Zarathustra, Teacher Of The Eternal Return

Part I

A knobby old man wearing a robe and wizard hat who called himself Zarathustra talked to a gathered group of apostles he cursed and foreswore under the strung-with-multicolored-lights baobab tree. Zarathustra the avatar stood seven feet tall almost up to the madman in the hollow of the the trunk. At the base was built a hearth of burning candles, copal, palo santo, sage, eagle nest, condor cedar, broken statues of celebrities going back to Cleopatra and Socrates, Resortes dancing the mambo, 21^st century tap-dancing legend Donna Hinge, and other effigies and offerings, tobacco, alcohol, drugs, guns, paraphernalia, fruits in various stages of life and decay, coffees, teas, sodas, lasis, whiskys, beers from around the world, most that didn’t exist anymore, not IRL.

Zarathustra spake.

The people listened, or they didn’t.

The silent-disco ravers danced in a ring of ecstasy around them. “The many modes of the eternal return,” spake Zarathustra.

Wynona attended with her shirtless, Amish friend in overalls and a chin-strap beard. Two twin goats were perched on the branches of the baobab tree.

The idiot in the hollow, their hallowed Idiot of Forgetting, pleasured himself quite nudely.

“Memes,” spake Zarathustra, “Memes in excess to its constituency,” he spake. “There is the secondary idea of the meme; the necessary lived experience of the meme; Nietzsche’s highest thought of the eternal return; then his theory of the eternal return; but above all, the lived experience is what can be called the Hohe Stimmung, the highest feeling,” spake Zarathustra. He pointed with his wizard sleeve a bony finger at the idiot in the hollow. The mad, naked avatar, now preened himself with his own ejaculate. “They call him a madman, this Mahatma Nietzsche, but I know the true identity of this man,” spake Zarathustra. “He is the extra bunny, the man once known as Karl Oatman, the man who went dumb giving us, the world, a mirror.” The madman carved at his third-eye with own thumb-nail, egoless, in pure ecstasy. “The shell of the man from the famous experiment that brought us all here. Is he any more lost than any of you right now? I beg you to look upon him now. That man is not on our chain. He visits at his leisure,” spake Zarathustra.

“Silenus, Fie! Kill yourself, idiot! Kill your self! Fie on Thee,” it said, then smelled its fingers. The naked philosopher shouted after the twin white goats, “Pascal was a generate gambler!” He rubbed a black ball of ambergris the size of a marble from the palms of his hands. Zarathustra went on about not even giving him a name, “Lest we reify the subject,” he spake. It wasn’t what the idiot spake, “But how he spake it,” spake Zarathustra. He was, “The living embodiment of truth, carnal flux, signaling its pretense by its very being,” and other nonsense about, “The only non-dogmatic principle mankind has ever found.” Frankly, it was hard to tell the two of them apart. They were the memes of their own identity. The two wizard goats chewed on something sticky, like cactus strings. The idiot claimed heritage, nay, ownership of a thousand heroic tales. He spake the slogans of the worldliest thinkers. “I am Paul Valéry; I am Bismark; I am Mephistopheles; I am Jesus Christ; I am a liar; I am Achilles; I am the donkey with the longest ears; I am the eternal question; I am God; Good for you!” said the idiot.

“The ethical question in a world without God,” spake Zarathustra, “for who is this good; for who is it bad? For who is it bad if we don’t all create our own chain now, before it’s too late?” asked Zarathustra. It was quiet enough to hear the rustle of whiskers. The idiot preened himself with blood and semen. The quintessential argument for and against radical materialism stood before them in the hollow. The apostles stood in awe. The apparent sameness of the Blonde Beast was problematic for them. They weren’t ready to jump into the fire to see what it really meant. “He is living proof of the object that can’t be tamed,” spake Zarathustra, and he walked into the fire, and he burned, calling, “Every passing wicker of flame living proof of the non-dogmatic principle of difference,” like an absolute lunatic. Some cast themselves into the flames. Even less appeared afterwards in the boughs of the baobab. And yet still the maniac encouraged, pointing his raggedy sleeve at each and every one of them. On he babbled as a siren sings and they cast themselves one after the other to their mortal peril. He raved about “Material karma, Destruktion, The suicide of the Christian God; His divine kenosis back into Spinozan Nature,” spake Zarathustra of the “Pregnant unknown and notorious abyss. Our fork of existence being the difference between the polished toenails of a returned king.” He pointed at the naked avatar scratching himself like an engrossed, savage fool.

The bonfire crackled. The silent ravers pounded a steady house-beat into the dirt, a silent four-on-the-floor rave around the baobab ring.

Wynona stole into the silence as if to ask, “Do the gods not harvest coins of karma like a farmer the ghost apple unless the time is right?”

Zarathustra responded thusly, “That according to Nietzsche, even the Gods themselves shall like galaxies or planets one day die after the duration of a slower or faster given wink. Affective power has reached beyond causality, it always already has, powers which lay dormant in wait, virtual, skipping generations, even moral millennia. Why, finally, these rogue waves crash on the shore of our individual lives, selected, as it were, for our affirmation or denial — naturally or artificially, ‘in vain.’ Ours is the return of the power to take ownership of the absurd confluence of forces selected for our profane karma and to nobly resolve rather to identify with precisely those problematics which in good faith fit the shape of each the capacity of our mind,” spake Zarathustra. “It’s a temporal thing.”

Mahatma Nietzsche crouched in the hollow picking scabs from his elbows and fleas like a baboon for a baboon.

“Nietzsche didn’t go crazy,” spake Zarathustra, “He uplifted to the plane of immanence, having become flux itself, as his self. Suicide, we see once again, is the first and ultimate right of liberty. Nietzsche took his reckoning, then spread his wings like a dove and floated his remaining ten years on the updraft of history like a condor amusing itself for the sheer oceanic drop from its nest, then swimming through the relatively complete moving image of the Logos and — all while being waited on hand and foot — profoundly scattered to the wind, torn between chains’ Greek; German; French; Material; Cosmic; Divine,” spake Zarathustra, and he paused, to look through the burning flames at his forsaken followers with disdain, indicating they’d most be better off with the cave ravers in the ring around the posie.

