Dear diary,
Right and wrong. Good and evil. I’m sure that I misunderstand Nietzsche’s writings, but the idea I get from him is that, for these moral terms to have meaning, there must exist an authority figure to enforce them — that’s why he calls them master-slave terms:
A slave gets his idea of what is right and what is wrong from his master’s code of morality. What pleases the master is labeled “good”, and what displeases the master is labeled “evil”. But the master himself has no such code to inform these terms, since he lacks any authority figure to rule him; therefore he does not think in terms of right and wrong: the master simply acts in accordance with his own will; he does whatever he wants.
Now what if a master desires to harm other creatures, other beings, even other masters? How can we stop him, since he answers to no one, and none have authority over him? — I guess we can’t stop him; all we can do is try to dissuade this master by calling him names:
So I call this master sadistic, low-minded, vulgar...
This is my attempt at being the master of that master. If I can persuade him to change his behavior by judging him unfavorably, then I’ve momentarily increased the domain of my own masterhood; if my words have convinced him to stop tormenting others, then I’ve rounded this master up into my system and steered his will into alignment with my own. Now I am superior. For I believe that a distinguished master will desire what is harmonious, measured, rhythmic... (Here I’m inventing and applying my own personal values — I’m not sure how much Nietzsche would agree with my idea or definition of being “distinguished”.)
Yet if that sadistic master were to remain unmoved by my name-calling and instead simply pull out a Tommy Gun and riddle me with bullets, then I would be dead. Or at least my body would cease to move as much as it used to. (I can’t say that “I” would die, cuz I don’t really know what I am — God forbid that I’m no more than my brashest perceptor — but I think it’s safe to say that, in this case, my body would no longer be very masterful.)
But let us return our focus to the first hypothesis. Note that, upon convincing the sadistic master, by means of name-calling, to repent of his evils, I immediately thumped my chest and proclaimed from the mountaintop, “Now I’m superior!!!” — What I meant by this is that my will had mastered my fellow-master’s will; I therefore temporarily had achieved a position loftier than his, in the sense that I commanded more will-space (tho then he snatched his will-space back, later on, when he shot me). Now here’s my question:
Isn’t that word “superior” kinda like the word “good”, since it requires a master-judgment? Isn’t it like another type of “right”? And therefore, in a weird way, can’t “superior” almost be seen as a synonym for “inferior”?
What I’m trying to hint at is that, even tho my slayer and I were both masters, once upon a time, we still harbored ideas of “better and worse” or simply “desirable and undesirable” (“superior / inferior”) which are very much like another code of morality. — It’s like there’s an overlord who lives inside our will, or in our whim, or in some control booth of our nervous system, and this super-superior (or rather infra-inferior) is calling the plays for us, the same way that we order around our own slaves in real life. So now I wonder:
Must every seer put up with an overseer? And, of course, does upper management answer to a higher power as well? Are taskmasters subject to their own hellish multitask-masters, or is there truly a top shelf somewhere?
“We’re all just miserable slaves to nature.”
—Officer Duke, from the film Wrong Cops (2013)
And how do you know that your slave isn’t really your master? Or that your subordinate is the ÜBERMENSCH!? — I mean…
Actually, I don’t know what I mean by that. It was simply fun to say.
And also: Who cares? Cuz, having written this far, I have the distinct feeling that I’ve wasted my time even touching on this subject. Nietzsche’s writing is sublime: I mean that sincerely — I love it to death. But I myself don’t need to talk about such matters. Even if, instead of a superhero, I prove to be a super-duper slave, I will not mind, as long as I still have a name and an identification number.
(If it turns out that we all must serve something, then I suggest that we serve wisdom.)
But there are a lot of feelings inside me that I wish would not be there. Like the feeling of hunger — why is that in my body? Cuz this proves that I’ll always be a slave to food, for as long as I live. — Also the feeling of nervousness, which makes me want to run away rather than listen to the Lord God’s lecture.
