Chapter1

Revision—the act of looking back,
of seeing with fresh eyes,
of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us
more than a chapter in cultural history:
it is an act of survival.
Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched
we cannot know ourselves.

When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision
Adrienne Rich

A starry black night is broken by a cold eye forever watching over the human sea of life. In relentless pursuit, the Sun guards the hazy horizon like an island of fire heating the earth, although this is not its real intention.

The glittering eye from the horizon knows about the theft of fire and is angry because we steal its energy. We capture its fire to live, and that is why the crimson ring is a noose around our necks, or better yet, a raw tattoo of smoldering iron carved in our hearts. If a watcher stares long enough at that unblinking hydrogen eye, he will understand as I do that it is a living organism out for revenge. Plagued by ideas such as these, my estranged state of mind forced me to quest for the eternal Death of the Sun.

Thoughts of this nature do not shape the destinies of the general rabble who question their existence, but such considerations have styled the lives of two individuals that I respect, a madman who despaired and a sadist who lived crazed by the belief that the universe is a purposeless, monotonous machine cycling round and round like the earth about the Sun.

Certainly, the sadist’s idea of a purposeless world is disturbing, but more disquieting is the madman’s warning, which haunts my mind like a thief stealing the remains of my sanity. He said that when a person gazes too long into the abyss, the abyss begins to gaze back. The horror hidden in this idea forced me to quit staring at the Sun.

Unlike the sadist, I could not believe that human existence had no purpose, and I doubt that Friedrich the madman believed this either, for he told me a story, a parable about a shepherd who was sleeping when a black snake crawled into his mouth and bit him. The snake was lodged in the shepherd’s throat, and Friedrich had tried in vain to rip it out. Finally, my friend screamed to the choking shepherd that he should bite the snake’s head off. Desperate, the shepherd brought his jaws down hard on the snake, bit off its ugly head and spat it out. Jumping up laughing, he was no longer a shepherd, no longer human, but changed and radiant, which plunged Friedrich into deeper despair and madness because Friedrich wanted the shepherd’s transformation. He wanted to be the Overman, a being beyond human, but he did not know how to make the change.

Before going completely mad, he told me more about his Overman, and I could see reason in his madness. Friedrich explained his makeover idea by saying that a human being was like a rope, with one end held by a beast and the other by the Overman. If a person could walk the tightrope from the beast to the Overman without falling, he would become the Overman.

“The object,” Friedrich said, “is not to let the jester pass you on the rope.”
When he first said jester, I imagined some fool balancing on the same rope and tripping me. But Friedrich explained that the rope stretched between two towers, and that I would come out of the small tower door on the left, followed by an excited jester, who would taunt me as I walked the rope. Friedrich agreed that the erotic clown would be hard to beat because he was behind me, and from this vantage point, he could easily threaten me with abusive shouting that I was lame, slow and should be locked back up in my tower.

Friedrich then said that when I least expected it, the hyper-freak would jump over me, throwing me off balance to crash to my Death. The situation seemed irreversible, but I could not give up Hope that there was a solution to outwit the jester.

“Is there any way I can trick the jester”—I said cleverly—“into coming out first so I won’t fall off the rope?”

Visibly shaken by my remark, Friedrich said, “I have never been able to overcome the jester. All that I can do for you is to pick up your corpse after you fall.”
Looking at Friedrich’s heartbreaking eyes, I could see his despair, and I sensed the beginning of my own. The tragedy of always trying and forever falling was disturbing, but an idea came to me.

What if Friedrich did not have all the information? Maybe he had overlooked some valuable piece of knowledge related to the jester, a mystery about the jester that if known would make it possible to walk the tightrope to the Overman. It then occurred to me that only a fool would choose to walk the tightrope with the joker behind him.

“You have no choice,” said Friedrich, “you are born to walk the rope and fall off.”
I insisted that there must be a solution, that he had overlooked something, but he sadly shook his head no. That was my last memory of the madman, for he had a complete emotional breakdown. In 1889, Friedrich witnessed a sadistic cab driver brutally whipping his carriage horse. Sobbing, Friedrich ran to the suffering animal, throwing his arms around its bloody neck to protect the horse from the merciless whip of its master.

Friedrich collapsed completely in the Turin street next to the horse. Even though he underwent psychiatric treatment, he never recovered, dying almost two years later on October 25, ten days after his fifty-sixth birthday. I was still carrying the corpse of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought with me, still thinking of a way to outwit the jester, when I read the works of the sadist, who was also missing valuable information.

According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders, a sadist is a person who inflicts physical or psychological suffering on another to achieve sexual excitement. The earliest age of onset is childhood and three criteria determine this disorder. For the purpose of sexual excitement, if one repeatedly and intentionally abuses a nonconsenting partner, or mildly or mortally abuses a consenting partner, then that person is a sexual sadist. The disorder can become severe, for some sadists rape, torture and kill their victims.

My friend Donatien was a self-professed sadist who only abused consenting partners. Yet, he was branded a demon, an alchemist, a Casanova, and a Bluebeard, who cut up his wives. Born into aristocracy, he was naturally arrogant, coming from a family well-known for their activities in civil and church affairs. Although neglected by his parents, household servants indulged him, and by age six, Donatien was tutored by his uncle, a friend of Voltaire’s. In time, Donatien understood that Nature was totally indifferent to the experiences in a man’s life. It did not matter whether one was dead or alive, imprisoned or free. Donatien understood this well, for he had spent twenty-eight years of his life in prison for charges such as not paying debts, excessive behavior in a brothel, and for writing and publishing his stories. One wonders what was true about his life and what was contrived to prevent Truth seekers from reading his writings.