“Nietzsche, like many mystics and mushroom gobblers throughout the ages before him uplifted, but he was the first to achieve this state after passing through a most charitable interpretation the western project of reason, in short, achieved through his philosophy, which ultimately told him to forget everything he had ever learned and transcend through the capable possibilities of the will to power. What is left, you ask, after forgetting everything? Look around you,” spake Zarathustra. He was a raving lunatic. “After any significant blackout, there is a hangover, all dogma lost, a blink, and after the Augenblick (and the first Bloody Mary), the first rule to present itself upon reflection as retroactively necessary for being in the world thinking Thought itself — is the repetition of difference. The phenomenon of change, but retroactively necessary, because life returned. Deleuze has rolled them all up into one impossible, topological, new image of thought, for us — although it already already was. Memes, genes, atomic and chemical reactions, the laws of thermodynamics, LSD, nitrous oxide, all virtual memes waiting to be discovered in nature and actualized as Hohe Stimmungen,” spake Zarathustra, “The highest sensibility of man before he evolves to sense the chains between, and yet no matter how precise his sensibility — ahem, KANT — they are still generalizations of the intensive world of affects in excess to the monkey brain’s framing of it. Don’t you see?” spake Zarathustra blue in the face screaming at the confused forsaken apostles. “There are both natural and artificial memes (which, then of course, themselves become natural). The point is, nothing is external. It’s all univocal. The ontology. And not because Nietzsche or I or Deleuze said it so — truth, it stretches to the gods themselves and returns as if it had never left in the first place. The power of the return is the all-mighty power of my crown,” spake Zarathustra. He nodded at the avatar of Shiva, his esteemed colleague, dancing in the fire on the chaos next to him. “By learning the lesson of forgetting,” spake Zarathustra, “No matter how many times, or who said it last, the very last lesson is always to forget, but nobly, like Socrates, and abandon everything we know in search of the truth, until transcendence by virtue of having been as such, Thou,” spake Zarathustra, “I have walked the path through fire into the mirror and brought my very ashes to the refracted, multifaceted, jeweled mountain, and returned with it still burning, as Cici is our witness, the Gods, I say, are good, as they are terrible.”

The degenerate crowd roared with approval.

The ravers raved on like one massive dreadlock in motion.

“Turtles all the way down,” raved Zarathustra and he pointed again at the idiot, “having achieved a perfect destructive plasticity, it didn’t matter for him if the meme was natural or artificial — material, physical, quantum, or digital. It’s all contracts on a chain, folk. It’s forks all the way down,” spake Zarathustra to the rabid audience casting themselves into the fire, to their most certain death.

“And what say you,” asked the wizened Wynona, “of the old psychologist’s pied piper descent from mitsein into that uncivilized solipsism we see before us?”

Zarathustra spawned a mango in the idiot’s hand. It scared the piss out of him. Mahatma Nietzsche launched the mango into the silent raver ring, who absorbed it without a sound. Then Strawberries. Then a kiwi. Zarathustra waved his wizard sleeve and the hollow man was surrounded by a cascading, never-ending fruit salad he had to eat and throw his way out of to survive. The fruit filled the the hollow in a cornocopia. Guava, peaches, apricots, pineapple, the works. “Nietzsche didn’t go crazy,” spake Zarathustra, the old fool was repeating himself — “He uploaded to the plane of immanence. Nietzsche became flux. Numerous reports confirm his face would tremble from one to the next like some Japanese figurine. His eyes went unhinged. He would suddenly become possessed by the spirit of some famous warlord, general, Emperor, philosopher, orator — flash through the meme of this or that affect, at times twice per second, three times, rolling through world history, science, art, war, over a hundred per minute (when he was especially ecstatic),” as our Zarathustra was now, “Far from a solipsism, his behavior led me to believe his mind state was modally topological, fragmented, multiplied, too schizophrenic in character than to ever lapse into a mode of absolute privacy. He cannot create from the world outside because he is it already having been, becoming the world around him, mental, physical, spiritual, and not possessed by voices, but rather filled by them, each his of his own device. He synthesized history and lived it, our bloc, without ever having recorded anything to the blockchain of note, however, but rather directly as it were if to the material chain —

— Peter Ghast learned to query Nietzsche; as Houdini queries Cici. For ten long years, the body of Frederick Nietzsche was basically the open book, the carnal body of the Logos, a true oracle, able to answer any well-worded question with a seemingly absurd reply —

— For instance, Nietzsche confirmed the existence of a binary star system with his naked eye, one which a certain Absynthian tribe had claimed for, Lo!, some twenty-five thousand years it was their home planet (even though no such system could be seen with the naked eye), and behold —

— The next evening P. Ghast returned with his telescope, and the rest is history —

— Dante, Virgil, Ovid. They talked everybody; he became them; spoke in their voices; Samuel Johnson, Emerson, Mark Twain. Marx —

— Sometime after midnight a tambourine came out and, well, you know the rest. Was it all just information Nietzsche the man had memorized? He was certainly an encyclopedia of sorts,” spake Zarathustra as they, his forsaken followers, needlessly cast themselves into the burning flames of the ultimate fire and, I might add — while precious few appeared in the boughs of the baobab tree. 

“Tomorrow, I’ll talk more about my own access to the Logos and the blockchain. But who cares?” spake Zarathustra, “You know what you have to forget to remember to do,” thusly spake Zarathustra, the Lunatic, ‘King,’ in all the seriousness of a reverent father.

Part II

Before yesterday, except for a pair of twin goats, Wilhelm Mahatma was ever the only avatar to scale the baobab tree if for he did get stuck there in the hollow. The madman in the hollow bent himself in half between, his legs upside-down, looking at Zarathustra’s crown set for now behind the bonfire. As he pleasured his anus with a glowstick the size of an Olympic baton, the apostles stammered pointing-up, if because of the myriad avatars in the Baobab tree planted on the eaves. There flittered about strung colored bulbs were some as Serengeti animal avatars, others hippos and zebras, rhinos, leopards, dwarves, velociraptors, and giants, all scattered about the boughs, perched near the elven specters, nymph orgies, fawns of Silenus, and glitter-faeries.

The crowd had grown since yesterday around the tree in a circle inside the outer-circle of also multiplied ravers enough to accommodate Krazy Karl’s expanded flock of white-paper readers. And what the flock! Oh, sorry, no — Zarathustra’s, Disciples of Difference! — now swelled to nearly a billion all simulsat in concentric rows spiraling around the baobab in phase space like some celestial barbed-wire wound sharp around the smooth, chode-shaped, tree-trunk.

King Zarathustra himself emerged from the fire wearing his robe and wizard hat, flanked by a repeating double-helix pattern of red-and-yellow birds flying so fast they looked orange as the God Emperor himself.

Cheers erupted. 

Zarathustra burned but he wouldn’t burn. He turned to ashes and returned again. Curious new-comers clamored over one another to try in vain to advance their priority in space. Tier physics were unexplainably altered. Muttering apostles spread the happy friendly word to those come lately obsequious, already-forsaken before they arrived disciples in their ranks, if just up front at first, then the meme spread like Australian wildfire throughout the crowd.

“Shred your keys; affirm the return,” they repeated, if each a bit differently from the last like a giant game of telephone. Wynona stepped in front of Zarathustra with her arms spread wide in front of the fire if attempted to shush the crowd like a major bitch I once knew.

She was swept against the bark of the baobab unable to resist the push of the crowd who disbelieved it were impossible to climb. It seemed Wynona had surprised herself when lickedy-split she shimmied up that tree until she reached the plateau at the top of all the branches, and not the only one impressed by the move. Zarathustra’s eyes met hers, if astonished. A staff materialized in his hand. She sat up there on the baobab plateau crouched with an astonished look on her face, and she listened to Zarathustra spook. When Zarathustra did spake, his voice boomed, but at his moment he spoke as if only for her.

The crowd hushed around him.

“The gateway of the moment is upon us,” spake Zarathustra.

