are generally considered to have the mise-en-scene of the market-place of the Motley Cow. Our protagonist arrived in the town, soon after abandoning his cave and ten years of isolation to return to and engage with the world, early in Part One (after the ‘Prologue’). His speeches thus appear to be directed, at first, toward disinterested passers-by and novelty-seekers, then later, to a small but dedicated coterie. A coterie that is growing? Yet in chapter 12 Zarathustra appears to be addressing a single interlocutor: ‘my friend’ (anticipating chapter 14 – ‘On the Friend’). Is this one such as the youth met under the tree on the mountainside? Or is Zarathustra speaking to himself? At the end of Part One our protagonist will leave the Motley Cow, cut free his followers and return to his cave for a few more years (P1.20.3; P2.1). The theme of isolation and solitude will thus pepper the next few chapters (P1.14; 17). So, is this a moment expressing self-doubt? Rejecting the lure of the idol? Advice to another? A speech to his listeners? All of these things? None?<br />
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Flee into solitude from what? ‘Where solitude ceases, there begins the market-place’. Spaces of stink, din, chatter, inconsequentiality and confrontation crammed with both the great and the small in a symbiotic relationship of host and parasite. The great: play-actors who pontificate and preen – the populist who ‘always believes in that whereby he most strongly makes others believe’; ‘[t]o drive frantic’ the populace, a fascist where ‘blood counts for him as the best of all grounds’. The small: in awe of these self-posited idols, hanging on their every word, their noise, their ‘fame’, their ‘security’ – they are flies buzzing around the shit which chugs endlessly from their orifices. Awaiting the command from on high: ‘blood is what their bloodless souls’ desire’. Slaves and masters, the populace and their idols, the idols and their people – the echo chamber: a symbiotic twittering.<br />
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‘I care less and less about it and less about you’ – so intones Kevin Parker, aka Tame Impala, over a psychedelic groove of electric guitars tripped out with chorus and wah-wah.<br />
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For Parker isolation is not only an escape from the incessant buzzing of the market-place for a ‘[s]pace around me where my soul can breathe,’ but also an affirmation of lonerism. It’s there, of course, in the title: ‘Solitude is Bliss’. Instead of the desperation of people ‘Making friends like they're all supposed to,’ Parker sings ‘I don't care what I miss’. For the real action is elsewhere: ‘There's a party in my head / And no one is invited’. Accordingly, the upbeat and joyous refrain: ‘You will never come close to how I feel’. Perhaps, however, it is only in the song’s bridge, after the Hammond organ driven wig-out, where what is crucial in such lonerism is unveiled. The kicking riff that powers the tune dissipates, the pace necessarily slows and we are drawn into an amorphous blurred soundscape: ‘Movement doesn't flow / Quite like it does when I'm alone / I'll be the one who's free’…<br />
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As Zarathustra echoes: ‘slow is experience for all deep wells’. For the idols and their parasites everything is simple, black and white, everything is bought and sold, everything has two sides, everything is this or that, right or wrong, left or right, everything is founded upon a given identity: ‘only in the market-place is one assailed by “Yea?” and “Nay?”’ The loner needs space and time to create ideas, new values: ‘long must they wait before they know just what has fallen into their depths’, and accordingly, as Zarathustra concludes: ‘you want to set down your chair between For and Against’.<br />
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In this way, the great may mistake the loner for one of them; and the small may mistake the loner for one who is great. The lure here would be for the loner to accept the role of the play-actor. To become a populist and seek the power of the Yea and Nay. Yet it is just this role the loner must reject. Hence the Tame Impala injunction: ‘Don't ask me how you're supposed to feel’. No wonder those of slow-thought and deep-thinking are hated by the great and the small, by the populists and the populace alike. The ‘petty and wretched’ may appear innocent but they know only too well what they do and so are full of ressentiment and revenge. They hate the indecision, the contemplation, the unsureness, the process, the thinking of lonerism. The people are not dumb – they are more than willing to give up their freedom, and the freedom of those around them too! All hail the idol! Yet the great are also unfree: they must embody and proselytise either and only the Yea or the Nay. And those who are acentred – the loners – are called heretics, unbelievers and their values called betrayal and that which is haram. They’ll be coming after to you, threatening you, smashing your windows. Conform! Get in line. Choose a side – seek security with the mass under the shadow of their idol, the idol (‘God or Devil’) which is raised on high by each mass.<br />
