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Ancient Greece Art Friedrich Nietzsche

Crusade

against the Cross, 8

The publication of Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music) caused so much trouble in the stagnant German-speaking academy that even when Rhode wanted to defend his friend Nietzsche against the attack of their colleagues, he was unable to obtain a professorship in Freiburg.

We are used to the culture of cancellation in the darkest hour of the West. This month, on the Führer’s birthday for example, Kevin MacDonald expressed his mixed feelings that his ideological enemy at Cambridge University, Nathan Cofnas, had been expelled for daring to talk about race and IQ. But already in 19th-century Europe things were far from an open marketplace of ideas. The aforementioned textual critic of the New Testament, David Friedrich Strauss, whom Nietzsche had read, was also unable to obtain a professorship after the publication of his book (even today academic exegetes don’t even bother to read Richard Carrier’s book about the dubious historicity of Jesus).

Once one understands that the academy is not the proverbial forum for an open marketplace of ideas, but for the ironclad and orthodox transmission of the paradigm of the day, one will understand that only the freelance philosopher will be able to write something worth reading. Always keep in mind that guys like Kant and Hegel didn’t openly contradict the interests of the State or the Church, so their obscurantist philosophies weren’t only tolerated, but promoted.

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche not only expounds the content of his study of the Greeks, but begins to shape his philosophy. The book is a hybrid of philosophy and philology, which is why Nietzsche himself called it a ‘centaur’. It deals with the birth of Attic tragedy, the motives that inspired it, and the causes of its demise. He aimed to interpret tragedy in ancient Greece, which differed from the concept that the learned had of it. The work develops the thesis that two great opposing forces govern art: the Dionysian force and the Apollonian force. These two forces, once united in Greek tragedy, were separated by the triumph of rationality with Socrates. Nietzsche hoped to rediscover this ancient union in the music of Richard Wagner, to whom he dedicated the book.

The Greece of the white sculptures came to us, but originally they were painted. (Something of this can be seen for at least a few seconds in Oliver Stone’s film in a scene of Alexander the Great’s father, though that film is generally Hollywood Greece rather than historical Greece.) And the same can be said of its architectural ruins: they were originally painted in bright colours, as can be seen in some contemporary reconstructions. To understand Nietzsche one would have to colour not only the sculptures and temple reconstructions, but the original pathos of Greek tragedy, insofar as the Germanic psyche of his time was burdened with what we might call an ogre of superego: something like baptising the pagans through the late saintly Socrates, a figure who doesn’t represent the violent origins of Greece and the ensuing tragedy.

For the man of our century, one way to grasp the controversy that Nietzsche’s first book sparked would be to watch a film like the tragedy of Iphigenia and compare it with thousands of Hollywood turkeys where we see no tragedy at all: the drama is simply resolved with a rational and even happy ending. Apollo is present but Dionysus is absent: prolefeed for the proles! If we take into account what we said yesterday about how the degenerate Aryan, emasculated by comfort to the point of losing the tragic sense of life—and Hollywood has played a central role in making us forget about tragedy and believe that life is merely a drama—we will have, perhaps, a distant analogy to what happened after the publication of Nietzsche’s first book.

Without going into the details, which can be read in scholarly biographies, Nietzsche had violated the rules of the philologists’ guild by saying that a German Renaissance could be catapulted by Wagner’s music. In The Birth of Tragedy a holy man, Socrates, was dethroned. I would add that, being physically ugly, Socrates was never a true Greek because in the real Hellas physical ugliness was almost a refutation (being the son of a midwife, the baby Socrates avoided premature infanticide by the eugenicists of the time). According to Nietzsche, the original tragedy was lyrical-musical, like Wagner’s musical tragedies. With Socrates and his calculating reason a dangerous optimism had penetrated the Greek psyche, and the original, deeply pessimistic tragedy died (I really suggest that any fan of Judaizing Hollywood watch the Greek film Iphigenia, linked above, to get a taste of what we are talking about).

Wagner went to great lengths to calm Cosima down from the shock of such iconoclasm, and she herself wrote to Nietzsche: ‘The master must have told you what excitement I have been in, and also that all night long he had to talk to me about it, with all the details’.

Wagner certainly applauded Nietzsche’s daring, but he feared greatly for his academic future. For in turning against the white Greece to which 19th-century Europeans were accustomed, introducing the violent colour of the original culture, as well as advocating a revival of Germanism thanks to Wagner’s musical dramas, the book was no longer a dull text: it was a political essay. By presenting himself not as an obscure Basilian professor whose texts are suitable only for colleagues but as a Dionysian dancer, Nietzsche, besides being too strong for the palate of his classicist contemporaries, was marked in relation to the notorious composer.

These were times when Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung—the most pagan and ambitious of his operas—was much talked about in Germany. He was still working on the last of the four operas in that series (see our summary from Wagner’s libretto here). Tannhäuser had been left behind in public conversation and the neo-Christian Parsifal hadn’t yet been composed. Nietzsche couldn’t have imagined that he alone would lead the way in transvaluation while the Wagnerians would take a step backwards. Only the next century Himmler and his kind would take steps forward on the psychological Rubicon instead of the fear that the Rubicon causes by stepping back (say, like the regressive step William Pierce took after the exterminationist The Turner Diaries with his next novel, Hunter, where Pierce introduces a Christian character as the good guy in his drama).

Before Parsifal the medicine that Nietzsche prescribed for the general malaise of the Germanic peoples was still sold in the Wagnerian pharmacy. Richard, in fact, invited Nietzsche, now his herald, and in Cosima’s diary we see that her husband even wept with happiness after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. Unfortunately, Nietzsche didn’t attend because that winter he suffered from the typical Christmas depression that invaded him on the darkest days of the year.

The King of Bavaria himself, a great friend of Wagner, let it be known via third parties that he had received Nietzsche’s book but didn’t comment on its contents. Ritschl, the representative of academic philology who had been so supportive of the young man, wrote in his notes not intended for publication that the book was ‘a witty drunkenness’. For what was already apparent in this essay was a desire to reorganise German culture and to declare conventional philology, so devoid of bright colours and the tragic meaning of life, dead. For the depressed Nietzsche all that suited him: to fight. He wanted to pick a fight to get out of his depressions!

And the fight actually came. One of the normies of the time, the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, who like Nietzsche had studied at the boys’ cloister, asked the professor to leave the chair and wrote a pamphlet denouncing The Birth of Tragedy, where he writes: ‘What a shame you inflict, Mr Nietzsche, on Mother Pforta’ and later added that Nietzsche had degraded all that he had been taught as untouchable and sacred. Biographer Ross comments: ‘The serene Hellenism… was like a piece of religion for bourgeois and intellectuals that would not be extirpated’. For Wilamowitz had grasped Nietzsche’s intention to create a new philology based on the original spirit of Ancient Hellas, on that deep blue of the Mediterranean and so distant from the grey skies of northern Europe.

Rhode replied to Wilamowitz and even Wagner himself intervened in the exchange with a published text of his own (ignored by the philologists of course). Wilamowitz in turn replied to Rohde and other professionals intervened. Never before had such a furious controversy raged in philology, and Nietzsche took refuge in a further elaboration of his pregnant philosophy.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Wagner

Crusade

against the Cross, 7

Erwin Rohde, Karl von Gersdorff and Nietzsche.

