Seeking Zarathustra

Objective reality is the object of science. One feels various deficiencies early on – e.g., if all I know pertains to my subjectivity, then this separation that science makes between subject and object is a split that, paradoxically, has to occur within that very subjectivity, so subject and object is destabilized and the subject is alienated from themselves. We must start somewhere, so let’s start here.

I went from seeing the world as an objective external material to a material that I act within and upon. What is objective is my action that shapes the world. The question of what is true becomes the question of what is right, for everything hinges on action. Thus an encounter with an Abrahamic conception of God as law. The fantasy that there is a “right”, an external law that we just don’t know. Taken to the extreme, it’s Moses bringing the law to the Israelites. Again, subjectivity is alienated – what determines the value of action in the world becomes dictated by a thoroughly non-human God who can’t even act in that world. Reconciling that fantasy lets us become aware of something like conscience, or felt right action within our subjectivity.

Here the stage is set for the battle between feeling conscience and desire. Despite our best abilities to tell what actions will cause suffering and sympathize with that suffering, we are faced with desires that would urge us to act in the contrary, disrupting the sense of social harmony that our feeling conscience provided, hence again alienating it from within. But desire does not just urge us to act contrary to our sense of social harmony, but in ways that must properly be called evil, for what springs forth is beyond what our feeling and conscience was able to foresee. For the first time in our journey we intuit a divine alienating force: the creative power of desire as a transcendent force which can bring evil into the world. We are closer to God than at any point before, as Satan and God occupy the same realm. The question now isn’t of right action, but of right desire, and what power do we have over our desire?

I believe there are many exit points that people commonly take at this point. Standard ones are to say that evil just doesn’t exist, or that people are fundamentally good and innocent and if they just follow their conscience and are true to themselves, everything would be good. This is in bad faith. Similarly with thinking that evil is just out there in the world, “what a tragedy, how can such injustices occur?” etc.

Another common exit point is where one acknowledges the conscience and its antithetical corrupting alienating desire, but as two coexisting elements of the human (all too human). Here we get the fantasy of “the human”, a false unity of opposites because it stands precisely as a symbol of two opposites that could not be reconciled. One follows one’s conscience in some vague awareness of the power of evil within them and does not let one side grow in disproportion of the other. They vaguely strive to be a good person but also learn to “accept their faults”, perhaps partaking in little pleasures from time to time and maybe causing some hurt along the way, but not letting their vices get the best of them. In other cases, one stakes everything on their conscience and feeling, striving to be as good of a person as possible and maybe even appearing to live as a saint. The banal human existence.

Alternatively, one gets closer to the Abrahamic God proper. God as Power, or as the unrestricted creative potential of abstract desire, externalized as a force of pure judgment in relation to me. Here is a legitimately dangerous space to navigate, requiring great care of logic and feeling, as well as recognition that one really is dealing with a power that far exceeds them and can make short work of their all-too-human mind and shred it from the inside. The earth and sky tremble and one wants to turn away.

Deleuze, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Henry Miller all committed an error at certain points in their works which seems quite common: the innocent creative will gets confused with the human will for evil. That is, Satan and God are conflated, and evil is understood as arising out of the innocence of the world’s development, and hence is only “evil” in the eyes of those who perceive it as such from the outside. The world proceeds in innocence as a radical experiment: let a thousand blossoms bloom, for the only true evils are the reactive forces that dampen the free child-like play of the universe. The social, the material world, my part in it, is all conceived as the evolution of a demiurgic surface and one claims their share of the divine spoils. This external surface of the Good. The surface of God’s innocence and creativity. The surface does not remain smooth but undergoes striations, double binds. So much Deleuzian and literary nonsense. So much mathematical nonsense. There is no surface, no body without organs that we scurry along. No spacetime manifold. There are only local phenomena, even when such phenomena appear to us as stretching across the entire universe or as splitting off and discretizing the very surface – the death of the surface where one still desperately clings to the surface, such as Deleuze does in ‘A Thousand Plateaus‘.

The demiurgic surfaces are nothing more than a hallucination of divine innocence in response to the guilt that the alienating force of desire poses. It does not reconcile the good conscience with the evil will of desire but lets one do the opposite: “my hands are clean in the eyes of God, for it is people who invented the word ‘evil’”. Similarly, Buddhism either denies desire altogether or arrives at a realm of innocence through Zen, which, armed with the metaphysical apparatuses of Daoism, would erase all resistance to desire and set us on “the way”. But the struggle was between personal conscience and personal desire, and fleeing to a concept of the social or absolute at this stage is a sleight-of-hand that lets one avoid the confrontation in a much more personal sphere. So often the fantasy of “losing oneself” arises from not knowing how to deal with oneself.

