I Am Zarathustra: A Dance to a Different Drummer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcSdwXay5es

Zarathustra, Zarathustra, Zarathustra, Zarathustra…

Ears I have eyes I have mouth I have mind/ Dumber and blinder the harder I try

I strike a principle down from on high/ Scatter it wide / Ashes to fire/ I am alive

I sing a song of one, not all/ Behold the writing on the wall/ What makes man, makes him more

Confound the Scriptures, play with fate/ That speeds a man, or makes him wait/ Not early, nor too late

Ears I have eyes I have mouth I have mind…

The devil’s advocate I am (Hear me now) / Have little time for fall of man/ The devil and the damned (Uebermensch)

The Superman is what will be/ Come, come now, disagree with me/ I am too well received

Zarathustra, Zarathustra…

Ears I have eyes I have mouth I have mind...

(C) Christina Brodie 2010

From the time I was knee-high to a grasshopper, probably from the age of 4 or 5, it was plainly obvious that I had a tendency to go where no others had gone before. Parents, teachers and everyone else were exasperated by the fact that I seemed to have difficulty with following orders, even to the simplest degree. I was the bane of my ballet teacher; if she told a line of us girls to go left, I'd go right. Or, I'd dance when I wasn’t supposed to, or when I didn’t feel like dancing, lie down during a performance, in the middle of the dancefloor, and the others would just have to dance round me.

I see brighter colours and hear brighter sounds than your average bear, and have been emotionally off-the-grid, so to speak, from a very young age. There are many modern terms (bipolar, the most likely) which could describe my condition, which in part derives from a combination of social, physical, inherited and hormonal factors.

Mood stabilisers for me are almost completely ineffective, but from the extensive experience I do have, manageability of my condition seems to centre around having a quiet, stable, safe and undisturbed living environment of my own, the space and time to live, paint, write, do music and most of all, be able to exist in the knowledge that I can be allowed to breathe, without having to ask anybody’s permission. Somewhere, where others don’t annoy me; or tell me I'm weird; or conversely, are too “weird” for me; or tell me that I should be doing this or that, because what I’m doing is invariably wrong; or, that I’m “breaking rules” for some cooked-up, trumped-up reason known only to themselves; or, where people having canniptions over my leaving a couple of crumbs on the worktop after making toast; it’s not my kind of thing, OK? I have Higher Things to occupy my mind with, and so should they have.

GPs and psychiatrists alike, have notoriously, rarely been sufficiently insightful or highly trained, to recognize the symptoms of bipolar, which I have probably always had from an early age. Even though my father’s family has genetic links to schizophrenia, and my mother’s odd behaviour, whilst she was alive, didn’t help matters, it seemed that I was the one who was cast as the “nutter”, and obliged even at the tender age I was, when I couldn’t necessarily articulate my emotions properly, to tell the psychiatrist what “I thought” was wrong with me. I was expected to come along with my own diagnosis, rather than the onus being on the psychiatrist to do what they were paid for, which was and still is the case; as in: check through medical records, use your profound and intimate knowledge of the human psyche which you should have by now, to get a pretty good idea of what is going on with this person, and compare it with current events. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, you would think, especially regarding the length of training one had to go through. But no; in over a century of psychiatry, we have still got no further than Sylvia Plath’s prescient description of one decidedly very unhelpful psychiatrist, quoted as saying to the patient: “So, what do you think is wrong with you?”)

For me, the lack of cognitive function and impulse control one gets with bipolar is in my case, genuinely out of my control. After a number of years of struggling with this and finally - finally, exactly realising what the problem is, gives me enormous pleasure in giving a metaphorical slap in the face to those especial duds, and everyone else, who have all taken equally great pleasure in calling me a “nutter”, “raver” , “loony”, or an “evil child”, all these years.

