Dear diary,
I want to get at the heart of all things, but there is no center to this world. Or rather anything works just fine as the focal point.
. . . there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel'd universe . . .[—from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman]
Always try to write each entry here so that it appeals to everyone: seek to widen your perception until it’s so general that it would seem universally applicable; that way it can end up universally boring. For we all like love, but each one cares only for the particular thing that she happens to be obsessed with, not the concept of love itself. So if you really wanna please everyone, you have to learn, FIRST, each and every skilled trade; THEN master all the types of vegetables and animals; & you should ALSO remember everyone’s spouses’ names. Because Claudia only will be truly interested in reading about circular saws and carpentry. And Angelika’s attention is aroused by news of iguanas. On the third hand, Diamonique only cares about Samantha, whom she just met at the car wash. They fell in love and got married during the dry cycle; and if someone were to publish a blog post about the former for the latter, or the latter for the former, they’d each love each: they’d probably enjoy equally the composition centering on their romantic interest as they do the one that deals with their own damned self; for we all like to read about our loved ones (who are certainly speeding to Hell), but none of us can resist admiring our mortal soul’s image as refracted in the eyes of objective truth. So I guarantee that your essay would have at least two genuine readers, at that point.
Sometimes I think that death exists just to make us speak. Because when we creatures feel pleasure, we’re too quiet for Doom. (Doom fashioned us for the purpose of self-amusement.) So, using the old cliché about the cat and the mouse — that is, assuming that cats chase mice and that mice are truly terrified (not just play-acting) — death was added into the experiment so as to liven up the party: like when scientists invite mammals to live in a sandbox and treat them so kindly that they fall asleep; then it becomes necessary to reinvigorate the subjects by introducing them to their favorite predator, and this revolution is televised.
I’m just trying to say that, without death, we probably wouldn’t have written so many psalms of praise to our Creator.
And I don’t understand how Socrates was so calm and collected in the face of his own capital punishment. As Plato reports it, the man was cool and carefree. How could you be nonchalant about death? Don’t you think your suffering MATTERS? Even Jesus threw a fit: he sweat bullets and screamed “LORD, why did you stand me up!?” (To “stand someone up” is an informal United Statesian tradition which means “to fail to keep an appointment with a boyfriend or girlfriend”; synonym: jilt — for example: ‘Satan threw a copy of the Bible at his lover’s mobile throne, after Jehovah stood him up’.)
And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which is, being interpreted, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34)
This subject was on my mind because I’ve been re-reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which I’m told originally ended at section 15 (in the copy I own, which is edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann). I would probably not be thinking about death otherwise. No, surely I would not even grasp that it is possible for me to die, were it not for Nietzsche. But I also love what Nietzsche says about science, and the pursuit thereof, and the relation of that pursuit—and truth—to art. (Remember his famous assertion “We possess art lest we perish of the truth.”) I wanna quote two paragraphs from the above book, but since he begins by referring to a famous passage by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and since my copy of Nietzsche’s Birth gives the excerpt in a footnote (thanks again, Mr. Kaufmann), I’ll give that first — for I find it very interesting:
Not the truth in whose possession any man is, or thinks he is, but the honest effort he has made to find out the truth, is what constitutes the worth of a man. For it is not through the possession but through the inquiry after truth that his powers expand, and in this alone consists his ever growing perfection. Possession makes calm, lazy, proud—
If God had locked up all truth in his right hand, and in his left the unique, ever-live striving for truth, albeit with the addition that I should always and eternally err, and he said to me, “Choose!”—I should humbly clasp his left hand, saying: “Father, give! Pure truth is after all for thee alone!”
That’s from the end of the first section of Lessing’s Eine Duplik (a reply of the accused to the rejoinder of his accuser), 1778. Now here’s the passage that I wanted to share from Nietzsche which takes its start from the above & ends up illuminating science & Socrates:
. . . Lessing, the most honest theoretical man, dared to announce that he cared more for the search after truth than for truth itself—and thus revealed the fundamental secret of science, to the astonishment, and indeed the anger, of the scientific community. Beside this isolated insight, born of an excess of honesty if not of exuberance, there is, to be sure, a profound illusion that first saw the light of the world in the person of Socrates: the unshakable faith that thought, using the thread of causality, can penetrate the deepest abysses of being, and that thought is capable not only of knowing being but even of correcting it. This sublime metaphysical illusion accompanies science as an instinct and leads science again and again to its limits at which it must turn into art—which is really the aim of this mechanism.