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‘Flee, my friend,’ concludes Zarathustra, ‘into your solitude’.<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2016/07/zarathustra-vs-violent-femmes.html">First Part: Chapter 13 - Violent Femmes</a>Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-18369046157124320632016-04-20T17:39:00.002+00:002016-07-18T21:26:14.228+00:00Zarathustra vs Judy Garland<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 11: ‘On the New Idol’</b><br />
<b>vs “Over the Rainbow”, Judy Garland (<i>The Wizard of Oz</i>, 1939)</b><br />
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We can turn to <i>Will to Power</i> – once again – to enlighten us on Chapter 11. In Section 75, Nietzsche writes: ‘An able craftsmen or scholar cuts a fine figure when he takes pride in his art and looks on life content and satisfied.’ However, ‘in addition to the real workers… in all fields and departments…’ we discover ‘“representatives”; e.g., besides the scholars also scribblers, besides the suffering classes also… ne’er-do-wells who “represent” this suffering, not to speak of the professional politicians who are well off while “representing” distress with powerful lungs before a parliament’. Such a situation – according to Nietzsche – is a consequence of the state-function, and ‘the state has an absurdly fat stomach’.<br />
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Such is the idea behind ‘On the New Idol’, with its criticism of the state and its ‘superfluous creatures’: or, more pointedly – ‘for the superfluous was the state invented!’ Accordingly in the wake of the death of god, the state becomes the new idol, that which – according to Zarathustra – must be worshipped. All hail the state: culture industry (the production of shit reality TV), the (tabloid – gossip mongering) newspapers, capitalists (with their off-shore tax havens). My commentaries on the examples that Nietzsche gives us – and he has his own words for all such representatives of the state, such superfluous creatures.<br />
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And there is probably little more to say except to listen to Zarathustra once more: ‘There where the state ceases, only there does the human being begin who is not superfluous: there the song of the one who is necessary begins, the unique and irreplaceable melody’. I can hear that unique and irreplaceable melody now, and a lyric which dreams (yes, dreams) of a place beyond the state. I can hear the wonderful voice of the young Judy Garland.<br />
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‘There's a land that I've heard of / once in a lullaby’. Zarathustra’s final words of Chapter 11: ‘There where the state ceases – cast your glance over there, my brothers! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the Overhuman?’<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2016/07/zarathustra-vs-tame-impala.html">First Part: Chapter 12 - Tame Impala</a></div>
Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-70072391669078266442016-04-17T10:38:00.002+00:002016-07-18T21:27:26.719+00:00Zarathustra vs The Cult<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 10: ‘On War and Warrior-Peoples’ </b><br />
<b style="text-align: center;">vs “War (The Process)”, The Cult (<i>Beyond Good and Evil</i>, 2001)</b><br />
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‘I should like to see,’ declares Zarathustra ‘many warriors!’ And these warriors are Zarathustra’s ‘brothers in warfare!’ War and warriors – is Zarathustra advocating militarism? Is Nietzsche promoting the soldier, the rebel, the terrorist, the gun, the sword, the state, nationalism, rebellion, patriotism, revolution, restoration, conquest, empire, imperialism, intervention? Etc.<br />