AND - furthermore, there’s a twist to all this. I was, in recent years, found to have a brain tumour in my right frontal lobe, which has now conclusively been confirmed as such. It’s likely what’s called an “incidental meningioma”, which type of brain lesion is notoriously “silent”. In that, no-one considers that possibility, i.e. that it could be a brain tumour causing all the problems, when sudden behaviour or mood changes occur, and severely impair one's life. Because of its location (my right frontal lobe), this tumour corresponds to unusual, or limited, cognitive functions, and most certainly the later development in a child, of motor skills. This goes hand in hand with a link to diminished emotional recognition, and interaction capabilities, which in my case, is compounded by my bad eyesight, and which severely impacts relationships (say, if you look at someone, and they accuse you of giving them a “dirty look” and tear a strip off you, when you yourself had no idea what you were doing in the first place to provoke this reaction). Fair be it to say, that I didn’t have much of an easy time, in school, work or anywhere else.

From a very young age, unless out in nature - whilst my heart was on fire with colour, light, the explosive creations of spring and buds blossoming forth - I found the world a frightening, mean-spirited, threatening, confusing, unwelcoming, cold and inhospitable place of grey drudgery, with people’s unexcited, miserable, hostile faces the length of a football pitch, and skin the colour and texture of porridge, or: the fake smiles, fake conversation, and gravitation towards scheduled supposedly “fun” (read idiotic) activities, for the sake of currying favour, and trying to impress others, who didn’t care anyway, wouldn’t care if that person disappeared tomorrow, and for whom one association was as good as another. Easy come, easy go, in other words.

To outside onlookers, my parents and I seemed to “have it all”, and I was continually told this by both of them, as they had both come from humble backgrounds: “look at what you have – your own room/ posh school, etc”). I will say this: a so-called “wonderful lifestyle” is nothing, if what are supposed to be one’s closest and most trusting relationships, are shot to bits; and the sole objective of the people who arranged all this, is to shoot you down, each and every single day, and let you know, to the nth degree, how they wished they’d never had you; if the natures of school and work depress you as a young child so much through their relentless curtailment of freedom, that you find it hard to get out of bed every day, knowing it will be more of the same, and you are trapped in the rat cycle unless you escape, with whatever explosion it takes to do so. It was tiring to be told how “wonderful” my life was, and how “grateful” I should be, and to be shunted into a system not of my own choosing, where one would be expected to turn out as a perfectly milled, seasoned, stuffed, cured and packed sausage at the end of it all; M & S, or Sainsbury’s Finest, anyone?

I could not see the point of all this rigmarole. It was intensely boring, depressing and nauseatingly inauthentic, as I listened to my mother conversing in her silly little “baby” voice to acquaintances, before resuming her normal screaming tactics towards me once all the visitors' cars had disappeared down the drive, and where the only witnesses at that point were our four walls, who may, or may not have had ears. I felt not loved for who I was, but what I was “supposed to be”, according to some projection, it seemed, that was continually being foisted on me against my will.

I grew up in a Tory stronghold south of Bristol (Liam Fox's former constituency), with your obligatory Round Table, Lions Club, preponderance of older people called Howard, Dennis, Hilda and Margaret, all of them wannabe “managers” of the seemingly numerous eldercare homes in the area, which were invariably conversions of Victorian mansions, too large to serve as individual homes at that point, but which had been built on the proceeds of the “Slave Triangle”, before slavery had been abolished, and before people knew enough to know better. All of these middle-aged female “managers”, dressed in identical Margaret Thatcher blue skirt-suits, and put on the voice to match, which I suspect I can still do a passable imitation of.

Even their progeny, the younger people, my peers - seemed old, or at least already retired. Some of them are still living in that dead end-of-the-world place, and I expect they will move to fill their parents’ shoes in the retirement homes, once the old folks have gone. The last train line to that place (from Bristol) had disappeared in the 1960s; the long antiquated, third-rate girls’ school I attended, which thankfully died a death eventually, was like a prison; and the highlight of the week was when my parents used to take a shopping trip to Bristol - or, the massively deserted Cribbs Causeway shopping centre, and spend money they didn’t have, on things they didn’t need. Success, for young people who didn’t go on to Uni, was defined as being promoted to “manager” of your retail store at 21, getting married early, and purchasing a “starter” box house on an estate north of Bristol, aptly called “Sadly Broke” (Bradley Stoke) - on account of the fact that the builders responsible had mixed the bricklaying mortar with such a high proportion of sand to cement, that the houses were beginning to fall apart within a couple of years of construction.

