What is the anti-essential essence of mine I foresee? Never comprehensive, rather a part of it. Perhaps a part that had been, looking back. We are asked to take up careers, single pursuits that define us over the lifetime. I am a doctor, teacher, a clown, a waiter; all in bad faith.
A lineage of academic background, further exemplified through talent in Mathematics and the other sciences, led me to forge the identity: The Mathematician. A few years ago, the start of my teenhood. I still love the subject deeply, even wish to tread water in more, but the act of static identity, linguistic identity more so, exacts the inauthentic act. Foucault’s seemingly unintuitive critique of the gay liberation movement comes to mind.
As I am now, ahead is a possibility. A fine-line, a tightrope over the chasm, to be perished at any time, at the flick of a finger. And if not, the repeatable difference that defines the future me; the pretext accentuating the then-now.
To be the man who represents the multiplicity of creation. I was favored to write poems over prose fiction, for its finer possibilities of abstraction, the generalized-analogous connection to the mathematical. Now, I write fiction that supersedes any poems (of mine). As the Fractured Zeitgeist soon shows, an abstract flux represents our faculties. Fingers, of various shapes and forms, point to us: Evolution’s chosen one.
As is, a singular strain of possibility is unlike my style. Another in brief – to exhaust all modes of enacting beauty via creation. Similar, but not the same. A perishable life-affirming second child.
Untimely Meditations, the muse behind this. More precisely, the essay – On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. Immediately, the text starts with (one of) Nietzsche’s historical mentors: Goethe
In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A critique of the dominant cultural view of Germany at the time, with respect to history – knowledge for the sake of itself, facticity to perpetually be feasted on its tail, historical knowledge as circular pursuit. A happening prevalent in our times, the social science academia’s mutual strokes of their egos, the precise citables and niche, null-intentioned, factual propositions as status symbols of intellectual standing. Who is concerned with the color and texture of Caesar’s undergarment?
Nietzsche presents the alternative, history as means for life. To be thoroughly studied, critiqued, transformed to aid creative ways of living. A prose sketch of a God, that cares none for existence for itself, who “on their way to immortality and to monumental history, how to regard it with Olympian laughter or at least with sublime mockery”.
Hence, the relevance of this. I write for others, as Nietzsche did for me, so that “she learns from it that the greatness that once existed was in any event once possible and may thus be possible again; she goes her way with more cheerful step, for the doubt which assailed him in weaker moments, whether she was not perhaps desiring the impossible, has now been banished”.
To let another know, that a god once walked among humans. And for myself, if I look back once again. An affirming consolation to get through dark nights.
Emerging from its internalization is chaotic hope. The traditional, inseparably intertwined cultural conception, speaks of one that desires outcome, a happy one. One willingly donates the now to the thief of Hope, thereby escaping the pain and living in the borrowed happiness of tomorrow.
As its opponent, perhaps only similar in its name-sake, chaotic hope effects excitement, fear, a trembling anxious sublime. All in wait for the process – that starts the next moment. An intimate meeting with the terrifying uncertainty of existence, and the eternally returning love for it.
இந்த மாதிரி நேரத்துல வீரங்கல்லாம் அடிக்கடி சொல்ற வார்த்தை என்ன தெரியுமா?
பாத்துக்கலாம் !
Translation:
Do you know the word brave souls utter at times like this?
We’ll see!
Vikram, 2023
References
Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. 1968.
Krishna, Niranjan. Evolution, Creative Ontology, and Deleuze-Guattari Against Freud. 2023.
Krishna, Niranjan. The Fractured Zeitgeist. Upcoming.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Untimely Meditations. 1873.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. 1943.