Although 19th-century Basel was picturesque, it lacked hygiene to such an extent that a few years before Nietzsche lived there it had suffered a bout of cholera.

When he was already a respectable town professor, Nietzsche wore a top hat: the only one in Basel to do so. His friend Rhode remained faithful if distant; with Wagner, he continued his affectionate relationship, and the theologian Overbeck became his closest friend. It is difficult to imagine this Prussian reading passages from Mark Twain’s amusing novels in conversation with his friends, but this has come to light thanks to documents that have come into the possession of his biographers.

Although Nietzsche was already established and a member of the community, the Basilian professorship was to last only a decade. He didn’t like to be a teacher, although the exercises of the Greek tragedies were somewhat close to his interests. Nor was he interested in philological minutiae but in the intense spirit of ancient Greeks. He wanted the spirit of ancient Hellas to be reborn and distinguished from the sombre way in which its study was taught in the formal academy.

He also disliked that he had to appear daily before his students very early in the morning, in addition to preparing the countless hours of lectures and seminars. But he enjoyed the walks, the social life and the meals with his colleagues; he invited his students to his home—time and again he sought their warmth—and when he arrived home, a beautiful grand piano awaited him for his improvisations. With the anchorite image we got of him in his later years, it is hard to imagine him eating at his colleagues’ invitations, joking and even dancing.

But he was too shy to take the step Wagner strongly urged him to take: marriage. Werner Ross tells us that Nietzsche ‘has gone down in history as one of the few important men who has never even been known to have had a relationship with a woman. He was a special being: a fact that can be understood as a priestly renunciation for the sake of a mission that was to shake the world…’

Old-time friendships in Europe were deeper than ours. Curt Paul Janz observed that Nietzsche’s compositions for piano responded to the motto of friendship. Of Rohde, for example, Nietzsche writes, ‘of the best and rarest kind and faithful to me with touching love’. Rhode for his part wrote the following retrospective soliloquy in his diary of 1876: ‘Think of the golden gardens of happiness in which you lived while, in the spring of 1870, Nietzsche played for you the fragment from The Master Singers: “Morning Brightness”. Those were the best hours of my whole life’. And about the celebrated composer Nietzsche wrote about ‘the warmest and most agreeable nature of Wagner, of whom I want to say that he is the greatest genius and greatest man of our time, decidedly immeasurable!’ The group he had first formed with his Shopenhaurean friends mutated into a group that now deified a living man: Richard Wagner. Just as Bayreuth aimed to break with the way music was taught in Germany, Nietzsche wanted to break with the dead form in which philology was taught at the Academy.

Another of Nietzsche’s friends, Karl von Gersdorff, pictured above with Rohde, converted Nietzsche to vegetarianism; and Nietzsche, in turn, converted him to Wagnerianism. Although Gersdorff was in complete agreement with Wagner’s anti-Semitism and even viewed Mendelssohn’s music with contempt, Wagner was exasperated that Nietzsche wouldn’t eat meat when he invited him and even scolded him in front of Cosima. It is very significant to note that neither the Jupiterian Wagner nor the aristocratic Nietzsche said a word about the victims during La semaine sanglante (the bloody week) with which the French government repressed the Paris Commune.

When Nietzsche visited the Wagner house he brought toys bought in the Eisengasse in Basel for Cosima’s children, who saw the professor as a welcome playmate. Wagner himself began his letters with phrases like ‘Dearest Herr Friedrich…’ and had drawn up plans that, should he die prematurely, Nietzsche would be the tutor of his son Siegfried: named after the third opera of Wagner’s tetralogy inspired by pre-Christian mythology. This was Wagner’s fervent wish when Nietzsche was already twenty-eight years old, so, understandably, the academic activity to which he was chained was experienced as an ordeal.

By this time he had left philology behind and philosophy represented his real passion. But we must make it clear that Nietzsche didn’t have in mind the nonsense that, before him, had been written by all the so-called great philosophers (whom I have referred to on this site as neo-theologians). After all, none of them said anything influential about the Aryan race or the transvaluation of all Christian values. The ‘great’ philosophers had spent their lives discussing abstruse metaphysics and theories of knowledge but absolutely nothing relevant to our sacred words. Philosophy has been an immense Sahara of sterile discussions, and the fact that after so many centuries the philosophers haven’t even intuited what eventually motivated Adolf Hitler, is testimony to the frivolity of their activity.

At this point in his life, Nietzsche was already beginning to glimpse a prophetic mission. Many things were on his mind besides the reform of philology on Greco-Roman authors, and the majestic Aryan art that was to give birth to a New Renaissance as envisaged by Wagner, who now inaugurated it in Bayreuth: ideas that were swirling around in his head. We can imagine those times when the master already had white hair and the young professor sported a dark moustache, meetings presided over by the slender and refined Cosima: a woman who was to become a kind of muse for Nietzsche. Although, as a passionate admirer of Greece, one could imagine the professor travelling to Attica, the circle of the inveterate bachelor didn’t leave Naumburg, Leipzig, Lake Lucerne, Lake Geneva, the Swiss mountains and occasionally the Wagners’ house.

When the philosopher would mature, he would discover to his surprise that even Wagner had only been a way station on his spiritual odyssey.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Vincent van Gogh

Crusade

against the Cross, 6

Friedrich Nietzsche in 1867.

Before saying a thing or two about the social impact on the educated sectors of Germany of Nietzsche’s first book, I would like to collect in this and the next entry some revealing anecdotes from the years outlined in the previous entry.

Given that the Nietzsche who would become popular was the philosopher—the hermit Nietzsche, taciturn, myopic and sullen—it is difficult to imagine him cheerful in 1867 when he enjoyed, as he put it, a ‘strong march on foot’ with his faithful friend Rhode: a march in the woods and mountains of Bohemia and Bavaria. Nietzsche had procured sturdy double-soled boots and the experience, which freed him at least for a few days from his academic duties, had Munich and Salzburg as their destination, although they made their way as far as Nuremberg, mostly on foot.

It is also difficult to imagine the philologist gunner whistling Offenbach tunes in the morning, or that the chronic ailments I spoke of vanished that happy season, despite the horse accident as mentioned earlier. The medical examination deduced that he had torn his pectoral muscles, and during therapy, several cups were filled with pus; the sternum was affected and Nietzsche confesses that he had to learn to walk again. Nietzsche’s volume of notes during his convalescence covers many pages, where the philosophical concerns that were to take possession of his soul are absent.

As a professor of classical philology, Nietzsche now earned a decent salary at the University of Basel. For someone born in a humble village, this was like winning the lottery. His mother wrote to him euphorically:

My dear Fritz:

Professor of 800 thalers’ salary! It was too much, my good son and I could not calm my heart in any other way than by immediately sending a telegram to Volkmann in Pforta.

