Jeffrey Harpeng
Medicate the Anthropocene
Here we are in the age of Nietzsche’s Letzter Mensch, those who are only able to destroy. He wrote,
“The opposite of the overman (Übermenschen) is the last man: I created him at the same time with that. Everything superhuman appears to man as illness and madness. You have to be a sea to absorb a dirty stream without getting dirty.”
For many years the plastics industry has lied about recycling their intractable long-chain molecular pain to the ecosystem. Another shiny promise of the Anthropocene gone sour, gone seaward choking fish as they swim, swirl and swallow, and a stuffing for albatross and gull, chick and hunter—stuffing not for flavouring the roast, but to gravely grace the innocent with starvation. Even the seas choke on the guilt of industry. We too consume microparticles in the food we eat, the water we drink.
On screen she wades into the tide lapping shiny dead fish. I want to rub sleep from my eyes, to wake. . .
Last night I fell asleep, a granddad nap while watching YouTube on the telly. When I woke there was a Buddhist monk giving a class in meditation. While he chats and chuckles I do his thing while lying on the couch, no straight back or crossed legs. With eyes closed, I take the palm of my hand up to my forehead, but not till it touches. “Be aware of that feeling—warm or cold. Just be aware of that.” He then interrupts with “fish and chips” from an earlier instruction. “Then be aware of the feeling at the top of your head.” His words travel the body.
Other than his instructions there is no room for words. I become aware that I haven’t cleaned my teeth. I am aware of the leftover taste in my mouth. Not unpleasant—avocado on lightly toasted Turkish bread, with baba ganoush spread over with slices of tempeh, and lettuce from the garden.
Being aware of that, I ponder what the bacteria and their chemistry are doing to my teeth. I could infer but do not know that something I cannot feel until I have cavities.
I am aware of something I am not or at least was not aware of.
Before I made the sandwich, I didn’t know what would go in and yet, and yet it all was already there.
For some time I have had a recurrent cough and recently my voice his got rough. Trying to sing with full voice would always set off a cough. Then recently sharp pains in my gut, somewhat relieved by not drinking coffee. Ouch—I had a hard time giving up my writing companion. I just had a wafer ice-cream to get through this. So no coffee, and now a pill to reduce acid production. Then an MRI to check the passage to the gut, as even before I saw the doctor I had reasoned that an ashen feeling in my gullet and a gruff voice inferred reflux. (Inferred and reflux, now there are words that resonate together and which I have never paired together until now.) Every new sentence is something we did not know before, and the MRI told me something I did not know before. It was that old “I’ve got some good news and I’ve got some bad news.”
After the result, I got a quote on a prepaid funeral, basic disposal of the remains expenses. With taxes just over $3000. Dump me in a dumpster would have done.
The MRI showed the good news, no reflux damage, but there frontal to the vertebrae between the scapulae, behind the heart was a white bow of calcium a couple of centimeters thick. But that wasn’t the punchline. The coronary arteries look like hollow bones. Despite years of statins to prevent fatty plaque (?) my arteries have become a cage around my heart.
Possibilities before the MRI and after traveling through me as through a foreign land
First options are lifestyle changes. I already don’t smoke, don’t drink, and am on statins to lower cholesterol which was naturally high despite a lazy vegetarian lifestyle, and tests show blood sugars are fine, but salt is in most things that come from the supermarket aisles.
In this world where we are products of the products, the products are slowly killing us, modernity looks less like a promise I don’t want to keep and progress sounds like an advertising gimmick telling you, selling you on what ‘you need?’
Made in China toys of superheroes – ancient lives born, buried, baked to oil and cracked into plastic
And the media’s algorithms lead me astray, take me to what backs up my view. There’s a pot of pessimism simmering on the hob, and the Internet provides bitter herbs. Even if you are a sea you cannot absorb the plastic stream industry encourages us to be.
I meditate on what I don’t know – the Vedas tell of a nightless dark with no death, or immortality, I meditate on the world's changes burning to waste, where only gravity holds it all together.
I clown around with text and its texture on the tongue. It feels as if, as if, as if language is senile, as if all is only as if. As if all we say is in some way foolishness and that in some weird mock Darwinian joke we are just aping our smarts, and that our suits of rank for the rank are a tatter of half truths and figures stitched into a steam pressed Versace verisimilitude.
I medicate what I never knew was going wrong. One pill is so small it could start a universe.
Author’s Note: Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Summer 1882–Winter 1883/84), translated, with an Afterword, Volume 14 of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, edited by Alan D. Schrift and Duncan Large (SUP, July 2019).
About the Author
Jeffrey Harpeng is an erratic autodidact, a fossicker in the ocean of notions.