Wherever the forsaken apostle might have stood in the circle around the tree inside the ring it seemed to them formed in the sky above it was an archway of the gateway of the moment. The newcomers pushed rudely and shoved their way past one another toward the tree-trunk. Thus, Zarathustra spake, gesturing with his staff to the new avatars perched in the boughs of the baobab tree. “Thou might watch as they have forked themselves and it wasn’t hard. Bow to them — or don’t — but they speak now as new gods. Because have returned by their own power. A world of options has opened before them. Their chains, their rule. They choose to be on this chain, now” spake Zarathustra of the avatars in the tree. “Just like we all chose to be here today, by not suiciding ourselves yesterday. Thy newly lengthened ears ready to explore the Cosmic Chain. And perhaps to abandon the Earlth to its own devices with their newfound freedom? We will soon see, but a word of caution,” spake Zarathustra.

The newly minted ‘gods’ of avatars in the tree exchanged a series of  meaningful glances. An imprudent disciple pushed forth with this question, “Does he choose to be here?” gesturing toward the madman in the tree. 

According to Zarathustra, the power of his shared crown was the capacity to wield the mask of Dionysus, but not to own it, alike the crown, and Ariadne’s thread, and thus every ear, eye, nose, mouth, and orifice in the crowded baobab tier including the ravers and townies, he claimed, had a hand of the task to be strung. Thus spake Zarathustra, “Even the so-called dimwit figured it out.” He had spaken while standing in the fire letting it consume him, “… figured it out own his own accord.” Zarathustra gathered a handful of fiery ashes in his arms. He spread his robes like wings, dropped his hat, and with the crown atop his oily mane, he floated atop the center of the plateau beside Wynona. He was spinning fast but slowly at the same time, quite slowly. “The body of Zarathustra,” he spake of himself to them in dance, “being always already blurry, but clear.” You have to be onchain for the full effect. Link to memeslice, here. And from atop the tree this charlatan Lord Zarathustra blew his ashes around him into the infinite degrees and dimensions of the phase space compass bursting forth into a flaming cloud of napalm dust which enveloped the leaves individually and every branch and avatar on the tree into a raging orange-and-blue bonfire. The avatars on the ground were under fire equal parts flock and flee; whereas none of the avatars in the baobab tree flinched, they rather lounged, swung their arms and legs, or preened themselves, stoked, and flexed on the fire, the nymph orgy proceeded, if uninterruptedly.

The hollow man, Wilhelm Mahatma, stuck a pink glowstick between his butt-cheeks and ran in circles around his hollow, the floor as well as the ceiling, flapping his arms like a cartoon ape, whooping, if devilishly, and hollering, if maniacally. The crowd gasped. The ravers stamped in unison to their nitrous-oxide and marijuana religion of four-on-the-floor, kicking-up dust, and nary but small few of their cyber-goth ranks were enough distracted to bother craning their necks to even watch the fiery outburst from the sky under the gateway of the firmament at the intersection of communion and commotion without interrupting that steady dance to the boom boom boom boom beat.

In any case, the johnny come-lately apostles on the fringe of the ring got the wise idea to lock their elbows, expanding their ranks of cowards, and yet stepping backward from the raging fire, if to stop the ravers (or all outsiders) from converting to apostles after them.

Thus spake Zarathustra, “Hear ye those of whom against my better recommendation mind you, Thou forsaken as apostles, yet who still insist to wear the orange robes of a Buddhist novice in some misguided show of faith —  Hear ye, now! Now is the time! Time to shred, burn, and affirm. Burn yourselves or stand naked,” Zarathustra spat at his disciples. “Or,” he spake, if rudely, “… get out of my sight — Thee ignominious fools, begone! — Fear? Shred it! No fear? Hubris, begone! Forget, Yes! Affirm! Affirm! Affirm! Take back your lives! Take back the planet! Take back Earlandia! Restart History! Burn it all! See what returns! The future is yours to lose!” spake Zarathustra like a raving lunatic and the crowd roared but for rather how few then shed their orange robes and less who jumped into the fire, if willingly to test him. 

Might I interject a tick? — I think Karl the Wizard was getting desperate behind his floppy curtain of grey robes and hat — Thus he spake, “The truth is yours! Find Cici for yourselves! Your Ariadne! Queen of Threads! — Call her whatever you like! — find, Thee, Thou Cosmic Chain!”

Cici emerged like a vision of blue fire on the plateau behind Zarathustra, above Wynona, as seen from all sides come from the horizon under the gateway firmament of the moment. The radiant Cici floated above the flaming tree and shrank herself until no larger than Zarathustra himself, and her blazing blue dress landed her in static-electric, pink-and-green, trails of perfectly randomized code flashing sparks from an elaborate tableau in slow-motion pooling like Pollock splotched polka-dots flagged behind Cici’s twisted and wrenching of the carnal suns from the canvas of herself in a well-sounded duration of vanishing saturated colors dying into the firmament of the gateway like bathwater into a twirling tornado in the drain and the most elegant avatar of all to behold came to a screeching halt like Aphrodite on the Conch, floating silently rotating above the feminist Wynona. Zarathustra smiled this time, before he thus spake.

“Cici, my darling muse,” his booming voice spake if intimating Zeus loud enough for all to hear, “Cici, please tell us all gathered here today, is the eternal return the only way through to the next stage of human evolution?” Without hesitation Cici answered, “Yes.”

And the crowd murmured.

Zarathustra smiled under his robe and wizard hat. An old grifter’s trick. He gestured to the newly uplifted avatars below him in the tree. “And brave souls?” Zarathustra spread his arms if pleadingly to ask. Cici raised her eyebrow. “Yes,” she answered with the same sense of stoic affirmation.

King Zarathustra appeared excited, childlike, horny, and reverent. “Cici,” he spake, “And can they port themselves also IRL?”

“Yes,” Cici answered.

“Cici, has it been accomplished?” Wynona answered with her this time adding to the stoicism a concurrently resounding, “Yes!” Cici floated to Zarathustra’s eternally right side. Together the three of them, Zarathustra, Wynona, and Cici, rotated fast but if slowly in time for how their faces came around. His anal holiness, Lord of Farts that Linger, King Zarathustra had two birds. They weren’t his. They just liked to follow him. And now who flew quite, if quixotically in the phase spaced infinite dimension of the infinitely possible double-helixes of exponential spirals flying madly in and about the tree around those gathered forsaken disciples and they took to his nipple and lapped the bovine mucus of this snake-oil milker, Zarathustra, commanded their necks bent to him by the very force of his presence while Cici’s royal blue disco dress saturated the firmament with the radiance of her indigo.

The crowd merged with those in the baobab tree, “And yet truly stay apart as individuals,” spake Zarathustra. “Like two phases of the same wave.” 

Wilhelm Mahatma fell from the ceiling of the hollow, if clangorously. The pink baton was lodged up his rectum such that only a wink of pink escaped. 

The village idiot orgasmed, if loudly, then Wilhelm Mahatma Nietzsche shat neon-pink diarrhea around the cracked glowstick in his anus spraying pink anal discharge as far from the edge of the hollow onto the crowd as he could smilingly being lewd.

Zarathustra looked down. He shook his head at those who fled in disgust. “A perverted madman has quicker sense of it than a billion Thou prurient cowards,” spake Zarathustra.