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Let us begin again: ‘I see many soldiers: I should like to see many warriors!’ – Nietzsche forces a distinction (‘“Uni-form” one calls what they wear: may what they hide with it not be uni-form’). ‘My brothers in warfare! … I am also your best enemy’ – Zarathustra encompasses friend and foe (‘I know about the hatred and envy in your hearts… be great enough then not to be ashamed of them’). Warriors and warfare as concepts are revealed in an ungrounding.<br />
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We can turn immediately to The Cult – to Ian Astbury and Billy Duffy – to one of their most brutal and beautiful compositions, a psychedelic-metal track that kicks off their most intense and powerful album: ‘War (The Process)’ from <i>Beyond Good and Evil</i>. Over one of Duffy’s heaviest killer riffs (first rendered in the dirtiest of fat bass lines), Astbury chants – ‘Cultivate a war breed / Get the head your soul needs’. The war breed are warriors of the body, of the will, of thought, desires, ideas.<br />
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‘Crystallize at light speed / Dis the lies that they feed’ – continues Astbury; the chant to be repeated once more as Duffy’s distorted guitar re-joins the fray. This is the war, this is the task of the warrior, as Zarathustra makes clear: ‘You shall seek your enemy, you shall wage your war – and for your own thoughts!’ As Astbury echoes in the chorus: ‘War – A state of mind’.<br />
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And both Astbury and Nietzsche see such war as ongoing and the warrior as an affirmation of being in the world. Hence the subtitle of The Cult track; and Zarathustra’s recommendation to ‘love peace as a means to new wars. And a short peace more than the long’. War as a process, the warrior as someone who faces themselves, embraces the process and understands ‘the human is something that is to be overcome,’continually. Life is struggle: ‘Lies Drugs Hate Guns God Fear Flies Sex / We're burning out of control’. Hence: obedience. ‘May your nobility be obedience!’ writes Nietzsche, ‘May your very commanding be an obeying’. ‘Drop your front baby’ sings Astbury ‘Obey the command’. This is the will to power, the will which surges forth and must be embodied, acted upon, birthed into the world. Astbury puts it beautifully: ‘Ride the horse that runs free / That runs free’. This is acceptance and affirmation: accepting the war, affirming the warrior.<br />
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Two related questions follow. The first: is Zarathustra’s use of warfare and warriors merely figurative? If so – the second question – why use war and warriors as a figure? In <i>Will to Power</i> (the collected notes from Nietzsche’s notebooks) we discover many possible keys to the text, and many disturbing reflections on war and warriors. Here is one: ‘what good is it to hold with all one’s strength that war is evil!... one wages war nonetheless! One cannot do otherwise!’ (WP: 353). Astbury taunts: ‘Is nature dead?’ You think Nietzsche wrong? Do you wage war against injustice? Against those that do not believe what you believe: for social justice, equality; against sexism, racism. Genocide? For traditions? For freedom from government? Do you wage war against sin? With those who believe what you believe? How far would you go? ‘Exterminate the bad seed’? Destroy the destroyers? ‘War and courage,’ challenges Nietzsche in Chapter 10, ‘have accomplished more great things than love of one’s neighbour. Not your pitying but your bravery has so far saved the unfortunate’ (there will be more on pity in Part II). ‘Therewith,’ concludes Nietzsche, we should consider this ‘ideology of good and evil as refuted. But’ – the crux! ‘one cannot refute an illness’ (WP: 353). Sometimes reading Nietzsche is like having your face rubbed in your own shit.<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2016/04/zarathustra-vs-judy-garland.html">First Part: Chapter 11 - Judy Garland</a></div>
Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-23703574713689118152016-01-08T22:29:00.000+00:002016-04-17T11:16:46.404+00:00Zarathustra vs First Aid Kit<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 9: ‘On the Preachers of Death’</b><br />
<b>vs “Hard Believer”, First Aid Kit (<i>The Big Black and the Blue</i>, 2010)</b><br />
