Vertigo
But that I may reveal my heart
entirely to you, my friends:
if there were gods,
how could I endure it to be no God!
Therefore there are no gods.
Yes, I have drawn the conclusion;
now, however,
does it draw me.
–God is a conjecture:
~*~
but who could drink
all the bitterness of this conjecture
without dying?
Shall his faith be taken
from the creating one, and
from the eagle his flights into eagle-heights?
God is a thought
— it makes all the straight crooked,
and all that stands reel.
What? Time would be gone,
and all the perishable
would be but a lie?
To think this is
giddiness and vertigo to human limbs,
and even vomiting to the stomach:
truly, the reeling sickness do I call it,
to conjecture such a thing.
Evil do I call it and misanthropic:
all that teaching about the one,
and the plenum, and the unmoved,
and the sufficient, and the imperishable!
All the imperishable — that’s but a simile,
and the poets lie too much.
~*~
–But of time and of becoming
shall the best similes speak:
a praise shall they be,
and a justification of all perishableness!
Creating — that is
the great salvation from suffering,
and life’s alleviation.
~*~
But for the creator to appear,
suffering itself is needed, and much transformation.
Yes, much bitter dying
must there be in your life, you creators!
Thus are you advocates
and justifiers of all perishableness.
For the creator himself
to be the new-born child,
he must also be willing to be the child-bearer,
and endure the contractions of the child-bearer.
Truly, through a hundred souls went I my way,
and through a hundred cradles and birth-throes.
Many a farewell have I taken;
I know the heart-breaking last hours.
But so wills it my creating Will,
my fate.
Or, to tell you it more candidly:
just such a fate
— wills my Will.
Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Thomas Common, In The Happy Isles Part 2, No. 2
When I was younger I simply couldn’t imagine, impossible to wrap my mind around the hypothesis, this one real world without God. Forcing my imagination in that direction, I recoiled with horror. Impossible, even evil to suppose everything and I with it, are here without a first cause. Then I read about the arguments for God’s existence: the cosmological, ontological, the moral argument, etc., etc.. In retrospect, such argument is similar to artillery battery fire covering a retreating army. To simply insist upon, well “God” on account that my imagination is unable/unwilling to entertain the obverse, – makes no sense.
Just a taste of that and I felt sick. What if such makes one dizzy, disoriented, woozy? That is, something you must have so badly that you go-ahead to conjure it up….! That sounds quite like addiction!
All that we know, every scintilla of experience, from the quark, the energy flux undetectable by the five senses, to the cosmos, which is detectable in tiny slivers of time and light, by our most sophisticated radio telescopes suggest that nothing is exempt. Every single item is enframed by time. I mean the coming-to-be of new birth, followed by the regression of energy and internal disintegration or bluntly put, death.
Time and becoming is the superlative of metaphors says Zarathustra. Creation/suffering/bitter dying. No doubt about it, -dying is bitter, heart breaking.
So, this is what we have, friend and reader. The canvas upon which you are I are invited to create, to give birth. Pain at times so intense as to be unspeakable, – still it is magnificent, is it not, god-like to be here, be here now, to create.
Creating – is the great salvation from suffering, and life’s alleviation.
P.S. Perhaps writing this is obtuse, seeming unhinged. The two photos captured at the track over the weekend, show a good friend and I just before taking our turn at four laps in two super cars – my notion of how good it is to be alive. Photo No. 1, Tom in the Ferrari GTB. Photo No. 2, I am in the Corvette ZO6.
2 thoughts on “Vertigo”
My sense is (and please correct me if I’m wrong) is that Nietzsche must have had religious training as a child. I say this because I sense rebellion against the concept of a god, as if he had been bludgeoned with the idea early on, just as you describe your own upbringing.
There is a very different perspective for me. I grew up with no religious training. No magical or omniscient being had sway over our household, so there was nothing except a smattering of family dysfunction to escape from. In my entire family there was never a whiff of doubt about humanity’s existential nature, for which I am very grateful.
I once had a brilliant and artistic girlfriend who was also Christian Scientist. Her knowledge and intelligence were things of beauty. Now and then we would discuss the logic of religious belief and she did her best to hold her own within that context. But at some point she said, “Enough!” Her intellect and her faith could not coexist when questioned, so we left that topic by the side of the road. After a few months we were distracted by other things in life and went our separate ways.
A few years ago a mutual friend told me that Claudia had passed away at 62. I wondered if she had allowed her Christian Science faith to impact her health decisions, but there was no one to ask. What I do know is that all of us have our own paths to walk through this flash of light we call life and that no two paths are ever the same, like snowflakes on a winter’s day.
Our greatly different upbringings notwithstanding, it seems our angle of view of this matter coincides. Upbringing is quite determinative, but not absolute. The Christian notion of a divine universe need not be oppressive and dehumanizing. I have known quite a few believers who were kind and strong enough to allow others who thought differently, to follow their own path. It is just at this time when Christianity has become so darkly politicized, that common decency suggests that one must stand in opposition.