why you should read Twilight of the Idols

[EXCERPT]

The church fights passion with excision in every sense: its practice, its "cure," is castratism. It never asks: "How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?" It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of the lust to rule, of avarice, of vengefulness). But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life: the practice of the church is hostile to life.

The same means in the fight against a craving — castration, extirpation — is instinctively chosen by those who are too weak-willed, too degenerate, to be able to impose moderation on themselves […] Radical means are indispensable only for the degenerate; the weakness of the will — or, to speak more definitely, the inability not to respond to a stimulus — is itself merely another form of degeneration.

discovery

It is never the idea alone that inspires. Have you ever run up against some one idea throughout your life, only to throw it out as trivial the first 50 times you hit upon it and be completely changed by it on the 51st encounter? The idea hasn't changed - so what accounts for the difference?

In reading other people and developing dialogue we expose ourselves to new ways of seeing. With new eyes comes the ability to see everything again for the first time. To reinterpret the world. "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes." (Proust) Books and dialogue are not the only way to take on new eyes, but they help, particularly when the people you're reading and talking with are brilliant. "The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on." (Coleridge/Newton/etc.) Running one's head into the ground is the result of approaching a thing in the same way over and over again. One rarely gets very far that way. There are lots of reasons people argue and debate. One reason is discovery. Another is fame. Two people might seem to be doing the same thing in all outward appearance, but I suggest that you can usually tell who is looking to discover and who is looking to be looked at.

what you are

...a convoluted mess of projected personality?

. . .

Some have learned to think that who they are is nothing more than their outward appearance. They value only how they appear to other people. They can't feel worth unless they are selling themselves in some way or another. They have no sense of intrinsic worth; worth for them is a function of how well they've approximated an idea in someone else's mind. For many, they value appearing some way or another because

. . .

Man no longer dares to appear what he is. What he is is nothing, what he appears is everything for him. ~Rousseau

Man has acquired an artificial self and become alienated from his inner being. The general effect of this concealment and distortion of human nature is to deprive people of individuality. ~book about Rousseau

top down

first, i don't mean to offend anyone. second, i mean to offend everyone. the language is not professional. but neither is life.


I think:
my shadow is more me than me.
and I wonder,
does the outside reflect the inside?
no,
the one prostituted, the other true.
but you can't prostitute your outward self and not have it affect the inner self.
collateral damage.
the outside infects the inside, and pretty soon
we become what we spend so much time trying to appear
(what at first we were only trying to appear)
because the two are inseparable.
::
two lives conjoined,
like the two sides of a sheet of paper:
an impression on one side
appears inversely on the other
and vice-versa.
::
but the realization comes too late.
and by the time you have any sense of all this you've wasted so much fucking time.
why do we aspire to be cardboard and paper dolls?
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3phsIEmKWbw)
we are self-censoring, image projecting cover-ups.


money and all this shit we do for it.
it makes things so...unreal.
we have to pretend in order to live.
it's so top down.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-down_a ... ganization)
::
and yeah, I feel entitled to complain,
precisely because I do not feel it needs any special entitlement.
what if I don't like "the way things work"?
I don't want to go through some bullshit process of petitioning
for change that'll take years to actually happen
and many more months for some ineffective law to be effected - if at all.
my right to petition. great.
::
it's a machine.
we feed it so that it can feed us.
and we're all just feeding each other most of the time.
it's mostly an act to get fed.
to get fucked.
to get satiated. to get satisfied.
it's ugly.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQntzqyde-w)
and I don't want it. but i'm in it. up to my neck and can hardly breathe.


i'm trying to be real.
of course, everything is "real."
but that's not what I mean.
i'm trying not to allow myself to be molded so completely by society.
society is a powerful force-
it's a jet-stream that pulls you along
and before you realize it you are playing the game
and can no longer remember creativity...inspiration...wonder.


the game.
some people call it "growing up."
false.
there is no reason growing up has to also suck the fucking life out of you.
maybe some people manage to retain themselves.
maybe this is what we're alluding to when we talk about keeping one's inner child,
i.e. remaining a child-at-heart.
as for me,
I've almost totally lost that part of me and I am - obviously - very bitter.
at who, at what, I don't know.
but this feeling is the only real thing I have right now.
(how dramatic!)

on emotions

Yes, we can now take anti-depressants, mood stabilizers, what have you to block a good amount of the pain of feeling, at the expense of doing just that, severing yourself from your own emotions. People on meds do commonly report feeling numb and emotionless. "Chemical imbalance." What they're really saying is that you have a disposition, the tendency, to predominant unhappiness. Detrimental to yourself and others. So you must artificially check your emotional lows (and highs) and re-condition yourself to manageable (acceptable) levels. But you can never "re-condition" it away.

"My point is that beauty, passion, creativity, love, would cease to exist if we all allowed ourselves to become devoid of emotion, and that is much more sad to me than feeling crappy about my life (even if I feel that way most of the time)." I believe in paying attention to all of my feelings, even and most especially the ones I would try to hide from myself. I used to go to great lengths to avoid uncomfortable social situations and certain emotions; I had conditioned myself to intellectualize, rationalize, and feign competency. I was in denial about a whole range of my own emotions. I couldn't bring myself to validate my feelings and convinced myself otherwise. So I did not learn. So I did not grow.

We are fated to go through the most unpleasant emotions. This may never change about us in general; but, if we have the honesty and courage to accept our condition, we can at least then begin to understand ourselves better.