One story has it that when he was thirty-two, he and his manservant Armand engaged four prostitutes to satisfy his flogging fantasies. All enjoyed the episode until Donatien offered the girls aniseed sweets laced with Spanish Fly. This resulted in the girls becoming very sick and Donatien on trial for poisoning and sodomy. Escaping to Italy with his wife’s younger sister whom he passed off as his wife, he was soon imprisoned by the King of Sardinia in a cell called the Great Hope, after his mother-in-law requested the King to arrest him.

Nonetheless, these reports of Donatien’s antics did not stop me from reading his writings. I considered him my mentor as I did Friedrich, even though Donatien sometimes acted like the cruel cab driver that tortured the horse. Like Friedrich after his breakdown, Donatien believed in nothing at all, except perhaps for a good flogging to relax oneself. To me, he was a free spirit, a rebel against the absurd as Camus perceived him, a revolutionary force for a change in thinking.

One day he told me that his storyline modus operandi of maiming, raping and humiliating women for male pleasure was just a literary technique to emphasize a point.

Wondering whether his misogynous method was that effective, I said, “Well, Donatien, it better be a good point because posterity has you labeled as a sexual deviate. They have taken your last name and made it a psychiatric disorder.”
The Marquis Donatien de Sade laughed and motioned me forward as if to tell me a secret that would change my life.

He said, “In the real world, virtue serves no useful purpose. Even a woman uses her virtue as a mask to disguise her physical weakness, while showing off her sexuality.”

The Marquis de Sade had little compassion for the weak or any guilt for his actions, and he believed sexual gratification was rooted in power over the weak, a power similar to Nature’s ability to forever rearrange indestructible molecules for its creations. Whether God is dead or alive did not matter to Donatien. What mattered to him was that knowledge and vice had rewards.

Emboldened, he continued, “The idea of heaven having power over us was designed by hypocrites and charlatans to deceive and suppress the strong.”
I listened to him curiously, wondering if war, murder and cruelty were really necessary, so I asked him the purpose of these crimes of strength.

“War and murder release atoms of matter for Nature to recycle,” he said. “It follows that mercy, Charity and virtue in general only help the weak to survive longer than necessary.”

Somewhat shocked, I sensed that he was telling me the Truth because he didn’t care whether I respected him or not. His libertine logic reminded me of the Irish poet Yeats who professed that the best means of achieving freedom was through battle, rage, drunkenness, sex and art. Like Friedrich, who believed that man could be described as a herd animal, Donatien compared the virtuous weak to lambs among the ruthless wolves that Nature favored. No wonder he aspired to be a wolf, for based on the limited Truth he understood from experience, he had lost Hope. The jester had beaten the Marquis de Sade.

The idea that the tragic visions of Donatien and Friedrich resulted from their being deprived of Hope by the jester haunted me. The jester understood the gag; he knew how to get the snake out of the shepherd’s throat, he knew how to stop the fall. If Nature were unstoppable, ruthless, uncaring and ruled by the urge to create and rearrange molecules, then it would seem that Nature could also reorganize a person into a being that did not root sexual gratification in power.

To me it seemed that the problem was the jester, who was hiding the answer to some simple mystery that could restore the Death of Hope. There had to be a way to force the jester to walk the tightrope first, tempting the stormy freak to reveal what he knew about becoming the Overman.

Tormented by these ideas, my entire existence has revolved around solving this riddle, especially since I met John Friedman, Irish by blood, impulsive by nature. This is as much a story about John and me as it is about the pursuit of Truth. As for my identity, I must remain anonymous due to the events that transpire, yet I can tell you that this story is about the power of the Imagination to discover a New World, one that we can live in with Hope, not despair. It is about giving up the ordinary life for the sake of a spiritual quest that discovers and unmasks the lost meaning of an ancient Egyptian legacy.

End of Chapter One.

Excerpt from Ch. 5 :

John and I packed just enough clothes and supplies--hiking boots, a jacket for the cool evenings, a couple research notebooks, and two cases of Coors beer, which we were now drinking and spilling all over the old Bronco as it lurched up the last dusty road to Lucia’s house. The Sun burned relentlessly above the mountains along the road, which curved sharply to the right, and the landmark we were looking for soon splashed into view. A natural granite-tiered waterfall spilled out of the rocky jawbones like a huge swirling tongue in a blank stone face. Against the walled sky of amethyst mountains, it rose before us like a mutant living thing, writhing, eyeless, menacing in its height.

Defensively, John swerved sharply almost missing the road to Lucia’s, then he downshifted the jeep to scale the last narrow incline. A red-tiled roof separated a tan two-storied house from the indigo sky. In the west, the red Sun was setting, muting the purple mountains that blended into the tawny gold desert below. Central to the Old World design of the Southwest, a double-arched entrance with potted Pindo palms landscaped the walkway leading east past the front door to a glass laboratory, where Professor Farrell sat writing at a cluttered desk. Through the laboratory windows behind her we could see a large inviting swimming pool, a cool oasis of glistening cobalt.

Excerpt from Ch. 6 - first 2 paragraph:

Everything was yellow when I woke up. There were no shades or curtains on the large window that faced east, no yellow wallpaper, only a huge throbbing Sun, turning the room glaring yellow. Sweating, I stared into the pulsating, menacing heart of hatred and it swelled hideously then splintered into thousands of jagged teeth. Blinded by the prophecy of horror, I collapsed on the carpet, creeping out of the room into the hallway without looking back.

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