Reading and Writing - Beauty and ugliness
All great people Read. All great people write. All great people are literate... or are they?
All people read
That everyone can learn to read will ruin in the long run not only writing, but thinking too.
You can read, how else would you read this blog post. But a question of literacy is raised. Most people do not read a single book in the year. What they read? Harry Potter, or some 600 pages of inane nonsense. Of these, they are circus-goers and bread-munchers, who speak loudly but are functionally illiterate. If most occasions of what they needed to read were changed for symbols, they would be just as literate... and in many cases that happens, with no smoking and stop signs.
What do I mean by functionally illiterate? This is what Nietzsche means by ruining not only writing, but thinking too. They read, and have no legs to swim deeply into the depths of what is read-- the depths are not on the pages, nor in the symbols, but in the meanings of symbols- in the interpretations of the word.
He who writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read, he wants to be learned by heart.
Here too, we can see what it means for good reading. A good word, is one like a mountain, running with water, frolicking with deer, burrows of Rabbits and depth comparable to nature, without commanding attention all the time. It strikes, in parables, fables, myths, legends- in the stories of our ancients. But what does it mean, writing in blood?
Writing in blood
What is written in blood, is written from sweat, from toil, from labour, from experience. Ideals from this, rung, ring hollow- but ideals written that are written in ink... they ring, and the glass shatters, piercing the veil of fog put before your eyes. This is to say, the untested idea, the untested wisdom is a burden of glass that teetering shatters when your path is waylaid- and from the jagged cuts upon your flesh, you'll find your blood, and your life. And from your life... your blood. From your blood... your writings.
Think on your blood... and you'll find your writings.
To be learned by heart, requires a writing style that can be summed up like lightning from the dark cloud- that its words carry the heavy weight of those heavy drops raining from the firmament... and in learning, in ringing the bells and testing the wisdom it's truisms are unveiled.
Prussian Education
So why is it, most people can read. Function and factory work, factory work demands higher abstractions, and the functions need filling- this stems all the way from Prussia. Prussia had need for German Spirit, and in filling their ranks with German Spirit ironically crushed not only their enemies but their spirit too. That education of officers, robbing from the senses, into the abstractions of the ideas and the glass palace. All pretty and beautiful and untested. Speech and echoes, in a trembling palace of beauty... but a single hammer and all will fall.
It did not take long for the hammer to cock, and gunpowder to light, and the World went to war... Wotan... German spirit put to rest, or resting in its insidious corrupting influence in schools today.
The Victorians, the Americans... all fell under the German Spell cast by Wotan God of Frenzy... Germanic raids upon all young minds. That reading now has become a terror that inflicts functional illiteracy! What social conditioning!
As if Alduous Huxley in his Brave New World was only ringing the bell for our Brave New World!
Blood
Classical bloody writings, are found in the Gospels, the lived word of Christ. An idol, tested and rung- it's knell heard a century ago... but it's well full of blood. Taste it, and you'll find its lessons, but take care. All blood wants to reign supreme, blood is the lifeforce of the virtues, and each virtue wants to be the supreme virtue. THE Virtue. In Christ, the Golden Rule.
It is not an easy thing to drink of foreign blood, and it is not an easy thing to wash your hands of native blood- when in Rome, do as the Romans do, as Pontius Pilate did.
The point of this: drink in foreign works- ring their bells and see most shatter! Untested wisdom, is their terror of the functionally illiterate masses! That it ruins thinking too. Of writing? In shortness, and in blood.