Returning, the conflict between personal conscience and alienating desire must be pushed to its limits. Conscience and feeling, however, are no match for desire. If one pits their conscience against the damaging nature of their desire, sympathizing with the hurt it can cause, while also throwing themselves on their desire – that is, allowing themselves to desire their desire – then one finally says “to hell with their suffering! if my sympathy keeps getting in the way, then let my desire transmute my sympathy for their suffering into my joy of inflicting pain upon them”. A different union of Satan and God, this time in psychopathy. This is a more “authentic” resolution than the demiurgic in some sense, but not a reconciliation between desire and conscience, for desire has simply dominated conscience.

If conscience has sway, we arrive at the human. If desire has sway, we arrive at the psychopathic. If we conceive of God’s nature as Power but turn away from the original problem, getting lured by the “innocence of creative will” or seeking to flee guilt, we arrive at the demiurgic world. If one worships the multiplicity of desire from the standpoint of the human, one gets the Greek pantheon of gods, etc. We must maintain both sides of the struggle, our grounding in conscience and the alienating power of desire, and push the encounter forward. Desire overpowers the conscience but conscience pleads with it and seeks to understand what desire demands from it. In this process, the feeling subject of conscience finds that it was never located on one side of the equation, but experiences its alienation precisely as a split in its subjectivity. Here we witnessed a Platonic demiurge of God as the Good, the first image of completeness. God’s Power forms an innocent surface of desire and humans corrupt it with their nature, fetishizing God’s innocent desire and striating the surface. We should feel guilty and shameful of our sin – how could it corrupt something so Pure?

“This object of divine desire belongs to me because it is not accessible to me”. The subject is a lack: neither that which was looking to attain its desire or what its desire was seeking, but both and neither; a completeness only through its incompleteness. The glue is guilt or shame, and one does not know where it is. The subject is neither human nor divine, neither subject nor object. The struggle was sustained by a higher unity of guilt and shame. In this realm begins a mystical encounter with G-d. In this union, there is infinite freedom yet infinite responsibility, for everything unfolds within the hollow of G-d. G-d then hides from themselves in infinite shame yet infinite visibility, folding themselves into infinite concrescence of flesh. There is infinite subjectivity yet infinite materiality. We see the psychosis that sleeps in the molten heart of matter, where delusion and reality coincide. Here we have straightforward rational answers in the affirmative to rhetorical questions such as “did Moses actually bring the law of God to the Israelites” or “was Christ actually the son of God”. One finds oneself in the Fire of Heraclitus, where opposites are merged and the poet’s heart stirs with the earth. Such a fantasy of completion. Such a vision of a purifying flame.

Enough! What of my desire? Have I become God? Do I now dwell within the eternal Fire of innocence and responsibility, reborn anew? What trickery gets pulled over my eyes when I try to reconcile concrete aspects of my desire, this concrete psychological strife? To Hell with Fire – leave it in care of the poets! Everything stinks of German loftiness where one wishes to fly away. To hell with god and their flame. Our human existence does not suffer in a divine flame but suffers in life. A human lives a human life, full of banal struggle and desire. Whereto my evil desire? Here we are. Quite disfigured from the flames and nearly unrecognizable, though now properly my own and me. What once was a color so vibrant on the palette that it seemed a threat to the painting has been incorporated into the landscape. My truths, my laws, and my desires were once such vibrant transcendences. We still mourn the death of God at the festival that celebrates Life. There was always a lure, a fantasy, a hope that kept us going. Fire is the greatest delusion: the fantasy that one day we will no longer have to suffer. We cannot become it, but merely pass our banal suffering through it again and again before realizing we’ve awoken from yet another fever dream. We go on living the same life, each time different. My fear, my hate, my desire, my sin is the Fire’s kindling, transmuted into my joy. Let the Fire consume itself, for only thus can it return to us.

I wish those at stake more evil, more pain, and more suffering. May you never find peace so that the opposites are one day united.

“Was that life? Well then, once more!”

– Nietzsche

The Body

Who is it who visited me again last night? First the visions – a hollow, the Flesh, the schizophrenia in the heart of matter, Fire. Zarathustra visited me to protect me, to instruct me. When one gets too close to danger, the divine steps in. Too much in us wishes to come out, so it was necessary for God to fashion the human with skin. An element of His divine vision has become wrapped up in the human – an all too human schizophrenia. It helps to ground yourself as much as possible in your identity and physical world to not let psychosis dissolve them, hence the feeling sensation that the skin allows. We do not learn to stay out of it until we acquire reverence, and we shouldn’t have access to anything without knowing its danger and when to seal it up. Thus we acquired skin and reverence.

