blog

"...Another image also comes to mind: Nietsche leaving his hotel in Turin. Seeing a horse and a coachman beating it with a whip, Nietzsche went up to the horse and, before the coachman's very eyes, put his arms around the horse's neck and burst into tears.

That took place in 1889, when Nietzsche, too, had removed himself from the world of people. In other words, it was at the time when his mental illness had just erupted. But for that very reason I feel his gesture has broad implications: Nietzsche was trying to apologize to the horse or Descartes. His lunacy (tht is, his final break with mankind) began at the very moment he burst into tears over the horse.

and that is the Nietzche I love, just as I love Tereza with the mortally ill dog resting in her lap. I see them one next to the other: both stepping down from the road along which mankind, 'the master and proprieter of nature,' marches onward."

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Yo, sensation, emotion is felt in the body, And the human race has completely failed in giving names to things. Palpitations are felt in the heart and may indicate some sort of illness, but palpitations in the liver or the stomach are completely ignored, even if they are a function of (or in fact ARE) very real and interesting emotions. Note how much meaning we assign say -- the spleen, and the nothing we assign to things felt there. (Writing directly here). "...the psychic cataclysm experienced by Lautreamont and Rimbaud. Not madness, but the realization that the psyche is an unmapped continent..." -- more or less what i mean.