Chapter 12 But anyway ...
Part B: Attempts at mating
‘Hi Steve,’ says Joseph as he arrives. IWednesday. Two sessions today and every day til Friday, our targeted day for finishing.
He's not looking hostile this morning, but nor does he seem particularly enlivened.
‘It feels as though there's nothing really to talk about,’ he says once he's settled in his chair.
‘You can't think of anything that you want to talk about,’ I say.
‘There's just nothing there.’
I stay silent.
‘God Steve, was I a real pain yesterday?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Was I really boring? I got carried away, I'm sorry, I just couldn't stop yabbering.’
‘You're feeling that yesterday you did something you shouldn't have done.’
‘I get carried away sometimes,’ he says. ‘I just repeat myself, I end up telling you the same stuff over and over again. It must be really boring for you.’
‘When you were talking yesterday,’ I say, ‘you seemed to be enjoying it, you seemed to be having a good time. But now you're worried. It's almost as though you're ashamed of something.’
‘When I thought about it afterwards I thought I must have been boring you.’
‘No, I wasn't bored. But let's stay with this feeling of being worried that you'd done something wrong.’
‘Not really wrong,’ says Joseph, and I can feel something slipping away. ‘It's not like I think I committed a big sin or something. Anyway, it's not all that important.’
‘I was wondering,’ I say quickly, before he can move too far away from what I'm sure is important, ‘if this is another instance of you distancing yourself from your feelings.’
‘How? What do you mean?’
‘Well yesterday you had a good time talking to me. You were enjoying yourself. But it seems as though there's been a reaction to that. It's like you suddenly felt afterwards that you'd lost control and that felt very uncomfortable.’
‘Mmm, maybe,’ he says. He's not rejecting this but he's not embracing it either.
‘It's like your floating dream perhaps,’ I say. ‘That feeling of being detached from the experience, being above it.’ No, this isn't quite right: the sense of being ashamed isn't present in the dream. I'm stretching things here, working too hard to make a connection that isn't quite there. But I find myself continuing, perhaps in compensation for this failed attempt. ‘You do find strong feeling very distasteful. There's something very scary about it for you, especially the way it seems that you're taken over by it ... by crying a few years ago... by yabbering on yesterday?’
‘I thought you must have been bored.’
‘You think others will think badly of you when you let yourself go.’
‘I guess,’ he says, then is quiet.
I can't leave this alone. I feel we've made contact here with something present and important, and I don't want it to slip away. I go looking for ballast.
‘Do you remember telling me a long time ago about a dream you had that was set outside a doctor's surgery?’
‘No,’ he says.
‘In this dream, your mother was dancing with bare breasts, she was having the most wonderful time dancing freely and happily.’
‘Oh God, I remember! Oh God, how embarrassing!’ he says, smiling and blushing at the same time.
‘You felt embarrassed then, as well,’ I say. ‘I have the feeling that you're embarrassed in the same way about yabbering on yesterday.’
But Joseph is in no state to come back to the present. He's still squirming at the thought of the dream of his mother dancing half-naked in public. I want Joseph to think about this, not just to re-experience it. I want him to make some connection between the Joseph-in-the-dream and the Joseph-present-this-morning, who are both in the grip of a confusing mix of excitement and shame. I'm wanting to trace some connection with the other exciting and shameful incident, the one in the school library. I want to help something to shift through the insight that these connections offer us. Something is being revealed but he can't see it. He can feel it now but he can't see it. He's too caught up in the feelings themselves. He's sitting there, confused, embarrassed and excited.
A thin internal voice might be tentatively suggesting that perhaps I could say something like, ‘You seem to be feeling confused, embarrassed and pleased all at once!’ But, in my heady state, the prey now in view, I dismiss my pre-session resolve to travel more lightly and instead inexorably continue to gather my evidence and marshal my arguments. I'm aware that I'm feeling quite good here, in control, calling the shots. I'm speaking with a sense of authority. I'm in charge. This is what I've been wanting all along, isn't it? To feel less dizzied by a too-complex world?
‘You’ve become estranged from your own strongest, deepest feelings,’ I say. ‘Our work is all about getting back in touch with feeling.’
“I’m going through life not really in touch with how I'm feeling,’ he says intelligently and dutifully, his own confusion now put behind him.
‘It's almost like that man you described a while ago, guarding the computer who went off to have sex with his secretary and then found it wasn't satisfying. His feelings weren't involved.’ By now I'm beginning to be uncomfortably aware that my comments are coming from an over-active brain trying to rein in all possible connections.
‘Well that wasn't sex, between you and me,’ he says.
For the tiniest fraction of a second I feel a rush of panic. I cannot think about what he is saying, what he might mean. I feel like I'm being propositioned, teased, played with ... but this is utterly irrational, there's nothing about his words or his manner which convey any of this. Yet this feeling (so fleeting that even to articulate it is to distort it) is real and familiar. I feel something like this whenever anyone says something unexpectedly intimate to me, and there have been times in my life when I've reacted with inexplicable hostility. I reach desperately for, and find, my ordering mind.
‘Well,’ I say regaining my ground, ‘it was about exposing yourself and then feeling that you'd bored me, or that it hadn't been satisfying.’
‘Well, what do I do about it?’ he says in a way that is both acquiescent and disengaged. ‘Is there a six-step-programme so I can get in touch with this part of myself?’
‘There's a side of you that feels things intensely and which won't be ignored. We know that now. If you ignore it, it will come into your life in distressing ways, it will cause things to happen which are right out of your control, in ways that feel to you to be unacceptable. It's almost like a revenge for being ignored. This is why the distancing that you do and which we've talked about matters. It gets you into trouble, and it will continue to get you into trouble until, somehow, you can make a relationship with this side of yourself.’
What I'm saying, I'm sure, is true, and yet its timing isn't right. He had been in touch with his feelings – or been touched by them – at several significant moments in the session. He's full of feeling at the moment, for goodness sake, but I'm too busy making a point to notice it.
‘Talking about mooning...’ Joseph suddenly says.
Talking about mooning? We haven't been talking about mooning, have we? Unless he's making a jump from one kind of exposing yourself to another? Is that what he's been thinking as we've been talking? What's going on here?
‘Talking about mooning,’ says Joseph, ‘my friends and I had the most radical fun the other night after the school formal, running around the streets. You should have seen us Steve. There we were, out in the dark near this big road and these cars were whizzing past us and all of a sudden one of my friends drops his trousers and starts mooning at the cars ...’