I hated absolutely all of it; the relentless retail culture, which I was aware even at that stage could not possibly be infinitely sustainable; the trundling around in cars everywhere, from pillar to post, with no real objective but to pick up some fish and chips from the greasy spoon 5 minutes down the road; the resulting increase in traffic on the roads; the 3- or 4-car households; the insistence that one should learn to drive (I objected, for environmental reasons); the vacuous TV culture (cable TV made it worse); the over-focus on gossip; the constant comparisons with so-and-so, and so-and-so; and the constant self-justification by people of themselves, by saying “isn’t this great?”. I thought to myself, “God, what a thing to want to strive for; what advances in thought, is all of this going to make in the world?” As far as I know, that place where I grew up is still a backwater; it's EVEN WORSE than it was 30 years ago; many of the numpties I hated at school, have gone on to reproduce themselves, for better or worse. Let’s hope their kids do a better job of creating some sort of society than they ever did; as I have a healthy sense of disdain for the vast majority of my own generation. Not all, of course. My friends, of course, are safe; the rest of you, are hell.

Another thing: these people’s darting eyes, their following you around like you were some kind of Pied Piper, trying to get some dirt on you. At school, it didn’t matter what sort of mundane activity I engaged in; whether it was eating a sandwich, playing piano in the music practice-rooms, or going to the toilet; there were invariably between 2 and 20 people following me around, at any one time. It equated to harassment and abuse, but no-one cared. Unless I threw a chair or some other missile into the middle of the throng, and promptly legged it, which gave their tiny minds something to talk about and reflect on, since this kind of episode could never be replaced by the turgid Thomas Hardy or Shakespeare which was supposed to be our reading matter for the day; since it was far more exciting, and had the added value, of being contemporary, and not made up by some fusty old windbag, “x” number of years previously. I sympathized, I think, a few years later, with Hugh Grant, and the uses to which baked-bean tins could be put. In the 80s, the days of Britney Spears and paparazzi were 20 years away, a mere twinkle in the eye - but the Big Brother spirit, I kid you not, was alive and well.

And this following me around didn’t just happen at school; my mother used to get in my face at home, wouldn’t stop the first few times when I asked her reasonably, so when I did eventually explode and tell her to get knotted, she'd get my father to come home and beat me - instead of her, for a change, I suppose. I took to inventing some serious code writing, so people wouldn’t read my secret diaries, and I once wrote a diary in backwards script, which was too small to see unless one had a magnifier, and held it up to a mirror. How my mum managed to read it all, I'll never know (a brain-dead housewife with too much time on her hands, I suppose?), but she threw it back in my face when I came home, and said “is that what you think of certain boys...you should become a whore”, whereas I'd written no more, than that I fancied them. Am I upset she’s dead now? No. Not a shred. Not one iota.

I must have been so interesting and so important, and so livening up of some of these people’s sad, tiny, little, daily lives. Where are they all now? I don’t know, and I don’t care. As my mother once bitterly said, on reflection on her own life, “they’ve probably been swallowed up by motherhood”.

If I had to do everything all over again, I would have walked out of my parents’ house at 18, and never looked back. I wouldn’t have wasted my time trying to find love with those who didn’t love me back, or didn’t have my interests at heart. I wouldn’t have bothered with Uni – waste of time. I would have gone to the Rocky Mountains, or some far-flung place where no-one could find me, got to be an IT whiz, gone off grid and done my Art. I wouldn’t have chased love, or acceptance by society. If someone had come along, and we found we got on, that would have been fine by me, and we might have made a go of it, but my Art would have come first and foremost, even before them, sometimes (if they could handle that fact), and I would have wanted to get myself into a position, where I was answerable to precisely NO ONE but myself.