When it is sealed up, we can train to let it come out and acquaint ourselves with our limits, and harden our skin without reverence. The most terrifying at first was visions of the concrescence of flesh, but one still remains oneself in the flesh. Fire was the most beautiful, and Air always gave us reprieve. Much worse was the element opposite of Fire that we refuse to name at this point. One can then expose oneself to one’s poison over long periods of time, building gradual immunity.

We do not know where God’s Power comes from, so He remains hidden within so many folds – the bark of a tree, the ripples on the surface of water. But the truth is that the folds represent God’s great shame at his Power. God hides even from themselves. Thus, He bestowed the most shameful body part to women; perhaps this is why men find it so difficult to believe women. Man defiles the folds of the body with his hands, defiles the Earth itself. But what God is shameful of most of all is his pride, for he is a vengeful, narcissistic God. Thus, God is unconscious even of their own power of creation. God has an opposite: Water! Such an absurd unity of desire: the fear of death leads one straight to heaven. You only see heaven when you no longer have a use for it, at which point why stay?

We are speaking confidently of God, but what is it we are speaking of? God, the human, and the earth ripple with so many folds. We saw a vision of Fire – is it gone? All we see is concrescence of flesh, man created in God’s image and God created in man’s image. We were seeking truth, but we should have been seeking honesty. One should confess things in secret – that is, into a fold, for the secret is between one and God. Since all I can see right now is flesh, here is as suitable a fold as any for my Great Confession: the suffering of the world is my joy. 

On the Vision of the Fire

Isn’t this the truth of Christianity? Christ’s followers would have him bring God’s judgment to the world in Fire. Let us be jarred from our flesh – it was getting stuffy in there anyways! Nothing we are speaking of is metaphorical or symbolic, for we are speaking of the soil, of the Earth. The great misanthrope, Heraclitus, and his Fire. He would have loved to be alive right now! The myth of Prometheus attains the full extent of its divinity in Christianity. What lives in the human is a vengeful Fire that desires itself: it is the Fire in men that stole Fire from the Earth to spread it across the Earth.

My Ouroboric Vision: Reverberating in the piercing cold, its teeth cut furrows into its own flesh and leave wounds that bleed of dripping delirium. Spasming tissue sews itself around dreams and births creatures that claw into Promethean livers, born in the image of their lord. Inhabiting a rumbling expanse of dust and bones, we encounter and perform surgery on our master: the skin folds back to reveal fire and metal.

Since we are speaking of the Ouroboros, let us address the case of Jung. Reverence and humbleness in the face of God always reveals a grandiose narcissism. One hides from oneself the fact that they would be a God, hence all the Jungian nonsense about “the individual”. God was always man’s greatest evil, the greatest sin we had to be redeemed from. The suffering narcissistic psychopath resides in us alone. Nothing is sacred to me anymore, except that which can extinguish or dissolve God. This is my great reverence: Water.

Let me now speak with God’s judgement. So, your God is Love? Are you able to wrestle from Him your share of the divine spoils. Do you expect to take love by force? Do not trust the love of those who seek visions, for they will burn you as kindling. Jung was a poor philosopher – he did not have the love for it.

Air

The truth of enlightenment in Zen Buddhism is the apeiron, which rings out with an extinguished roaring old flame. Free from suffering, free from Fire. It does not reconcile Fire with the body but wishes to be free of the body altogether. It would lift the burden of our suffering and our trauma and make them light. It was my Abrahamic God who fashioned man from the earth. The Buddhist wishes to forget where they are, but when the mind is light, does the body forget? Us Bodhisattvas returned to the earth to lead others towards enlightenment, yet how we failed to understand the depths of bodily suffering. The Zen master hits us with blows and riddles, but we did not yet know the true meaning of War.

The rocks in the zen garden ring out in a ring of rings, but do we know what sleeps within the stone? In August of 1881, the sky rang out far above a large pyramid shaped rock at Lake Silvaplana. Today my voice reaches you because it rings out across aeons, far above the water.

Martyrdom

Does one descend from the mountain from the grandiose pride of reaching new heights, or from love? Did God create the world to exercise Their grandiose power, taking pride in Their creation, or out of love, rejoicing in the love of it? The world once shone with such wicked and questionable questions. Who here is Oedipus and who is the Sphinx? Who is God and who are we?

One wicked question was posed to me in particular: “was Nietzsche a Christian Martyr?”

We are of course speaking of his madness and his love. Was his end that of Dionysus or of Christ? Or, was his end a biologically and environmentally induced psychosis or dementia leading up to his biological death. What does it matter to you? The answers lie hidden in the folds either way – or, perhaps, the soil? But the eternal nature of God changes and changes for all eternity. We are the breakers of the circle, those who grant and seek forgiveness.