I can't believe this! He's telling me the whole story in every detail again, as if he hadn't told it to me before! And he's telling it with exactly the same energy and unbridled ebullience as he had the first time and as he did when he told me the dream about his mother dancing and as he did yesterday when telling me about the tormenting of his younger brother.
As soon as he finishes this anecdote he rushes breathlessly into another, this one about a film he's recently seen. Again he recounts every scene in boring detail ... this time I am bored, though also disoriented, unable to make contact with my therapist-self.
At last he is finished and our time is up. I've been feeling progressively deflated listening to him, and haven't had the energy to try to engage him again, to interrupt his monologue.
‘Sometimes,’ I say as he gets up to go, ‘you leave here feeling confused and frustrated. Today?’
‘I'm feeling full of life, full of energy!’ He's smiling broadly as he leaves.
He's feeling full of energy and I'm feeling deflated. I find myself scribbling notes and thinking frenzied and sometimes despairing thoughts as I wait impatiently for the time when I'm due to ring Giles.
I just can't get it right! It doesn't seem to matter how much I prepare myself, how much I think about what has gone before, how much I talk to Giles and am reminded of the importance of staying with what is actually present in the room, I keep clambering back up into my head. My overactive thinking process keep taking me (and us) somewhere logical, tidy, objectively right but utterly unproductive. At crucial moments it takes us away from what is actually being felt.
What is wrong with me? It's as though I'm either too thick to really understand what the therapeutic literature and supervision is telling me, or I'm so out of touch with my own feelings (or so afraid of them) that I unconsciously recoil from anything vaguely emotional. It's as though I'm afraid that what is emotional will lead us in the direction of dissolution, chaos, madness and anarchy.
I keep wondering about the relationship between thinking and feeling. At moments like this, it's as though they're two utterly separate things, the one (thinking) being the refuge from the fearful realities of the other (feeling). Both Joseph and I retreat there when the going gets tough. There's a temptation for me to give it up, to stop endlessly reflecting on these sessions, to simply see what presents itself this afternoon when Joseph returns and let what happens happen.
But there's defensive thinking (the flight from thought, or the flight to thought which acts as a fortress) and there's connected thinking (the impulse to articulate more clearly what is being felt as a confusion). It's this latter that I'm trying to do right now.
I feel confused and depressed. Deflated.
I can think about this in a number of different ways.
One is to think of it as a necessary deflation. According to this way of thinking, this is something that Joseph is doing to me. I need to feel deflated because otherwise my inflation will continue to prevent him from making the necessary move towards his own feeling life. My interpretations are too often taking him out of his feelings and into his dutiful head. The telos of our relationship is ensuring that I reposition myself, that my court room manner is thoroughly deflated and is replaced by something more affectively permissive. When I'm deflated he can gush, and there's no doubt that his gushiness has a connection to his feeling life that his request for a six-step-programme does not.
The other way of thinking about this is to own that it's my stuff. This isn't something that Joseph is doing to me, it's something that I struggle with in all aspects of my life. It's the Hannibal challenge, the challenge to let go of the safety inherent in being in charge of a vast unfeeling organisation of thought (it exists both inside and outside the prison walls) and to focus my attention on the dust-coated piano sitting over there in a dark corner. My need to know what's going on, to be in charge of the direction we're taking, to be manipulating the resources to ensure the most favourable outcome, is stifling the therapeutic moment.
I am repeatedly surprised by the confluence of these two strands of thought. It is both what he is doing to me and what I am experiencing as my own issue. I live my life as if I were a separate self, as if the wells of motivation, inspiration, will-power, capacity and emotion were to be found within, but keep being brought face-to-face with the unsettling but unavoidable fact that I'm not alone, that I'm connected to others. What Joseph is doing to me and I am going through in my apparently private life are not two different things. The problematic relationship with intense feeling which is a characteristic in both our lives, and which keeps getting manifested in our therapeutic relationship, seems to be coming from the same pool.
Is this, as I've implied earlier, an example of synchronicity? Has this coming together of two people with remarkably similar issues been orchestrated by some hidden hand that has plucked these two from the millions of people who might be thrown together, simply because these two (and especially these two) have something to offer each other?
‘There's another possibility Steve,’ says Giles after I've blurted all this out at the beginning of our supervision session. There's a book I want you to read sometime, called Sources of the Self by a Canadian academic, Charles Taylor. Have you see it?’
‘No, though it rings a bell. Didn't you mention it during the philosophy workshop last year?’
‘Quite possibly. You'll enjoy this book. He's talking about the postmodern experience of self and what you've been saying today brings to mind what he's arguing.’
‘Tell me Giles! I want to get some kind of bearings here, before Joseph comes this afternoon. I'm feeling all at sea again.’
‘Let's start then with Taylor, because he's got things to say about being at sea with no bearings. But let's not get too far away from Joseph in all of this. He's made you lose your bearings Steve. That's what his yabbering is all about. But we'll come back to this.’
‘OK,’ I say, feeling reassured and calmed (as I so often am) by Giles's willingness to engage with ideas without losing sight of what's happening in the room. ‘Tell me about what Taylor says.’
‘Well, you've talked today, Steve, about feeling that your thinking is taking you away from what is actually happening in the room, from your actual experience of things, and Taylor would say, I think, that this is characteristic of modern ways of thinking. Where once humans had a more animist sensibility, a notion that meaning was in the world, in things, nowadays we experience our thinking as existing outside of the material world; our thinking, then, distances us from this world. This move (which began with Descartes but which is still deeply embedded in the way we experience things) disenchants the world for us, strips it of its ontological meaning, and makes unavailable to us the sense that we are a part of some kind of matrix of realities which hold us.’
‘Is he saying that if I'd lived in a different time, I'd have felt less separate from Joseph, I'd have experienced my thoughts about him as being a natural part of this matrix of realities which hold us.’
‘I think that's right Steve,’ says Giles. ‘You would have felt more that the two of you were a part of an order of things. Since Nietzsche, though not because of him, there has been a sense of the old certainties disappearing. Nietzsche's own phrase was that the horizons were being 'sponged' away. There's been a shift in what it feels like to be a human. The time of eternal orders which had ontic significance ... God, state, societal hierarchies, nature... with which one was once in a kind of clear relationship has been replaced by a sense of finding or even inventing meaning.’
‘Where once we took it for granted that we were already in an articulated relationship with something fixed, we now feel we have to create the meaning ourselves.’