Why the hell didn’t I do that? Because I just did not have the confidence. If your confidence has been hammered, and your views and opinions negated from the year zero, it does stuff to your head, after a while. Now, I personally prefer to retreat within my head. No-one can touch me there. My head was and still is, the safest place to be, and right now, I’ve come to the conclusion that I like it that way. When I was happily playing in the sandbox at school at the age of 4, minding my own business, making up my own little adventure world in my mind, and a bigger girl came along and kicked my handiwork over, and I flicked a pebble at her, it wasn’t her that got hauled off to the Mother Superior and caned, but myself, as she started screaming to everyone “Christina threw a stone at me, waaah, blah blah blah”. (It briefly touched her foot. It didn’t touch her eye, the blithering idiot!)

It proved to me very early on the sycophancy and hypocrisy that is human nature, and that if for any reason you see it for what it is and refuse to be beaten, and shout, and rightly fight back at the bullies, ultimately you are the “bad” one, because everyone else knows they would never have the strength to shout back at these ringleaders, and so they cower, as pathetic, abject cowards, behind the fat beefy, piggy hockey players in the foreground, because they are afraid the same might happen to them; and so, you're threatened with the ubiquitous old chestnut “I’m going to tell on you”: whether it be teachers, parents, partners, workmates, or whatever other forms of so-called “authority” this childishness and frankly, wussiness, comes from. They all scream from the same script.

I scoff at, and actively despise such people; they have nothing better to do; they hate the fact that I am relatively self-contained and full of my own energy - it generates itself - how does it do it? Hell, I don’t know - and, because I have a million ideas which I can occupy myself with, they loathe this fact with a passion, and they know I have better qualities than them, and they know I have understanding of a lot of things they don’t, and could never hope to have; that in fact, yes, I am better than them, in many ways, and that I'm not ashamed to admit it, and that I’m not a bighead by the way, this is just fact. I have no time for humblebragging just to get people to like me, which is what it is always about. I just tell it like it is - I know what I am, and what I’m not.

They are so jealous of me because of this, that their sole occupation is to try outright to destroy me, and distract myself from my life’s purpose, which is to create. I have but one phrase for them; - off and leave me alone, unless you want to be turned round and feel the force of the divine, metaphorical boot so hard in your backside, that you will be projected into eternity, never to return. If you enjoy the sound of that, then go straight ahead; I can assure you, you won’t like it, not by a long chalk. I'm by all accounts very lovely, when you’re on my right side; you would be ill-advised to consider the reverse, and it would be most unproductive – for you, that is. I will just dust off my hands thereafter, and say that it’s all in a day’s work.

Everything I have ever observed about people has all added up to the mindset that I wasn’t put on this earth in order to fulfil everybody else’s inordinate number of rules, which have seemed to be foisted on me every second of the day, every day of my life. Really, why should I?

I was rushed madly through early life, not of my own accord. I was induced prematurely at birth; packed off to school at only 3-4 years old, with class peers of 6 years old - which absolved my mother of having to take care of me for as long as was possible, so that she could indulge herself by lying in bed with depression all day, owing to the fact that she had never wanted children, and that parenthood had grown very old on her very quickly. I was presented by my mother at school, as being supposedly “academically precocious” (reading at the age of 1 3/4), but was sent to school without being able to tie my own shoelaces, or without necessarily being able to control my bladder effectively at all times during the school day. I was chastised constantly by parents and teachers, and older children, and held to standards which were way above my age at the time; either for not concentrating/ inattention/ being overactive, or having social or physical skills which were obviously less developed than my much older peers - who all hated me, by default, as well as did a number of bullying teachers.

I tried my best, but apparently, nothing I ever did was good enough – there were enormously high expectations placed on me, and hours more homework piled on me than on other kids. I had to do the basic homework the class was set, as well as the more advanced personal work that was set for me to do on top of that, and if I couldn’t manage to do all this work, or understand it, or keep up with it, was spitefully sent to detention by certain teachers.