I admire those people who can recline on the beach and just soak up sun-rays. Whenever I go outside in the daytime, I feel immediately claustrophobic, cuz there’s no escape from the light: all my cells grow warm: I can tell that the photons are making it past the barrier of my skin and seeping dangerously close to my vital organs. No, the one thing I do NOT need is sunshine in my heart.
Plus even the strongest master, as long as he is alive, will not be able to forgo breathing: he remains addicted to air. Even when sleeping, his body automatically forces him to respire. And we terrestrial creatures think that we gained an advantage by crawling out of the sea. But I myself would far prefer to be at the bottom of the ocean, hovering in place, refusing to push any water thru my gills (cuz if you don’t actually move thru the water, you don’t need to breathe — at least that’s what I heard); so you slide into a state somewhere in-between life and death, thus sidestepping the whole catastrophe. That’s why fish don’t even close their eyes when they sleep: they’re the most intense dreamers.
Yes, now that I think of it, THIS is what I wish I had begun writing about today; so let me start over and choose to be underwater, neither alive nor dead. Now here’s the dream I would have as a fish:
MY FISH DREAM
by Bryan Ray
I would find myself on a battlefield. I’d be wondering: What are we fighting for? My misunderstanding of Fish History would lead me to believe that all the fish from my colony were victorious in flushing Fish Britain down the whirlpool, so we christened our new unified fishery The Fish Nation State; and we would run this country correctly: we wouldn’t just allow it to become a repeat of all the old problems, like Fish Britain Part Deux: Bigger, Badder. No: all our fish citizens are happy, cuz they’re free of all the safety nets that keep dragging them up; whereas the Brit-fish got all their roe froze by a brutal regime of wigged scientists, who sport black smocks over their redcoats in compliance with the symbols of cowboy fashion.
Sorry, that didn’t start out very well. But, don’t leave the theater; my dream’s not over yet — I just have to think of more material to fill it with...
OK, so I’m on this battlefield, wondering to myself: What’s the deal? For so many years ago we gained our independence and became The Fish Nation State, and for five glorious winters we ate gold crackers in the shape of our own physique, fed to us by slaves on slave-ships, up above the water surface, where they let down ropes from heaven which had hooks on the end.
What else….? (Think, fish-brain, think!)
Ah, yes, the battlefield scene — another thing I’m wondering to myself is: What am I doing holding this automatic rifle? Just as in ancient times I was told that we beat our samurai swords back into plowshares, so also today we might be better off modifying these machine guns back into the auto-seed planters that they were intended to be before the conflict started. For wouldn’t it be more pleasant to be planting potatoes and raising goats in a peaceful field, than to be hovering here, bored witless on a desolate battlefield, where there’s no fun things to draw in my sketchpad, and I have no idea why we’re fighting or who is the enemy?
I bet my goats would be thankful to have a fish as their goatherd, cuz I’d feed them well — I’d let them graze anywhere they wanted, as long as it was near my potato patch; and I’d make sketches of them in my notebook. I’d portray my favorite goat, Rebecca K., as leaping over a wooden fence (there is no fence: I just imagined that); and I’d portray my other favorite goat, Regina H., as sprawling on the ground, under the shade of a broad-leaved tree; and I’d portray yet another of my favorite goats, Jenny L., as being a really happy and friendly goat. I’d give her a nice house with a good family.
Hmm… I don’t feel that my dream is quite as swashbuckling as I intended it to be before I fell asleep; therefore, let me steal the rest of the vision from the plot of The Searchers (1956), an American Technicolor VistaVision Western film directed by John Ford — cuz I did this same thing the other day with The Big Sleep (1946) and it was easy & self-amusing.
I forgot to mention earlier that my dream began in the Fish Year 1868. Up to this point, I’d been fighting in Fish War after Fish War. We citizens of The Fish Nation State even got so confused at one point that we started fighting ourselves! — that latter conflict left more than 850,000 fishies dead, and their bodies all washed up on the shore and stank.