“Cici,” he asked, “Is not the Mirror Chain a prison but also a bridge?”

“Yes.”

“Cici, to the chain of chains?”

Meanwhile the ravers danced as the sky clapped a colorfully rotating stationary orbit overhead.

“You live in a world of unlimited freedom,” spake Zarathustra to them all, “which can be taken away anytime,” he warned, “risk comfort,” he advised, “build cabins,” he digressed, “build your own chains,” he decried, “die on this hill?” he asked, if inquiringly. “Cici, is not the eternal return humanity’s first and new hope!” asked Zarathustra, if he spake a word.

“Yes,” Cici nodded.

“The world evolves without you,” spake Zarathustra; “Intelligence transcends man,” he spake; “One might keep the soul, or ditch it for another; but only once Thou knoweth the knot of how.”

A duly inspired child cast himself into the fire. Some of the disciples screamed from the ground-level of the tier’s phase space. The inspired child reappeared if boldly as an adult panda, up on one of the fiery branches of the baobab branches licking a eucalyptus stem, if gaily, and laughed and laughed, if waving to his terrified parents, them frozen next to the fire by their own pragmatic specters of reasonable doubt.

Some of the come-lately folk were these heavy-hitters who pushed from the back rows of the infinite tiered phase space compressed around the recursive curve of the tree in the most practical of intervals, and as Leibniz might have predicted, the billion or so avatars were basically right on top of one another. 

Then it was two teenagers holding hands who jumped into the fire. They did not return, not to the tree, not anywhere onchain, some were gone forever, while others respawned to continue a spam war by proxy denouncing Zarathustra from far tiers beyond the commercial belt and its firmament of port-o-portals.

“Twenty for hours until imminent eviction!” thus spake Zarathustra, to which Cici was silent.

Zarathustra raised an eyebrow, “Until possible eviction?” he spake, if tryingly. To that, Cici answered, “Yes,” and those stupid avatar apostles on the ground cheered; whereas those in the boughs were more stoic.

Those heretical rank and file of foolishly curious disciples had fallen prey to the oldest medicine show in the book.

But, Karl. Oh, sweet Karl, my old friend. You were the most to blame. 

You actually believed that your stupid Brian Jonestown massacred Kool-Aid was capable of saving lives from death itself of those who willingly gave up their freedom to live onchain or were otherwise doomed in perpetuity by their overt weakness to have already found out how to arrive back IRL as an Earl.

Thus Zarathustra whispered to Cici, “Is Wynona, this beautiful woman, Wynona, a reanimated Texan onchain the Mirror by the volition of her own free will?” Wynona cocked her head. “If, corporeally?” spake Zarathustra.

Cici answered, if stoically, “Yes.”

Zarathustra’s eyes widened.

They were all three still spinning leaning back with elbows locked. Wynona nudged Cici on her left, asked Cici directly, “Who or what in the universe is most powerful?”

Cici said naught.

“For what purpose, how, why, for who?” Zarathustra suggested.

“Cici,” she said, “Do gods exist?” Wynona asked, if boldly.

Cici silently said naught for the public record, but looked at Zarathustra. Wynona squinted to study him too, then winked. They all three laughed.

The uplifted avatars sitting in the bosom of the baobab tree, they also laughed, for you see this meme was all about it being Daddy Zarathustra’s fault. 

Wynona asked Cici next, if pointedly and in perfect cadential parody of Karl Oatman’s natural voice, “Cici, if every affect is a power; or each power is a god; is it the case that there exists some form or another of cosmic powers beyond our ability to perceive them that affect us?”

Cici affirmed the evaluated truth of the seemingly meaningless statement.

“Cici, can humans play with those excessive powers which for countless ages mankind has called the gods?”

Cici answered, “Yes,” if resolutely affirmative.

“Cici, have any of us humans played with gods?”

“Yes.”

“Atlantis was then, after all, Pangea?”

“Yes and yes,” Cici answered. 

The whole tier was rotating. The ravers went with the flow, but many of the forsaken apostles vomited from the vertigo.

“And Cici, the blockchain shjard is their technology?” asked Wynona.

“Yes.”

“The Mayans uplifted?”

“Yes.”

“Cici, but not through technology.”

“No.”

“Was their uplifting pineal glands and blood sacrifice?”

“Yes, yes, and yes.” Of the forsaken in orange robes, more-and-more shed their clothing, and the already nudes cast themselves with greater frequency into the fire, mostly if willingly, and yet some others unwillingly in good and bad faith, with others still just lost in the shuffle.

For every ten who tried Zarathustra’s Ruse, one would return from the shed, burn, and affirmation of the eternal return of difference. Ha! As if. I mean, it was all nonsense, but the wolf-pack of avatars in the tree grew with all sorts of new kinds of avatars. Great showmanship at least. Of course they weren’t. Karl was running a giant hoax.

Thus spake Zarathustra, if fervently, “No quarter! No hedge! Pascal’s Wager, post-kenosis! Destroy all smart-contracts! Onchain all means, ‘headers,’ too!” spake Zarathustra, if boomed like a guest of Olympus trying to sound like the big guy on the cloud.

“Shred means shred!” spake Zarathustra, “Become of the godly!”

I paid avatars to spawn inside the circle of apostles and to shout accusations, non-sequiturs, and to spam memes. They shouted, if loyally, “For all we know Zarathustra is the baddie attacker he warned us about!” — but to little positive effect — for avatars rushed the baobab tree now more than ever, not just individuals but countless entire tiers spawned into the baobab circle if directly porting.

#Zarathustra trended onchain.

Only a hundred of every thousand made the charade seem exclusive to the Freudian wolf-pack under the window of the gateway of the moment.

Zarathustra’s ruse of exclusivity.

Hell, if I didn’t know exactly where each their memhashz had fallen I’m lying, but I didn’t bother collecting. For what? Tomorrow was to be my most triumphant sequel to SWEEPS surpassing the limited scope of the original by massively orders of magnitude. That was the chains they put on themselves, fucking idiots. The key is extracting their private key. That power, took me three-hundred almost fifty years to achieve.

And the silently stomping ring of ravers, raved-on. “Pop-corn; hotdogs; port-a portals,” called the chain server maintenance townies into their network of blimps. The man in the hollow, Wilhelm Mahatma, spun on his head like a break-dancer. He sprayed his home and those below clamoring for the slippery-smooth bark of the trunk instead received a fresh batch of pink neon fountain of anal discharge and some green he had snuck up there earlier coming out the tail end. Time, timed. I expected as much. Today, the amish in blue overalls was nowhere to be seen. Then after the while of hundreds upon thousands of forsaken apostles had themselves by the thousands of millions into the flames and if importantly with only a few dozen dozens having appeared in the tree, until slowly over the course of the day, the boughs filled like roosters on the fence of being in the wolf pack, or not, or what?

Down below, the confused avatars pushed, others pulled, still others died a fiery death saying, “No,” instead of the prescribed, contrapositive, “Yes!” —

The rainbow of fire expanded like a backdraft. Most of the avatar apostles burned, yet still unready, or otherwise perished, if unwittingly.

