Nietzsche and Modern Mountaineering - Wilfrid Noyce

All your five senses are differing forms of one basic sense—something like touch. Seeing is highly sensitive touching. The eyes touch, or feel, light waves and so enable us to touch things out of reach of our hands.

Similarly, the ears touch sound waves in the air, and the nose tiny particles of dust and gas. But the complex patterns and chains of neurons which constitute these senses are composed of neuron units which are capable of changing between just two states: on or off.

To the central brain the individual neuron signals either yes or no — that’s all. But, as we know from computers which employ binary arithmetic in which the only figures are 0 and 1, these simple elements can be formed into the most complex and marvelous patterns.

In this respect our nervous system and 0/1 computers are much like everything else, for the physical world is basically vibration. Whether we think of this vibration in terms of waves or of particles, or perhaps wavicles, we never find the crest of a wave without a trough or a particle without an interval, or space, between itself and others.

In other words, there is no such thing as a half wave, or a particle all by itself without any space around it. There is no on without off, no up without down.

The philosopher king

“The problem now is how to lose me..” (Nietzsche, Turin, 4th January 1889)

Here your peregrination ends. No more borders
to cross; no more mountains to scale. The night train
steams through the sleeping Alps, rattling you home.
You chant the Gondola Song; slump under drugs.

In the house of the mad you ramble in French,
eat like a Titan, smash windows, scrawl in the dust.
Every deep spirit wears a mask –
but now the actor’s dead, the mask of insanity
is stuck in your face, a permanent grimace.

Soon your sister will crown you philosopher king,
dress you in white, comb your walrus moustache,
place you in a high chair, powder your skin.

Each morning from the high veranda
you gaze towards Buchenwald and the swastika sun.
The steel light chisels the distant pines.
Your posthumous life has already begun.