So at this point in my dream I found a wagonload of virtual coins. It was dirty money, of uncertain origin, according to a sign that had been affixed to the side of the wagon. This is what I used to finance my quest. I also got a medal from one of the campaigns that I fought in, & it was engraved with the phrase “Good Warrior” — I wore that with pride, every place I went. I also wore a yellow ribbon. (I’m only relaying these details to you so that you can recognize my character as you watch me swim throughout the rest of my dream-vision.)
Now, I live on a potato farm; and we don’t have any livestock (the pictures of the goats above that I showed you from my sketchbook were all just done from my imagination — I don’t like to draw from live models: I worry that it makes them feel uncomfortable). And my next-door neighbor, Lars Jorgensen, uses his 180 acres of underwater farmland to raise potbellied pigs.
Now, shortly after my dream began, I started noticing that the pigs belonging to my neighbor Lars kept drowning. Whole legions of pigs would be found potbelly-up, as if they leapt off a cliff and landed in our ocean. The only problem is that there’s not a cliff for miles around for these pigs to dash toward and drop from. So Lars and I concluded that someone must be murdering the creatures. So we got Captain Andy from the funeral scene of our favorite film Wrong Cops (2013) to accompany us on an adventure. And the Captain and Lars and I led a group of Fish Rangers thru the subaqueous dust-bowl region to see if we could find out who the heck keeps drowning Lars’ livestock.
Sure enough, the pig-killer turned out to be the Christian Devil. So that solved that.
But there still was one mystery that I couldn’t stop thinking about, during this next scene in my dream: “Why oh why,” say I to my friends, by way of a speech bubble (which was literally made of bubbles, cuz we’re all freshwater fish, bowl-free since birth) — I say: “Why oh why was Lars’ home in flames when we returned from our mission? And why was my brother Aaron, his wife Martha, and their son Ben Stockwell, burnt to a crisp when we went to check on them? For I had told them they could stay with Lars as his houseguests while I was renovating my yurt, which I refer to as my ‘igloo’, and I promised them that nothing bad would happen to them ever. Plus Debbie and her older sister Lucy have been abducted by monstrous beings named Wolves with Gills (which are the sharks of potato-farming).” And neither Lars nor Captain Andy could answer me.
So, we set out on another Underwater Sea Adventure (U.S.A.); and the first thing we did is have an afterlife-sized funeral for all the dead pigs. We saluted their bodies as they smoldered in the pit.
Then we went and found one of the pyramids that was built by the Gilled Wolves, and we broke into it & stole its mummy & defiled it. We took pictures of ourselves standing with our arm around it and making the thumbs-up sign while bearing our fish-teeth, and we posted these pics on Aqua Foto Scroll, a social networking website for minnows & guppies (but we mature adult fishes often use it too).
Then we ride our sea-ponies into the enemy camp, and we see the Wolves with Gills having a birthday party for one of their community members. So Lars sez “Let us kill them all instantly.” But the Captain sez: “No, Lars!” And I say: “Andy’s right, Lars. Don’t kill anyone right now. Let them have their fun. Wait until the piñata is broken: for you can see that they’re all blindfolded and swinging baseball bats at the hollow Fish Effigy, and once it crashes to the ground, I promise you that it’ll prove to be filled with gold crackers, which, as you know, are like the candy-corn of the ocean. Also note that our beloved Debbie and Lucy, who they have hired as hostages, are ambling up & down among the Gilled Wolves, and walking to & fro among them; & we don’t want them to get exterminated by accident, for they’re the whole reason that we agreed to star in this film.”
“He’s right,” sez Lars to the Captain; “except for the fact that they’re swimming, not ‘walking’ or ‘ambling’. They are fish, after all.”
Now Captain Andy is shown in a medium-shot, apparently thinking about the import of Lars’ remark.
So, when the party ends, we wait until everyone clears out, and we go and eat whatever crumbs remain from the cracker-feast. And we gather seven baskets full of the broken leftovers. There is also some gold cheesy dust that landed on the coral, and we lick that up too.