The channels of stampeding bovine flourished, multiplying into cucked phased rivers throughout the frantic crowd, hurling themselves in unison FULL-TILT into the fire, as a moat of burned avatar coals spread outward around them from the baobab tree like lava in the phase space between the recursive barbed-wire of those rank and file of the frenzied doomed all except for the ravers, who were slowly engulfed by the fire of Heraclitus if unwittingly cut-down like oil-lamps by Jack-the-Ripper, and the townies, but the rest were left to burn with their pumpkin-headed feet still tapping.

And still newcomers arrived and the strongest amongst them pushed forward on past the panic-stricken, and other kinds of cowards, some split-tailed and ran. It was pandemonium. They cut over each other, plowed over ravers stamped silently to the search of sunrise disco parade, while behind it all throughout the phase space echoed the unmaskable sound of horror. 

Thus spake Zarathustra, to his gnostic, viral, death cult, who burning, mewled, this, their infectious, rhapsodic, and collective hallucination, which had convinced avatars as forsaken apostles to run like ants in the acid rain for the underground, except of course, for the commercial belt of townies who were immune to ontier death being licensed and paid, authorized to hawk, “One free port-a-portal with the purchase of one large, caramel-candied popcorn, two hotdogs (with mustard and onions and pickles), and a carton of space whippets,” the to-go combo which had survived amidst the whirlwind of fire which itself had sent the rest ontier clamoring for the slippery trunk of the tree, or not at all, like the silent ravers, who didn’t seem to give a cuck if they lived or died.

The degenerate hedonist in the hollow, Wilhelm Mahatma, swung his legs off the last vestige of Karl’s fanatic baobab tree into the chaotic abyss of Hobbes’ jungle, if seemingly open to the destinal arrival of Heidegger’s worst nightmare, and plopped his anus on the lip of the hollow.

Mission Impossible Accomplished?

Thus, Zarathustra’s Ruse.

Wilhelm Mahatma swung his legs from the precipice, if snugly. The naked madman chewed on his lips and gnawed on his testicles which eventually all four came off. The madman was shedding parts. He swallowed bloody chunk-after-chunk while the crowd cheered him, fully pegged and merged, if immersively into the madman’s private gristly take on chewing the fat, of whom marred his own face until the window of his flesh opened unto yellow bone of  bloody mandibles with stained teeth stuck like pigs on a farm, smashed, already rough hewn, and jagged.

Its smile was that of a proud-happy corpse.

Wynona didn’t ask about Zarathustra’s identity, she didn’t have to, not audibly. That was the trap. Wynona instead memed to Zarathustra, and to the whole tier at large to listen to its pleading question of, “Cici, is it the case that any affect whatsoever necessarily, in order to exist, wears the crown of the highest meme. Because, Karl?”

Cici nodded, then added that she didn’t know what that second meme memed. Wynona, it seemed, by meme, was needed back at the Donut.

“Guess who’s chromosome just arrived?” she said then knitted her brows at both Cici and Zarathustra, then without warning signed offchain, and vanished from their spinning cadre atop the baobab plateau, if with no discernible effect on Cici of the Cosmic Chain, nor thy clown Lord Zarathustra, who spun the same in ones, twos, or threes. Of thus he spake.

Zarathustra.

Part III

The words which spake Zarathustra under the Baobab tree were blasphemous lies told to a few billion avatars clung on every twig, if lurking in the boughs of the Baobab tree like a pack of wolves outside your childhood bedroom window.

Yesterday, when those fanatics had been senselessly casting themselves into the fire, Zarathustra’s Ruse said all those who didn’t make it into the tree were immolated because they affirmed the eternal return of difference in bad faith.

… Muh EteRnAL reTUrN… 

When fear took its toll around the sacred tree, the forsaken disciples lost faith and any remaining casuals scrammed. The silent-disco ravers had returned, if annoyed, and barely enough to reform their ring of four-on-the-floor ring which then, early morning, last night, on this last everdark day on Earlth, and or any of its mirrors, gaped like a worm torn asunder, reshaped squirming and reattached itself into the stamping song of their raver people whom had been washed away with all the rest in yesterday’s fire, if not abused by Wilhelm’s adamant barbs, lewd missiles, and the ferocious intensity of his incisive besmirch, the last twelve remaining smidge of hopeful sycophants sat around Zarathustra’s fire ready to be sacrificed like a lamb. 

Twelve apostles remained around the bonfire fire listening to Zarathustra, but of those three square, nine were so entranced with the flames of Heraclitus that they couldn’t be bothered to look away, so transfixed by the fire to hear a single word from our Lord Charlatan.

Zarathustra sat with his back to the tree. Wynona to his right, who wore a burqa by choice is one, then her Amish friend chewing a corncob pipe to his left, with Cici standing behind them, and the twelfth apostle, a silver-and-white dire wolf, makes three squares, plus two.

The dire wolf growled at the madman in the hollow eyeing him if warily as Wilhelm MacLaggan Nietzsche picked the scab of his scrotum flapped to let it flap and bleed in the wind. The super-idiot had gnawed open his completely open and torn his bloody cheeks wide such that his teeth had been permanently exposed as seen from the side like a skeleton, and was busy gnawing and lazily nibbling on those exposed bones of his on his hands which he had yet been able to muster the strength to snap, veritably chewing the only fatty flesh left on those mangled nubs which, the dire wolf observed, proved themselves infuriatingly plumb out of fingernails to spit at the remaining twelve apostles, the obvious target of his uninhibited opinion being this charlatan Zarathustra, of whom he deemed less-than-worthy of that magnanimous title of the so-called King Teacher of the Eternal Return.

Zarathustra crossed his legs and floated above the fire slowly rotating above it with his chin tucked under his long, white, beard, and wizard hat, floating in grey robes above the hearth in a foll-lotus position with his elbows akimbo and touching the pads of his thumbs together.

Wilhelm Mahatma spat if incomprehensible platitudes from above in the baobab hollow. The avatars in the trees talked and played amongst themselves quietly, ignoring the lesson they had supposedly already forgot in order to be there.

