Two recent dreams.
In the first, I'm back home, playing poker at the dining room table with friends from high school, but the game is very hostile. Meanwhile, my mother is trying to load endless, giant bags of laundry into the car to take to a laundromat. This is strange because we have a laundry room at home, but in the dream, the laundry is overwhelming and needs industrial-level washers and dryers. As the game goes on, I'm taking all my friends' money, but they resent me for it. 1
In the second dream, I'm on a boat with people from my theater company. The boat is not much bigger than a fishing boat, so we're all crammed in there, and we're in the middle of the ocean, far from land. Everyone is in denial about the situation, telling stories and jokes, but I'm becoming more and more aware that we're nowhere near land. Some people need to use the bathroom, others want food and water, and I don’t know what to tell them. Thankfully, I wake up before anything worse happens—before the boat capsizes or conditions get worse. I have a general fear of deep water.
I'm writing this now, looking out at Hampton’s Bay. We're at S.'s family house. The light is warm and playing off the waves, which seem to toss the light back and forth. It's a perfect Indian summer day.
This morning, I got a phone call I've been dreading. It was bad news, but I won’t go into detail here. I feel very heavy as a result.
I've been reading an old edition of Nietzsche that I picked up for a few dollars. It’s a selection of his works, bits of everything. I find it fortifying. Even though Nietzsche is easy to read in short doses—his aphorisms or small sections of his books—I don’t think it's good to dip into Nietzsche for just five minutes. I think the perfect amount is about half an hour. The right dosage is so important for Nietzsche. Too little, and you don’t get it. Too much, and you start to take it too seriously. The trick is to find where the dialectic is oscillating.
What always strikes me when I read Nietzsche is how much his ideas came not only from deep reading but also from his own great physical and spiritual pain. Everything he wrote about overcoming and strong will came from his relationship to his own will. His books were his own attempt at self-mastery, at being strong-willed. In that way, they're more interesting than auto-fiction or confessional writing. It's the attempt at transcendence, at transformation, that makes the greatest writers great. It's not enough to just report on yourself or develop in the direction of your own life. If you only report on yourself, you lose contact with the deeper, more divided parts of the soul. You repress your own capriciousness, your spirituality, your strength.
Paradoxically, all the confessional writing on the internet is anti-confessional because it insists on a narrow, subjective perspective. There's no philosophy behind it. That's what makes someone like Knausgaard so good, while many of his imitators are boring. Knausgaard tries to weave together the personal and the philosophical. He sharpens his subjective point of view with philosophy, especially in the fiction sections of his novels. Meanwhile, the writers who simply report on moving to New York or L.A., smoking, drinking, going to parties, and recounting their nights beat by beat—they're really just asking for attention. It's neither fiction nor philosophy. There's no struggle with the authority of one's own rationality or the reliability of one's perceptions. There's no analysis of instincts or the subtle ways consciousness deceives itself the more it examines itself.
Without that, there's no irony.2 There’s no admission of real falseness or secrets. Everything becomes wallpaper and surface. Irony, by the way, isn’t just withholding real meaning. It’s a rejection of real meaning. It’s a way of saying knowledge and cognition are limited. The only way to push forward through immature beliefs is to trust in the far-reaching overtones and undertones of language—the musicality of language and thought. The truth lies in the musical part of the mind, actually, and nowhere else.
I think about the people in the dream—old friends I don't talk to anymore—and in real life, most of them stayed in Bethlehem or tried to leave but ended up coming back. As far as I know, I'm the only one from that group who has "made it," even in a small way, by building a life in the big city. I think this dream expresses my guilt and the sense that I'm being judged from afar. It's like I've left a tribe. I don't get invited to weddings anymore. I've shifted allegiances. I’m a city person now.
To quote Nietzsche directly: “The highest and strongest drives, when they break out passionately, drive the individual far above the average. And the flats of the herd-conscious wreck the self-confidence of the community. Its faith in itself and its spine is snapped. Hence just these drives are branded and slandered most. High and independent spirituality, the will to stand alone, even a powerful reason, are experienced as dangers. Everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil. And if they are modest, submissive, conforming, and mediocre in their desires, they are given moral designations and honors.” The irony of an idea like this is that it will only be understood by a few and will be slandered by most.