This book is dedicated to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Its poems and illustrations are literal and symbolic expositions of contemporary life in the West. The New World meets The Old World in collision and collusion. Its raison d’être is fed by the onslaught of secret societies, neoliberalism and wars of aggression (neoconservatism); they are the most relentless and sinister means of corruption on earth. Zarathustra’s cure for biblical blindness begins the account of what happens to the reader next, being oblivious, of course, to the disease gnawing away at his liver: Anthropocentricity plus truth in a feedback loop that leads to temporal godlikeness is a blade that cuts in more than one direction. Still, poems can give us what we need. Sixty-Three Endeavors tells the story of citizen Prometheus chained to his life with every poem and picture defining the chain links of conspiracy that bind him to oblivion with occasional asides into the vagaries of an anomalous, anamorphic medium.
The poems Meine Härte and Bitte first appeared side by side one hundred thirty-six years ago in Nietzsche’s Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. In Meine Härte, Nietzsche forces himself to climb stairs to remove himself from the herd i.e., to remove the social restraints and impediments that hinder his search for truth. Nietzsche seeks truth and does this by a constant reevaluation of values, his and society’s. Like all philosophers he wants to elevate the masses to his level, but first he must seek his own level and therefore he must climb! As he climbs, he knows he will hear the masses condemning and ridiculing him for seeking wisdom i.e., his search for truth. In Meine Härte he has the masses ridiculing themselves for being weak, this is his use of irony; his climbing is a metaphor for seeking truth; the whole poem is an aphorism declaring that people aren’t interested in truth and will ridicule or condemn those who look for it. Yet, in their desire to remain ignorant, people refuse to be used as stepping stones by others who seek wisdom i.e., they want to be ignorant, but they resent being told or shown that they are ignorant. People will accept living and working as slaves, but they don’t like being told that they are slaves. To demonstrate to the herd by climbing or stepping over it that it is unworthy to live among is the worst possible insult that can be inflicted upon it! Once Nietzsche has climbed the stairs, he is better situated to continue his philosophical search for truth, which he cannot bring to fruition wedged in among the herd. In Bitte, Nietzsche petitions the herd seeking redemption from the very people he cannot live with, but cannot live without.
If the world has not approached its end, it has reached a major watershed in history…. It will demand from us a spiritual blaze; we shall have to rise to a new height of vision, to a new level of life, where our physical nature will not be cursed… [and] …our spiritual being will not be trampled upon…. The ascension is similar to climbing onto the next anthropological stage. No one on earth has any other way left but — upward.1
Leipzig, May 2018
JAV
1Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn. A World Split Apart. Commencement Address, Harvard University, June 8, 1978.