There was this one time I was on the phone with John, when I walked through the basement hallway on Daly, past Jonathan’s drum kit, and paused at the frame of his door.
“You’re so megalomaniACal”, I told him.
“No, no, Jeff, it’s megalomaNIacal”, he curtly responded.
And I knew. And John knew. And I knew that John knew that I had simply thrown more fuel on the fire, I had somehow added to his limitless ego. I could see the smirk on his face through the phone, as if Anderson himself was there with one of his close ups in my brain.
When approaching anything new, as a human, aside from bias, there is always the danger of relating even the furthest idea to the self. Everything is subject to interpretation, of course, and I’ve always strongly believed in the importance of interpretation. However, when interpretation stretches too far, the entire learning process can become perverted, an understanding based on nothing.
An example: after the Nietzsche’s death, his sister secured the rights to his publications. She later married a leader of the german anti-Semitic movement, and made distorted publications of his works. The Nazi’s welcomed his ideas, eventually building a monument for him. Yet Nietzsche himself wrote about his strong opposition to racism, and his contrast with the German Nationalistic movement.
And such is how we, as humans, see ourselves in almost everything. I admit that at times I’m guilty of such a thing myself, when I see my life in the characters of movies, when I read my stories in other peoples books. So I start Thus Spoke Zarathustra with trepidation, with the hopeful awareness that I will be able to be open-minded in what I learn.
It’s ironic that Nietzsche had paresis when he wrote his book, and was most likely suffering from delusions of grandeur at the time, although how much it actually affected him is debatable.
Perhaps the best that one can do is to keep a work in mind as inspiration, and not as an influence.