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Here are the preachers of death: the preachers of eternal life. Such is the equation Nietzsche explores through Zarathustra’s speech of Chapter 9. Whether this eternal life be that preached by Christian priests in black robes or Buddhist priests in yellow robes – the song remains the same. ‘They come across an invalid or an old man or a corpse; and straightway they say, “Life is refuted!”’ This fleeting life is suffering – and the peace of the next external life will be the reward for such torment. And it is here Zarathustra exposes the central paradox: ‘Their wisdom says: “A fool is he who stays alive, but such fools are we! And this is just what is most foolish about life!”’ And while Zarathustra will concur (some say ‘”Life is only suffering” – … and do not lie’), suffering becomes that which must be transformed, overcome, surpassed. People make themselves ‘ripe for the preaching of death’ by believing suffering to be an aberration, rather than as the very motor of life. Suffering is what gives birth to life.<br />
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Such is the starting point for the glorious acoustic ballad ‘Hard Believer’ by the folk duo First Aid Kit. This seemingly simple two verse, three chorus and one coda song is as complex a critique of the propaganda of the consolation of eternal life as that of Zarathustra’s speech on the preachers of death.<br />
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In the first verse Klara Söderberg explores the break-up of a romance; yet she does so without hysteria or self-pity: ‘So you ask for my opinion well what is there to say / To be honest and just foolish won’t make you want to stay.’ As Klara and her sister Johanna harmonise in the chorus: ‘Love is tough, time is rough / On me’. In the second verse Klara takes us from a moment of actual suffering to the sisters’ philosophical understanding of such an event, they use the pain of a break-up to both deny and refute the solaces of religion, as well as affirm a secular worldview. ‘Well I see you’ve got your bible your delusion imagery / Well I don’t need your eternity or your meaning to feel free / I just live because I love to and that’s enough you see / So don’t come preach about morality that’s just human sense to me’. This is the crucial point: ‘Love is tough, time is rough’, yet it is through overcoming such suffering that we live. The final coda of the song – one of the most wonderful musical passages ever created – is a sequence where the guitar and mandolin are augmented by an old bar piano and the voices of the two sisters soar in harmony: ‘And it’s one life and it’s this life and it’s beautiful’. Here are the three truths: one life, this life, and its beautiful.<br />
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For those that preach death, for those that preach eternal life (over the beauty of the one life, this life) Zarathustra has a mischievous message: please ‘pass on to it quickly!’<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2016/04/zarathustra-vs-cult.html">First Part: Chapter 10 - The Cult</a><br />
<br />Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-9458239983453529892016-01-07T11:55:00.000+00:002016-01-08T22:38:23.029+00:00Zarathustra vs The Cure<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 8: ‘On the Tree on the Mountainside’</b><br />
<b>vs “Why Can’t I Be You?”, The Cure (<i>Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me</i>, 1987)</b><br />
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Perhaps when not teaching in the market place of The Motley Cow, Zarathustra was to be spied walking in the hills surrounding the town, gathering his thoughts and creating his philosophy. If so, it may not have been pure chance that – one day – he was to stumble upon a young man sat beneath a lone tree overlooking the valley. This young man was known to Zarathustra by sight, the teacher having noticed him at the market place during his teachings. At the periphery of the group who had become Zarathustra’s disciples, this youth would hold back, set himself apart. Now it seems apparent the young man wants to talk to Zarathustra in secret, and so has engineered this this meeting. Zarathustra, understanding this, opens up the conversation, and does so by observing he believes the youth to be troubled.<br />
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‘You have spoken the truth, Zarathustra,’ replies the young man, ‘I no longer trust myself since aspiring to the heights, and [furthermore] no one else trusts me.’ It seems that in his attempt to become a free spirit, the young man has distanced himself from the day-to-day lives and activities of his fellow humans, and is feeling the loneliness of the exile. This is making him question his whole project: ‘What do I want then in the heights?’ Zarathustra uses the tree beneath which the young man shelters in various analogies: ‘[t]he more it aspires to the height and light, the more strongly its roots strive earthward, downward, into the dark’. ‘How is it,’ replies the young man ‘you have uncovered my soul?’ Such vacillation has led to the youth despising himself: ‘How ashamed I am of my climbing and stumbling! How I mock at my violent panting! How I hate the one who can fly!’<br />
