Riding Mother Nature's Silver Seed to a New Home in the Sun
I am being haunted right now by a ghost. By ideas that have been instilled in me and that are now being threatened by, of all people, a monk. The ghost fights back, and he is wreaking the havoc of his insights on my mind.
I haven't read a word of Nietzsche for a very long time. I think its a phase you go through, like when you eat hamburger helper for a month straight just cuz you like it. Its been probably 4 years since I even picked up one of his books. Yet his ghost lingers.
What is important will perservere.
As an aside, is there anything more cliche then a young man making a poetic reference about Nietzsche? I should be slapped and fined for writing without a poetic license.
Still, even the cliches are sometimes are correct. There he is, staring me in the face.
'Is this really what you were brought up to believe?'
The last thing I read of Nietzsche was from a t-shirt.
On the front of the shirt it said 'God is dead' - Nietzsche, 1888.
On the back it said 'Nietzsche is dead' - God, 1901
Anyways, I thought it was pretty funny.
For better or worse, I learned from him. At times I think I learned too much. Here's a few paragraphs I wrote about five years ago. I stumbled on it yesterday.
He was considered a genius, at least by himself, and while much of his writing seems a tad indulgent to me and some of it is just straight off the wall and into the abyss, it isn't without its merit. There is this one idea in particular that pervades everything I have been reading, and I just haven't been able to let go of it. Tonight I finally get it. He's talking about the necessity of man to create. He sees the one who creates as being the crack through which the light is drawn.
I always thought that I understood what he was saying. Oh sure, its simple, straightforward, he thinks we should all be artists or builders or something of the sort. We need to create. But I was wrong. Tonight I think I figured it out, as I was wandering in my typical aimless stupor around and around the blocks circling my house. He was talking about meaning. We are all to be the creators of our own meaning.
I gained an ounce of solace in realizing that.
I think it's safe to say, in retrospect, that I gained more than an ounce.
It's a pretty simple idea really. I guess most anything of any importance is. But anyways, I latched onto it. It lifted me from the mundane dance of futility that, at the time, was bringing me down. Because what he is saying, in essence, is that we are our own creators.
Would could be more empowering? Because it makes it all ok. It makes it ok to be human, it makes it ok to make mistakes, and it makes it ok to try.
So that all brings us to the now. I am being asked to follow a path that I am told is the 'right one'.
And I hesitate. And shake. And sometimes I even tremble.
I am not all that sure about it.
Because there it is, the voice of Nietzsche, haunting my gut, telling me that there is no 'right one'. Telling me that we must all be creators. Telling me that if I give up my ability to create my own meaning, even if it may be in favour of the 'right one', then I give up that chance that we are all blessed with, to create the world in our own image.
Well, I don't know. I don't know much. But I do know that I'm not ready to give in to that just yet.
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