Neitzsche said “if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
This, and “god is dead” are the only quotations for Neitzsche I have retained from high school studies.
Neither is encouraging, but I am concentrating on the former now.
It seems I gaze, if not stare into an abyss of creativity most of my waking life. The abyss-gazing in my case consists of my attempts to radiate the warmth and light of the sun of my art out into a universe that quite clearly does not want it much of the time. It is in fact a shadow, a blackness, and total void of passion an interested.
Despite my often mentioned attempts to merely work for the process of it, giving little if any thought to the reception my work will inspire, I can no more avert my gaze from that abyss than an average B-Movie adventure character stuck on top of a precipice could heed the words, “don’t look down!”
Does the abyss stare back into me?
I don’t know. I guess in some ways it does. But unlike the concept I (think) Neitzsche was describing, I gain no further inside into who I am or what I am doing. It is just…an abyss into which I gaze, nay stare for much of my waking life hoping for something that is not there. And if old Friedrich is to be believed, the abyss finds almost the same level of insignificance gazing back into me during the whole affair.
It certainly seems not to pull anything of particular note from me as I sit here now, and ponder it, or when I do so any other time.
Nothing or artistic or literary merit, at least.
Then again, ir probably wasn’t supposed to. But then I wonder if I might be one of the few exceptions to the pronouncement in the first place–perhaps I do gaze into an abyss that does not gaze back.
- Posted in: Miscellany
Ty Unglebower 