the philosopher buffoon

Lately, LI has contracted the bad habit of picking up and dropping threads. Like Roger Rabbit blithely hopping down the path of Needles, this kind of thing can lead to no good end. Although it might not seem like it to the reader, LI likes to think of this blog as our own, our.. our Fors Clavigera, our Cantos, our Maximus poems, our Collected Looney Tunes, vol. 2, 1941-1948. We are in hot pursuit of a central but always somehow eluded pattern here, fellas. Our threads – the Giants, Asinine philosophy, the Infinite Earth, Anima Mundi, and especially, via Michelet, the Witch’s path of negation (or is it a train of powder, already lit? the path you can’t go back down, honey) – actually and obscurely point to each other, with the political posts crudely breaking in upon the flow, a Robert Wilson-like chorus of pyromaniacs and junkies equipped with a barbaric yawp lined with newspaper.

Ah, and you thought you were simply reading the heebee jeebees of a logomaniac, eh?

Well, lets set out another little tub. This thread is gonna be about the philosophic buffoon – or the buffoon philosopher.

It all goes back to a moment of absentmindedness – it all goes back, for me, to the eighties, when I used to talk to my friend and prof, Kathleen Higgins, who was writing her first book, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. K.H. had become fascinated by ass fests, one of which is featured in the big Z, and was seeing large echoes in the text from Apuleius’ Golden Ass.

At the time, I didn’t grasp the import of this. Only lately have I begun to connect what she was telling me with my sense of the-muse like power of the ludicrous – which has always operated like the Air Loom gang on the broken winged crow who speaks to you here.

However, I have forgotten (and can’t find the book this morning) whether K.H. mentions Bruno. Nuccio Ordine’s book, Giordano Bruno and the Philosophy of the Ass, was published after K.H.’s book – I do know that.

At the time that I was talking to her about Nietzsche, I was especially drawn – like Krazy Kat to Ignatz’s brick – to one particular moment in Nietzsche’s corpse-us – the beginning number of the Gay Science, in which he says this:

“To laugh at oneself, as one must laugh, in order to laugh out and out of the whole truth – up until now, even the best did not have enough probity, and the most talented had much too little genius! there is, perhaps, a future even for laughter! at that moment when the principle, “the type is everything, one is always none – gets assimilated into mankind and everybody then will always have access to this last liberation and irresponsibility. Perhaps then, laughter will have bonded with wisdom, perhaps then there will only be a “gay science.”

From what we know about Nietzsche, in his private life, he did have a peculiar sense of humor. The first time Franz Overbeck saw Nietzsche after the breakdown, he wrote that “I have seen Nietzsche in certain conditions where it seemed to me – a terrible thought! – that he was faking madness, as if he were glad that it had ended thus.” This, to me, implies that Nietzsche had, in his sane years, a very large appreciation of the practical joke and the dead pan – and would probably have liked Buster Keaton, if he had lived long enough to see the twenties films. In my private list of all stars, many similar jokers crop up – Kurt Tucholsky, Franz Kafka, Georg Grosz, etc. They all appreciated the cruel laughter at the cripple, sliced and diced into the cripple’s laughter at the ludicrous unconsciousness of the sound.