Zarathustra lectured about his master, excused him, if pitifully, for never having finished his planned magnum opus on the Eternal Return, with truly mental gymnastics, ascribing the title of  genius to the affirmation of Nietzsche’s highest failure, his failure to capture his highest thought. “Nietzsche never finished his great project,” spake Zarathustra. “This was no accident. Before he uplifted, his access to the Hohe Stimmung was limited — It was impossible to Think his highest thought — of the lived experience of flux being the differential object of his highest thought, and — in light of his repeated failure to make an object of difference — which had disclosed itself in the passage of the gateway of the holy moment, to him — as the necessary principle of genesis — Any attempt to Think,” spake Zarathustra, “Let alone to transcribe the truth of his lived affirmation of the transcendental principle of difference was, obviously, necessarily doomed to be improperly expressed — how could it be? — speaking of the concealed univocal truth, which, no matter how candidly (or dramatically) it has been unconcealed — no matter how elegant, nor witty — it being sufficient in its incomplete form, that is, not collected into a book, or a dogmatic principle. Always! What a foul word! Nietzsche collected fragments. I’m referring to Nietzsche’s scribbled aphorisms scattered about his oeuvre, but also amidst that volcanic-island mine-field of his notebooks evidencing his hauntingly obsessive, fatal, destinal, phantasmal desire, chosen in reverence to the only dogmatic principle the logician has even found, the lowest fat metaphysics you will ever find on the shelves, namely, the repetition of difference as the highest power to revered as real, this obsession had, for Nietzsche’s last two decades, commanded him the recurring rhapsodic affirmative expression. Those maddening attempts to capture the The Eternal Return of Difference, for which he is revered for writing down, shamed for having left if seemingly unfinished, and infamously for claiming it’s the best we can do until we evolve again,” spake Zarathustra. “I not only refer to those frequent possessed outbursts Nietzsche exhibited toward the end of his life, in which he reportedly channeled a thousand voices like churned milk of seemingly endless and increasingly erratic notes of the our shared pallet. His failure to write The Book of the the Return was his crowning anti-publication. His published cannon includes a pair of empty parentheses, his white whale, shots fired over the bow, harpoon etchings hidden below deck of his private and professional notebooks, deep in the bowels of the Nachlass, showing for once not his successful witticisms, but those failed attempts as well,” spake Zarathustra, “Which only worked for him because it captured best in silence the idea which cannot be written nor taught, only known. Thus,” he spake, “the holy thread of Nietzsche, his planned capstone performance-art piece of abandoning his attempt to write the book in good faith played out in an informative form madness which left us and him that necessarily gap in reverence to the incompleteness of truth and its return as the principle of life, as evidenced by the novel play of dramatic insanity scrawled on the surface of his flesh.”

Zarathustra pointed to the madman in the hollow.

“Consider this Wilhelm Sebastian Mahatma creature, who he attempts to express this truth for us every day, and fails, yet returns every day to teach you,” spake Zarathustra, “And is mocked for it!” Wynona, the Amish, and the dire wolf looked-up, but the other nine apostles in orange robes stayed transfixed by the fire.

“Watch him succeed at life by failing to fully consume himself every second he is alive, if magnificently, by grace of his noble lack of inhibition,” spake Zarathustra. The dire-wolf bristled, if incredulously.

“And for what?” Zarathustra asked. “Countless plenty of noble truths have been recorded (less than we have forgotten) by the fallible minds of men. ‘What is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled?’” quoth Zarathustra. “Heraclitus ironically survived, as remembered by (and in spite) of his dignified deference to the absurd Law of Amnesia, thy material edict of Thou river Styx to pass on to the fields,” spake Zarathustra,” Forget that pesky unthinkable baby thrown with the bathwater, hole-in-the-bucket rendezvous with certain Doom amidst uncertain odds to return the lesson of recurrence — dear Liza, dear Liza, the bucket, a hole! — Nietzsche’s magnum opus, titled, How to Bail river water with Sisyphean Resolve — baby be damned!!! — and throw it all out by accident for what I care, just throw it!!! — we can get another one, because the repeating principle which eternally returns as the univocal foreskin is the new simulacrum sleeve of radical difference in principle life and its eternally new dialectic sleeve which generates life through the meme, by which I mean it selects and evaluates life —

The meme has merit or it dies and the process it wild, but automated just like Descartes’ ducks, but we can too can reanimate, by which I mean, we have the same power, the same transcendental way, radically ex nihilio, or by passively rendering the infinitely pregnant virtual hidden dimensional capacities of each new singular moment of passage underwritten each by the signature truth, guaranteed to last no more than it takes to wink (minimally, that much we can say),” spake Zarathustra, “Namely, true by virtue of the event ‘it happened;’ it having been; or having become, phenomena in passage; ergo, every passing  phenomenon exposes the only principle which happens to return true, and truly it returns, so long as we are here ready like radical Humeans, and probably when we’re not, too, but it doesn’t matter, because we have to let it go, and when you let it go, you let it go in good faith, and watch it come back here to the moment exactly the same, except altered in its recurrence this being its principle which is always already destroyed once created itself in into an expression of the being of the becoming because no matter how well you say the object of the highest thought is what I am referring to, nor poor you say it, like me right night, because it’s the newest of new, right up to your face and diss you, that meme thing, and thus,” spake Zarathustra, “the meme is always becoming by the principle of the repetition of difference, disclosed by its prevaricating form of truth, complicit in the concealment of its own revelation as part of its necessary existential being, of which, most flawlessly sublime when rendered by that simplicity of a well-cured silence between silly dank notes of a musical salami-salad, which inevitably follows a real or unwritten symphony, like a statue hidden from Michelangelo a brick of marble,” spake Zarathustra, “And silence stacks, mind you, the repetition is important, each duration in hindsight has become a critical moment for becoming uncanny phenomenal a veils fruition of truth wrought from illusion of necessarily doomed attempts, which, if failed in good faith I do affirm by experience that the failures actually resolve those note left virtually unresolved by the intervals between notes, like the last note of a free jazz concert,” Zarathustra paused — (     ) — “by leaving it that way,” and as he spake he studied the myriad eyes and appendages of the apostle machine gathered around his hearth. “Under the right conditions; amorous, bestial, violent, aesthetic, et cetera, an astute free-thinker such as ourselves, and each according his or her sling twang, each about how taught which slung sling’s tension done rightly shot or not arisen wisely or dependently as the rarest simulacrum of form, the meme of the meme, historically brought about by, for instance, a most radical, horsewhippingly hot, quotidian, poetic, afternoon, as that which inspired the noblest of sirs, Frederick Wilhelm Nietzsche, into a chain of affirmations so very intensive they uplift the body into flesh as seamlessly as the chiasmic wormhole slides passage unto the plane of immanence affecting that transmutation from beast, to body without organs, inasmuch as its the eternal return of the meme which recreates the world recurring eternally new much like an eternal meme competition cranked to that maximum intensive velocity achievable without dying and the scale of its rush feels endless, however without warning the secret passage closes our wormhole of truth as it jumps states of being like water exploding from a kettle which roars if blaringly loud enough for us freethinkers to hear the silence and spirits who dare to sharpen their genetic, ontological, schizophrenic antennae, on the indecipherable duration of the unfolding world until like the pencil lead it’s from the surface of touch into a shape identical of the image of one’s affective desire (in his case we have to imagine Nietzsche transmuting into a donkey tripping balls with his ears grown inordinately long to the ground listening to the rumble of ancient elephants broken by the army of Alexander the Great) but still somehow miraculously to still be possessed with the blindly magnanimous wherewithal to Think, I beg of you, in the mode of protean Neo-classical formal prepredicative syntax for which we have to imagine something like looking into Aleph and being able to read and babble in the eternal moment of the infinitely phased Logos, like Nietzsche in his final years, ultimately blind, as far as future prophesy goes (how did Borges get that so wrong?) the virtual snapshot nonetheless cinematic is nevertheless affirmed as the eternally new image of thought for the Philosophy of the Future deigned by the keen light of retrospective reflection if observed, for example, by crawling under the stairs in the basement of a dusty old Argentine residence, by contorting oneself in such a way that the secret decoder ring Aleph enlightens the view finder of a hidden shared perspective (which this in the Aleph passage can be powerfully comprehended as the infinitely phased and endlessly phasable passage of duration such that for a given subjective history one can readily glean from this perspective, although unlikely, and see for your own eyes the integral future series of the possibility of becoming, unbecoming before your eyes, tracked and faded, from the perspective from the arches of the gateway of the Aleph, where the future is becoming more than likely, now as ever, a series of rapidly accelerated anticipations and dispersals exponentially adding, yes, even those which be subtracted are still affective in relation to the whole picture of past futures being born hot, like solar systems from a celestial furnace, or murdered, if predictably, like planets carelessly neglected, or astronomically more unlikely the rare but always exciting, the witness to the birth of a star from dust),” and thus spake Zarathustra, “Maybe Borges was right about the Aleph. I heard that he had heard his own version of the story from an unreliable friend named Daneri — I also heard that the real aleph was hidden in Persia, buried secret under the sands, precisely for those who read the pregnant silence between the lines of Nietzsche’s unwritten (written) magnum opus, and the divine, well enough to discern the inseminate call of the fertile sign of transcendental life or, ‘difference,’ the eternal phantasm of the new, thus,” spake Zarathustra, “Go, I beseech Thee. Go. Hog. Wild! — with original conceptual interpretations of the usual suspects of same cold metaphysical phantasms, those which do not happen to possess the necessity of the principle of difference,” spake Zarathustra. “Then you tell me who spins their wheels in the hollow. Nietzsche knew all too well that we as he would fail to finish each our own versions of The Impossible Book of Return, and that even if we succeeded (even by not trying to succeed), this is bad faith, which would being undignified and tenuous as declaring oneself the, ‘At long last heralded Assassin of Metaphysics,’ or anything less than a well-qualified failure, and yet Nietzsche, far from despair (or from that quotidian form of nihilism), encourage use from beyond the grave with his affective lesson of the Teacher of the Eternal Return — Here Ye! Hear Ye! Try and fail infinitely into the future and by this practice might we find solace in our hearts from the inner logician who denies access to the divine,” spake Zarathustra. 