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Zarathustra is exemplary of the free spirit the young man aspires to, and so can answer: ‘Some souls one will never uncover unless one first invents them’. Accordingly, the yearning and despising of the youth is not only a reflection upon his own situation, but has another dimension. He yearns to be like Zarathustra, but he also despises him. Such is the problem Robert Smith of The Cure explores in the funked up groove that is ‘Why Can’t I be You?’<br />
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On the one hand, the lyrics praise the beauty and accomplishments of another: ‘You're so gorgeous I'll do anything / I'll kiss you from your feet to where your head begins / You're so perfect you're so right as rain / You make me, make me, make me, make me hungry again.’ On the other hand, there is a dark and disturbing undercurrent to the song: ‘I'll run around in circles ‘til I run out of breath / I'll eat you all up / Or I'll just hug you to death.’ Smith – in his usual (and wonderfully) divisive manner – has given a number of origin myths about the song. One theme, however, echoes the situation of the young scholar on the mountainside. ‘The song’ says Smith ‘came from a question asked by a fan. Even if I understood the sense of his question, I tried to explain to him that it was impossible… This idea of being someone else can create a terrible feeling of alienation.’ Accordingly, Smith discovers this feeling in himself: ‘Me bemoaning my inelegance? Or being jealous of someone else's poise?’ The feel-good brass stabs of the effervescent music act to suppress, efface and deny the envy, hate and scorn permeating the song: ’Why can't I be you?’<br />
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The young man admits ‘you are the lightning for which I was waiting! Behold, what am I now that you have appeared among us? It is <i>envy</i> of you that has destroyed me!’ It is in response to this, that Zarathustra approaches the youth, embraces him and says ‘You aspire to the free height… But your wicked drives, too, thirst for freedom… Your wild dogs want their freedom.’ Thus: ‘You are not yet free, you are still seeking freedom.’ <br />
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The young man sees his problems in relation to others. The resentment of the good townsfolk to his own seeking is mirrored in the resentment he feels toward Zarathustra. The youth needs to free himself from these reciprocal snares, and to become noble, like a noble metal, with low reactivity. For reacting to the resentment of others, and becoming caught up in resentment, is ‘the danger of the noble man, that he might become insolent, scornful, an annihilator.’ This chapter is all about becoming a hero for yourself, becoming noble, free, aspiring to the heights and the real problem in such a quest. Zarathustra’s lesson – and it may be the teacher has invented or is reporting this encounter to his disciples – is that the young man’s resistance is hidden both deep within and from himself.<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2016/01/zarathustra-vs-first-aid-kit.html">First Part: Chapter 9 - First Aid Kit</a>Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-22041867228962614282015-10-03T17:55:00.002+00:002016-01-07T12:05:54.080+00:00Zarathustra vs Lupe Fiasco<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 7: ‘On Reading and Writing’</b><br />
<b>vs “Dumb It Down”, Lupe Fiasco featuring GemStones & Graham Burris (<i>Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool</i>, 2007)</b><br />
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‘Dr. Heinrich von Stein once complained very honestly that he didn’t understand a word of my <i>Zarathustra</i>…’ (<i>Ecce Homo</i>, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, I)<br />
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Or, as Gemini (aka GemStones) tells Lupe Fiasco in the first hook of ‘Dumb It Down’: ‘You goin' over niggas' heads Lu (Dumb it down) / They tellin' me that they don't feel you (Dumb it down) / We ain't graduate from school nigga (Dumb it down) / Them big words ain't cool nigga (Dumb it down) / Yeah I heard "Mean And Vicious" nigga (Dumb it down) / Make a song for the bitches nigga (Dumb it down) / We don't care about the weather nigga (Dumb it down) / You'll sell more records if you (Dumb it down)’.<br />