‘That's it,’ says Giles. ‘That's what you're experiencing, in this work with Joseph and in your thesis. You're a part of a modern Western consciousness, different from earlier ways of seeing things. You are driven by an unconscious belief that you must find or create a sense of coherence because, like all of us who live in this post-modern society, the old verities have been 'sponged' away.’
'So Giles isn't this is connected with my anxiety in this last session? Deep down, like most of us living in these times, I have this fear that there's nothing there, that lurking behind my desperate attempts to make sense of things that there is no sense at all.’
‘We are forever shadowed by a sense of immanent catastrophe, as Bion said. We're all aware, at the edges of our consciousness, of the unthinkable anxiety associated with the idea that the mother ... the mother who is sometimes our thoughts, sometimes our creative life, or our relationships, our community, our addictions, our work, our God, the piece of music we're listening to, the film we're watching or the novel we can't put down ... for all of these things we can, in this context, use the shorthand 'mother', the one that holds us in her secure embrace ... we're all aware that the mother might die or lose interest or go away and never come back. This was Winnicott's way of thinking. And Steve this is what I think was happening with Joseph, this is why he suddenly started yabbering and why he needed to successfully destroy your capacity to be the therapist.’
‘I don't see the connection,’ I say.
‘You were onto something in that session Steve. You knew it and he knew it. It was a something that had the potential to take him right back down there into all that disgusting, painful disowned stuff. He also knew that you weren't going to let it go, that you were marshalling your forces as it were, bringing in all the supporting evidence. He was squirming, Steve, feeling that you were close to revealing his terrible secret, exposing his rotten and unnatural self, and this was utterly intolerable for him. He couldn't stand it. He had to stop you. So he started yabbering and it worked,’
‘Yes, that sounds exactly right,’ I say. ‘At the time I felt confused...’
‘This is what I mean, Steve, about your own feelings being a clue to what's going on. You felt confused, put off the scent, discouraged, out of touch with your therapist-self ...’
‘... and that's because Joseph was feeling like he was on the stage again, in front of a huge audience..'
‘... with a disgusting and unnatural side of him about to be exposed.’
‘So I was feeling that something was slipping away ...’
‘... because something was slipping away.’
‘.. and I was trying to scramble with my mind to keep hold of it…’
‘... and you weren't noticing Joseph sitting there and squirming ...’
‘So he yabbers or he retreats to a kind of thinking that distances him from painful feelings. And I get thinky in a session where I feel I'm losing control of things, that meanings are evaporating.’
‘Taylor would say, Steve, that the distancing gives us a sense of control.’
‘We're retreating to safer, more familiar territory. Our minds. I sit there thinking that my mind, my clever thoughts, my ability to marshal the evidence, is going to change something.’
‘Yes,’ says Giles. ‘The distancing goes together with the notion that the objects of the world are subject to the influence of our rational thought, and that we ourselves are subject to the influence of our own rational thought ... that is, that self-mastery is a possibility. The Lockean position.’
‘But it keeps breaking down,' I say. 'Ps-D. (1) The thoughts or interpretations or stories, the sense that I've at last got a handle on what's going on … it keeps breaking down.’
‘This I think is where Taylor's argument gets particularly interesting and pertinent Steve. Because the old verities have been sponged away, because we've lost this animist sense that there is meaning in the world, we no longer have the sense of being made or held or found or seen by something 'other' (God, group, nature, whatever). We're on our own. To find meaning in the modern world, we must go within.’
‘We're continually in the process of inventing ourselves.’
‘The post-modern project is not so much to find meaning as to create it.’
‘So Giles, you're saying ... or you're telling me that Taylor is saying... that there's something about our times which contributes to my inability to shake myself free of the overly intellectual. It's not just me. It's not just my own personal neurosis or weakness. It's the air I breathe, the language I've been taught, the perspectives I've been led to look through.’
‘We're all caught up in these perspectives. Joseph is right in a way. Distancing himself from feeling does give him a greater sense of control. Thinking in this Cartesian way does do something about postmodern dizziness. It does protect us from painful realities.’
‘And it insulates us from their energy too. Hannibal locked in his cell, unable to play the piano.’
‘It seems to me that the issue of playing the piano is connected to the issue of creating meaning. What was the message in your Winnicottian dream? That which is created doesn't have to be destroyed but can be played with? This is the same thing, isn't it? We're not trying to strip back layers to find meaning, or not only that. We're inventing it. We're creating it and then playing with it! I like that, I like your dream!’
‘I still find it difficult to accept that there's no meaning.’
‘I wonder, though, if it makes any practical difference, if we believe it exists or not. We'll never find it. Our equipment isn't up to it I'm afraid. Either there is no underlying meaning, or the meaning is unknowable. We're not searching for some 'thing-in-itself" which lies beneath or behind appearances. This project is not about a search for something that exists. Such a project is bound to fail. The project is about giving a shape to experience that makes a difference to how we feel about our lives. This is what you're attempting to do here with Joseph, to create together some sense of coherence that will reduce the fear, the dissociation, the terrible anxiety he feels.’
‘This links in so strongly with what I seem to be fumbling towards in my thesis, which is the suggestion that the creation of a story through the therapist-patient relationship is in itself therapeutic and is what prevents us being overwhelmed by Winnicott's "unbearable anxiety", The creation of a story in the relationship is an attempt to reconnect with the missing mother.'
‘That's what you're saying in the thesis and we keep coming back to in the supervision.’
‘It's just that I have to keep reminding myself that the story isn't just what's said. It's what's felt.’
‘And how those two go together, Steve. How the words can be found which not only describe the feelings but shift them.’
‘Create something new,’ I say. ‘I worry that in sessions like this one I'm telling Joseph a disembodied story.’
‘I wouldn't say that Steve. You're telling him a story which is relevant but not always connected with what's actually being felt at the time.’
‘It would have been good if I could have found a way of commenting on the yabbering. I get a bit lost in my head ... Giles, I had another dream last night which I've just remembered! I think it may be connected.’
‘Tell me your dream Steve.’
‘I dreamt I was teacher telling a class of 11-year-olds how to write an essay. What I was saying was very sound, potentially very valuable given the number of essays they'll have to write in their secondary school lives. It was good advice, based not just on my understanding of kids but also on what I know about writing. I liked the sound of what I was saying. But the kids weren't listening. They weren't interested. What I was saying didn't touch their felt lives in any significant way.’
‘This is how you're feeling this morning in relation to Joseph.’