Then I wrote to the good mother, the guardian, the Sidonchen, the Ehrenbergs, Miss von Grimmenstein and the Schenks in Weimar. In the meantime, Mrs Wenkel and Mrs Pinder came to congratulate us, at about 6 p.m. I took my letters to the post office, 25 pages in all, and communicated my joy first of all to the Luthers, who burst into shouts of joy; they called the old privy councillor, and all burst into tears, and heartily congratulated you, as well as Mrs. Haarseim, Mrs. Keil, Mrs. Grohmann with her daughter, Mrs. privy councillor Lepsius, who always shouted: My good son Fritz, as well as Mrs. Von Busch.

And what a beautiful city, said the Keils, the Pinders and old Luther: the university at the top and the Rhine below.

The dream of Nietzsche’s father, who saw it as a prodigy that his firstborn would be born when the king’s birthday bells were ringing, seemed fulfilled. His academic success reinforced the fantasy that Nietzsche would be a genius and probably contributed to that familiar wine going to his head over the years.

And what did his mentor Ritschl have to say? He wrote a eulogy in his reply letter to Wilhelm Vischer, who was envious of the uncouth, medium-sized, light-brown-haired colleague who did not yet dress elegantly. Ritschl wrote:

The man doesn’t even have a doctorate, but only because the obligatory five-year period since completing the baccalaureate (incidentally, taken at Schulpforta) has not yet fully elapsed. Otherwise, he would already have had one. I want to formulate my judgement in a few words, and neither you nor Büchler, Ribbeck, Bernays, Usener [all disciples of Ritschl] or tutti quanti should take it badly.

With as many young people as, for more than thirty-nine years, I have seen being trained before my eyes I have never met, nor have I tried to promote in my speciality according to my possibilities, a lad who so early and so young was as mature as this Nietzsche. The papers for the Rheinisches Museum he wrote in the second and third year of his academic three-year term! He is the first one I have accepted in collaboration while still a student. God willing, he will live a long life. I prophesy that one day he will be at the forefront of German philology.

He is only twenty-four years old; he is strong, vigorous, healthy, bizarre in body and character, made to please similar temperaments. Moreover, he possesses an enviable facility for calm as well as skilful and clear exposition in free expression. He is the idol and unwitting guide of the whole world of young philologists here in Leipzig, quite numerous, who cannot wait to hear him as a teacher.

You will say that I am describing a kind of phenomenon. Well, he is, and a kind and modest one at that. Also, a talented musician, which is irrelevant here. But I have not yet met any active authority who in a similar case has dared to go beyond the formal inadequacy, and I offer my entire philological and scholarly reputation as a guarantee that the thing will have a happy outcome.

No matter how much of a nose for academic talent Professor Ritschl might boast, he never imagined that his protégée was a time bomb that would blow apart the cloistering he had been suffering from since childhood. Instead of the grey monotony of Pforta that continued in Bonn, Leipzig and now Basel, Nietzsche would end his last sane days singing to the God Dionysus. The very intense blue sky seen in the islands of ancient Hellas, to which Nietzsche always aspired, evokes another flight from the gloomy skies of the north to the limpid south.

Vincent van Gogh, who lived within Nietzsche’s lifespan, was also the son of an austere and humble, though Dutch, Protestant pastor.

Unlike Nietzsche, Vincent would become a Protestant pastor for a time, at the age of twenty-six, and go as a missionary to a mining region of Belgium in search of the crucified of the time: a sort of St. Francis in a Protestant version. Only after prolonged self-mortifications would Brother Vincent abandon this black period of his life—literally black, as he watched the poor miners leaving the mines covered in charcoal—and flee in search of the enlightened landscapes of Arles (Nietzsche would do something similar, but not in the South of France but in Italy).

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Friedrich Nietzsche Music Richard Wagner

Crusade

against the Cross, 5

A student philological organization in Leipzig. Nietzsche stands third from left facing Ernst Windisch, who is looking down.

The 19th century represented an awakening of a sector of the population in German-speaking countries to the Jewish question. As a man in tune with his times, Nietzsche would even write to his mother that he had finally found a brewery ‘where you don’t have to swallow melted butter and Jewish facades’. With his typical aristocratic tendency, the young Nietzsche considered all commerce unworthy, not just Jewish commerce. The proletariat was alien to him. He always believed that an uprising of the working class would destroy the world, so it had to be opposed.

For, having studied classical philology, Nietzsche had read directly the Greek writers of the ancient world, who weren’t infected by secular cross-worship in the sense of worshipping the crucified in turn. It was precisely the century in which Nietzsche lived that Doré, Dostoyevsky and Marx saw the horrors to which the Industrial Revolution had brought London and Manchester, times when ‘the crucified’ par excellence was the worker.

The decade before the photograph above, Count Gobineau had published his essay on the inequality of the human races, and Darwin on the origin of species. Those books written in French and English respectively ought to have been the best influences for the young philologist who knew so well the Greco-Roman classics and thus the scale of values before the advent of Judeo-Christianity. But Nietzsche would be impressed by what was then fashionable in German.

He read David Friedrich Strauss’ Life of Jesus. I have complained a lot on this site that much of the racial right is ignorant of the textual criticism that Germans have been making of the New Testament since the Enlightenment. The special edition of Strauss’ book that Nietzsche bought had been precisely the one that had appeared in German bookstores at a reasonable price for freethinkers of limited means. Nietzsche made the mistake of wanting to convey to a silly woman, Elisabeth, the reasons for his recent apostasy, now endorsed by the book in vogue at the time, while his sister replied to his letter confused and saddened by this typical turn of a 19th-century freethinking.

But Strauss wasn’t the most important influence on Nietzsche. In an antiquarian bookshop, he found Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and began to leaf through it. He bought it and took it home to read. Later he would read Parerga and Paralipomena.

Except for Kant, Schopenhauer rejected the philosophers of classic German idealism, and showed Nietzsche what criticism of a nation’s culture is: university philosophy serves the State and the Church since it is from them that the philosopher receives his livelihood (Schopenhauer is somewhat hypocritical in this matter, since The World as Will and Representation begins with a very dull two hundred Kantian pages that could also fall under such category). The young Nietzsche had found an educator, but more than Schopenhauer’s doctrine, what was decisive was the attitude of the philosopher who not only opposed Hegel and company but presented himself to the world as a pessimistic and solitary hero.

That Nietzsche’s group worshipped the rebellious philosopher is evident from the fact that every year a group of Schopenhauerians celebrated his birth by drinking to the memory of their late master at a bacchanalian dinner. These were years in which the subject of Richard Wagner was also the order of the day, the talk of Leipzig. Werner Ross tells us: ‘The approach to Wagner is the most important event in Nietzsche’s entire biography. It surpasses in intensity and scope even his appointment as professor at the University of Basel’.

Wagner belonged to the section of Europeans aware of the Jewish problem and had written a book on the subject, but he needed fighters for his musical cause. Sophie Ritschl, the sister of Nietzsche’s teacher, took advantage of a whirlwind visit by Wagner to Leipzig to arrange an interview between Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche—a great honour for the latter. Everything seemed calculated to recruit the young genius to the Wagnerian cause!

On 8 November 1868 Nietzsche met Wagner, to whose music he was fully converted. He would never forget those days in which he felt himself treated as an equal of the greatest genius of the age.