“Homework”, to be honest, was something of a blur to me. My mother used to go through my essays word for word, and make me write them out as many times as possible (3-4 times) before they were to her satisfaction, despite my fury and protestation that the result was not exclusively my own work, and I wanted to do things “My Way”. The excuses for my having had to rewrite my homework again and again, according to my mother, could have been because of anything such as: a crossing-out; my handwriting not being perfect; or some change my mother had made, that she then changed her mind about. This was all just for her satisfaction – so she could be seen to “score points off the other mothers”, most of whom she hated. However: homework aside - I suppose I must have got some brains from somewhere, in order to pass exams - as I won scholarships, to two different schools, 2 years earlier than I should have.

So it was, that, given this rather unappetizing environment for learning, I completely lost interest in school following entry into secondary school, partly because of the dire curriculum (a lazy repetition, for the first 3 years, of everything we’d learnt in the previous 2 years at primary school - even the photocopied notes were the same!), and teachers, who were there because they couldn’t do anything else; partly because of running from pillar to post carrying a bag of schoolbooks and files equating to my own body weight to different classrooms (why? Just why?); partly because of precocious puberty; partly because of social rejection; and partly because so much onus had been foisted on me to “achieve” from an early age. I was fed up with being a performing monkey, and the expectations that came along with it. My mother was particularly harsh and cruel, with practically no attunement to myself, in any sense of the word. Typically, she would come down on me like a ton of bricks at least once a day for God knows what, and if I was clearly seen to be at my lowest ebb, would do her best to kick me whilst I was down, and enjoy every minute of it.

Everything I was supposed to like, was what she liked. Never, not once (except to test the waters), was I asked by her, what I would like. She assumed that I would automatically like what I was given by her, and if I didn’t, then it was an insult to her, and I had upset her dreadfully, and so I had to spend the next fortnight apologizing, and attempting to stop her giving me the silent treatment, starting from the age of 5. Didn’t matter that on several occasions, when I'd drawn a Mother’s Day card or picture, and gave it to her with the best of intentions – two minutes later, it would either be thrown down the stairs or out of the window, leaving me sobbing, and wondering what on earth I had done to upset her. I didn’t give her anything one year, as I was fed up with her ingratitude, and according to her, that wasn’t right either. She did the same with my father, and his presents to her. Any china ornament present of his would usually bite the dust, within its first half-hour of reception by her.

Although there was no support from my parents as to what career I should follow - as long as this choice had nothing whatever to do with my interests or plans for myself – as my ideas were invariably considered irredeemably “stupid” - any other choice would be, apparently, fine – as long as it sounded sexy - so for example, Botany was out, but Biochemistry or Materials Science were immeasurably sexier, if of course, potentially significantly more hazardous to health. Almost any career choice was a good one, so long as it wasn’t "wet-sounding", or, Art.

In fairness, my father was, over time, more encouraging and lenient towards me in terms of career choice than my mother, as he owned his own business, and wasn’t himself very good at taking orders either, so to some degree he could see where I was coming from. My mother, by contrast, had no idea how to deal with me at all. She always said that my father understood me better. With her, it was always all about the money. It was about all sorts of brass neck, but in no way about any sort of dignity, integrity, or genuine investment in making the world a better place. When Sam Fox was popular in the 1980s, and appeared on Wogan when I was 11, my mother said “why don’t you be like her – she earns more than the Prime Minister” (I was aghast, and said "MUM!" in horror) or, later, “why don’t you be a yoga teacher – or do nail extensions? You could really BE SOMEBODY!”

Instead, I chose to become a painter, botanical illustrator, fashion accessories maker, and musician. When I eventually wrote and illustrated my botanical painting book - a pretty forward-thinking publication, for its time - her words were a grudging “Hm. Well done. At least you can say you've been there, and done that. Even if you NEVER DO ANYTHING LIKE THAT AGAIN!” (Thanks Mum. I got the message.)

By the time I reached tweenhood, I hadn’t really been given the time and space to think for myself, and my social skills amounted to precisely zero. I had had enough, and focused solely on art, music and writing, to the exclusion of all else. Nobody could do anything with me, and I didn’t intend for them to, either. I was out of touch with them, and they with me, and never the twain would meet, or so I thought. I was completely disengaged. The foolishness and senseless of everything, was beneath me.

