Nihilism Rules, OK?
As the eye of heaven sets on our century, it lengthens
Shadows like fears. The greenwood now wakens to polar
Winds, swooshing with a Zarathustra¹ swish that strengthens,
Gusting from the desolation of a vast emptiness of soul.
‘The self-overcoming of morality by means of truthfulness’
Was the light that beamed in Nietzsche’s humanistic eye,
While flushing in his face was his hate of Christian ruthfulness.
When the sultry day held us in its grip and folk were kneeling,
Sartre and Heidegger offered worship to Time (which reclaims
The meaningless one-way trip of this life, revealing
Nothingness at the core). They shot down the sky in flames,
For we all compounded war crimes by idealizing ourselves
Above beasts and prizing the values we invented as eternal
And unconditional, as if to ennoble some part of ourselves:
Take away all pious self-delusion and the projections of vanity -
And now sail for the New World! The sea-lanes are clear for a Mayflower²
To voyage under the flag of human self-affirmation from inanity
To Goethe’s Krypton, where truth is the Will to Power
(Its nature decided by the vision of the ‘I’ that prevails
To say ‘I am the truth’). ‘Und das ist der Nihilismus!’ mused Adolf -
For irreligion, too, can tell delusive and self-flattering tales.
If the sublime soul is a bubble and ‘God is dead’,
If values are epochal or tribal, but self-sufficiency is true -
Then the falling ruins will not strike you or fill you with dread,
Nor strip you of the dignity you never had or the God you never knew.
But your beam, that smiles inanely at the Sistine Creation,
² The Puritans, who in 1620 boarded the Mayflower bound for the New World, viewed the old world as ungodly. Imagine a new start being made by ungodly brethren to found a new world order, based on the vision of one man with total self-belief.