On the night of Monday, March 16, I for the first time in almost twelve years did psychedelics (shrooms), and for the first time with a female (my girlfriend, who happens to be almost twelve years younger than I). I’ve said before that a great spirit is like a great fire. I meant this especially in the sense that it needs lots of oxygen: I’m always concerned about sufficient oxygen inflow, whether it be at home or at the office or anywhere else; I prefer being too cold to having too little oxygen at my disposal. In winter especially, this can be a delicate balance–and it was definitely still winter in Amsterdam. Now we were sitting on the couch, which is near the front window, which in turn was as slightly open as possible. I had a hot water bottle for my feet, a blankie for my legs, reasonably warm clothes, and my girlfriend leaning against my right side, which was facing the front of the house. I was precariously balancing between being too cold and being too warm, for my girlfriend gave off lots of heat and I was also a bit paranoid about my heart. I now think what psychedelics do to me in terms of my fire metaphor is that they reduce my spirit to a pilot light, but thereby also really focus it. (About ten years ago I wrote, paraphrasing Jim Morrison: “Trips are at once fruit & outcry against an atrophy of the spirit.”) Now I was trying to explain this precarious balancing in terms of Apollo and Dionysus: I was, to use Nietzsche’s metaphor in The Birth of Tragedy, a man trying to keep his rowboat steady on the Dionysian ocean. At some point, my girlfriend said something like: “Yeah, I always feel my environment is trying to take my warmth from me.” This gave me a great opportunity of explaining to her what I consider the basic Lampertian-Straussian interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power: even entropy is nothing but the extraction, consumption and combustion (cellular respiration is a combustion reaction) of resources by living beings (according to Nietzsche we have no other idea of being than as living (section 582 of The Will to Power)). So it’s all perspectival: in trying to keep itself at a constant temperature, my girlfriend’s body, too, was taking warmth and even life away from living beings (it must constantly decimate entire colonies of bacteria, even as those colonies must pose a threat to her body in order to prosper). In short, my girlfriend, too, was a devourer–and with that I was reminded of Blake:
[size=95]The Giants who formed this world into its sensual
existence and now seem to live in it in chains, are in
truth the causes of its life & the sources of all activity;
but the chains are the cunning of weak and tame minds
which have power to resist energy: according to the
proverb, the weak in courage is strong in cunning.
Thus one portion of being is the Prolific; the other,
the Devouring: to the devourer it seems as if the
producer was in his chains; but it is not so, he only
takes portions of existence and fancies that the whole.
[William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.][/size]
Now it has always seemed to me that Blake was tripping when he wrote his Prophetic Books. I even interpreted his saying that he “print[ed] in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” (ibid.), in the sense that he wrote those writings under the influence of (a) certain acid(s). In any case, whether spontaneous or induced, in trips I tend to be especially sure that Blake had great psychedelic experience. And when I started reading the above passage, I more or less wagered that the Giants spoken of actually existed… I gave my girlfriend my interpretation: the word “Giant” is a reference to the Gigantes, a race of giants, children of Gaia, in Greek mythology; but Blake did not so much mean that particular race, but the giant children of Gaia in general and the Titanes, the Titans, in particular. The Titan Prometheus, for example, who is quite analogous to the Lucifer of the Christian tradition, was chained to the Caucasus by Zeus. Zeus took over from his father Kronos, also a Titan, whom he threw down and had chained in the Tartarus, the deepest pit of Hades.
[size=95]“Him [Satan] the Almighty Power
Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’Ethereal Sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire,
Who durst defy th’Omnipotent to Arms.”
(Milton, Paradise Lost 1.44-49)[/size]
In my view Blake’s “Giants” are the Greats who created the world as we know it; the philosophers, in the Nietzschean sense (see aphorism 9 of Beyond Good and Evil):
[size=95]“Of Hyperion [another Titan] we are told that he was the first to understand, by diligent attention and observation, the movement of both the sun and the moon and the other stars, and the seasons as well, in that they are caused by these bodies, and to make these facts known to others; and that for this reason he was called the father of these bodies, since he had begotten, so to speak, the speculation about them and their nature.” (Diodorus Siculus, Bibliotheca historica 5.67.1, my emphasis.)[/size]
In aphorism 300 of The Gay Science, Nietzsche’s suggests that Prometheus did not steal the light (note: the light, not fire), but created it himself, projected it outward–and not just the light, but also the god from whom he imagined he stole it. And Blake writes that “[t]he ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses”, but that “at length […] men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.” (op.cit.) This is basically the insight that has led me to see Nietzsche’s founding as the founding of a new pre-Homeric age–a new Titanic or barbaric age (http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2357568).