‘That what I'm saying has little connection to his felt experience.’
‘And what I'm saying is that it does have a very direct connection Steve, too direct in some ways, that he's frightened by how much you seem to know, by what you see.’
‘And you're saying that it would be easier for him to take these things in if I was more in touch with how difficult he's finding this, how anxious it makes him, how it gets him yabbering.’
‘Yes, you mustn't underestimate the importance of your insight, nor let go your ability to find words for it. Joseph needs these things too. I want to read you something from Taylor's book. Is that OK?’
‘Of course.’
‘Taylor says this,’ says Giles:
We are inducted into language by being brought to see things as our tutors do. And it is through these relationships and these conversations that we come to have an identity, which is a sense of who we are and what we stand for ... which is just another way of saying that we come to have a notion of the good which orients us. There is an essential link between identity and a kind of orientation. It is through our pursuit of the good that we can find our way. (2)
‘So pathology might be about having lost one's way,’ I say, ‘of having distorted or conflicted moral maps. This makes sense to me: Joseph shutting off feling in order to 'get on' with things and, as a result, losing his way, losing some vital connection with the good. He is a traveller carrying a defective map. Part of my job has to be communicating the limitations of his map and helping him construct a better one.’
‘As long as it's a joint project, shaped by his experience and his concerns, Steve, and not an imposition coming out of your own.’
‘Like in the dream. That was an imposition.’
‘It's in danger of becoming your project rather than a joint one every time you find yourself saying something and Joseph is either not interested, not "getting it", or is following diligently with his head but not with his heart.’
‘This points to another sense in which stories – in this case interpretations – can be disembodied,’ I say. ‘We've already talked about the sense in which a disembodied story is one that exists outside of a relationship. But a story can also be disembodied... cut off from the body ... if there's no connection between it and the hearer's body, which in this case refers to the emotions the hearer is experiencing at that moment. If Joseph is feeling panicky, impelled to a fit of the yabbers, there's no point in me telling him a story (giving him an interpretation) which explains in a rational way the reason for the yabbers. He won't be able to hear it. He'll most likely be like the kids in my dreams, simply not interested. But if I tell him a story which has at its core the mixture of confusion and fear and shame that he's currently feeling .... even, at its simplest, if I say something like, 'You're feeling that you need to talk a lot at the moment' ... then the story can be heard, it has a connection with the hearer's body (his pulse, his breathing, his racing mind, his nervous laugh), and it can shift something, move something along.’
‘And this is the essential thing, is it not,’ says Giles, ‘to help to move something along rather than to reveal some essential reality? We're not there to strip away layers in order to reveal a true self or an authentic core. These parts of ourselves - if they in fact exist - will always remain hidden from view, will always remain a secret. In the end the self remains unknown and unknowable. You can't uncover anything to an intrinsic meaning.’
‘Giles, this conversation has gone well over the ten to fifteen minutes we agreed to. There's more I want to talk about though. Can I keep going?’
‘Keep going, Steve. We can have another ten minutes or so.’
‘It's to do with a particular moment in that last session.’
‘I think I may be able to guess the one you mean!’
‘I'm sure you can! Where he said to me, “Well, that wasn't sex, between you and me.”’
‘And you experienced a moment of panic.’
‘I'm not sure exactly how to describe what I experienced but it was something like that. I felt shocked, for an instant, confronted, unbalanced What I said in response seemed like a kind of gut response to restore an even keel. I'm imagining that it was utterly unhelpful to him, that it missed some essential point which I might have seen had I been less panicked.’
‘I couldn't disagree more Steve! Yes, your response did come from the gut, but it was connected and it came intuitively out of your experience of that moment! "When you expose yourself to me," you were effectively saying, "you feel bad afterwards". This was absolutely the right thing to say! You were letting him know that you'd accurately heard what he said, that there was a real relationship between the two of you where disappointments and satisfactions can take place, and that what happened in the library that day was not an isolated incident but a part of a bigger psychological picture. This is what I am talking about! That response, unlike some of your others, helped move things along. You responded out of your subjective and passionate and painful experience. You allowed his comment to have its effect on you.’
‘So I did! It seemed at the time that I was just keeping the panic at bay.’
‘If you'd then regained your composure, perhaps you might have explored this a bit more. But there was so much tension in the air! To relieve it he had to tell you all about the mooning again.’
‘And to ask me if there was a six step programme.’
‘He had to both get into his disengaged head and yabber at the same time.’
‘We both panicked. I ended up scrambling up onto a debater's podium.’
‘The first step must always be to acknowledge what is being done to you, and your access to that is how you are being made to feel. You can't leapfrog what Joseph is doing to you. Trying to scramble into activity to regain agency does not work. Preaching to him isn't going to help at all.’
‘I'm tired at the moment, and that's one of the reasons it's difficult for me to know what he is doing to me.’
‘He's getting under your skin Steve. This encounter is agitating and deflating you, it's prompting frenzied thinking, some of which feels related and fruitful.’
‘And he's talking about things more. Even in the odd session we've just had he's talked about his concern that he's bored me. He doesn't want to bore me.’
‘He wants to connect with you Steve. It's the relational energy. It's just that he's not very good at it yet. He needs your help.’
Joseph has just settling into his chair for the afternoon session. Only two more days to go after this one, if we're to stick to the timetable that Joseph is himself so keen on. I'd like to finish too, I'm so very tired.
‘I've just had lunch with Annie,’ he says. ‘She told me that mum was having a lunch today for some her friends, a really big lunch, and none of us boys were invited. But anyway…’
‘I guess you're feeling a bit left out,’ I say quickly, before he can take us somewhere else.
Joseph is silent for a moment.
‘Steve, have you noticed how often I say, “But anyway” ...’
‘I noticed it that time,’ I say. ‘You seemed to be wanting to take us off somewhere else, away from thoughts of your mother's party.’
‘I don't say it a lot outside of here, it's more just when I'm here that I've noticed it. I'm always saying it. "Oh well. But anyway..."‘
‘I wonder what it's about?’
‘I don't know.’
‘Let's think about it for a while,’ I say. ‘I wonder if it's a way of getting things moving away from an uncomfortable area?’
‘Maybe it is.’
‘I wonder if when things are feeling uncomfortable, you are faced with two options. One is to stay with the feeling of being uncomfortable, and the other is to lead away from it by saying "But anyway".’
‘I think that's it. It's taking me away from my feelings.’
‘In this case it's taking you away from the disappointment you feel about the lunch.’
