Nietzsche's Mustache

In the fall of 1888, Friedrich went for long walks in and around Turin, Italy. He was returning to his modest apartment when he felt the corners of his mouth curl up as if pulled by a string. He was enraptured, and could not stop smiling. His laughter, too, had become uncontrollable. Is it any wonder that a man this intense, this erratic, this volatile should have an extravagant forest of hair between the bottom of his nose & the frontier of his upper lip? “My face was making continual grimaces in order to try to control my extreme pleasure,” he wrote in a letter, “including, for 10 minutes, the grimace of tears.” One night, perhaps due to the noise, he was discovered in his room naked, playing the piano, and dancing. His entire being shook with tremors of music, the raptures of the void, as if spirited by some inner demon, or mustache.

Aphorism 381 in Book IV of Nietzsche’s Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, reads as follows: We are too prone to forget that in the eyes of people who are seeing us for the first time we are something quite different from what we consider ourselves to be: usually we are nothing more than a single individual trait which leaps to the eye and determines the whole impression we make. Thus the gentlest and most reasonable of men can, if he wears a large moustache, sit as it were in its shade and feel safe there he will usually be seen as no more than the appurtenance of a large moustache, that is to say a military type, easily angered and occasionally violent and as such he will be treated.

So there’s that. If you’re a male of the species, there is that option. But a lot of animals go further, and employ various modes of camouflage. A giraffe melts into vegetation. The Baron Caterpillar of Southeast Asia is indistinguishable from the leaves of the mango and cashew trees on which it feeds. A Blue-crowned parrot vanishes into the verdant rain forests of Belize. My preference is to wear cardigans and jeans and disappear into walls, most of which are imaginary, and drip with hairy succulents. The perpetual look of stunned amazement puts everyone at ease, as they believe themselves to be the cause of my astonishment. The reality is something different. It always is. Sometimes it resembles a continuum curve, and sometimes it’s you and I, hapless as poor Tom running naked on the heath in a thunderstorm, camouflaged as reality.

You can think of a skull as a round dome with the stuff of dream in it, like the string of a kite, or a circus in your pants. I bring it up now because it’s stucco, and the horses are restless. A feeling of increased power is natural after robbing a jeweler. But not this constant French skepticism, however exquisite it may be. I have in my hand that something you may be interested in. It’s only a pen, but if you work hard toward maintaining a dream, the passions running against the paper will fold themselves into yaks and pull the stars with them all the way to Kathmandu.

The interior of my skull is opaque today. I forgot what it was I was going to ask. I had a question concerning Nietzsche’s uncanny reoccurrence as a barber in downtown Memphis. I remember now. It was when he slipped on a contradiction & fell into a catastrophe. Changed his mind about everything. Even his mustache seemed to say have a nice day. One is best punished for one’s virtues, he laughed. But really, when it comes down to it, one’s tonsorial preference should indicate a mood of alleviation, acquittal, and a reliance on geometrical principles. I didn’t want a crewcut. But he gave me one anyway. Like I said. The interior of my skull is opaque today.

Should I grow a mustache? Would a mustache help? Why not a beard? A long one, à la ZZ Top. And a funky hat with an ostrich feather. It’s why I plucked a plume, and began writing. Times when I have my shoulder to the grass I like to think about sidewalks. The flesh of fish under gloomy circumstances can permeate an entire sentence if you let it. Let it what? Let it walk forward on its letters and shake like a package filled with a storm on somebody’s porch. I’ve seen sentences do that. Turn into palm trees on South Pacific islands. Or camouflage themselves as welcoming fragrances of sage during a time the clocks forgot, and morning slid over the grass.