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‘Dumb It Down’ – severe electronica delivering a catchy tune, intricate wordplay and laced with laughs – both exemplifies and explicitly reflects upon Fiasco’s method. The verses are composed in a complex aphoristic style: ‘I'm fearless / Now hear this / I'm earless / And I'm peerless / That means I'm eyeless / Which means I'm tearless / Which means my iris resides where my ears is / Which means I'm blinded’. And the hooks – given by Gemini playing a fellow rapper and Graham Burris playing a record company exec – critique Fiasco’s method. As Burris, in cheesy cracker-corporate voice puts it (without, of course, the ‘nigga’ refrain): ‘You've been shedding too much light Lu (Dumb it down) / … / I'll tell you what you should do (Dumb it down)’.<br />
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What these characters do not get is that ‘Aphorisms are summits’. In Chapter 7 Nietzsche allows Zarathustra to reflect upon the method of his philosophizing and the style of his teaching. The aphoristic style – condensed sorties on a particular subject; each like a diamond cut with multiple facia, surfaces arranged to echo and resonate with each other on each of their aspects – is elusive, illusive and allusive. <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i>, subtitled <i>A Book for Everyone and Nobody</i>, ensures it is ‘not easy to understand’, Nietzsche declaring ‘I hate those readers who are idlers’. If you think you can simply dwell on a moment of the text as giving you the answer to some philosophical question – then beware and be aware – this could just be a moment of a trajectory, a moment in a long game, one side of a paradox. And either way, Zarathustra is no prophet with answers, but a poet with questions. ‘Whoever writes in aphorisms… does not want to be read’. Rather, the text requires some time living in its atmosphere, thought, reflection, it must ‘be learned by heart’.<br />
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Yet while writing in blood is difficult, it is not without laughter; Zarathustra’s war is Fiasco’s war: ‘Not with wrath but with laughter does one kill’. Gemini tells Fiasco in the final hook: ‘You putting me to sleep nigga (Dumb it down) / That's why you ain't popping in the streets nigga (Dumb it down) / You ain't winning no awards nigga (Dumb it down) / Shit ain't rocking over here B (Dumb it down) / Won't you talk about your cars nigga? (Dumb it down) /… / Pour champagne on a bitch (Dumb it down) / What the fuck is wrong with you? (Dumb it down)’.<br />
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Lupe: ‘I flatly refuse, I ain't dumb down nothing’. Or, as Nietzsche replies to von Stein, ‘I told him that was perfectly in order’ (<i>Ecce Homo</i>, ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’, I).<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2016/01/zarathustra-vs-cure.html">First Part: Chapter 7 - The Cure</a>Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-69239160199557386132015-09-26T15:14:00.000+00:002015-10-03T18:20:51.554+00:00Zarathustra vs Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 6: ‘On the Pale Criminal’</b><br />
<b>vs “Bonnie and Clyde”, Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot (<i>Initials B.B.</i> and <i>Bonnie and Clyde</i>, 1968)</b><br />
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Here is the scenario: someone has robbed and killed; they have been caught, and thus face death themselves. Why – as in the title of the chapter – is this criminal, this murderer, pale? ‘An image made the pale man pale’. This image is the memory of the murder. Yet, Zarathustra observes ‘Equal to his deed was he when he did it’. However this act ‘he could not endure after it was done’ – guilt, perhaps; or the threat of the trouble now brought upon himself. Murderers betray themselves when they do not accept their act, and do not accept responsibility for their act. Furthermore – the criminal, ‘before the deed’, will find a reason for the murder. ‘”What is the point of blood?”’ asks our ‘meagre reason’, our I, thought, our spirit. ‘”Do you not want to steal something too? Or to take revenge?”’<br />
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Such a narrative informs the trajectory of the wonderful Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot romp (which appears on both their albums of the same year, 1968), ‘Bonnie and Clyde’.<br />