‘You know, it used to be so good in our family,’ he says. ‘It used to be so good before mum and dad got sick of each other. Especially before either of my brother's were born, when it was just me and we were living in this fabulous house which Dad was extending. I remember I used to walk around after him with my little hammer and nails. There's a photo I've got of me as a toddler sitting on Mum's lap, and Dad's behind us with his hand on mum's shoulder’ He smiles his broad sunny smile, though much of this is said wistfully. ‘It was great then, but then Mum and Dad started having problems and started to get sick of each other, and my brothers were born ... I remember how mum used to leave us every now and then to go travelling. She used to go off to workshops or courses or something. Anyway she always used to tell us boys that she'd take us next time, but she never did. But anyway ... oh, see, there I go again!.. It's always seemed to me that mum makes arrangements to suit herself. We find out about it afterwards, she doesn't talk to us about it, doesn't plan things with us, doesn't include us in her plans.’
‘It's pretty disappointing for you.’
‘It is, but what can you do?’
‘You feel helpless about it. Nothing will change things.’
‘I don't think anything will ever change Mum. She's a very strong character, she's got a strong will you know. When we were all together, it was like she was the boss and we were all on our toes a bit. I remember how we used to relax when she went away, even Dad. There was this one time when Mum was away ... She always used to make it a rule that there was no eating in the main room, she was obsessed with the carpet, about getting marks on it, so that was the rule, no eating in the main room. Well once when she was away, we got these pizzas, Dad was in this as well, it was like the kid in him was suddenly released, and we sat on the carpet and ate these messy pizzas, and then we had chocolate and we threw chocolate at each other. It was such fun, such a release! I don't know what happened to the carpet. I didn't care. No-one seemed to be bothered about it! I remember it so well.’
‘A good time,’ I say.
‘Yes. There were good times with Mum too, I remember some of those. But I get really pissed off at her broken promises and her selfishness. She said that she was our mother Number 1, and her friends are Number 2. But she won't drive me to these sessions twice a day because she's too busy and she hasn't invited us to the lunch. It's like we've been dropped off the list. She lies about things and sometimes I catch her out, but she always denies it. I love her, and I guess that makes it all the more difficult to be so angry with her. My brothers are angry too.’
‘You feel let down by her.’
‘Just angry, really angry.’
‘You're feeling it now as you speak,’ I say.
‘Yes, I guess I am.’
‘And you told me that you thought anger was somehow involved in the incident in the library.’ This is risky. I'm aware, this time, that I might be taking him away from his present feeling, but I also want to give him a chance to explore the connection, to understand something more about the library incident, if that's what he now wants to do.
‘Yes, I think it was connected, but don't ask me how.’
He wants me to lead him here, but I also don't know how it's connected. So I sit silently.
‘What do I do with this anger, now that I'm aware of it?’ he asks.
‘Do you have any thoughts about what you might do with it?’
‘I feel like gardening.’
‘You feel like gardening.’
‘Yes, I want to garden. Gardening is how I handle my rage.’
‘I wonder if you also use your anger at school, that you channel it into doing really well at school?’
‘Yes. I do that too I think. But that's the cold anger, the more controlled one.’
‘Yes.’
‘When I'm feeling hot anger I can't concentrate properly. Like I can't do maths which needs me to be logical. Maybe painting, maybe I can paint when I'm angry.’
‘Something more with your body.’
‘Yes.’
‘Anger seems to give you strength,’ I say, remembering the story about Joseph hacking away at the garden. ‘Maybe that's important to remember. Without anger, you're not as strong.'
Joseph looks up at me, puzzled.
‘I'm thinking about what you said about Zeroing the unacceptable part of yourself and how you've connected this unacceptable part with anger. Maybe if you Zero it you'll be robbing yourself an important energy.’
‘Maybe,’ says Joseph, glancing at the clock. It's time to finish and there's something he wants to say. ‘Well, how am I going, do you think?’
‘How are you going? What do you mean?’
‘Are we getting anywhere?’ he says. ‘Will we be able to finish on Friday?’
‘'d be very interested to know what you think about how we're going?’
‘I don't know. It's hard to tell.’
‘You're the one who's going to notice something,’ I say.
‘Yes, but what do you think?’
‘I think we've done a lot in an intense and indirect way. You're speaking more easily from your feelings now than you have been at earlier times, and identifying this "But anyway …." impulse seems relevant. I just don't know though whether by Friday we'll have done enough. I have a sense that we've still got some tough territory to travel through. I have a gut feeling that this is connected with sex. I'm wondering what you think?’
‘There's nothing,’ he says. ‘Nothing I can say. He's looking a litle awkward. It's different from the cold hostility from which similar words have come in the past.
‘Well, I guess we'll see,’ I say.
I can see now, as he leaves, that these blanknesses aren't simply defences. He needs me to help him create a meaning. Without me to help him articulate something, there's just a blankness with panicky edges.
It seems that there is a paradox. Life is to be found in the intersections between worlds, coming (as it were) from the outside and infusing us with energy ... and it also comes from within, from our impulses and instincts, from the relational and creative urges, out of the generative mix of goods and bads, through our in-built need to play, all experienced as inner urgings to move to the edges of our known world, to the frontiers of the unknown, and to engage.
The paradox – the tension created by the co-existence of apparent opposites – is necessary. Too inward a focus leads to the solipsism and sense of isolation and powerlessness which was the starting point of this thesis. Too outward a focus leads to an unconscious activism which is motivated by an underlying fear that there is no internal meaning, no core to the self, nothing within except a painful emptiness. We are compelled, by virtue of our need to be psychologically healthy, to connect ourselves with the world, but we are also compelled (if we want to remain healthy) to maintain our connection to our unique internal fantasy, our individual way of experiencing and seeing the world.
Our fast-paced world doesn't have a lot of time for introspection. We need, it says, to get on with things. The world passes us by, we are told, if we gaze at our navels or disappear up our rectums. As the Victorian Mrs Edmund Craster put it:
The centipede was happy quite
Until the toad in fun,
Said, "Pray, which leg goes after which?"
And worked her mind to such a pitch
She lay distracted in the ditch
Considering how to run. (3)
And yet so much happens in ditches! This is where we feel our most painful feelings, where we allow ourselves the time to recognize that we feel controlled, smothered, confused, betrayed, disenchanted, lost, bitter, weighed down, unconnected, lonely, angry; and where we ask ourselves how we might find some relief. This is where we feel our pothos, our yearning for the good and the beautiful; and where we ask ourselves how we might move closer to what we lack.