So, maybe this illustrates why I am the way I am now, since it is an incontrovertible fact that our basic personalities don’t alter over time; I am an unashamed manifestor of sheer, bloody-mindedness. One of the things I loathe, first and foremost, is CONTROL - from other people. I refuse to be controlled in any way, shape or form, and people who wish to be aggressive towards me (remember, I’m just a bear shuffling around in the woods looking for eats, shoots, leaves, and minding my own business), will soon feel they had wished to encounter, face-to-face, the rough end of a pineapple. People control people, just because they feel they can. Noticing this is important, as it marks that would-be controller as a weak fraud who does not want to hear the truth, and instead prefers to perpetuate lies, because it is easier to engage with these, than a) their own brain cells; b) dare I say it, the mask they wear for others; or c) dare I say, furthermore and moreover, their gut feelings. The truth will out. It always will.

Therefore - to return to the original subject of my article - I am Zarathustra, and no-one can take that away from me. I am a free spirit of the truest kind. I play my own fiddle, and dance to my own tune, where precisely this, and nothing less, is the order of the day.

I am the epitome of the true artist – as opposed to, the con artist; and whilst I've put a lot of work into what I do over the years, I always aim to be original. Or, at least, pursue a body of work that is going to stretch my mind, and improve my understanding of whatever I've done before. I refuse to be one of those people who churns out a very similar body of work, to whatever it was they were doing 20-25 years ago. It’s probably very easy for them, and gets the money rolling in. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. However, who said life was meant to be easy? It certainly wasn’t for me, but that’s because I've refused to jump on the bandwagon and give people what they want, because there's more to life than jumping on the bandwagon and refusing to expand your mind, and worse, refusing to reflect and think, whilst, or preferably before, you're actually putting your stuff out there. Some people, of course, don't want to think, and you can see it in their “art”; it's trash, and always and evermore, will be so. That’s not what we're interested in. It certainly doesn’t interest me.

I'm a rebel, but I'd prefer to pursue rebelliousness in the noblest sense. People may think that because I’m an artist, I’d have an easier time doing what I'm doing. Not so; I have never, ever got on at “Art Schools” (most notably, when I started an MA at London College of Fashion, left six months through the course, and received no less than a full refund of three-and-a-half thousand pounds, because the course and teaching were abominable, and they knew it, and I wasn’t going to pay that much for a piece of paper, which I could just as well print off at home myself). It was a total con, and the course leader was still so scared of me years later, that he would cross the road whenever he saw me coming. Or: when he thought he'd seen me coming; paranoia, no doubt. What a very silly man!! I mean, what did he think I'd do? Say, “oh hi, still producing the same old rubbish, are you?”

To illustrate the difference: if someone said that to me, I'd say, “no, actually, I'm producing some really RATHER GOOD, new stuff, my BEST EVER, and of course, as you’d expect from me, it's not rubbish. Because I rarely, if ever, produce any rubbish. What’s your excuse?”

This type of “art” world, where legends in their own lunchtime scratch each other’s backs, is not mine, and never has been. Art's about beauty in its many shapes and forms - and seriously unusual, interesting takes on subjects, and great vision. For example, there has been an explosion of wonderful artists, from all around the world, who have been producing some incredible work in lockdown during 2020, which is much better than one would want to pay the earth for to see at some drab exhibition in some fusty and impersonal gallery, where they've only impregnated the woodwork with as much beeswax as is humanly possible, because it disguises the smell of the general public and Great Unwashed - who have paid through the nose to come to goggle, because apparently someone told them that this Gallery and this exhibition is the place to be, and that these so-called “artists” are apparently supposed to be geniuses (Cy Twombly invokes my particular hatred), and because even still, the general public has too low an opinion of itself to think that if it tried hard enough, too, it could create works of wonderment in its own home, which were over and above anything sputtered out by these proposed “titans”. Mind you...this attitude could be changing. I've seen glimpses of it, especially over the past year. People don’t want to pay 10,000 bucks a year and wind up in debt, to be told rubbish by some so-called creme-de-la-creme of some nondescript tutor - which they know in their heart to be crud - and go through the motions in the vain hope that they’ll be "accepted" by the powers that be; to just to get some stupid bit of paper at the end of it; and produce work which they would not really have wanted to produce, but did so because they felt they needed a “mentor” in order to “get anywhere in life”, because that’s what “they were told” by “everyone who seemed to matter”.

