Uncertain, what to write this morning.  Tom, stopped by for several minutes and we exchanged our impressions about “philosophy.”  Tom mentioned the slog of reading John Stewart Mill.  I agreed with him.  Mill was as inaccessible to me as well.  I said, that one must pick and choose among the philosophers, selecting material that is agreeable to read.  My own personal historical circumstances, makes reading Nietzsche relatable.  The troubled mind of the late 19th century genius seems congenial to me.  I am no genius but still, — the moody, impassioned style of Nietzsche makes him a kindred soul.

The question is perennially: What is our condition?  And by extension: Where to from here?

Both of these questions unnerve me.  Both are impossible to answer, unless one is a fool, or in the thrall of political conservatism.  The world is tightly linked by communication and transport technology, fragile and necessary.  A war grinds on in Europe, with unspeakable waste of life, and destruction of towns and cities.  Why make this list of uncertainty any longer?  Anyone with a iphone taking note of the news feed, understands that the list grows by the day, by the hour.

I continue to read On Nietzsche, by Georges Bataille.  Bataille wrote the book which impresses me as confessional, a journal account of his inner self, ruminations, processing of experience in 1943 when the Nazis occupied Paris.  Bataille was surrounded by upheaval, an unsettled time.

How boring it is to think so much and so much — about everything possible.  The future envisioned as a weight.

…No one is more lacerated by insight that I…

In a state of extreme anguish — then of decisiveness — I wrote these poems:

And I cry out
unhinged
what is
hopeless

in my heart is hidden
a dead mouse

the mouse dies
hunted down

and in my hand the world is dead
the old candle blown out
before I go to bed

sickness the death of the world
I am the sickness
I am the death of the world.

There are more verses to the poem but these verses are sufficient for this post.  The lynch pin of the matter is the metaphor of the dead mouse.  The mouse is a helpless victim of circumstance.  The poet is both victim and perpetrator.  The final two lines of the verse show the poet as a representative human, takes responsibility for the world.