But we must take into consideration the time we are talking about. When I saw Wagner’s first masterpiece, Tannhäuser, I was shocked that the Goddess Venus was defeated by invoking the voice of the Virgin Mary. While it is true that Wagner played with pre-Christian myths, he never broke with his Lutheran origins as drastically as Nietzsche would over the years. Nonetheless, when Nietzsche attended concerts playing the overtures to Tristan and The Master-Singers of Nuremberg, he wrote to his friend Rohde: ‘I cannot keep calm before this music: every fibre, every nerve stirs in me, and it is a long time since I have had such a feeling of rapture as when listening to the above overture’. (The same could be said of the impressions that the lad I was decades ago had!)

On 13 February 1869, the University of Basel appointed Nietzsche professor of classical philology: an astonishing case, for he was not even a doctor. This was mainly due to the influence of his teacher Ritschl, now indirectly involved in recruiting his pupil to the Wagnerian cause. On 23 March the University of Leipzig awarded Nietzsche a doctor’s degree, without examination or thesis, based on papers published in Ritschl’s Rheinisches Museum. On 13 April Nietzsche abandoned his German (Prussian) citizenship and became Swiss.

Wagner invited Nietzsche to ‘talk about music and philosophy’ and the young man naturally accepted. On 17 May he visited Wagner for the first time in Tribschen and was captivated. Wagner was ‘a fabulously lively and fiery man, who speaks very fast, is very witty and brings joy to a meeting’.

On 28 May Nietzsche gave the inaugural address of his professorship: Homer and Classical Philology and met the Renaissance scholar Jacob Burckhardt. In 1870 he continued his classes, lectures and philological studies, and in April he was appointed full professor: the year in which The Valkyrie was premiered in Munich. On 8 August he asked the university for permission to take part in the Franco-Prussian war, which was granted, but only as a nurse. Ironically, Nietzsche became seriously ill with dysentery. In October, he returned to Basel and began his important friendship with the theologian Franz Overbeck.

In 1871 Nietzsche began to write The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music: a plea for Wagner or proclamation that, through his music, the glorious days of ancient Greek values would return. (In this Nietzsche wasn’t wrong, as the next century Hitler would intuit; and the dream would have crystallised had he won the war.)

Early in 1872, The Birth of Tragedy was published, the book with which Nietzsche first introduced himself to the public at large. It was well received by his friends, but poorly received by the philologists in the profession. For this reason, Nietzsche even entertained the idea of leaving his chair in Basel to carry Wagner’s gospel as an itinerant preacher. The young philologist had become enchanted by the man who had been born in the same year as his father and, as Nietzsche himself would much later reveal in one of his letters of madness, also by Cosima Wagner.

In April Wagner left Tribschen, and on 22 May Nietzsche attended the laying of the foundation stone of the Wagnerian theatre in Bayreuth. These were the times of his greatest interest in Wagner, and he met Malwilda von Meysenburg through Wagnerian circles. At this time Nietzsche also composed the Manfried Meditation for piano four hands.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Crusade

against the Cross, 4

Nietzsche had to argue with his mother over his resolution not to continue his theological studies, i.e., to prepare for the career of parish priest.

In Bonn, Nietzsche finally experienced his first breaths of freedom. He no longer had to comply with the rigorous rules of dress, or the obligation to attend religious services in what had been, de facto, the Schulpforta convent for kids. Moreover, Bonn was so far from his mother’s home that he couldn’t even afford to spend Christmas at home. The difference between Bonn and the sullen family life in Naumburg couldn’t have been greater for the young student who attended parties, something inconceivable in Schulpforta.

Nietzsche, who came to live very close to Beethoven’s birthplace, visited Schumann’s grave. His friend Paul Deussen, who was the same age (but who would outlive him by almost twenty years) told the anecdote that Nietzsche didn’t accept the services of prostitutes when they took him to a brothel during one of his escapades in Cologne. More than adolescent sex, music was his girlfriend. As the teenage Hitler would later do, he attended concerts and the opera despite their financial hardship.

A letter to Deussen opens a psychological window into how the young Nietzsche first discovered the late atavistic effects of pagan festivities:

The entire population of the city lived for three days in total debauchery… There was complete freedom to visit and to receive visitors, even to kiss. Breakfast was ready in every home, accompanied by wine and punch; joking and laughing, drinking a glass, and then the round went on… When they arrived at the house of a slaughterer, the party had passed through the window, which was easy, since in the Rhineland houses have very low windows… The students kissed the splendid girl leaning out of the window and left through the front door. In the meantime, the father objected to the custom of wearing masks and wanted to prevent the parade. That’s why I was called. I carried the rather stout man outside and closed the entrance, then collected up my kiss and the procession moved on.

It was a time when the young Nietzsche already wore a moustache, though by no means the bristling wig with which, after his death, his face became iconic. He was such a gregarious young man that in addition to the opera he attended the theatre with friends. No one could have suspected that he would eventually become a hermit. So little noticed was the normie Nietzsche among lads of his age that, except Deussen, no member of the ‘Franconia’ association to which he belonged remembered anything about him when he was already famous. Nietzsche’s German biographers swim in information and documents about his life, to the extent that even some of his class notebooks have come into the public light for centuries to come.

If, to his mother’s chagrin, Nietzsche had abandoned his theological studies after one semester and started studying classical philology with Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, the following year, in October 1865, following his teacher Ritschl, he went to the University of Leipzig. Nietzsche’s experiences in Leipzig are recounted in a colourful account, Retrospect of My Two Years in Leipzig. When he enrolled in the faculty of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, a century had already passed since Goethe had done so.

With his mentor Ritschl Nietzsche again showed himself industrious: a model student as he had been at Pforta. Ritschl gave his favourite pupil heavy assignments, such as extracting and collating ancient texts and indexing the issues of the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie. In 1866 Nietzsche gave his first lecture at the Philological Association and befriended the student Erwin Rohde, who was to become his best friend. This was the time of the war between Prussia and Austria, in which Prussia emerged victorious although Nietzsche, a Prussian in Leipzig, objected to the city becoming immediately Prussian. But the young scholar writes about that year: ‘I often longed to be torn away from my monotonous labours’.

On 9 October 1867, Nietzsche began his military service with a cavalry regiment. These were terrible times on the other side of the Atlantic, when the Mexican Indian Benito Juárez had Emperor Maximilian shot in Mexico. (In sharp contrast to today’s traitorous white Mexicans who admire Juárez, my great-great-grandfather José María Tort y Vivó, a Catalan living in Mexico mentioned by José Zorrilla in Recuerdo del Tiempo Viejo, was a staunch supporter of Maximilian of Habsburg.)

In March 1868 Nietzsche suffered a fall from a horse, but the period of convalescence served as an opportunity to approach philosophy and in October he finished his military service. Once again: terrible things were happening on the other side of the Atlantic. Blacks were granted the right to vote in the United States because of the triumphant Christian ethics of the Yankee Puritans (at a time when Jewry hadn’t yet taken over the media). But by then the twenty-three-year-old young man already bears the name of Nietzsche.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Pedagogy

Crusade

against the Cross, 3

When one delves deeply into Nietzsche’s biography, curious anecdotes come to light that would be hard to imagine for those who are only familiar with his late writings.

