Nietzsche Contra Brunk

circa 2008

Nietzsche Contra Brunk

     by d’ Ouglasrei Mer

Here is a terrible story that happened to Noger, one of my friends. Nichard, his dad, pretended, no matter what the circumstances, to love Noger’s sister, Ephegenia, and his mother, Patriswill, a great deal, but pretended to love Noger only if he unfailingly did as he was told. Does that make sense? Go to Zarathustra for advice on this. In fact, Nog’s dad loved no one. Do you know how you can tell if someone loves or only pretends to love? You can tell by if you feel loved by that person who is in a state of supposed-to-love-you.

     I need to establish here right from the start that I (who write this reflection) am not Douglas Reimer. I am someone who admired Reimer but with whom I have not had contact for many years. And, if truth be told, I don’t expect that he would remember having known me if we met at some social event. Although some might blame his forgetfulness on a habit he picked up when he was in the North, teaching high school English in Thompson, MB. Each Friday, the moment school finished for the week, Reimer and a couple of his cronies headed out to the Mystery Lake Hotel to drink beer and consort with each other, telling tall tales and what not. 

     It therefore behooves us to consider that Reimer might, to some degree or other, be afflicted by an addiction to drink. That would not surprise me since he had about him a personality that sometimes went off the rails both in emotional outbursts about value systems and government attitudes as well as in unpredictable violence towards his fellow man if he fancied himself crossed. That is, if he found—despite being handicapped by extreme myopia—someone criticizing or trivializing something he firmly believed (fellow drinker or friend or some incidental wit about town), he frequently liberally pummelled such a one about the head and groin and beat him senseless. 

     If you know Reimer at all or should happen to encounter him, be sure to treat him with great deference, and assume towards him a sincere attitude of submission because he will seek ways of testing you to perceive whether you have that about you that finds humour in his views. And he is very powerful. I have seen him lift a 300 pound man bodily into the air and toss him, like so much flotsam, against a brick wall without any effort at all.

     My name is Lloyd Purloin, and I have volunteered my skills and services to the school district of Hamiota for the last three decades. Now that I am of retirement age, I find myself with time on my hands enough to pontificate about such matters as Love and Truth and Care. Furthermore, I feel it necessary to exercise my meagre talents for the benefit of the people in my community. So, I participate in a number of group events such as the Boys Club run by our church. I serve as leader of this club. We do outdoor nature activities during the winter and summer, approximately once every two or three weeks. I also sing in the local choir and my bass voice has been likened by monotones to the croaking of an octogenarian bullfrog and by mellifluous, gifted singers as someone who, with the right sort of training, might’ve actually managed to go someplace with it!

      I blush to say that I take responsibility for feeding the town’s chickens and pigs and do so every day after a supper eaten with Madelina, my wife of forty years. I spend these workdays alone, looking to the needs of the pigs and chickens, unhurried, unnoticed by any overseers. Consequently, I enjoy easy access to the grain storehouses of the town. Much as I am tempted on occasion to do so, I never steal the amount of even a bushel of the grain that the municipality provides to be deposited in these animals’ food troughs.

     Why is the story with which I began a terrible one? It’s terrible because the person who desired to be loved so much turns out to also withhold love from his sons and daughters. He appears to love his daughters but not his sons. He does not feel any compunction about visibly not loving his sons. Why is that? Ah, that is the thousand dollar question, as my father liked to say. He does not feel worried about not showing love to his son because you are allowed in our society to show love for women without loving them in actuality. You are compelled to think this way by the averages and overwhelming percentages of males who do just that, show love for women without actually loving them. 

     All love for women, as well as all love by women—that is if it’s visible and notable—is such love. It is hypocritical. It is done by you in order to manipulate others to be controlled by you. Why do I say that such outrageous love is participated in by so many? Ask not me, for I have such a short text to write this in, but ask my mentor, M F Nietzsche, the one who married that unwanted sister in that African state. He knows what I mean and he can explain it much more satisfactorily.       

