Wednesday, January 11, 2012

what's the place of willpower?





i've always been suspicious of over-riding my feelings, for fear i'd lose all sensitivity, vulnerability, the ability to sense currents in the air and the news. i pretend to be an automaton, simply to throw people off the trail. i'm terribly uneasy at parties, for example, especially having sworn off alcohol. like everyone else i wear a blank look and a smile. anyone looking closely into my face would discover the contradiction. luckily, everyone else too focused on themselves to notice. 


the other day i grew annoyed with myself for being upset. an acquaintance with a bit of power over me suggested i'd lied. i proved to him i hadn't, yet in the process i  felt the old oedipal urge against the father. this pricked at me as i prickled. suddenly, i thought, 'do i want to be controlled by childhood all of my life?' no, i didn't, so i simply waved the torment away, or rammed it into my unconscious, i'm not sure which. i said to myself, 'i can be a man!' 


still, the rest of the day i asked myself, 'am i numb? have i voided my intuition? do i wish to be caesar or alexander the great? is that worth losing my poetic sensibility? hugh mccloed, one of my gurus, writes, power is always taken, it is never given. that i have pondered. say, j.p. morgan (picture above), what was the source of his wealth, banking? absolutely not, rather,  the knife in his hand. or look at krupp (picture below), financier of hitler, the greenish glow around him the aura of self-importance, even if he looks (and acted) like an icon of greed. 


along with that, there's leni reifenstal's movie triumph of the will, hitler riding in glory before saluting crowds. yes, we know what happened to him and the misery he caused,  this bad artist  rejected by the vienna art academy. if only they had accepted him ww II might have been avoided, his faint artistic ability overcoming his ire, which he made all of austria suffer for.  maybe he would have been softened up just enough. alas, history had something different in mind, using nietzsche's the will to power for it's own purposes.





i had to go smell the roses, simply to escape my damning ambition.  http://www.pbase.com/wwp/rose2