Much has been said, for example, about the friendship between Richard Wagner and Nietzsche. But few know that Wagner was born in 1813: the year Nietzsche’s father was born. When Nietzsche was a little boy playing with his sister Elisabeth with tin soldiers and the porcelain figure ‘Squirrel King’ was executing rebels, the revolutionary Wagner was in serious trouble with the king and his life was spared because he was a conductor. The still-small Nietzsche was on the side of the rulers in his Christian kingdom. There were to be no revolutions.

When Nietzsche would later write about his life, he didn’t remember his home in Röcken except for the image of the parish priest, the father, whom he continued to idealise even after he had finished The Antichrist. Indeed, since his father had died when Nietzsche was four years old, the memories of Prussian discipline the priest had meted out to him, in which the little boy would furiously retreat to the toilet to rage alone, were left out of his memory (his mother would later tell some anecdotes about her young son’s life). The idealisation of the parish priest was such that, in the words of Werner Ross, ‘Nietzsche was to merge with his father to form a single figure with him’.

In the family it was taken for granted that little Fritz would become a clergyman like his father. His mother, who put him to bed, told him: ‘If you go on like this, I’ll have to carry you to bed in my arms until you study theology’. Fritz was an obedient child who knew several Bible passages and religious songs by heart so that his schoolmates called him ‘the little shepherd’, who was impressed above all by religious music.

But since the pietistic oppression was a thorn his body began to rebel. In 1856, when Fritz was already a dozen years old, he began to suffer from head and eye ailments. Although he received special holidays for this reason, from that age he would always suffer from these psychosomatic complaints (which would only be alleviated thirty-two years later, with the catharsis of writing several books in a few months, including The Antichrist).

The young Fritz would sneak into the cathedral to watch the rehearsals of the Requiem and was shocked to hear the Dies Irae. At the age of fourteen he entered the famous school in Pforta, where he received an excellent humanistic education and his love of music increased, although he continued to suffer from severe headaches.

Schulpforta near Naumburg in Germany, a boarding school system for advantaged pupils.

At Schulpforta he even attempted a Mass for solo, choir and orchestra, and at the age of sixteen, he sketched a Misere for five voices. At seventeen the parson’s son was ready to die to meet Jesus, and when another of his friends trained in Prussian education (broken in like a horse I’d better say!) received the conformation, he wrote: ‘with the earnest promise you enter the line of adult Christians who are held worthy of our Saviour’s most precious legacy’.

Nevertheless, the first signs of rebellion, albeit still unconsciously, began to spontaneously sprout in his seventeenth year. In the Easter holidays of 1862, the student Nietzsche wrote to the union of his friends, under the title Fate and History, a prophetic declaration: ‘But, as soon as it would be possible to overthrow the entire past of the world with a strong will, we would enter the roll of the independent Gods’.

Schulpforta’s severe discipline had been a kind of convent to train not only Nietzsche but also the rest of the inmates, but the adolescent Nietzsche, always at the head of the class and lacking an esprit de corps, was such a good boy that in cases of insubordination he sided with the teachers.

In his thick volume (866 pages in the edition I have) Ross comments that the letters of the pupil Nietzsche are empty of content, in the sense that his inner life was still hermetically sealed off from him. Nevertheless, when the lad Nietzsche left Schulpforta on 7 September 1864, close to his twentieth birthday, and the following month went to study theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn, thanks to his Prussian education he already had the resources for a premature doctorate.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Pedagogy

Crusade

against the Cross, 2

 

Lutheran father (1813-1849).

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in the small town of Röcken, near Lützen in Thuringia. Formerly part of the kingdom of Saxony, it was annexed to Prussia in 1815. Nietzsche was the first-born son of the local Protestant pastor, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (pictured above), who at the age of thirty had married a woman of seventeen. A year after the wedding, Friedrich was born, followed a couple of years later by his sister Elisabeth (Nietzsche’s younger brother was born afterwards, but died at the age of two). What is important to report is that, among the ancestors of the future philosopher, on both the paternal and maternal sides, there were several generations of theologians.

The main biographies on which I will rely for this biographical series are the very voluminous treatises by Curt Paul Janz and Werner Ross. The latter, who unlike Janz writes with humour, mentions that exactly at the moment when Nietzsche was born the bells were ringing for the king’s birthday service. The parson’s eyes filled with tears as he uttered: ‘My son, on this earth you shall be called Friedrich Wilhelm in memory of my royal benefactor, for you were born on his birthday’. He added that his son would be so-called because that is what Luther’s Bible said. Friedrich Wilhelm IV, by the way, was no friend of the ideals of the French Revolution. Although benevolent, through the Holy Alliance he longed for a return to feudal times even with knights, orders and castles.

Little Friedrich Wilhelm was instilled from the outset with the messianic consciousness of being a son of the medieval king and a son of God. To use my language, I would say that Nietzsche was a slave to parental introjects. So much so that, decades later, when he suddenly fell into a state of psychosis and his friend Overbeck came to his rescue in Turin, he realised that only by telling the disturbed man that royal receptions awaited him, did Nietzsche obey to leave Italy. And when somewhat later Langbehn accompanied Nietzsche on his walks in the asylum at Jena in Germany, he said: ‘He is a child and a king; he must be treated as the son of a king that he is. That is the only correct method’.

But in this psychological study I’m getting too far ahead of myself. Let’s go back to his childhood. The thing is that, like Kant, Nietzsche was brought up in pietism. But Kant’s defence mechanism was to shut down all his emotions and he tried to do philosophy as a sort of Mr Spock through pure reason, like a soulless computer. Nietzsche’s defence mechanism against severe pietism would be the diametrical opposite: the mythopoetic explosion of emotions, as we shall see in this series. What we must now tell is that the little Nietzsche was not allowed, in such a Prussian upbringing, to vent his emotions, let alone his anger. Janz’s multi-volume biography informs us of this:

As soon as the eldest son began to talk a little, the father took to spending some of his free time with him. The child did not disturb him in his study cabinet, where, as the mother writes, gazed ‘Silently and thoughtfully’ at the father while he worked. But it was when the father ‘fantasised’ at the piano that the child was most enthusiastic. Already at the age of one year, little Fritz, as everyone called him, would sit in his pram on such occasions and pay attention to his father, completely silent and without taking his eyes off him. However, it cannot be said that during these early years, he was always a good and obedient child. When something did not seem right to him, he would lie on the ground and kick his little legs furiously. The father, it seems, proceeded against this with great energy, despite which the child must have continued for a long time to cling to his stubbornness whenever he was denied anything he wanted; but he no longer rebelled, but, without a word, retired to some quiet corner or to the lavatory, where he bore his anger alone.

Unlike what Alice Miller wrote about little Fritz in The Untouched Key, Janz didn’t suspect that the severe pietistic upbringing might have been abusive.

When Nietzsche was four years old his father died, perhaps of a stroke (it is not clear that the Nietzsche family’s claim that this was due to his falling down the stairs is true). The family moved to Naumburg and Fritz found himself, from then on, as the only male in a household of women: his mother, grandmother, two aunts and younger sister.