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With a repeating acoustic guitar riff that infects the body like a virus, backed by minimal strings low in the mix, and a wonderful, incessant vocalised ‘whoop’, Serge and Brigitte play the parts of Bonnie and Clyde. Their delivery of the lyrics – adapted for two voices from a poem, entitled ‘<a href="http://texashideout.tripod.com/poem.html" target="_blank">The Trail's End</a>’, written by Bonnie Parker herself in the weeks before she and Clyde Barrow died – is semi-spoken, semi-sung. In the Gainsbourg-Bardot version, Brigitte/Bonnie tells us: ‘When I came to know Clyde long ago / He was a loyal, honest, upright guy’ [‘Moi lorsque j'ai connu Clyde autrefois / C'était un gars loyal, honnête et droit’]. Accordingly, while ‘They say we're cold-blooded killers’ [‘On prétend que nous tuons de sang froid’], murder becomes necessary as they must silence their victims ‘when they start shouting’ [‘De faire taire celui qui se met à gueuler’]. As Serge/Clyde tells us: ‘It ain't much fun but we got no choice’ [‘C'est pas drôle mais on est bien obligé’]. Yet there is another explanation for these crimes: ‘I really think it's society / Which has spoilt me forever’ [‘Il faut croire que c'est la société / Qui m'a définitivement abimée’].<br />
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Brigitte/Bonnie and Serge/Clyde articulate Nietzsche’s three moments: thought, act, and memory. These are non-causal relations: ‘the thought is one thing, the deed is another, and another yet is the image of the deed’. Three madnesses which see the murderer as a ‘heap of sicknesses’, ‘a ball of wild snakes that are seldom at peace’, a ‘poor body’ which has ‘interpreted for itself’ – it has interpreted the world as a reflection of itself, as a world of ‘murderous pleasure and greed for the joy of the knife’. And overcoming the human in oneself is externalised – and interpreted as the overcoming of other humans through murder.<br />
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Why do we kill? Zarathustra identifies two apparent conditions: killing in the first instance, without or before the law, with no legal mandate; and – in the second instance – killing as the enactment of a lawful judgement, in response, for example, to a prior killing. The ‘pale criminal’, and ‘Judges and sacrificers’ (the cops – for example). Yet these two conditions are merely appearances because – for Zarathustra – we kill because we want to kill when caught up in <i>ressentiment</i> which is acted upon as revenge. We then love to kill; and blood must flow. To be human becomes to be a killer of humans; <i>homo sapiens</i> is <i>homo homicidium</i>. Such evil – of course – is historical: ‘once doubting was evil and will to self. At that time the sick became heretics and witches: as heretics and witches they suffered and wanted to inflict suffering.’<br />
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And so Zarathustra also addresses the ‘judges and sacrificers’. Posed as a question, Zarathustra asks ‘You would not kill, you judges and sacrificers, until the beast has nodded?’ And answers, ‘Behold, the pale criminal has nodded’. Now the judges and sacrificers have reason to murder. Their own ressentiment and revenge given mandate through the law. ‘And you, scarlet judge, if you were to say out loud all you have already done in your thought, everyone would cry out: “Away with this filth and poison-worm”’. These good people disgust Zarathustra, ‘and verily it is not their evil. How I wish they had a madness through which they might perish, just like this pale criminal’. The criminal overcomes the human in themselves through their own death, and by a mad circuitous route: ‘The only way out was death’ sings Brigitte/Bonnie in the final verse of the song; ‘But more than one followed them to Hell,’ adds Serge/Clyde. ‘When,’ in unison ‘Barrow and Bonnie Parker died’.<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2015/10/zarathustra-vs-lupe-fiasco.html">First Part: Chapter 7 - Lupe Fiasco</a>Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7057849387510631558.post-38650048120096728472015-09-20T10:48:00.003+00:002015-09-26T15:20:47.543+00:00Zarathustra vs Happy Mondays<b><i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i> – First Part – Chapter 5: ‘On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions’</b><br />
<b>vs “Loose Fit”, Happy Mondays (<i>Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches</i>, 1990)</b><br />