Anyway, on with the Blake quote. My girlfriend as well as her parasites are devourers; indeed one must be a devourer first if one is to be prolific. To illustrate this, I next turned to my first German copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra–in fact, to the very pages which, when I read them during a trip in 1997, caused me to be taken over by Nietzsche (http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/viewtopic.php?p=2272023#p2272023). I translate:
[size=95]Tell me, pray: how came gold to the highest value? Therefore, that it is uncommon and unuseful and beaming and mild in its sheen; it always bestows itself.
Only as an image of the highest virtue came gold to the highest value. Goldlike beams the glance for the bestower. Gold-sheen makes peace between moon and sun.
Uncommon is the highest virtue and unuseful, beaming is it and mild in its sheen: a bestowing virtue is the highest virtue.
Verily, I divine you well, my disciples; you try, like me, for the bestowing virtue. What should you have in common with cats and wolves?
That is your thirst, to become offerings and gifts yourselves: and therefore have you the thirst to heap all riches in your soul.
Insatiably tries your soul for treasure and jewelry, because your virtue is insatiable in wanting to bestow.
You force all things towards you and into you, so that they shall stream back from your wellspring as the gifts of your love.
Verily, a robber of all values must such bestowing love become; but whole and holy call I this self-seeking.—
Another self-seeking is there, an all too poor one, a hungering one, which always wants to steal, that self-seeking of the sick, the sick self-seeking.
With the eye of the thief it glances at all that sheens; with the greed of hunger it measures him who has plenty to eat; and always it sneaks around the table of the bestowers.
Sickness speaks from such desire, and invisible degeneration; of a sick body speaks the thievish greed of this self-seeking.
Tell me, my brothers, what counts for us as bad and the worst? Is it not degeneration?—And we always divine degeneration where the bestowing soul is lacking.
Upwards goes our path, from the genus across to the super-genus. But a horror to us is the degenerating mind, which says: “All for me.”
[Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “Of the Bestowing Virtue” 1.][/size]
In translating roughly the second third-part of this, I was trying to explain to my girlfriend that the prolific is the devourer who devours not so much to sustain and aggrandise himself, as to aggrandise his whole world. The cats and wolves are of course only a metaphor; healthy cats and wolves are also prolific (my girlfriend deeply loves cats and hates canines; I was trying to make her see that it’s all perspectival). I stopped at the point where Zarathustra starts talking about the sick self-seeking. Blake, however, says much the same thing in the quoted passage and its sequel, and in the book as a whole; and especially in an earlier passage. In the quoted passage he speaks of “weak and tame minds which have power to resist energy”; and in the earlier passage, he says:
[size=95]“Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.”[/size]
About this, I wrote elsewhere (http://personalitycafe.com/enfj-forum-givers/82393-eccentric-personal-ad-4.html#post2048809):
[size=95]Those who restrain desire […] can only do so by desire–those who restrain desire do so because their desire to do so is stronger than the desire they restrain! By putting it as he does, Blake is being unfair to those who do not restrain desire because they are told to (e.g., by the One Law), but because they tell themselves to! Because they desire to! These are the supreme, the Rationals, the true Brahmanas, of whom Nietzsche says:
[/size]
But this may not be what Blake means. What Blake may well mean is what Nietzsche says in Genealogy of Morals 1.13: that the weak tend to make a virtue out of their weakness, that they pride themselves on not “giving in” to their “evil” inclinations, to “temptation”; whereas they really just never experience anything even remotely like this:
[size=95]Upwards flies our mind: thus it is a simile of our body, the simile of an elevation. Similes of such elevations are the names of the virtues.
Thus goes our body through history, a becoming one and a struggling one. And the spirit—what is that to it? The herald, companion and reverberation of its struggles and victories.
Similes are all the names for good and evil: they do not speak out, they merely hint. A fool, who wants knowledge from them.
Attention, my brothers, at every hour when your spirit wants to speak in similes: there is the origin of your virtue.
Elevated is then your body and resurrected; with its delight it enraptures the spirit, so that it becomes a creator, and a valuer, and a lover, and a benefactor of all things.
When your heart flows broad and full, like the stream, a blessing and a danger to those who live near it: there is the origin of your virtue.
When you are above praise and blame, and your will wants to command all things, as the will of a lover: there is the origin of your virtue.
When you despise comfort and the soft bed, and cannot make your bed far enough from the softies: there is the origin of your virtue.
When you are the willers of one will, and this change of nature’s course is your unalterable course: there is the origin of your virtue.
Verily, a new good and evil is it! Verily, a new deep rushing and the voice of a new well!
Power is it, this new virtue; a ruling thought is it, and around it a clever soul: a golden sun, and around it the serpent of knowledge.
[Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ibid.][/size]
Enough, or Too Much!
…if you meant passion.
)