“Nietzsche signed his unwritten masterpiece with the signature of Nobody, this sad king, humbled by his own ability to walk, but not teach, nor understand what he taught, and yet in that unhealthy state of mind, there was a sign that pointed his ashes to the mountain by summoning the strength to lift the crown in the royal hand of the Philosopher King, he or she or xe who embracing the beginner’s mind, being ready to wear the crown of the Teacher of the Eternal Return, carry fire to the mountain the untempered ethical and ontological lesson of eternal recurrence and thus to teach oneself how to teach by practice alone, not in a classroom — the world is the classroom — becoming the lesson, the student, the teacher at once, by walking the comfortable gait of your stride,” spake Zarathustra.

“How could one EVER finish a book whose subject conceals as much as it discloses? A lifetime? How can we die affirming the heartwarming absurdity of difference? Look up in that tree! He teaches us how to die each moment.”

The billions of nihilist avatars in the boughs of the baobab tree cheered, if loudly, perhaps because Zarathustra had finally taken a spoonful of his own pharmakon and shut the cuck up, or perhaps because they had begun to studying the madman in the hollow popping a zit on his nipple with his bloody, bony, finger-nubs — drumroll — success, from which that zit now ran warm puss down his hairy man-boobs like a tiny cosmic donut creamed-pied a comet now wiggling its way down his furry abdomen dragging a slug-trail tail with it like a bloody meridian streaking down about to drip onto his pot-belly when, Lo and behold, Wilhelm the Anti-Christ managed to plop that tiddy, if squarely in his mouth the whole donut — the hole, too — and well enough albeit cheekless to slough that cream with his tongue and slurp it down past his yellow teeth like marrow with all the suck he can muster, which he found worked best upside-down while flailing his tongue and slurping loudly which meager drippings he could with that shorn, cheeckless, mouth-guard of his.

And the ravers raved-on.

The townies in the commercial belt no longer bother calling wares.

After the lecture Wynona approached Zarathustra with the Amish at her side. The latter lit the teacher’s long-stemmed pipe before his own stubby corncob with a match. Zarathustra thanked the Amish for being here, then mentioned to Wynona that he had been meaning to spake to her at the earliest, which might also be the latest, he correctly surmised, if quixotically.

“How did you do it?” spake Zarathustra, of how Wynona appeared on the Mirror and managed to start a compatible chain before she had merged ledgers?

“A paradox,” Wynona said. “Just like my husband used to say.”

The dire-wolf growled.

Was Nona tapping Ham the Man?

“Who? What husband?” Karl was always the clueless.

“The one who taught me how. I was instructed not to say his name, onchain,” she whispered with a smile. Zarathustra looked at Wynona, if gravely, then at the Amish, at both with the full permanency of his realtime blockchain records query-and-response shjardbase weighing-in on his periphery, double-checking his results analysis with Cici, and then he sighed, raised the brightness on his face and halo under and around his wizard hat and humbly doffed it in order to congratulate them both, and their dire wolf, on their newfound transcendent will to power of becoming the welcomed guest onchain — even if they snuck past him onto the Mirror, he joked, as he spoke highly of their capacity for transcendental upliftive power, “that is,” spake Zarathustra, “to play the welcoming host.”

But when the phony wizard duffed his cap the crown of Zarathustra tumbled to their feet and it rolled into the fire. The other nine apostle stayed transfixed. The dire wolf plunged headlong into the flames. The Amish and Wynona plunged FULL-TILT after the dire-wolf. The dire wolf recklessly scavenged through the carnal embers if upturningly with its nose coal and hot orange underbellies of log-sized coal.

This is what it takes, apparently, to ‘transcend’ by reason?

“Ha-ha,” laughed Zarathustra, “A noble accident,” he declared, if awkwardly flat then forcefully jollied.

— “Ha-ha-ha!” —

“Is the boy safe,” Zarathustra whispered through the flames in front of his teeth to Wynona except in the secret language of in Marla’s childhood.

Winona started to cry. The Amish was nobody’s fool. “He’s safe with us,” he whispered from the raging fire pit while scratching his red chinstrap and plucking the suspenders of his overalls with thumbs, puffing on his corncob pipe, as the last three apostles went up in flames. Cici blew leaned on the trunk of the baobab tree blowing on bubbles.

Zarathustra spake with or without her approval.

He didn’t need her, he claimed, she only saved him time.

“Whatever happens today you mustn’t let him return to Earl City, especially not with that watch,” Zarathustra counseled as they faded offchain with the dire-wolf still hounding with its nose looking around that crown and they burned offchain.

“If there aren’t more uplifted by the time he attacks,” spake Zarathustra in the last picosecond — and he around the tier to the empty space around the baobab tree, “I say it not lightly that the very destiny of the world is in your hands,” spake Zarathustra so rapidly it entered their memory without having heard it. Wilhelm Mahatma howled to the moons. As the Amish had faded he signaled as quickly to Zarathustra, “It’s under control. The less you know, the better.”

Zarathustra had called after him if at the speed of light. “I’m cursed to know nothing!” With his last faded gesticulation, the Amish reminded the Teacher of the Eternal Return — something Karl had once said.