The adult women were to teach pious Christian virtues to little Fritz.

Categories
David Irving Holocaust Videos

Real history

‘Talking frankly’ (five videos)

Categories
Narcissism Psychology

Narcissism, 3

I would not have fully understood Marco without noticing that there were a considerable number of YouTube channels talking about narcissism. But there is a fundamental flaw in all of them. Unlike Silvano Arieti’s treatise which helped me so much to understand serious mental disorders (my summary here), these youtubers don’t illustrate their knowledge with specific cases. Perhaps they do so out of cowardice, as there are quite a few people like Marco in the world. They don’t even have to use real names but pseudonyms, so why they don’t use real-life cases to illustrate their theories is a mystery.

Quite independently of such an obvious flaw, I was impressed that these youtubers say that the malignant narcissist can be distinguished by his or her lack of empathy. As we saw in the previous post, Marco showed me off his cobwebbed house that reminded me of vampire castles without noticing that I watched in horror as the thick layer of dust also covered the armchairs in his living room. In fact, I had to turn over one of the cushions of one of his armchairs so that I could sit in his living room and not get dust on my trousers. To show off his house to me without realising that I was horrified, is to lack the most basic empathy.

Youtubers also talk a lot about the gratuitous rage of narcissists, who explode at the drop of a hat. As we also saw, Marco exploded in anger when the taxi driver and I couldn’t easily find his house without a street number. These youtubers also talk about paranoia, which I witnessed in that September call last year with his claim that his relatives craved to steal his house. Another thing the youtubers say that portrays Marco is that those who suffer from malignant narcissism have fluid contours in their ego, so they treat people as egoic objects. This is so surreal that I must illustrate it with an anecdote.

In the previous entry I had promised to explain why we didn’t meet in a mall last year. The answer is that Marco had told me he would meet me outside a restaurant. However, given the unpunctuality of Mexicans, I have been in the habit of meeting them inside a restaurant on my appointments. This allows me to bring a book and entertain myself if the Mexican in question is unpunctual. I told Mexican Marco a couple of times that I would wait for him inside the restaurant. In a Sam Vaknin video I saw yesterday, he said that the narcissist only registers what you say if it goes along with the narcissist’s narrative. It seems incredible, but even in something as prosaic as the location during an appointment Marco didn’t hear what I said more than once: he heard his original voice that he would look for me outside the restaurant.

The result was that we didn’t meet. It was very frustrating in that, although Mexico City is as large as Houston, with fifteen million more people and far fewer freeways it is very difficult to get around. I chose a Sunday for the appointment at the mall far north of the city because there is not much traffic on Sundays and the taxi driver only made an hour’s drive along a freeway from my house to the mall. Marco had arrived by public transport, so it took him an hour and a half to get to the mall. Counting the return trip for both of us, it was five hours of wasted transport, plus the hour and a half wasted in the mall thinking we had both been stood up. All because Marco didn’t want to register in his mind what I told him: that I would wait for him sitting down, inside the restaurant.

A trivial case you might say, but perfect to explain what it means to treat others as egoic objects: the will of the other guy becomes invisible, and one only deals internally with one’s own will, despite the calamity that Marco had to suffer (Perinorte, the mall referred to, is very notorious because the cell phone signal there is very poor, so we couldn’t communicate when we were in and out of the restaurant). But what causes a ‘narcissism’ that it is not even possible to convey such a simple idea as that we will wait for a friend inside a restaurant?

Thanks to the visit of Marco’s first cousin at my house, who had known him since he was a small child, I tied up some loose ends. I already knew that Marco had been raised by a slightly mentally retarded mother, who apparently had been raped: Marco’s absent father. What I didn’t know, and only learned from what the cousin told me, was that Marco had been raised exclusively by his mother. (Before his visit, I had been left with the idea that an aunt and grandmother, in addition to his mother, had been Marco’s guardian figures; I didn’t know that, from an early age, the mother had migrated from some villages to the capital, where Marco grew up.)

Now that single mothers are in vogue in the West, it is becoming clear what havoc some of them wreak on their offspring, especially boys, who have never had a father figure to attach themselves to. Marco, according to his cousin, suffered an absolute mental breakdown the day his mother died, to the extent that his cousin had to make all the arrangements for her funeral and burial while Marco was mentally blocked. I conjecture that this is when Marco’s depression began, as there was no longer the real source where the mother’s only child could settle accounts.
 

The schizophrenogenic mother

The word schizophrenogenic, which I abbreviate to schizogenic, never appears in the videos of the youtubers who talk about malignant narcissism. It doesn’t even appear in Vaknin’s videos when he openly blames those mothers who undermine the individuation process of their children. I sometimes use the term because it inverts the values of biological psychiatry to the trauma model of mental disorders. (Anyone who has not read what I have written about psychiatry in Daybreak, and still believes that psychiatry is a science, might now read ‘From the Great Confinement to chemical Gulag’ on pages 105-127 of my book.)

Once we reject biological psychiatry and see it for what it is, a pseudo-science, it is easier to see that Vaknin fails by using so many diagnostic categories. I reject not only biological psychiatry, but the hundreds of diagnostic categories of psychiatrists and even clinical psychologists. The reason for this is simple. Even in the videos of Vaknin, who uses a plethora of diagnostic categories, it is clear that sometimes a subject deteriorates from a basically neurotic narcissism into a psychotic one where Vaknin already uses terms like ‘mood disorder’ and even ‘schizoid’. In other words, unlike somatic diseases where a heart condition doesn’t degenerate into a condition of, say, the thighs, in mental disorders everything is very fluid. Contrary to psychiatric claims, neuroses, which even normal people generally suffer from, can degenerate into psychosis (what happened to poor Marco).

What Vaknin does get right in his videos is that the infant internalises the gaze of his mother. When the infant is mistreated by a mother, he cannot say that the mother is bad but blames himself because of a sort of Stockholm syndrome (cf. these pages of my book Day of Wrath). The schizogenic mother, from the fluid contours of her ego, sends her infant an unconscious message: I cannot love you as you are; only when you suppress your individuality, your desires, your will that doesn’t agree with mine and your independence and separation from me. I love you not as a separate entity but as part of me forever, symbiosis, womb: mother and child forever united.

With this engulfing behaviour, the child’s internalised morality begins to turn towards self-denial. The infant seems to internalise a message: To function not only in the family, but in society at large, I mustn’t be myself. Thus the future narcissist begins to be engendered, someone with fluid contours of his ego with the environment. If mother rejects me, it is because I am a bad, spoiled, stupid, ugly child. Some psychologists call this a ‘bad object’ and this object, because it is so bad, has to be expelled. Thus the child projects this bad object, externalises it and turns himself into its antithesis, what some call ‘split’. By projecting it outwards the child purges the bad object from himself, cleanses himself; but at the cost of projecting it onto others.

Marco’s cousin cried when, suffering from paranoia that he and his son wanted to steal his second house, enraged, Marco ran him out of his main house. What the cousin ignores is that Marco has internalised the bad object instilled in him by his mother and now wants to expel it symbolically, by projecting it onto others. What many youtubers call ‘narcissistic abuse’ is nothing more than the unravelling of this long-standing, unresolved dynamic with the real mother.

