When all else fails we whip the horse’s eye. Jimmy cries. Nietzsche weeps. God dies and we cry out loud, swept away by the madness of divine murder.
We are now beyond good and evil. Gods ourselves. And lonely. And bored. And prone to killing each other to pass the time. What else can the omnipotent do than destroy themselves?
They create creatures who will destroy and replace them. Yes, perhaps.
The romantics and hopeful frown and shake their heads in disapproval and denial. This is not a perspective they are willing to entertain — create and destroy others to avoid destroying oneself. Divinity is nobler than that, free from human circumstance and vice. God does not play games.
Then they remember their children, their offspring. The world they’ve created, it’s all around them. They ponder on their children, and their grandchildren, and their friends’ children, and their acquaintances’ children, and they realize God is not out there, playing games. God is down here, among us, within us. About us. Conscientious and active, indefatigable. They carry God wherever they go and get in touch with their virtual power, remembering they are Gods in themselves, creators once divine, once omnipotent, the force and fire, the core and soul of a world in the making; once upon a time rising, supreme and brilliant, now peaking, cresting, slumping and falling, receding, on their slow way out, the slow drift of ageing, it’s taking over, making space for their progeny, for their successors and creations: deities almighty, moving in to take over and displace their predecessors and rule and create and be displaced by their offspring in turn, ousted and expelled so that the ascending may ascend and create their world ad hoc, ad infinitum.
And that’s a good setup, a wonderful way for things to come about, in a wicked kind of manner, if you believe in good and evil. How the children displace the parents, how youth eats the old. Pain and sacrifice, they say, plenty of it in the majesty of the divine, none too possible to miss, intermeshed and reflective and imperative to existence.
There is evil in good, too much of it — paradox abound — almost as abundant as the good that occurs naturally in evil.
Funny how — have you noticed? Evil colors the relationship. If there’s evil in good, good feels bad; if there’s good in evil, it’s immediately a compromised, cynical good.
How the hell does that work?
Food for thought.
Yet, the more one thinks about it, they’re meaningless, these terms. Derivative. Value-laden and pretentious, if not presumptive and sanctimonious and meaningless. Good and evil, so made-up, self-gratifying, insubstantial. If they’re not part of your vocabulary, these terms, (wise you), they don’t matter. The theosophical turns of creation don’t concern you. You simply get on with it, call the process Life and worship it, weep for it, walk through it and stand for it, or bow and kneel before it, depending on your circumstances. You suffer it, strain under it, consumed by the savage grace with which the world suffers and strains under our brutal lashes.
Nietzsche weeps at the sight of the beaten horse. The horse dies and is replaced. The carriage moves forth. The road is eaten up, one step at a time, one week, one year, one lifetime and generation in turn, and so is the rider, and so is the carriage and the wheel and everything else.
Such is the nature of life, being put to use, in operation — being tested, fixed, worn out and replaced. To live is to die, to rise and fall, making way for the coming generations, which will suffer the lash and die like gods until the tears start rolling again. And then, just maybe, we may become truly divine, after we step down from our seat and walk among each other, beyond not just good and evil, but also the power with which we contoured the world, letting our vanity drop like a worn-out mask.
From the bays of Pearl Coast, and in conjunction with EON,
Fish a ton of oysters, strike a black pearl.
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PS – Here is the opening scene from Béla Tarr / Ágnes Hranitzky’s iconic movie The Turin Horse, a story inspired by the horse over which Nietzsche broke down in the twilight years of his life.