33

by Ştefan Bolea
translated from Romanian by: Zenovia Popa
click pentru versiunea română

It took me 33 years to realize I love life. In fact, it was necessary to get to this age to realize I have a passion for truth. How much harmed me Eminescu’s equivalence between „truth” and „superfluous” when I was 16! I turned it into a life principle and I got lost between the truth of the lie and the lie of the truth. How else could the marriage of lie and truth be translated but by Maya? Can someone honestly say they would rather have self-consciousness than illusion? Illusion projects us into being and oblivion while self-consciousness is infected with death and illness. At a certain point one must wake up from Maya, one must open one’s eyes, otherwise one will be doomed for ever in the uterus, in the incubator. To say I love life, to realize I accept it with all its capital of hazard, contingent and – sometimes – misery requires from me a courage I did not think I possess. The preeminence of the non-being onto the being is the main resolution of nihilism, its supreme arché. In the dark night of Schopenhauer you ask the dead if they want to come back and if they refuse, they choose anesthesia, apathy, adiaphoria. For the very fact we are mortals and our life goes towards degradation and decline and because pain is the queen of the world, because sometimes fear sings a sonata for hatchet, clarinet and piano where severed heads are thrown on the keys, it is difficult to choose between Schopenhauer’s Nirvana and Nietzsche’s Maya, between absolute extinction and the test of eternal return. Nothingness utters its last word even when your soul expires, this being the „small vehicle” of nihilism common people practice. You see so many empty souls, so many „live dead” people, practicing destruction like a colony of beetles in the heart of a giant, in Hera’s recess. You see masses controlled by media, imbued with the pus the newscasters spit from the TV sets: for example I am wonder-struck at dogs being demonized and more and more drones withdraw before my fox-terrier („my! It may bite me!”), as if I am supposed to put it a muzzle. The nihilism of the lesser ones lacks grandeur; moreover, it is a mechanical reflex. Most people are puppets, most people lack value, most mean nothing. Tell them and they will hate you, they will keep a distance, and they will search for comfort in conformism, in the symphony bleated in the safety enclosure. Since Lautréamont, generous spirits practice the „great vehicle” of nihilism in packs or in one-soldier armies and perhaps wolfs will one day strike the mortal blow to peons huddling together, that have no soul, no face, do not understand the notion of individual and whose real name is „legion”. But enough about the superfluous … The non-being is primary, I was saying, because it freezes the last breath and because pain breaks into the core of the being as the silhouette of the god Pan projects in the afternoons bathed in the light. Which is the only argument against the non-being? The only argument against nihilism? Clearly excellence! When you cut the death head, the heads of fear and pain appear into the hydra of the existence …You will beat the armada of demons, the monstrous coalition of failure, misery and insufficiency, if, in the last moment of your life you will have, like Beethoven, the feeling of the conquerer: amor fati, es muss sein … Your soul treading the dead and transgressing all the universe will accompany the inferno with storm! One must overcome one’s condition and leave the planet while nature breaks ground and the cosmos lays the axe to the root of the tree!