When a narcissist is confronted with a relative who really loves him or her, like Marco’s first cousin, the narcissist doesn’t know how to cope. It was very stressful for him. Paradoxically, he perceives this love, now really brotherly love (not like the manipulative love of his mother) as manipulation and mistreatment. This sibling love is perceived as dangerous, and the narcissist falls apart and resorts to so-called narcissistic abuse: treating the cousin precisely as he couldn’t treat his biological mother because, as an infant, he was one hundred per cent at her mercy.

But why such a twisted dynamic, in which the grown-up narcissist then tries to act out theatrically with other adults? Because the infant had been conditioned to associate love with betrayal. When the infant, who will become a narcissist, is confronted day by day with this mixture of love and all the negative emotions of the devouring mother—shame, fear, guilt, anger, frustration—he learns to associate love with these negative affects. The abused infant seems to internalise the following: Love is bad, it means that I will be betrayed. Even an eighteen-month-old infant who is treated with this sort of behaviour already feels anger about it. But given the absolute power the mother has over him, he internalises that it is illegitimate to be angry with her. It’s even dangerous. So getting angry with mom must be buried in the mind. But what happens to the infant who buries his emotions?

The anger is internalised as long as it can’t be directed towards mom. The child redirects it to himself. But anger redirected to the internal self, rather than to the original source, transmutes into depression: which is what has happened to Marco since his mother died, with his house so spider-webbed that it reminded me of Nosferatu’s. Just compare what Marco did with his mind with my Hojas susurrantes, the first chapter of which is entitled ‘Letter to mom Medusa’ where I direct the anger outwards, towards the original perpetrators. That’s why I never suffer from depression! In contrast to the vindictive autobiographer, depression is a form of self-directed aggression (see ‘On Depression’, pages 27-41 of my book Daybreak).

And compare also what I do literarily with what Marco advised me: to stop writing my autobiographical books and forget about the past! The very Christian Marco is simply following the accepted wisdom: forgive and forget. But since the unconscious can’t be fooled, look at how my old buddy ended up: mad as a hatter! In other words, not only Christian values must be transvalued as far as Hitler and National Socialism are concerned, but also the Christian ethics of forgiveness, and the Judeo-Christian commandment to honour one’s parent whatever she or he does. Marco, who offended me in his last phone call by subtly advising me to join a Christian church went the opposite way and, as Vaknin says in one of his videos, that can lead to schizoid depression: which is exactly what happened to him.

See for example the five minutes from this point in another of his videos, and especially what he says after minute seventeen when he talks about the work with children of Margaret Mahler, who said: ‘Interpersonal relationships become internalised within the ego, or the self’. Mahler also said that what we call the ego or the self is simply a reflection of our relationships with others, and that all mental illnesses are related to interpersonal problems. It is an important video that Vaknin uploaded twice with different titles. And here Vaknin uses a word I’ve used a lot on this site, introject, about which I’ll say a few things in my next post.

Categories
Autobiography Narcissism Psychology

Narcissism, 2

In this article I would only like to talk about the bare facts. The psychological interpretation will come in the next entry.

Almost half a century ago, in 1975, I met Marco on the chess benches in Mexico City’s Parque de las Arboledas, in Colonia Del Valle (cf. my little book on my chess misadventures). Those were times when the teenager I was didn’t want to be in an abusive home and school, but undisturbed by them in a park. The first game we played, by the way, was won by Marco with the black pieces, and I seem to remember that, against my chess habits, I opened the game with the queen pawn and if I remember correctly he replied 1…f5. Apart from the fact that I lost that first game (in subsequent days I would beat him), the only thing I remember is his rather surly face, and we hardly exchanged words before or after playing. In fact, in the 1970s I didn’t get on with him much more than I interacted with other players in the park, although I eventually discovered that Marco was a good reader of literature, especially the great Russian writers.

It was in the first half of the 1980s that I began to get along more with Marco; when, after playing chess or watching some of the other parkgoers play, he and I would walk around the perimeter of the park talking about philosophical issues. Sometimes, taking into account that he worked and I didn’t, he would invite me to lunchtime meals in the proletarian restaurants of Colonia Del Valle or Narvarte (Marco belonged to a different social class), and we would continue our conversations. Eventually I even asked my grandmother to rent him the maid room on the roof of her house, which was near the park.

In short, that was basically my dealings with Marco, whom I stopped seeing when I went to work for a few years in California in 1985. That image, of a friend with whom I could talk to about interesting topics, was the image I had kept of him from those years.

By the time I returned from the United States in 1988, I had lost track of Marco. Since I grew up in Colonia Narvarte, in 2003 I went to live in a guesthouse very close to my beloved childhood and early teenage home. I used to pass by Concepción Béistegui Street, when Marco no longer lived on that street. In late 2004 I saw his aunt coming out of the house where Marco had lived and I asked her about him. She gave me his mobile phone, and I spoke to him. Those were times when Marco worked in the neighbouring Mixcoac and we met only once in that zone on one of his lunch breaks. Since I kept many documents, diaries, and have classified some of my emails to write an autobiography over the decades, I am able to report that from his work office, Marco answered my email on January 7, 2005, and we didn’t see each other again for many years, although I already had his mobile phone in my phone book.

Remembering the old friend from the park, it wasn’t until 2019 that it occurred to me to talk to him again and we arranged to meet outside the Palace of Bellas Artes. We met there on the 27th of May and then went to one of those proletarian restaurants in the centre of the metropolis that Marco likes to eat at. Then we said goodbye. So far, nothing extraordinary had happened, and you can see that my diary entries about Marco were very laconic, in that there was nothing relevant to report. What began to obsess me about Marco’s mind was due to what happened next.

Two years after our relatively brief encounter in the city centre, I phoned him. I was interested in recovering two books of mine that I had given him decades before, including a splendid edition of poems of the Castilian language that my uncle Julio had given me, and a book of the chess champion Alekhine that my father had given me before the tragedy that struck my family.

So, without telling him that my real interest was in the books I wanted to get back, I told him on the phone that I wanted to see his house. With the help of a taxi driver we arrived on 30 May 2021 (remember I have diaries). On entering his house I was astonished at the level of Marco’s neglect by the dusty cobwebs and thick layers of dust throughout his house. I had only seen old cobwebs dusting the door frames in vampire castle movies!

I deduced that the old friend had been suffering from depression for years, if not decades. That had been the same day that Marco had given the taxi driver and me, as a reference point to locate his house, the electricity pylon without realising that there was a row of pylons; and that the real reference point to locate his house was a dumpster. The very rude manner in which he greeted us because we struggled to find his house without a street number was such that I promised myself that this would be the first, and last, time I visited him. Nevertheless, I repressed my anger and handed him the two illustrated books on the Aztecs and the Mayas that I had planned to give him before the trip.

That was the last time I saw Marco. I must say that, when I was dealing with him in the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Marco had never been so rude to me, but what happened afterwards was key to understanding him.

