Die Symptome von der Wahrheit: Four Square-Built Vignettes

                                                                                                                                                                       A Short Story from A Murder of Prose
Copyright © Jon Cor

January 3^rd, 1889

The Piazza Carlo Alberto was of preference to the philosopher, a pedestrian thoroughfare laid only slightly apart from the noise and the traffic and the look-at-me look-at-me pretenses of inner Turin. Like him, in the drippy, blue-gray aftermath of a winter’s rain, not even the birds had any more yes than no to say as his wolfish, Germanic features snarled over the evening’s manifestos in starts and stops. He was neurasthenic, by definition, a condition as comprehensive and common as the wars that presumably caused it. Headaches. Fatigue. Reticence. Melancholy. Even so the philosopher did not fear the corporeal vomit, that is, the sicknesses retching in and out of a now-industrialized Europe as if to proclaim, “God is dead!” After all, to be without God is to be without right/wrong is to be without fear is to be – as this would later be understood – free.

But was it fear, he wondered? Fear that brought him to diagnose the sociopolitical symptoms of a species born and raised on… what.

Ideology?

Ideology, he decided, was as the Greeks said of beauty: In its own time.

What now. What next?

Amor Fati

Soon Nietzsche tucked his willowy black mustache, proud as a curtsy. Maybe he’d meant to applaud the end of the day’s performance, vital and cathartic, as a writer. It’s helpful, after all, over the course of one’s inherently formative lifetime to be the hero of your own story, to face adversity with a vigorously resilient or creatively adaptable trial-and-error-based perspective. Or maybe it was that Boreas, one of the many Grecian myths he’d read about like everything else, had just trumpeted a northern wind over what was previously the garden of the Palazzo Carignano; just a big green tongue now stretching out of the palace’s Baroque façade.

Convex.

Concave.

Convex.

Ever observant against this undulating backdrop, he looked into the crowd and blinked: Once. Twice.

Could he read their minds?

So many heads! So many innermostnesses dancing invisibly like the windblown achenes of a dandelion!

No. Impossible. Instead he found himself longing to experience romantic love – that special Everest of a feeling – in reciprocity and totality again; to transcend the semantic mess or the limitations of language through the tangling of toes and the bare, beating warmth of a woman’s chest. Yet no matter how shrewd and distinguished an intellect one’s personality might companion over the course of a lifetime, he knew, tainted by the eventuality of suffering, that scarcity or mortality, conceptually and otherwise, is and always had been singularly accountable for substantiating anything and everything with what we’ve come to refer to as value.

That even love is mechanically, molecularly designed to destroy itself.

Like you.

Hmph. Why bother?

Nietzsche sat compactly in his too-small frock coat, cold and blue as the stars that would soon hole-punch the sky into a kind of Heavenly sieve. Couples laughed, hand-in-hand. Pointing. Planning. Hoping. Buying.

Silently, he wept.

Not So So-So After All

He first noticed the horse drawing the carriage – its bony knees shaking like maracas under the weight of an evidently thankless and utilitarian existence – just as the sun finished rolling its last yellow-red carpet out over the horizon; which is exactly what had kept him from lumbering over to the nearest opium den to fuck it all in the first place.

He stood up.

He bent to his cane.

Upon closer inspection, squinting through the harsh, flickering luminescence of a sidewalk lined with arc lamps, the horse’s belly looked —

Distended and… dog-eared.

– as if it had been dragged through the streets!

Like the pages of my favorite book.

Had this equestrian, a precocial species capable of salient feats like running up to eighty kilometers an hour and sleeping standing up, actually had to lie down all of the sudden? Could its paltry three-dimensional station in, say, the Victorian Era’s so-called Great Chain of Being, God’s would-be decree of a naturally-occurring hierarchy, actually be that strenuous, that finally diminishing?

Nietzsche’s batwing brows flapped at the driver like those M-birds children are taught to draw as he marveled contemptuously at this wanton display of have and have-not, of master and slave.

Wait. What?

Had he not reinvented himself as the title character of his treatise Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a pilgrim that in celebrating a will to power instead of condemning it announces the arrival of the übermensch or, in close translation, of the superhuman, of one’s ability to cultivate his or her best self by way of decisive perseverance and self-discipline? Had he not immunized himself to pity, to the diseased, moral absolute that says it’s good to be without and bad to be with – a passive-aggressive means to take control of or to invert X power hierarchy through the extraneous and manipulative application of guilt and accountability – as propagated for example by the Judeo-Christians to take Europe just as they had taken Rome?

He could’ve covered his ears as the argument swelled in his skull in the intolerant, inconsolable shouting of two divorcing parents; his lower lip contracting into its familiar rictus of revulsion. But it was then, in contrast to his own interpretations of the cosmos, as the driver’s whip snapped up black as the tail of some vile demon and the horse neighed peremptorily, in fear, in pain, that Nietzsche was beset by that which an entire lifetime of philosophy was posited to abolish: Pity.

STOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP —

Bursting through the populous as if burning at the stake, he threw his arms around the animal’s neck. Was this to keep himself from succumbing to his lightheadedness or would its lusterless, nicotine-colored eyes somehow reveal the answers to questions previously unknown or unarticulated? “Egli è un pazzo!” cried a woman in a bodice, toppling over during the charge. “Sottomettere lui, sottomettere luiii-ui-ui…”

The philosopher wailed and ranted unintelligibly, gesturing wildly, his universe spinning like a top.

Looking into your eyes, we’re both pupils.

And then, just like that, everything slowing down, everything washing by in watery brushstrokes and changing in an instant… something squeezed at the philosopher’s wits like a sponge.

Piss.

Shit.

Hell.

Il Matrimonio Segreto

“— for the camera, OK.”

…

“Friedrich,” the voice said. “Friedrich?”

It belonged to alias Peter Gast, recording his closest friend and mentor’s movements for posterity in Weimar, Germany. He lifted one of the man’s fingers. He let it fall. “Elisabeth,” Gast gasped. “I… think he can hear us.”

Nietzsche, just a face in the folds now, half-man, half-rocking chair, minute by minute, day by day, did nothing more than stare out from a blanket; his breathing as measured and inhuman as the clicking of a metronome. Still. His fingers responded to gravity against the chair with a not altogether lifeless t’unk.

Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche came into the room.

“It’s doubtful,” she sighed. “See how he sits like a begging dog? His hand returns to his collarbone as soon as you let go of it.”

“But I-I thought…”

Gott —

Could it be that her mute, spit-dribbling brother had actually overheard their conspiracies – in addition to so many speculative words for his mental decline like blunt trauma, policeman’s truncheon, frontal lobe and do you know what tertiary syphilis is – when visited by dignitaries of the National Socialists with whom she and in largely coerced yet no less culpable ways Gast, even, passionately sympathized?

— ist —

Could it be that love, by way of selfless, out-of-body pity, was just too bright a light for one of so athletic and darkly set a philosophy to awaken to in a place like this? On Earth?

— tot, tot, tot, tot, tot, tot —!!!

Like a voyeur, Gast looked at his longtime teacher through the aperture. He looked at the tar pit pair of eyes that ticked and tocked there as if to signal some faraway toll of dread and “— prosperity,” Forster-Nietzsche interrupted, putting a hypnotic finger in the air as if putting a period at the end of the man’s sentence. “I miss him. You miss him. …We all miss him. But what we need now is his prose, Herr. What we need is one people, one vibrantly prosperous and naturally-owed Reich.”

“Elisabeth. Friedrich’s Prussian citizenship was annulled, Swiss naturalization papers unprocessed and the other, German, is meaningless as he was born prior to nationalization. He is stateless. He is useless. To these ‘political ambitions’ of yours, I mean. Simply and only a…”

Gast paused.

“Man?” she offered.

He considered this for a moment.

“…Or whatever’s left. Yes.”

“Tsk, tsk. My dear Peter… Is Friedrich’s academic celebrity, his influence not yet apparent to you? We mussst continue to use him.”

Gast wiped the woman’s conviction-propelled spittle off of his cheek discreetly.

Forster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s doughy-faced sister and letter-forging curator of his estate, cleared her throat before continuing. Used to be the philosopher would tease Gast for styling all but the least of his accoutrements after the late Beethoven’s “— like a sycophantic fool.” In fact – if anything is ever in fact, in fact – Nietzsche would visit his sister almost exclusively in order to abhorrently oppose not only the bulk of her political views but none so viciously or specifically as the anti-Semitic. She shared his blood whether he liked it or not and served as a project of sorts with whom the conversation at least was lively more often than not. He knew nothing of her late husband’s plan to establish an Aryan colony that would be known as Neuvo Germania in the New World. Only that maybe, one day, she might learn to see things differently. Intelligently.

Kindly.

“But now is never, ever then,” Forster-Nietzsche came to a point. …Had Gast been listening? Her shadow seemed to lengthen like an obsidian sail driven by a terrible wind as she stepped closer, her breath smelling of meat and cheese. “They’ll be back tomorrow. Same time. You will take their diction as you took his,” she said, her brother a helpless undead no-witness only meters away, “for which you will be handsomely compensated. Only from now on it will print in proper favor of the Teutonic races.”

“Are you suggesting,” Gast carefully phrased, “that I egregiously adulterate Friedrich’s unpublished work in such a way that it would, endorse… anti-Semitism itself and directly so at that?”

She smiled, tender in its own right. She looked at her brother again.

Would he suddenly shoot to his feet and roar, breaking her rocking chair along with his silence? Clearing his name? Exposing them?

“But wh—” Gast continued.

“Because, Peter,” she snapped, turning back to face him almost sublimely, a cruel yet no less fulfilling to her sense of certainty taking over like a controlled orgasm or a surge of warm bathing light. “Imagine a culturally-conditioned, willful, machine-like nation of jackboots. Imagine totalitarian totality! Economic growth as a family value. Emotional detachment and desensitization as a skill and a virtue. Why, with any luck, sooner than later —”

Yours will run out.