If we clamber out of our ditches prematurely - if we ignore our illnesses and nightmares and bodily agitations and frenzied thinkings - then we turn away from that which seems to give to our particular life its intrinsic sense of individuality and meaning. Hamlet is Hamlet not despite the labythinthian complexities in his character but because of them. The same can be said about Joseph and all who spend periods of time stranded and distracted in ditches: Dante expelled from the city and writing the Inferno; Coleridge, addicted to opium, unhappily married and spurned by his beloved Asra and writing Dejection; the adult Dickens re-experiencing daily his childhood humiliations and sitting at his writing desk surrounded by the almost-palpable presences of his fictional creations (4); the Australian writer Robert Dessaix living in parallel worlds, the internal so obviously animating and giving direction to the external (5) ... to name just a few of the more striking examples. From the foul ditches and swamps of the psyche, where the mind in dreams and fantasy spurts and oozes its endless supply of animating images (6), come creations which animate both the creator and the world into which the creations are tipped. As Nietzsche, so obviously a dweller in lonely, painful and intensely beautiful ditches and swamps (and so clearly a key figure in the tradition upon which this thesis rests) has put it:
Those great poets, for example, men like Byron, Musset, Poe, Leopardi, Kleist, Gogol – I do not dare mention far greater names, but I mean them [Nietzsche meant, of course, himself!] – are and must be men of the moment, sensual, absurd, fivefold, irresponsible, and sudden in mistrust and trust; with souls in which they must usually conceal some fracture; often taking revenge with their works for some inner contamination, often seeking with their high flights to escape into forgetfulness from an all-too-faithful memory; idealists from the vicinity of swamps... (7)
It is Nietzsche himself who provides us with the most vivid picture of the frenzied and alive world of the ditch, for it was in the ditch or swamp, alone and in pain for most of his active adult life, that he developed his brilliant and energetic insights about what it was to be human.
Nietzsche lived his life in a state of frenzy, knowing in his bones (it seems to me) that if for a moment he stopped driving himself, if for a moment he eased off in his compulsion to locate and then articulate his psychological reality, his story, then physical and mental breakdown would be the consequence.
Toward a psychology of the artist. If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic of doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy. Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine; else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned, have the strength to accomplish this: above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy. Also the frenzy that follows all great cravings, all strong affects; the frenzy of feasts, contests, feats of daring, victory, all extreme movement; the frenzy of cruelty; the frenzy in destruction; the frenzy under certain meteorological influences, as for example the frenzy of spring; or under the influence of narcotics; and finally the frenzy of will, the frenzy of an overcharged and swollen will. What is essential in such frenzy is the feeling of increased strength and fullness. (8)
‘For believe me,’ he wrote in another book,
the secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to love dangerously! Build your cities under Vesuvius! Send your ships into uncharted seas! Live at war with your peers and yourselves! Be robbers and conquerors, as long as you cannot be rulers and owners, you lovers of knowledge! Soon the age will be past when you could be satisfied to live like shy deer, hidden in the woods! ... (9)
Nietzsche's Dionysian frenzy had a number of faces, one of which was a kind of ecstatic and destructive rage. The object of his fury was any idea or perspective or ideology that kept the human race docile, passive, asleep, servile. Scholars were a favourite target, with their penchant for taking life and squeezing it so tight into conceptual boxes that it suffocated and died. They were like the Egyptian embalmers, coming into their own only when the subject was dead.
All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive. When these honourable idolators of concepts worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship. (10)
Of the scholars themselves he said,
But they sit cool in the cool shade: in everything they want to be mere spectators, and they beware of sitting where the sun burns on the steps. Like those who stand in the street and gape at the people who pass by, they too wait and gape at thoughts that others have thought. (11)
Convictions were prisons he said, (12) and his task was to stir people up so that that they became aware of the suffocating confinement of their cramped quarters, to remind them, even those who (like the toad) thought they were men-of-action, that they were hopelessly confined by the ideologies that blinkered them. "To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task." (13)
He was especially impatient with a psychological eye that thought it could see clearly into the foundations of human motivation. Consciousness was eternally deceitful, he said, continually making us think we know what we are doing when in fact we have no idea.
What indeed does man know of himself! Can he even once perceive himself completely, laid out as if in an illuminated glass case? Does not nature keep much the most from him, even about his body, to spellbind and confine him in a proud, deceptive consciousness, far from the coils of the intestines, the quick current of the blood stream, and the involved tremors of the fibres? She threw away the key; and woe to the calamitous curiosity which might peer just once through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and look down, and sense that man rests upon the merciless, the greedy, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance - hanging in dreams, as it were, upon the back of a tiger. ... (14)
And again, in a passage that (like many others) betrays Nietzsche's fear that his frenzy was connected to his failing physical and psychological health:
How can a human being know himself? He is a dark and shrouded thing; and if a hare has seven skins, a human being could strip off seven times seventy and would still be unable to say, "now this is really you, this is no longer a rind." Moreover, it is a tortuous, dangerous undertaking to dig into oneself like this and to descend forcibly on the nearest way into the shaft of one's nature. How easily one can damage oneself in the process so that no physician can offer a cure. (15)
Look beyond your thoughts, said Nietzsche, if you wish to know something about what it is that motivates you, that impels you forward.
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, thère stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage - whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body ...
Your self laughs at your ego and at its bold leaps. "What are these leaps and flights of thought to me?" it says to itself. 'A detour to my end. I am the leading strings of the ego and the prompter of its concepts.' (16)
So what is the nature of this consciousness we have? And what is its connection to the body, the tiger, the self? It's like a fantasy, he said, like a commentary infused with the images of fantasy on the actual text which is being written in some unknown place beyond our capacity to perceive.
… all of our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text (17)
In none of this, despite his occasional warnings about introspection doing us psychological damage, does he ever suggest that we should forget our craving to understand and articulate the truth. Our love of the truth, he implies, is a part of our joy of being alive, a lust for living and knowing which are inseparable from each other.
All joy wants the eternity of all things, wants honey, wants lees, wants drunken midnight, wants tombs, wants tomb-tears' comfort, wants gilded evening glow.