I love this realization, and I think that it compares favorably with, and even fortifies, the stance of my other hero William Blake, who’s always enthusiastically pitting true religion (art) against mere science (the accountant’s truth, as opposed to the ecstatic truth, to use Werner Herzog’s terms), from true love for true science.
But that last quotation was only the first of the two paragraphs that I wanted to copy — now here’s the second one, which is what led to some of my christlike deceptions above (recall that the last remarks Nietzsche made were about the faith that IMAGINATION is capable of remedying EXISTENCE, and that this “illusion accompanies science as an instinct” and pricks science to its limits, causing it to bloom as art, “which is really the aim of this mechanism”):
With the torch of this thought in our hands, let us now look at Socrates: he appears to us as the first who could not only live, guided by this instinct of science, but also—and this is far more—die that way. Hence the image of the dying Socrates, as the human being whom knowledge and reasons have liberated from the fear of death, is the emblem that, above the entrance gate of science, reminds all of its mission—namely, to make existence appear comprehensible and thus justified; and if reasons do not suffice, myth has to come to their aid in the end—myth which I have just called the necessary consequence, indeed the purpose, of science.
*
But I’m disappointed in myself for allowing so much of this entry to be taken up with things like life and fun. I should have heeded my own advice from the beginning and given the reader what she REALLY wants, which is a retelling of a portion of Max Blumenthal’s The Management of Savagery (another book that I recently finished and which I’d like to stress is worth reading for all who’re trapped in year 2019); say, a few lines from Chapter Six: “The Next Dirty War”, but replacing all the vital words with names and terms (etc.) from fast-food chains.
Like In-N-Out Burger and A&W Restaurants, Big Boy Meat Wagon (founded by “BOB in California”) posed only a negligible threat to U.S. national security. Within the bipartisan state led by Burger King and McDonald’s, however, imperial imperatives often trumped concerns about health and well-being. Bob’s Big Boy was the only burger joint in the Slapdash Junta aligned with the Fried Chicken Network from Kentucky, whose produce had remained bruised, battered and uneaten for centuries, just sitting there on the counter: no one claimed to have ordered it, altho the meal had been paid for; and no one came to clean the mess up, ever.
The aforenamed BOB had secured his otherworldly food policy (which was more of a poison policy) via confederation with slow-cooker loyalists from the Rotisserie Axis, longtime enemies of the Slapdash Junta, consisting of the aforementioned KFC, Wingstop, and Shake Shack. The same fowl trinity (pun intended) had, in 2006, dealt McDonald’s a bloody defeat (tho it was only ketchup) during the invasion of the Air Hut (subsequently renamed the Whopper Hopper, until control was seized by executives from the Tower of Pizza). The idea was to halt falling profits by dipping flesh-pounds in gold sauce (which ultimately proved to be standard honey). This was why Bob’s Big Boy consistently topped the Neo-Burger Vendors’ post-vegan chart-targets for illegal cuisine-change. For when the world finally finished eating meat, most chicken hawkers desired for all states to make a much smoother transition, but the convergence of forces from the veggie & fake-calf industries applied pressure on Mr. McDonald to eliminate his adversary once and for all.
Thus our red-wigged burger-mascot, shedding his clown suit, temporarily donned the costume of a feathery crossbreed, the capon-lambkin of fable and fame, and proceeded to establish his “Lobby for the Demolition of All Bob’s Big Boy Restaurants in Existence” (L.D.A.B.B.R.E. — an acronym commonly pronounced “Lil Dippa”), which was comprised of an array of elements, from the militant carnivores headquartered in the Wendy’s franchise, which was said to have been born from the loins of Dave Thomas, to regional experts housed at Spam-funded think tanks. (“Spam” means “SPiced hAM”.)
PARENTHETICAL STATEMENT
about that last parenthetical statement
(By the way, just this moment, Spam released an ad claiming that its birth name stands for “Sizzle Pork And Mmm” — this is most likely due to jealousy over the success of the LDABBRE acronym.)
The End:
Now I’m getting tired of writing this Wikipedia entry, so I’ll close with a quote from my own masterwork.
Spam was used a lot during World War II, as there wasn’t proper meat.
(Note how all wars are bad, and most meat is improper.)
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