Although we didn’t quarrel (I repressed my anger), since I wasn’t going to visit him a second time at his house, Marco, who surely remembered our philosophical conversations of yesteryear, kept calling me on the phone to visit him again (he didn’t have my mobile number, that I almost never used anyway). My diary records phone calls to my mother’s house on 7 and 28 July, 11 August and 18 December 2021; although he may have spoken at other times. These were times when she would answer the phone and then pass the message on to me. By 2022 Marco gave up phoning to my mom’s place.

In 2023, on 22 May to be exact, remembering his love of literature, I thought of calling Marco to give him, outside his house to which I had promised not to return, a copy of my book Hojas susurrantes (Whispering Leaves). We made an appointment and Marco chose the large mall called Perinorte as the meeting point. It was a disappointment because we didn’t see each other at the Sanborn’s restaurant for reasons of his mental illness, which I will explain in the next entry. But the important thing was what happened next.

Until then I hadn’t had any real problems with Marco. The problems started the next day after our failed meeting. I phoned him to ask him to give me a postal address so that I could send him Whispering Leaves by post, since I was unable to deliver the book to him personally at the mall. With that seemingly innocent phone call on 29 May last year began my morbid curiosity to try to decipher a new Marco I hadn’t known before.

In the phone call to get his postal address, Marco suddenly told me something that stunned me: he wanted to give me his second house, and added that he had an account in the BBV Bank whose funds he wanted to give me as soon as he unfroze them! I was flabbergasted by this, as my friendship with Marco had been relatively superficial; we had never been really close friends. A few months later I learned that he had made the same offer to his first cousin, Marco’s only close human contact with the outside world since he secluded himself in his vampiric castle, so to speak. To offer me money when I knew that Marco, though he has two properties, didn’t have a penny was so grotesque that I wrote in my diary that it was pure blackmail to get his cousin, or me, to visit him. Those were times when I hadn’t yet met his cousin, although I had heard of him.

Then, in that same phone call on 29 May, after those bizarre offers to give me his second house and the funds in his bank, Marco spoke wonders of a train arriving near his house ‘with a broken voice, almost in tears’ says my diary, as if begging me to visit him. I told him that I didn’t want to suffer the hours-long bus odyssey to visit him (Marco and I live at opposite poles of the great metropolis), as I didn’t want to take my car to such a distant zone, and wasn’t going to pay taxis. So, during the same phone call whose only intention on my part was to get his mailing address, Marco had transformed the casual call into a discussion in which he had offered me his house and the phantom money in a bank account. Seeing that I would still not go to visit him by public transport, he scolded me that I was suffering from snobbishness, and that I should open up to a more proletarian lifestyle. Needless to say, I didn’t acquiesce to his demand to visit him despite his fantastic gambit.

The following month, on 9 June, the book I had written reached Marco through the mailman. By 18 July he had read it. He spoke to me and showered me with praise. It was the first time in my life that anyone had ever praised what I wrote in Hojas susurrantes so highly. Two days later, my mother died. On August 2, my second book analysing my family, ¿Me ayudarás?, which I had also mailed to him, reached Marco and he sent me his condolences, since I had inscribed a few words on the first page: that I was sending him the book on the very day of my mother’s passing. Then Marco’s cousin contacted me for the first time and we talked on the phone for a while.

By September, the surreal situation with Marco was back. Those were the days when I had arranged with his cousin that I would invite Marco to clear up the bizarre offer that no less than I, whom Marco hadn’t dealt with for four decades, would inherit his second house; and we wanted the three of us to be here. On the 3rd of that month I decided to speak to Marco on the phone to arrange the invitation but he was in a state of extreme paranoia against his cousin. He believed that he and his son, Marco’s nephew, wanted to steal his second house. He forbade me outright to speak to his cousin again, and started saying very nasty things about my siblings. But Marco doesn’t know a single one of them. In fact, he never entered my family’s house. My diary says that Marco spoke badly about my siblings in the context of his demand that I leave the house where I live to go to his second house which, according to his cousin, is unfinished (there’s even a big hole on the roof)!

That is to say, in that September call Marco was angrily demanding that I move out of my late mother’s mansion and into his uninhabited second property, in disrepair. (Just to give you an idea of my mother’s mansion, during yesterday’s move they took out a grand piano and an upright piano that were here as my siblings plan to sell the house, and there is still another piano in the other house, after the garden on the same family property.) Why did Marco surmise that I was getting on so badly with my siblings? To give me fatherly advice; to get me out of this mansion and to invite me to move to his second property in a poor neighbourhood. Marco’s tone was like he was advising me wisely…

I was so alarmed by that crazy phone call that I kept insisting to his cousin that he come to my house to meet me and in October, finally, his cousin and I met at my late mother’s mansion. Since the day Marco had exploded in paranoia that he and his nephew wanted to steal the house he wanted to give me as a gift, Marco and I hadn’t spoken on the phone. But on 8 December last year he phoned me. Unlike the furious paranoid of the September phone call, he began his remarks in a very cordial manner, albeit in an omniscient tone. Yours truly was the object of his ‘wisdom’ in the form of unsolicited advice. The paternal advice was so grotesque, so damaging to my self-esteem and self-image, that it explains why I became obsessed in my diaries with psychoanalysing him. Without arguing with him, because by then I saw him as a disturbed man, I wrote down his words as Marco said over the phone: ‘I want to advise you to stop writing. The house you are going to occupy…’

Marco still didn’t register the fact that I had told him several times that I wasn’t going there, and to boot I had to stop being a writer! He just continued to treat me as an extension of his mind. During that phone call, when I wanted to rebel against the change Marco was proposing (leaving my mother’s comfortable mansion for a house in a poor neighbourhood), at one point in the discussion he said emphatically ‘You’re giving me a lot of crap…!’ (my Spanish-English translation). It was so insulting that I was going to live in his second property, still in structural work, abandoning the mansion where I live, that I let him speak during that last phone call just to record verbatim what he said.

I won’t phone him again. When I met Marco so long ago, he had the same angry character, but he didn’t get out of touch with reality. Now, at his age of seventy-three, I see that he has stepped out of reality. Marco has also wanted his nephews, i.e. his cousin’s children, to live in his second house and set up the restaurant there that Marco couldn’t set up because he squandered all his pension money. But even when his cousin or nephews tell him that they don’t want to move to such a remote neighbourhood, Marco doesn’t come back to his senses. He is under the impression that, sooner or later, someone—for example me—will follow his wise advice.

It’s impossible to convey how perplexed I was when, decades after dealing with him, I came across a new person: a deluded Marco. It was only from the videos I saw on YouTube that I realised that it is fashionable to analyse his symptoms under the curious tag of ‘narcissism’. In this entry I can only add that, unlike those youtubers, who in most cases treated people with this condition because they were romantically involved with them, I cut Marco off from the beginning of his delusions. (Only to loved ones, such as my late sister, have I tolerated her delusions, sometimes directed against me, to the extent that I never broke up with her until she died.)

In the next entry I would like to talk about Sam Vaknin’s interpretation of this kind of psychopathology: not being able to conceive that a close friend, a relative or a partner has a will of his or her own.