It’s the early hours of the morning. I should be asleep, but I had a dream and woke up with a restless mind. Instead of having a glass of water and going back to sleep like any normal person would do, I grabbed my laptop. Now I’m sat hunched up in bed trying to make sense of what I was thinking about.
I dreamt I was waiting on someone. We were in a room, baroque and cavernous and empty except for a canvas on an easel that the woman was painting on. She was dressed like a lady-in-waiting but I couldn’t make out her face. Her painting looked atrocious, but she was very intent on touching it up with infinite detail, as though there were an unmistakable beauty in it that I just wasn’t developed enough to understand. Noises of everyday life were going by outside with a sense of purpose that gave me agitation. I was trying to get this lady to stop painting and leave the room with me, like we had somewhere more important to be with the others, but she wouldn’t listen. I wanted to shout: “Put down the brush and get back to the real world!” but I didn’t think it was truthful enough to convince her. Then I woke up.
For some reason afterwards, I started thinking about The Last Messiah — an essay from Peter Wessel Zapffe regarding his thoughts to Nietzsche’s On the Tragic. Common overviews allude to his interpretation of the Übermensch in regards to the japing maw of existential dread. He believed that such anxieties originate from the overly-evolved intellect of the human mind: “the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.” Alluding to the deer with its overly-developed horns, that nature allows such gross mutations to occur though they are not intrinsically part of what we perceive as ‘the natural order.’ Yet it happens nonetheless. Zapffe noted that such anxiety in trying to understand the metaphysical leads to existential panic, and that everyday people will attempt to remedy this through positions of isolation, anchoring, distraction or sublimation. Each work to certain strengths and weaknesses, but Zapffe believed them to be a consistent process of delusions that humanity — in its desperation — would find themselves incapable of escaping until eventually only one being would remain. The Last Messiah. Casting aside delusions of biological fate, this figure would come to understand doom on the cosmological level beyond all ideas of reason and understanding.
There are no ‘hypermen’ or ‘messiahs’ right now. While Zapffe’s pessimism is dignified and mystical (I dare say), I’m more concerned with his remedies of the common people. The idea of confronting the engulfing emptiness of nihilistic abandon is something I think is quite noble, despite what some might see as futile. It might not have been my place to judge that lady’s painting; maybe I just wasn’t in the mindset that she was — so set to her task. I often wondered why I quoted The Last Messiah during the pre-contents of All Besides I. Maybe it was because Barabal — the Stranger, so often seemed the subject of sublimation: going against every conceivable expectation of the conventional wanderer of infinite expanses. Either way, the ideas of these remedies always seemed to stick to me.
Why else is it that someone’s devotion to God can be as admirable as someone’s relinquishment of ‘self’? Part of me sees this unending drive to escape the rising panic, but I can’t summon enough pessimism to see everything done with purpose as an attempt to cope with dread — a dread born as a byproduct of our own so-called monstrous minds. Zapffe desired comparisons of his messiah with Moses, only inverse to the fruitful multiplication of Biblical lore. I cannot see a messiah without the flock to begin with, and I cannot imagine the submission to transcending anxiety as anything within human experience. We are animals with gifts, not remedies. We do not need to artificially create limits in our own consciousness as we already have them. The question is whether we will reach its biological limit as a species, because as of now there is still a long road ahead of us.
scottsthoughtson 