     Check out his idea about resentèment. The weak, he says, which make up most of Christian society, are taught to love and improve, which he (Nietzsche) explains actually means not to love and improve but to hate and get worse. The social constructions “love” and “improvement” are subtle means by which the strong are coerced by the weak, by the group. The strong, enlightened master can then be defamed, vilified by and made weak by the slaves (the group) who are never satisfied until no one is unequal. That is, the social push towards automatic equality gets rid of the good stuff and replaces the natural good with the stealthy subversive. So, increasingly, even the strong ones (the good, independent ones)  must bow to the group (the sneaky, collaborating ones). 

     Copulation! Don’t engage in it. It will only bring you sorrow. Many have done just that and suffered for it. You reach for the other, you put it in there, you sit around till your body recovers, you go to do the dishes in the kitchen and then you go to sleep, and wake next day only to copulate once more. Babies come from this activity and they follow the same routine one day themselves, and so the cycle of copulation, with its whispered endearments, the cycle of reproduction, continues to this very day. 

     Now, Noger, as I began to tell you, whose father Nichard loved him not a whit, grew up and retaliacted. Nichard did, however, have a daughter whom he loved with a great show of kindness and a great public show of affection. Nichard made a display of loving this girl, plus he publicly expressed fine sentiments towards his wife of thirty-two years. So much so that at restaurants or in church, he took her into his considerations and smiled with shy nicety at her whenever he felt like it and whenever someone was watching him and he could make his sentiments known there, and consequently voiced abroad via the social grapevine. 

     But I heard him! Never mistake my ears. My eyes may be weak and unseeing (almost as diminished as Reimer’s themselves), my feet big and stumbling, my intellect wavering, my boat a bit ostentatious for the others in my cottage community, but my ears hear and know. I heard the following on one occasion when Nichard came into the room where Noger and I were discussing renovations to create a much needed laundry and bathroom. He said in a quiet voice to Noger, as if I wasn’t there, but decidedly meant for me to hear,

     “Remove that cat.” That was it. I knew then that he did not love Noger. He put his arm around Noger’s sister’s shoulders and gave a friendly-looking squeeze whenever the opportunity presented itself. Furthermore, Nichard spoke with great and lengthy love about her (Ephegenia), and Ephegenia was obligingly demure and darling to him at all times, submissive and respectful. Ephegenia showed every sign of loving her father. 

     But then why did Noger also visibly love Nichard? Why did he stand there for a moment, then quickly bend obediently to fish the cat (Clucky by name) out from under the hide-a-bed and carry him out of the room if he knew that his father showered love on Ephegenia but never on him? Why did he obey his father’s quiet, unkind command with such speed as opposed to yawning and telling him to “Buzz off. Do it yourself?”  He did it because he still wanted his father to love him. His father had for twenty four years already not loved Noger and shown him only insults as a way of getting him to adopt his work and moral values, but to no avail. What Noger did eventually do, however, was to accept Nichard’s bargaining way of raising sons and daughters. 

     Read Toews’ Swing Low. It’s a perfect example of the lover who is in fact a manipulator. The protagonist, Mel Toews, runs his family by terrible control. Weak, sniveling, puling, whiney, spineless, subhuman, he gets his way continually by quiet, shy, vicious irony. The irony is the two-headed calf. It is the January of love. It is the winter of my discontent. It is the passive hating man who ruins everyones’ lives. He is loved and clucked over by all who see him operating, except his family members who each, every last one, suffer dreadfully all their lives because he wants none of them to be stronger than himself. It is the necessity of the weak to keep all the ones within their power and influence even weaker than themselves. What violence. How he will writhe. 

     Do you know who in this world does not fear a Day of Judgment? It’s those who hurt others as a way of keeping them from winning the race they are running. The race they think they’re running. 

     

     

(To be continued)