"Life is a jest and all things show it. I thought so once, but now I know it." You may have seen that tagged around the bathrooms of the Bay Area. It is the epitaph of poet/humorist John Gay, who lived, bemusedly it seems, in the seventeenth century. It is appropriate I feel, for bathrooms, where many of the more absurd qualities of life present themselves in harsh light -- the ridiculousness of sex, the final stages of digestion, the actual you facing the drunk you. As God is dead, meaning stripped from the world for good, this has been my mantra and my nihilistic gift to pissers everywhere. As all politics are local, then all morality is personal and that is the great galactic step one must take first to be free (=responsible). As my four year old daughter marvels and repeats, "Do you know, we are made out of stars? You are made out of stars!" This ceases to be a platitude when our random and meagre, but hereditarily grand assemblage is apprehended. It become an answer to the realpolitiks and every manner of conservative (nothing can be conserved). It is fatal to the most insidious sentiment which is nostalgia. It is a belittlement to the powers we serve or that hold power over us. The ubermench is not then a clear and dialectical giant among humanity -- a manifestation of objective logic. The ubermench is a person who has destroyed meaning completely and endeavors to rebuild it based on objective and subjective truths. But that, my friend, is the easy part. The challenge is to maintain and to adapt through compassion and willpower. What is the meaning? For each person it is unique, for each moment it is unique,. But it is not random and chaotic. It is the house we build to protect us from the cold of space and of nihilism, It is the soil we enrich with our degeneration and death. We who are thinking and feeling bundles of chance.
A new scrawl will appear in the bathrooms I visit with black felt pen:
BE EXCELLENT TO EACH OTHER
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