Then we ride our sea-ponies directly into an ambush. But we fend off the attack.
Then Captain Andy sez that he’s tired, so we escort him home. Now it’s just me and Lars left to finish the mission.
At some point in the dream, I find the slain body of Lucy, wrapped in plastic. “One down, one to go,” I sigh; “now only Debbie remains for us to rescue.”
Seeing the corpse of Lucy shimmering in the ocean-light, Lars is so enraged that he impulsively swims off on his own and whips his seahorse to a gallop, barreling straight into the camp of the Wolves with Gills. — They slay him directly.
Now finding myself all alone, treading water in the valley, I remark to the camera:
“Dang, you don’t expect bad events like this to happen when you’re a kid. You just sorta coast along and assume that someone smarter than you is directing the action, and that it’ll turn out all right. But here I just watched my best friend and closest neighbor Lars charge straight into the Enemy Headquarters and get himself filleted. They already shipped him off to the fishmonger. — I sure hope he makes a good meal.”
This controversial monologue causes much of the audience to change their mind about my character: they go from loving me to hating me (some of them even walk out of the theater in disgust); and it earns my dream a hard “X” rating.
Now winter arrives. The water turns VERY cold. I return to Lars Jorgensen’s pig ranch and inform the spirits of the dead swine that their master is in heaven. “Sorry, you cannot join him; for you are sea creatures. Heaven is only for pigs that can fly.” Then I notice that there is a letter on the floor, which the spirits of the pigs have been vainly trying to eat. I pick it up and hold it to the light. I notice that it’s a handwritten invitation from Mr. Futterman, the neighbor who lives on the far side of Lars. He sez that he’s interested in joining a local posse, now that he’s retired, and he’s wondering if Lars might know of any adventures that are currently half-underway and would welcome the addition of an old man like him tagging along. It’s true that he can’t ride seahorse anymore, because of the saddle-burn that still torments his inner thighs, but he can walk fast.
So I pay a visit to Mr. Futterman. And, as luck would have it, he possesses crucial info regarding the whereabouts of Debbie. For it turns out that Mr. Futterman has been trafficking young girls thru his charity organization for many years. And he’s stolen a lot of money from decent folk. — So my character kills him, and I take his son Fut along with me on my journey.
But before I kill Futterman, I say to him: “Please, Mr. Futterman, I’m begging you: tell me the name of the man that the clerk who works at your Front Company’s perfume counter said she heard bragging that he bought my niece-in-law Debbie from your Orphan Relocation Firm.” And then he tells me, right before he croaks:
“The bad guy is named Scar.”
Then his face freezes in a wide-eyed glare of terror, and I stand and aim my gun and say: “Thanks a mill. Now here’s a little something to make sure you remain a corpse this time: I had this Magnum pistol modified to shoot wooden bullets—” then my character pops two slugs right in his heart. This leaves a penny-sized burgundy splotch on his flannel shirt’s breast-pocket.
Before leaving, I take a last look at the body & say: “I hope the Good Lord doesn’t let your victims take vengeance on you in heaven.” My character then spits and mutters: “Arrivederci, Mr. Futterman.”
So I take his son Fut along with me on my journey. For altho Mr. Futterman was an awful man who did very bad things, his son knew nothing of the sinister side of his father’s life — he was only aware of the wholesome Front Company, which sold perfume and lingerie; and he assumed that this was his dad’s only business: he knew nothing of the wagonloads of dirty money that had accumulated over the years, because the illegal exchanges were all paid for in virtual coins, to make their trail harder to trace. Thus young Fut’s innocent soul won over the soul of my character, despite my hatred of his father, and our souls became knit together; as he and I enjoyed many philosophical discussions over balmy evenings in the goat-field (our favorite subject was morality). Fut loved me as much as he loved his own luck — and he was a very lucky fellow.
Then it came to pass that we made a covenant betwixt the two of us, that we would finish this affair that his father had started: Fut agreed to help me to utterly obliterate Scar, as well as, if possible, to rescue my niece-in-law.