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Joy and suffering are indistinguishable from the perspective of passion. Affirming your passion, making it your own, allowing it to permeate your body, define the self, overwhelm your consciousness, discipline your behaviours, enslave your drives and master your desires – this renders joy and suffering meaningless. In the sense of a turning toward, and a turning away. The writer writes; the runner runs; the gambler gambles; and the lover loves – through both joy and suffering, where suffering becomes joy, and joy suffering. This is Zarathustra’s teaching on passion in Chapter 5.<br />
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On the one hand, ‘On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions’ completes a triptych that began with ‘On Believers in a World behind’ and continued through ‘On the Despisers of the Body’. These chapters, the first three teachings delivered by Zarathustra in the market place of the Motley Cow, not only advance a logical trajectory, but also grow Zarathustra’s audience. In the first place, these chapters explore the meaning of the death of god and the rejection of a transcendent soul for a belief in the earth and the body, culminating in Chapter 5 and this affirmation of passion. And, in the second place, you can imagine people quickly passing by, some pausing and moving on, some remaining, until a coterie forms. In this way, and on the other hand, ‘On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions’ is also the central chapter in a series of five teaching where Zarathustra – over several days – secures some nascent disciples, listeners who will now stay to hear more (Chapters 6 and 7).<br />
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Chapter 5 argues for the creation of values through the affirmation of passion as meaning. ‘At one time you had passions and called them evil’ – such a statement is at the heart of Zarathustra’s philosophy. Passion is often seen as a denigrated concept. It associated with the body, as something from the body which overwhelms the rational mind. It is also associated with the torture of martyrs, Joan and Jesus. Yet Nietzsche realises – reciprocally – these martyrs were affirmed through such suffering; and that the rational mind in turn rationalises bodily passions. Follow your passion. As Happy Mondays have it: ‘Do what you're doing, say what you're saying / Go where you're going, think what you're thinking / Sounds good to me’.<br />
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There are three moments to the teaching, each of which is echoed in the lyrics accompanying the lazy beats, pulsing bass and psychedelic guitar of ‘Loose Fit’:<br />
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The first aspect: that of allowing and sustaining the ascension of an all-encompassing passion: ‘many a one went into the desert and killed himself because he was weary of being a battle and battleground of virtues.’ You must – as Happy Monday’s Shaun Ryder sings – ‘take your pick’, it doesn’t matter if your way is ‘small’ or ‘big’ – seen as being unimportant or important by others – these terms are meaningless from the perspective of passion.<br />
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Nor does it matter if it is ‘legit’. ‘Don't know what you saw, but you know it's against the law / And you know that you want some more’. The second aspect: passion becomes the meaning for an individuated body, as well as the means of that individuation. ‘I do not will it as a law of a God, I do not will it a human statute and need’. Rather – ‘if you have a virtue, and it is your virtue, then you have her in common with no one else’. The mistake is to give it a name: ‘you have her name in common with people, and have yourself become one of the people and the herd with your virtue!’ Thus, according to Zarathustra ‘You do better if you say: “Inexpressible and nameless is that which is torment and delight”’. Ryder never defines passion – just its condition: ‘Sing if you're singing, speak if you're speaking / Sounds good to me’.<br />
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Finally, the third aspect: (once again) the denial of God and gods, and the refusal to believe in a transcendent spirit allows for the affirmation of the material world and the body. In other words, overcoming human nature – which is defined by a herd mentality, ‘The human is something that must be overcome: and therefore shall you love your virtues – for by them will you finally perish’. As Ryder concludes ‘kill who you're killing’.<br />
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<a href="http://www.discothequezarathustra.com/2015/09/zarathustra-vs-serge-gainsbourg-and.html">First Part: Chapter 6 - Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot</a>Discotheque Zarathustrahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05832241755139306982noreply@blogger.com1