But why was this my problem, my destiny?

The Snake Hanging From the Tree

A bright red snake hangs uncoiled from a lush green tree in cartoonish vibrance. The snake is my friend and suddenly bites my hand, jarring me awake.

I had this dream in 2016, during a period of extreme mental unwellness. I was reading Part 3 of Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences for a class I was kicked out of (for being cuckoo bananas). I was not a reader of Hegel but I was a reader of Nietzsche, and the section on the master-slave dialectic led to a rapid intense rush of inspiration. I stayed up all night writing an essay entitled ‘A Portrait of Nietzsche as a Christian Martyr, or, How One Becomes a Child‘, which I now interpret as a very preliminary conception of this essay. After at least a week of being afraid to fall asleep leading up to this essay, back in 2016, writing this work led to my first proper exhaustion – the tiredness that a human feels after an honest day of labor. I fell asleep for maybe an hour as the sun was lighting up the dawn and had this dream. The snake’s bite on my hand jarred me awake and I felt pain in my hand from the pins and needles of having slept on it. Such toil over my Human All Too Human bodily sensation. My childish snake mocks me from its tree, and for the first time in what seems like a long time I do not sense any danger.

Several months ago, around November of 2024, a woman in a red wool coat walked into a Persian cafe where I was sitting. When I got up to order more tea I noticed she had a book on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Later I went to order more food and ask her about it. She was writing a paper that involved the eagle and the serpent in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. I regrettably did not remember Zarathustra enough to engage in the topic, but I suggested she read Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy. I did not wish to disturb her as she was writing her paper, so I said my goodbye. It was then that I saw that she had such depth in her eyes, such life. I wonder if she knows that the snake has fallen from the eagle and now hangs from a tree.

The sun is shining and I find myself in a smooth space. Is this heaven? Can I stay here? I recall a vision I once had of a smooth ribbon; a saving grace when I nearly killed myself during my first psychotic episode, when I desperately wanted to make it all stop. In this kingdom I now see the ribbon folding and multiplying itself into a flower and I feel flush. Which divinity is this? This is not a place for mortals and it is not safe for me to stay. The wind is stirring but I am no longer concerned with which way it goes. We must seal the wound now and return to being mortal. Every philosophy is a personal confession of the philosopher. I spend so much of my time doing nothing of significance but suffering so much impatience when inspiration strikes. Now I must make haste, in service of my Lord, Zeus!

Oh, to be Hermes and restore the Greek era, this time with love. Those tragedians knew so much about our instincts, about what lurks in the waters, deep within the eyes. 

“Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drips upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of Zeus.”

– Aeschylus

Who is it who would dare to name my mania?

Death

I reside in a hollow tomb. My most terrifying thought used to be “Dionysus”. Dionysus became a word that represented my madness, my sacred water, my shame, my sin. The profound intoxication that I felt in my psychosis. There is no madness here. The most terrifying thought is of the name without a name. The tomb is closed and people stir. It is night. The rain is falling. It is time to go home. I get snacks. None of this meant anything, as much as I really wanted it to. I just keep moving in circles. I wanted to bring something of value to the world, so that I could take credit for it. So that my life would be worth the suffering. 

What love? I chop things up with robotic precision, without regard for what use it will serve or how much harm it can cause. I don’t want to do this anymore. It hurts so much and it can only end in one way – I already see several steps ahead. What could a man know about fires of gods, or even fires of men? I don’t even know my own problems. I keep going around in circles, spinning myself into madness, dreaming of broken circles, of straightened out snakes. I do not want to go back to the psych ward – they will strap me down and inject me this time. I’m of no use to anyone mad and would cause so much suffering to others. This has always been the greatest tether keeping me from losing myself – visions of the harm that it would cause specific people in my life; the knowledge of the harm that it would cause them. Far worse that I drag them into my depths and expose myself in their depths. My heaviest thought is that my greatest suffering turns out to be my greatest empathy. This is why love is the first platonic form that must arrive on earth as a person. Has one ever found something to better drag them out of their circles than love? If one concerns themselves with questions such as, “did Christ actually come to earth as God to die for our sins,” then only the baptismal water of love serves as proof. Regarding martyrdom, would us Christians really be the measure of others, based on if they loved enough? Would we do so to ourselves?

I’ve learned many things from Nietzsche. The most significant being the extent of pain that the body can experience. At times I did not know if I was laughing or crying, and I even confused my pain for joy.

There is much sorrow in the world, but, this morning, I cannot tell if I am laughing or crying. I feel the sky above me and imagine Gabriel weaving broad circles.

Alexander Maximilian Liwoch