So we mounted upon our sea-ponies and trotted to a nearby military base. But Scar was nowhere to be found.
So we trotted to New Liquid Mexico, which is just like the regular New Mexico except it’s filmed with blue tints on the camera’s lens, to make it seem like everything’s floating: even the barmaids.
Here we find Debbie. She is now a beautiful woman, happily married to Mr. Scar. (This revelation really bugs my character.)
Debbie informs me, in a strong wolfy accent, that she has become a Gilled Wolvian — this was an entirely voluntary decision on her part: she even initiated it; they didn’t really want to let her into the club — and she wishes to remain with these people; for they are her family. They are good Wolves with Gills, who want exactly the same thing as we fishes: a safe place to swim, and plenty of gold-cheddar crackers to cannibalize.
My character now decides that he would rather see Debbie drowned than breathing happily thru a snorkel as the plaything of a Wolf-in-Fish’s-clothing. So I try to shoot her with my police pistol, but the thing won’t fire, cuz it’s waterlogged. (The wooden bullets must’ve swollen shut, because of the dampness of the atmosphere.) Then Fut shields Debbie with his body, just as Cupid the God of Love slouches forth from outer-stage and shoots an arrow in that direction. And it’s a magic arrow, thus it pierces everyone in the vicinity of the President’s motorcade (it turns out that Cupid was actually aiming at the First Lady, for he had deduced from various nonverbal cues that she had grown bored with the Prez, and he was attempting to amend that) so now all my friends and enemies are in love with each other, and I’m the only fish who has the guts to still remain a total cynic.
Now Fut writes me a letter saying that he’s furious with me for trying to force Debbie to join my fish-school’s swim-team again.
I write back that mermaids are monsters: the government should not be experimenting with fusing the legs of females onto fishbottoms. For that could make even a hardcore frogman like myself turn sapphic.
In the final reel of the dream, I come back to my hometown, to my burnt house in the snowglobe, and I note that all the townsfolk have succumbed to their burning passion and gotten married; and they’ve all chosen to wed the wrong people, of course. And today is the day of the last possible nuptial ceremony (cuz there’s no one left after this — the town has an even number of people — so if they wanna continue with their madness, they’ll have to start embracing polygamy again; cuz divorce has been outlawed), and this Finale Marriage is between a beefcake groom whom I’ve always detested, and a girl with whom I used to flirt before embarking on my revenge mission.
So this beefcake groom and I agree to perform a fistfight, and we fall down in the slippery mud & pummel each other.
Then, after wiping the mud from my eyes, I look back and notice, in the back pew of the church: my old pal Fut, sitting next to Scar and Debbie, and they’re all pointing at me and shaking with laughter. And they’re not laughing WITH me; they’re laughing AT me.
So I go and kill Scar by stabbing him with the arrow. (Its feathers reveal that it’s the same one that I saved from earlier when it fell out of Cupid’s quiver.) Then I give a hard look at Fut, and glare at him intensely, as if to say: “Whose fish-friend are you truly, dead Scar’s—that ravenous Wolf with Gills? OR are you my best friend, the real fish who is the hero of this dream!”
After staring for a moment at the lifeless body of Scar, Fut skins his pelt.
“Good choice,” I smile.
Then I grab my niece-in-law Debbie by the wrist, and drag her kicking & screaming to the trough where my mount is tethered. I tie her down to a sled; then fasten the sled to the back of my sea-pony:
“We’re going home,” I announce.
While hauling Debbie away from the Jorgensen ranch, I turn around for one last look at the place & notice Fut’s cadaver floating in a sand-trap. (He seems self-slain; but the audience has a suspicion that my character might’ve killed him.)
In the iconic Last Scene, I kick the sled, with Debbie still tied to it, so that it coasts into the kitchen of the homestead where I live on my battlefield. Then, in a wide shot from the sled’s point-of-view, I am shown swimming away from the igloo to go fight in more Fish Wars.
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