What does joy not want? It is thirstier, more cordial, hungrier, more terrible, more secret than all woe; it wants itself, it bites into itself, the ring's will strives in it; it wants love, it wants hatred, it is overrich, gives, throws away, begs that one might take it, thanks the taker, it would like to be hated, so rich is joy that it thirsts for woe, for hell, for hatred, for disgrace, for the cripple, for world - this world, oh, you know it!' (18)
Nietzsche is the sensual philosopher, the one who more than any other seems enlivened not by the aesthetic beauty of his thoughts but by the frenzy in his body (a false distinction, really, though perhaps a means of contrasting his way of knowing with that of 'the scholars'). He's restless, agitated, filled with longing, wracked with pain. His starting point is always what he actually experiences. He's the phenomenologist par excellence. We begin with what we know, with what through our senses we actually experience:
And what magnificent instruments of observation we possess in our senses! This nose, for example, of which no philosopher has yet spoken with reverence and gratitude, is actually the most delicate instrument so far at our disposal: it is able to detect minimal differences of motion which even a spectroscope cannot detect. Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses - to the extent to which we sharpen them further, arm them, and have learned to think them through. The rest is miscarriage and not-yet-science … (19)
It seems that the more Nietzsche contemplates the evidence of the senses, the more he wants to make a distinction between what he feels - his emotions, his suffering, his longings - and the will which he experiences as an irresistible undercurrent urging him forward, frenzied and lustful, to smash and possess and overcome obstacles and limitations.
Whatever in me has feeling, suffers and is in prison; but my will always comes to me as my liberator and joy-bringer. Willing liberates: that is the true teaching of will and liberty - thus Zarathustra teaches it.
But my fervent will to create impels me ever again toward man; thus is the hammer impelled towards the stone. O men, in the stone there sleeps an image, the image of my images. Alas, that it must sleep in the hardest, the ugliest stone! Now my hammer rages cruelly against its prison. Pieces of rock rain from the stone: what is that to me? I want to perfect it; for a shadow came to me - the stillest and lightest of all things once came to me. The beauty of the overman came to me as a shadow... (20)
This will to overcome (21) was something Nietzsche experienced as almost fateful, necessary, unavoidable - like Joseph exposing himself in the library, an act which upsets and complicates (but also deepens and gives meaning to) the conscious life. The will to overcome is greedy, restlessly and relentlessly coming again and again like successive waves against the rocks.
Will and wave. How greedily this wave approaches, as if there were some objective to be reached! How, with awe-inspiring haste, it crawls into the inmost nooks of the rocky cliff! It seems that it wants to anticipate somebody; it seems that something is hidden there, something of value, high value.
And now it [falls] back, a little more slowly, still quite white with excitement - is it disappointed? But already another wave is approaching, still greedier and wilder than the first, and its soul too seems to be full of secrets and the lust to dig up treasures. Thus live the waves - thus live we who will - more I shall not say. (22)
Nietzsche's inexorable insistence on the centrality of the will to overcome was no mere manic compensation for a brilliant but thwarted mind (his books were largely unread during his active lifetime). It was more like the only possible creative response to the conditions of his actual life. To imagine otherwise it to forget Nietzsche himself, alone, in pain and going blind, crouched over his desk and trying to read and write in some freezing boarding house room, a coat on and perhaps a scarf, gripping the pen with fingerless gloves. It's to forget the struggle, and how desperately he felt the temptation to give up, to crawl into bed or back home to his mother or his sister, to become what in fact he struggled all is sane life not to become, which was an invalid. The beautiful passage in Zarathustra called 'At Noon' reminds us of the painfulness of his struggle, of the temptation to rest, to sleep, even to die, to fall back into the arms of eternity and give up the frenzy. (23)
Spurred on by fear, desperately in love with life, Nietzsche didn't give up but instead drove himself on and was at last broken down (was it the sight of the horse being beaten, the upwelling of pity in him that he'd fought so long to keep out?), spending the last eleven years of his life incoherent and bed-ridden. His ditch was no sanctuary, no place of recuperation from which he could eventually emerge cured and reconnected with human society. Instead we're left with a sense of the tragedy and fatefulness (24) of his blighted and brilliant life.
Nothing simple can be said about him. Nietzsche himself continually insisted that nothing can be concluded with certainty. It is necessary, he said, for mind or spirit to 'take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining itself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. (25) All good things approach their goal crookedly, (26) and again:
As a learner one will have become altogether slow, mistrustful, recalcitrant. One will let strange, new things of every kind come up to oneself, inspecting them with hostile calm and withdrawing one's hand. To have all doors standing open, to lie servilely on one's stomach before every little fact, always to be prepared for the leap of putting oneself into the place of, or of plunging into, others and other things ... (27)
This, for me, is at the heart of the post-modern consciousness. There is no single, absolute truth, nor is there meaninglessness. There are many truths and we're brought closer to an intellectual grasp of reality if we consciously adopt many perspectives. The actual world which we experience through our senses is a many layered, dynamic and partially inaccessible reality (though, as Giles sometimes would enigmatically say to me, we'd understand completely if we had the faculties to do so; it's not in itself incomprehensible). We may not be able to grasp it all, or even its essence, but as Nietzsche himself so wonderfully demonstrated, this doesn't condemn us to impotent silence. On the contrary, our willingness and ability to articulate our experience is another source of meaning and vitality.
ENDNOTES
(1) See p 124 above.
(2)2 P 38 Taylor (1989) Taylor's Chapter 2. 'The Self in Moral Space' discusses this at illuminating length, making the link (which is relevant to this thesis) between an orientation to the good, identity and the construction of a life narrative.
(3) Attributed by the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations to Mrs. Edmund Craster d.1874
(4) There's a painting called Dickens's Dream by Robert William Buss, and I have a copy of it in front of me as I write. It shows the mature Dickens in his study, sitting in his desk chair, eyes closed, arms comfortably extended so that the hands rest on his knees, his pen in his right hand. Perhaps he is dozing, perhaps he's stilling himself before the next frenzied scribbling to meet a deadline or to keep up with the outpourings of his teeming and vivid internal world. There are clouds or mists in the room, some dark, others various shades of grey, and in the clouds the characters of Dickens's novels play out their various dramas. Dickens used to say that he could hear their voices as he wrote, he could see their mannerisms.
(5) Dessaix's account of his imaginary world Pure Land (pp 25ff Dessaix (1994) is infused with the tension that exists between outer and inner, reality and fantasy, sanity and madness, and extraordinary because in the fantastic world of Pure Land we can see the spirit or daimon (in the Hillmanian sense) which so clearly has animated Dessaix's own 'outer' life as a linguist, traveller, broadcaster and novelist. Dessaix's description of his fantasy world brings to mind one of Nietzsche's most beautiful sentences:
... all of our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text ... Nietzsche F. (1881) The Dawn and quoted in Kauffman (1992) pp55-56
Dessaix's description, like the most vivid of our dreams, offers us a glimpse of what this text - or his text - might look like.