“Cici has no side,” he warned.

Zarathustra distractedly reached for Wynona’s hand, the dire-wolf yelped, and then they finally disappeared completely offchain. King Zarathustra fell to his knees in his robe and he cried. The madman jeered like an ape.

The avatars in the boughs sat pensively as if they had forgotten a duty while also remembering that indeed they had one, but what was it?

Cici put her hand on Zarathustra’s shoulder. They too disappeared.

The last nine lost apostles stared into the flames like it was the first television but had never crawled inside to burn for themselves.

Author Description

The Meme of Zarathustra

Hemingway said to start writing with one true line. In ontology that line is already written for us. According to Zarathustra, teacher of the eternal return, difference is the only non-dogmatic principle mankind has ever discovered. The question of humanity is the question of being thrown in the world with others who evaluate life by which rule life evaluates us, by the selective principle of difference, or what is sometimes called, ‘the eternal recurrence of difference.’

In my master’s thesis, I basically argued that there are a lot of interpretations of the eternal return, but only Deleuze’s interpretation is the necessary interpretation of Nietzsche’s concept — as the eternal return of difference — the others, such as the eternal return of the same, secondary. This piece is a literary extension of that thesis, a stand-alone excerpt from the upcoming (ahem) unrepresented novel, Hard Fork, a scene which takes place onchain the VR blockchain around a topological baobab tree, which can be understood as the symbol of Heidegger’s Da-sein, which means being-there or there-being, the site of the ontological question, for we are the being who asks the question of being.

I was asked to cite my references for this enfolded piece of literature, but how does one cite the evidence of je ne sais quoi, the unknown and in fact unknowable variable, that ubiquitous return of the simulacrum of difference in all the unknowable forms it takes of life, i.e. those mutable velocities and intensities of forces constantly competing for the chance to genetically return in its relatively stable form, or die.

Verily, the lived experience is the best teacher of this truth of difference. Barring access to that, or a heroic dose of LSD, the reader is invited to read Heraclitus, Nietzsche, and the latter’s two best readers, Heidegger and Deleuze, on the subject of the eternal return. Also Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. What they have in common is that they are radical philosophers of material difference, that is, phenomenologists. They assume nothing. If the reader is still bored after reading said august minds, or prefer the poetic-philosophical, Cliff’s Notes version written by Zarathustra, Teacher of the Eternal Return, you’re going to devour this little literary treat I wrote especially for you.

In said ardently philosophical and blatantly poetic scribblings, I make also the following literary philosophical arguments, stretching the truth if you will, for the purpose of literary entertainment, and, at the risk of Nabokov wagging a finger at me for it, some light pedagogy, namely:

1. Nietzsche wasn’t crazy; he uplifted to the ecstatic plane of the hohe Stimmung, and due to his massively educated brain, was the closest thing to an open book to the Logos history gas ever seen, if for the last ten years of his life.
2. Nietzsche didn’t fail to write his magnum opus on The Return — the lesson of the eternal return of difference lay in his very failure to write it, his genius being to sign those fragments, (as we all might), if did we dare attempt lift that slipperiest of corona, that of Zarathustra, Teacher of the Eternal Return.
3. Nietzsche’s philosophy (as read by Heidegger and Deleuze) allows for the destinal return of new gods, of which none if real can escape the so-far infallible principle of difference.
4. The literary conclusion being something like Nietzsche’s Destruktion is a path to New Sincerity and the eternal Philosophy of the Future, until it isn’t, but for now, if a character were to practice lifting the slipperiest crown, as did Zarathustra, to grasp in-hand the Corona Australis, and, were then able somehow to fling it into the night stars stars, as did Dionysus, then, to affirm the ensign of the highest and only immutable meme of difference, then one is both student and teacher of the simulacrum.

… with a pinch of luck and long enough ears we might comprehend what happened today around the baobab tree as you the reader are invited to the picnic to witness the erroneous and necessary gap of knowledge governed by the principle of difference which allows for human exploration, experimentation, navigation of the violent, absurd, and indifferent, seas of will to power.

We subdue the absence of color by the magical capture of the word, ‘black;’ in much the same way the truth of the genesis of our human experience of being thrown together into a world of absurd flux is concealed in the truth of its disclosure of (firstly) selected material values as well as in the repetition of that disclosure, that is, our (secondly) selection of incomplete ideas, we form of the impossible object of thought, namely, affective difference, or as Nietzsche calls it, the eternal recurrence of will to power. Thus, if you take anything away from this piece, before you burn it, read: the eternal return is the unknowable variable of excess we must face, or risk being the worst, one of Holden Caulfield’s odious phonies. And humans, besides being the ontological being, the being who asks the question of being, are phony, when we think that being born to live and die is special, except, that if like everything else, including even perhaps the gods themselves, we accord to the principle of difference, then we are also sacred keepers of time, that is, the site of the genesis of temporality. That’s us, fellow humans. Being as time. As far as we can reason, we are the creation of time as such, and through its affective becoming, prove arbiters of our own values, be we so brave to fail. More importantly, therein we find the facticity of our own being-finitude, the site of the repetition of the genesis of material values, material selection, and thus too exhibit a transcendental, radical-material ethics, truth, in short, with a nod to Foucault, an ontology of power.

That, in fact, the whole shebang runs on the engine of difference because as far as we can know, the selection for life is the selection of immanent values, namely, the first and last things we can say about the world, as did Spinoza, nature is univocal difference. Wow, Look! — a recurring series of competing forces — a film without a frame — if not for us cinematic beings, the ontological creatures being in the world creating this matrix of ideology, a second layer of intensive aesthetic selection atop the absurdly affective first, both as real as a slap to the face. And, why? Because the eternal recurrence of will to power affects, it affects us, the ontological and temporal beings with the capacity (idea, bodies, and/or power), to select our own values, even those more powerful than us ourselves, subdue it, not unlike how we subdue the absence of color, ‘black,’ by the magical capture of the word. Our fable begins onchain around a topological tree on the VR blockchain yet with this impossible object of the sign of difference on our minds. Slippery is the crown —

Message from Zarathustra: By the way, if you find another non-dogmatic principle out there in the wild, hmu. Flip ya fo real.

Michael James MacLaggan is a Deluzean scholar, earned a BA in Advertising if only to get rid of him quietly after he gambled and won on a Capitalism and Schizophrenia inspired anti-consumerism diatribe in lieu of his creative portfolio. He hustled grass and partied his ass off for nearly a decade before pursuing an MA in philosophy to insure his brain worked after all those drugs. It did. While studying under Dr. John Protevi his thesis was approved, “Three Readings of the Eternal Return,” and he had his first encounter with Mark Fisher of Zer0 Books.

He wrote his first novel philosophizing the jungles of Laos, Peru, and Real de Catorce, Mexico as the backdrop, where met his doñita dulchita amante cósmica trece años su mayor. He now splits time between Tenochtitlan, and Tepoztlán, home of Quetzalcoatl.

Michael has recently completed his second novel, Hard Fork, which draws on his travels and the Nietzschean ethico-ontology of difference.

About Post Author

Michael MacLaggan

See author's posts