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One of the first pieces I ever wrote was a short collection of poems called “Funk Backwards.”
I was eight years old, and while I can’t tell you why I chose the title, or what I was trying to communicate with sentences like math is funny in the mind if trapper keeper does not unwind, I can tell you that “Funk Backwards” was saved on a floppy disk and has since been digitized thanks to my playwright of a mom, who always told me to keep writing.
What’s most curious about the “collection,” written some twenty-seven years ago, is that certain phrases still resonate, not the least because I honestly don’t think I could’ve written them today (one of my favorites: the world is a helper on its own with helpers on their way).
Indeed, the abstract, ecstatic playfulness of “Funk Backwards” is a timely reminder to reconnect with that peculiarly primordial, “childish”" wisdom that comes when we create for the sake of creating, without hope or despair for an audience—without overthinking it.
Here’s the first of six poems in the “collection” (the rest will be coming next week, with a thirty-five year old version to boot):
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In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche tells a story about a camel, a lion, and a child.
Nietzsche believes we can be much better than we are, not the least because we are stuck in an ideological world of binaries that insists there is such a thing as “good” and “evil.”
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), a hermit named Zarathustra descends from a mountaintop after a decade to share what he’s learned, telling a tale about a camel, a lion, a child, and the ubermensch, whose literal English translation “overman” belies its deeper meaning.
For many, the word ubermensch conjures all manner of knee-jerk reactions
and/or politically motivated misinterpretations, but an even cursory reading of what Nietzsche was actually saying shows that striving to become an ubermensch “overman” evolved human being is not about striving for power, but about transcending our human selves and all of the idiocies, contradictions, doldrums and obsessions that we think define our solipsistic existence.
We come into the world as camels,
beasts of burden who yearn for freedom but remain submissive to our familial/social/ideological/occupational/psychological yokes and obligations.
After years of toiling in the name of some thing or someone else, the camel becomes alienated from its very nature.
The camel’s submissive state of existence, Nietzsche says, is both a choice and necessary,
because once the camel begins to question the burdensome nature of existence—including others’ ideas about “the meaning of life,” “virtue,” “ambition” and supposedly “universal truths”—the process of metamorphosis can begin.
The camel yearns for freedom, and only through overcoming life’s challenges does the camel gain the strength and resilience necessary to attain the next spiritual metamorphosis.
The lion defines her own sense of freedom
and can thus pursue a new, individual sense of meaning:
“To create new values—that even the lion cannot do; but the creation of freedom for oneself for new creation—that is within the power of the lion. The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred “No” even to duty—for that, my brothers, the lion is needed.
The lion is tenacious, empowered and brave, but the lion is still burdened by its reactionary nature. Much like the bigot, the lion’s identity is less about what it is than what it is not.
In roaring a “sacred no” to all that stands in its way, the lion risks becoming disillusioned, arrogant and prideful, angry at a world that does not conform to its vision. Beholden to the memory of having once been a camel, the lion can only respond via power and rage and a resentful roar, which is why the third step in the metamorphosis is so difficult to achieve—the lion must first shed resentment, rage, and rebellious hunger for power in favor of a deepeer kind of wisdom.
“The child is innocence and forgetting,
a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes.” For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred “Yes” is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers his own world.”1
Revisiting “Funk Backwards” has been a reminder to
strive towards the child,
which is why for my next post, I’ll be sharing “Funk Backwards” in its entirety—grammatical errors, eight-year-old idiosyncrasies, peculiar formatting and all—as well as a thirty-five-year old version of the six poems to engage in a dialogue with what I’ve learned—and forgotten—along the way.
Nietzsche, F. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: The Modern Library, 1995.
I always think back on the pure, unbridled flow of creativity I experienced as a kid. You think it’s just how things are always going to be and it calcifies so easily as we get older if we don’t remember to stretch those “muscles” and assure ourselves if we’ve done it before, we can do it again.
My favorite line in this one: “the world would look like held in hand if not so tough on every man”
I remember reading funk backwards at moms and it being quite possibly my first ever interaction with abstract poetry. I think I thought something like, “How is Samuel even allowed to write this?”.