(6) ‘The mind never stops oozing and spurting the sap and juice of fantasy.' p 170 Hillman
(7) Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1888) quoted pp 678-9 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
(8) From Twilight of the Idols (1888) quoted pp 518-519 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
(9) Zarathustra (1883) quoted p 237 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
(10) Twilight of the Idols (1888) quoted pp 479-480 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
(11) quoted p 237 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
(12) From Genealogy (1886) and quoted p 126 in Kauffman (1992):
Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons ... Freedom from all kinds of convictions, to be able to see freely, is part of strength ... Conversely, the need for faith, for some kind of unconditional Yes and No, this Carlylism, if you will pardon the expression, is a need born of weakness ...
(13) from Notes written in 1974, quoted p 50 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
(14) On Truth and Lie (1873) quoted p 44 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
(15) Schopenhauer as Educator (1874) quoted pp 7-8 in Kauffman (1992)
(16) Nietzsche F. (1883-4) Zarathustra 'On the Despisers of the Body' and quoted pp 67-68 in Kauffman (1992)
(17) Nietzsche F. (1881) The Dawn and quoted pp 55-56 in Kauffman (1992)
(18) Zarathustra (1883) quoted p 435 in Kauffman (1992)
(19) Twilight of the Idols (1888) quoted p 481 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
(20) Zarathustra (1883) quoted pp 199-200 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
(21) I prefer this term to the usual ‘will to power', which although descriptive of the idea that Nietzsche was increasingly drawn to nevertheless has overtones which the Fascists drew on so effectively, with the assistance of Nietzsche's sister.
(22) Nietzsche F. (1882) The Gay Science quoted pp 99-100 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
(23) Zarathustra (1883) quoted pp 388-90 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
This Zarathustra did; and as soon as he lay on the ground in the stillness and secrecy of the many-hued grass, he forgot his slight thirst and fell asleep. For, as Zarathustra's proverb says, one thing is more necessary than another. Only his eyes remained open: for they did not tire of seeing and praising the tree and the love of the grapevine. Falling asleep, however, Zarathustra spoke thus to his heart:
Still! Still! Did not the world become perfect just now? What is happening to me? As a delicate wind dances unseen on an inlaid sea, light, feather-light, thus sleep dances on me. My eyes he does not close, my soul he leaves awake. Light he is, verily, feather-light. He persuades me, I know not how. He touches me inwardly with caressing hands, he conquers me. Yes, he conquers me and makes my soul stretch out: how she is becoming long and tired, my strange soul! Did the eve of a seventh day come to her at noon? Has she already roamed happily among good and ripe things too long? She stretches out long, long - longer. She lies still, my strange soul. Too much that is good has she tasted; this golden sadness oppresses her, she makes a wry mouth.
Like a ship that has sailed into its stillest cove - now it leans against the earth, tired of the long voyages and the uncertain seas. Is not the earth more faithful? The way such a ship lies close to, and nestles to, the land - it is enough if a spider spins its thread to it from the land: no stronger ropes are needed now. Like such a tired ship in the stillest cove, I too rest now near the earth, faithful, trusting, waiting, tied to it with the softest threads …
What happened to me? Listen! Did time perhaps fly away? Do I not fall? Did I not fall - listen! - into the well of eternity? What is happening to me? Still I have been stung, alas - in the heart? In the heart? Oh break, break, heart, after such happiness, after such a sting. How? Did not the world become perfect just now? Round and ripe? Oh, the golden round ring - where may it fly? Shall I run after it? Quick! Still! (And here Zarathustra stretched and felt he was asleep.)
"Up!" he said to himself; "you sleeper! You noon napper! Well, get up, old legs! It is time and overtime; many a good stretch of road still lies ahead of you. Now you have slept out - how long? Half an eternity! Well! Up with you now, my old heart! After such a sleep, how long will it take you to - wake it off?" (But then he fell asleep again, and his soul spoke against him and resisted and lay down again.) "Leave me alone! Still! Did not the world become perfect just now? Oh, the golden round ball!"
"Get up!" said Zarathustra, "you little thief, you lazy little thief of time! What? Still stretching, yawning, sighing, falling into deep wells? Who are you? O my soul!" (At this point he was startled, for a sunbeam fell from the sky onto his face.) "O heaven over me!" he said, sighing, and sat up. "You are looking on? You are listening to my strange soul? When will you drink this drop of dew which has fallen upon all earthly things? When will you drink this strange soul? When, well of eternity? Cheerful, dreadful abyss of noon! When will you drink my soul back into yourself?"
Thus spoke Zarathustra and he got up from his resting place at the tree as from a strange drunkenness; and behold, the sun still stood straight over his head. But from this one might justly conclude that Zarathustra had not slept long.
(24) From Twilight of the Idols (1888) quoted pp 500-501 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
What alone can be our doctrine? That no one gives man his qualities - neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself. (The nonsense of the last idea was taught as "intelligible freedom" by Kant - perhaps by Plato already.) No one is reponsible for man's being there at all, for his being such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this environment. The fatality of his essence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be. Man is not the effect of some special purpose, of a will, and end; nor is he the object of an attempt to attain an "ideal of humanity" or an "ideal of happiness" or an "ideal of morality". It is absurd to wish to devolve one's essence on some end or other. We have invented the concept of "end": in reality there is no end.
One is necessary, one is a piece of fatefulness, one belongs to a whole, one is in the whole; there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, or sentence our being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides the whole. That nobody is held responsible any longer, that the mode of being may not be traced back to a causa prima, that the world does not form a unity either as a sensorium or as "spirit" - that alone is the great liberation; with this alone is the innocence of becoming restored. The concept of "God" was until now the greatest objection to existence. We deny God, we deny responsibility in God: only thereby do we redeem the world.
(25) Section 347 of The Gay Science and quoted on p100 in Kauffman (1980)
(26) Zarathustra (1883) quoted p 406 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
(27) Twilight of the Idols (1888) quoted p 512 in Kauffman ed. (1982)
(28) Perhaps this was Giles talking about the Kantian categories of reason, or a reference to the Spinozan idea that from the point of view of God (sub specie eternitatis) everything follows nature's laws, everything is comprehensible.