Surrendered whilst squandered, the singsong of so long, adjured in black and white noir-past futures in sutures, I solemnly swore to forego my mother and father. Sitting reluctant, at the stand awaiting a never arriving cue from the man who promised to defend me, in century old film hue, children aggigle, ceilings so high bright…
FRIEDRICH NIETSZCHE
“I teach you the Superman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the Superman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment…
Behold, I teach you the Superman. The Superman is the meaning of the earth.Let your will say: the Superman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.
Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth…
What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.
The hour when you say, ‘What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.’
The hour when you say, ‘What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.’
The hour when you say, ‘What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.’
“Man is a rope, tied between beast and Superman–a rope over an abyss…
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under…
“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.
Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man.
‘What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?’ thus asks the last man, and blinks.
The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest.
‘We have invented happiness,’say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one’s neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth…
One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.
No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.
‘Formerly, all the world was mad,’ say the most refined, and they blink…
One has one’s little pleasure for the day and one’s little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.
‘We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.”
∞
REMINGTON GRAVES
Let the lulling beckon and sing, O Death-thy sword aflame, the screeching echoes of a hungry night scale the walls that flatten under foot; Mounted on horseback my gaze in a daze amid slightly shifting pine trees inclining at the back of a slumbering lion, star-arrayed and in full display, a nocturnal ballet whilst a thousand organs play- their mouths covered by hands who sternly demand reverence unstained. The heavens sway to my horse’s neigh and the creaking of the saddle and its tack, anchors me aback-resisting the vulgar desire of the vacuum’s witching attire. The sound of its mouth ajar, its scent of blood and honey-bees and wolves, foxes, coyotes, cicada roads of ants aplenty. Calling this cowboy to a land-one far too far from infernal and heavenly paradigms to understand.
The cold of Forge’s breath, coils upwards, ascending its way into the mountain depths; Sweat dripping down his heaving chest. Blood reins held upon my left, and right hand rests upon the horn with palm and fingers enthroned upon the crest. He snorts and bellows as the late hour spell goes. And we sit in magic company, perfumed with nature’s reverie, with ardent thoughts adrift-the revenant-a man who took flesh and carved his mark bit by bit. But now here he sits-atop a Quarterhorse -the cowboy’s war machine, the vessel of Indian fever dreams, the missing half of my heart’s moaning aches.
With three fractured nagging ribs, I resist…the singing of temptation’s urge to send me in a gallop. And I cannot help but notice how the more things change, the more they truly stay the same; Bakersfield and it’s streets did allow me to retreat in many ways, of one discreet, and hide the face of better days as its natives turned a cold and bitter cheek.
C’mon, ol’ boy, stay straight and through
Find your feet-firm agrip the avenue
Let the fangs of feral hills find you fondly
Of this thrashing and bruised lessons foreshadowed I do concede
To wrangle death-baroqued dragon upon my chest-breastplate beaming
Let any Cayuse come forth with challenge of abuse
And let her whisper somewhere far beyond the trees
‘L’appel du vide’
∞
REMINGTON GRAVES
The paper soaked the afternoon sun as it hovered gently on the oak table adjacent to the window facing the mountains; a seraphic zephyr with a childlike temperament flirted with the tattered curtains-spinning-swinging-almost forming a beckoning of the hands of the perfume outside-a call from atop the golden slumbering lions that laid still under a foggy blanket. The last few words still wet…the fountain pen rolling apprehensively toward the edge of the table. And the whistle and the roll and the thin guttural language of the sheet as it tapped at the table as it hovered and shifted to the right, entered the restroom where he shaved his face with his grandfather’s razor. The complicity of this symphony brought a smile to his face, which is why he opened the window and left it so since dawn.
His grandfather was the veritable man. Stoic and stubborn, the perfect pugilist-both in the ring and out, a ‘self made son of a bitch’, he once heard his grandmother muddle quietly under her panting biting breath. He had witnessed a myriad of atrocities back in his home town somewhere in Italy. Scars on his face, the nascent nihility of a driven devil determined, aseptic and banal. They spoke once. About something on television. Superman or some other such nonsense.
The facial hair added to the melody as the razor removed swaths of peppered foam. The words waited. The curtains wraithed. The pen rolled from side to side, possessed by the madness of the man shaving-eagerly awaiting the wielder. And he smiled with his eyes as he recalled his grandmother beating him for opening animals so he may explore their inner workings. ‘I could’ve been a surgeon,’ he thought.
The sun finally imposed its bright face in and began to read:
Vengeance is a marriage-of patience and commitment. One must not allow time to dissuade your duty. Words or deeds shall not pull you from the road that leads the way. If one has promised to deliver in serious or in just, the bond was spoken, the deed to be done, shall be the ebbing wave right before the crimson tide. Genius is eternal patience. A year is child’s play. Let two, maybe three go by, and never let your mark know it was you. Let them assume, in the puddle of their blood, it was merely bad luck, it could’ve happened to anybody, a series of events that let to this misfortune. Allow yourself the pleasure of forgetting the fire you once lit that took so long to roar like slumbering lions who were awoken by betraying lambs.
∞
GAIL GARDNER
Away up high in the Sierry Petes,
Where the yeller pines grows tall,
Ole Sandy Bob an’ Buster Jig,
Had a rodeer camp last fall.
Oh, they taken their hosses and runnin’ irons
And maybe a dog or two,
An’ they ‘lowed they’d brand all the long-yered calves,
That come within their view.
And any old dogie that flapped long yeres,
An’ didn’t bush up by day,
Got his long yeres whittled an’ his old hide scorched,
In a most artistic way.
Now one fine day ole Sandy Bob,
He throwed his seago down,
“I’m sick of the smell of burnin’ hair,
And I ‘lows I’m a-goin’ to town.”
So they saddles up an’ hits ’em a lope,
Fer it warnt no sight of a ride,
And them was the days when a Buckeroo
Could ile up his inside.
Oh, they starts her in at the Kaintucky Bar,
At the head of Whiskey Row,
And they winds up down by the Depot House,
Some forty drinks below.
They then sets up and turns around,
And goes her the other way,
An’ to tell you the Gawd-forsaken truth,
Them boys got stewed that day.
As they was a-ridin’ back to camp,
A-packin’ a pretty good load,
Who should they meet but the Devil himself,
A-prancin’ down the road.
Sez he, “You ornery cowboy skunks,
You’d better hunt yer holes,
Fer I’ve come up from Hell’s Rim Rock,
To gather in yer souls.”
Sez Sandy Bob, “Old Devil be damned,
We boys is kinda tight,
But you ain’t a-goin’ to gather no cowboy souls,
‘Thout you has some kind of a fight.”
So Sandy Bob punched a hole in his rope,
And he swang her straight and true,
He lapped it on to the Devil’s horns,
An’ he taken his dallies too.
Now Buster jig was a riata man,
With his gut-line coiled up neat,
So he shaken her out an’ he built him a loop,
An’ he lassed the Devil’s hind feet.
Oh, they stretched him out an’ they tailed him down,
While the irons was a-gettin hot,
They cropped and swaller-forked his yeres,
Then they branded him up a lot.
They pruned him up with a de-hornin’ saw,
An’ they knotted his tail fer a joke,
They then rid off and left him there,
Necked to a Black-Jack oak.
If you’re ever up high in the Sierry Petes,
An’ you hear one Hell of a wail,
You’ll know it’s that Devil a-bellerin’ around,
About them knots in his tail.
∞