Trust yourself, that’s the best advice I can give you. People are their own best mentors. They need to quit being afraid of themselves. Thankfully, this is now happening on a grand scale with the influence of previously “respected institutions” disappearing - about time!! I used to be an Adult Education tutor, although nevertheless an enlightened one (not your average bear). Not any more!! I’m done with teaching, since I still have so much to learn myself - but I invariably offer words of encouragement to people who produce, in my opinion, work which is original, noble, incisive, stunning or uplifting - where I feel credit’s due, and when I think something’s truly great. They should be flattered, and rightly so; after all, as a seasoned veteran in Art terms, I do know what I'm talking about.

I refuse to collaborate with other artists just because of sheer shock value. Say, the type of people who rave about films such as “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” (one can see where all this is going), in order to vie with each other in terms of elevating offensiveness, and how many times they can say to each other “wasn’t it great…you were great, darling...” “you too...” and I think, oh, for heaven’s sake, I'm done with all this ***-kissing; or they rave about the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose name I will mention only once, as I never care to mention it again, and who some might say met a timely demise, in that the world had rightfully had enough of his despicable, glorification-of-hell films; if you want a description, Google them, as I refuse to spoil anybody’s day with the details. Was divine judgement exercised on his part? Who knows? Human nature has many thousand facets and compartments, and it’s our choice whether to contemplate them; but as for the basest and most degrading stuff in life, I don’t even want to go there. Because life throws enough evils at us, so many of which seem to want to predominate over glory, that one has enough to fight against and contend with. The good stuff is the most important, but at the end of the day, it’s up to us make it good or better stuff, not go the other way and sink into degradation.

Individualism is the name of my game, as it should be for us all. Man is not an island, but neither am I, nor anybody else, part of some archipelago; most beings do not need completion by others, as they are already complete in themselves; they maybe just didn’t discover it yet. As for my song “Zarathustra”, written way back in the day when I was still doing my “Queen Christina” showmanship, for what it was worth – it wrote itself. It was like nothing anyone had heard, either before or since. Neither, I suspect, was the costume like anything anyone had seen, before or since.

In terms of some of the writers I like and who have inspired the general philosophic template for my life, I always find myself returning to Ayn Rand and Nietzsche. I cannot say enough how fed up I am with the claims that Nietzsche and Ayn Rand were responsible for inspiring Nazism, Trumpism, Thatcherism, Toryism and everything in between (all of which movements, it can be universally agreed, there was something wrong with). One singled out writer, or personality, cannot a movement or the fall of society make; and coals of fire cannot be piled on this one person’s head for this misdirected and foolish belief. It is the bozos who engineer, and participate in, and group together in mass hysteria, who do so.

I am not a political animal. In any way, shape or form. I stand outside it, because it pleases me to do so, and I look at the invariable pileups of people who have been whipped into shape in order to fight each other, and look away in despair. I am just a bod, who quietly goes about their business, whatever it might be, and ideally, would like to tell the majority of the world to stuff it, since many are intensely annoying. However, I'm not just any bod, and well I know it, and so do you; and if you have any doubt in your mind that this is indeed the case, you might want to re-read my article “And Ye Shall Know A Man By His Work”.

I dance to a different drummer. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. And I don’t care whether people take me, or leave me. I’m just here; and thus here I am. I claim my patch on this earth, to do as I like with. And, people can never slay me with words; because I will never be stuck for them, myself. Taking on me, in whatever argument of the day floats people’s boats, is a tall order; one would be warmly recommended, and extremely skilfully advised, not to try.

Queen Christina “Zarathustra”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcSdwXay5es