COMMUNICATION VIA LUNAR RELAY TO AKA MIEMBE

Habari Aka,

We were speaking of how the Promethean Long Dracocide chose his name. According to Archived Data Fragments 1665-4310–1665-4312, in the episode which inspired his name Surt dreamed of a more terrible danger still, a shapeless "enemy" threat quite beyond the war of ideas against any foe of principles, even those symbolized by the three heads of Long's dragon. These datartifacts show pages from one of Surt's own notebooks:

ATTACHMENT: "DATA FRAGMENT 1665-4310: scanned image from electronic media, minimal decay; transcribed"

thinking about Norse myth [...]
like eternal recurrence as test of life-loving capacity —
Do the remaining Aesir who play games with their golden chessmen after Ragnarok regret their deeds, their mistakes and their fall, or do they wish it all again, a thousand times more?
Chessmen — symbols of the power they once wielded, moving pieces in the world.
It is possible to come to face even the politics and the groupthink and the limits, the worst errors and the waste and so forth of this world with some humanity and affirmation, because it makes us what we have been, are and will be.

The next note appears hastily scrawled, on the next page:

ATTACHMENT: "DATA FRAGMENT 1665-4311: scanned image from electronic media, minimal decay; transcribed"

in night, after R. dream: Seemingly an eternity before the light of our Great Noon we put faith in, in the blackness of this terrible Nadir Solstice that forgets the sun returns, comes the terrible Fear of Nothing for Nothing, the empty fleshless monster of all monsters: the Beast of Nothing, Nihil, Apathy, Annihilation, Void — the wolf that devours the sun — hopelessness, doubt, inward collapse, the ground falls from underneath, only the Abyss stares back — worse than the Dragon we now see with 3 beastly heads, Nidhogg — dragon of destruction — whose true name and sustenance is this Nothing, inside us all, waiting to become in our lifelessness — it is not even a beast we can fight, not natural nor supernatural, not even a form until it takes one, and then its heads are the Hydra's — otherwise it is Nether but it is always us, in the time we are Alone, without illusions to protect us, seeing only the Night no longer cloaked in the light of stars, not the friendly familiar darkness of the seen-before or not-yet-seen, not Pitch nor midnight, only infinity looking back at us — the monster gapes, its knows no defeat — deny it battle: Live, Grow, Chase It Away, Banish the Withering No-Thing!

The subsequent note on the next page fills in more details retrospectively:

ATTACHMENT: "DATA FRAGMENT 1665-4312: scanned image from electronic media, minimal decay; transcribed"

morning after, about Ragnarok dream —

…some fought with fiery swords, they had come from fiery chaos to fight the Monsters and the Minions and their leaders, taken as mortal Gods by men, though their Aesir lie, recruit them to fight their battles, and play with them as pawns in a chess game — meanwhile the Horn blasted for a small Forever, echoing louder and louder, gaining energy, painful, shattering, never dying away until I woke. It summoned me awake. But first the wolf Skoll swallowed the sun and all the fighters lay down their weapons — even that now seemed pointless. Even that battle of "Good" and "Evil", in which the fiery rejuvenators would be called the Evil demons. They all no longer cared.

The ellipsis is preceded on the original notebook page by a space of three lines, as though Surt meant to fill in the rest of the details of the dream. Instead it seems he skipped to the most prominent thought in his mind to record the next morning, and once he had preserved that insight, neglected to set the stage by filling in the blank. I suppose that the setting up to that point is a more usual account of Ragnarok, the final doomsday battle of Norse mythology. These names: Nidhogg the dragon who chews on the roots of the world tree, Skoll the wolf who chases the sun across the sky, and the Aesir gods all belong to Norse mythology, as does the name Surt.

In the usual account, the valiant dead, fallen mortal warriors gathered for the purpose were mustered to follow the Aesir gods and their allies to fight a tremendous Armageddon at the end of the world, a battle fought against monsters and frost giants and other enemies. This ended without victory, in fact in the mutual destruction of doomsday. This remarkable eschatology in a sense indicates a radical fatalism, in that ancient Norse believers knew hopeless portents of how the battle would unfold, and specifically how their powerful martial gods would perish, but embraced the glory of the unavoidable Ragnarok, literally "fate of the gods."

In some tellings of the story, afterwards a few surviving Aesir toy with their chessmen. Chess has often suggested the imperium of political hierarchy and military prowess not only in the Norse but in many traditions. Note that in the game pawns serve as weak, but numerous footsoldiers. The surviving Aesir remember past "glories" of violent domination of their enemies, the former leadership by their pantheon, characterized by the devotion of a faithful mankind even willing to sacrifice themselves, and their command of a host composed in a sense by their pawns. The alienness of this image directly illustrates how considerably the Promethean change has altered perspectives since the dark ages. In a sense, the Aesir's rule could stand for the Three Scourges embodied in Long Dracocide's legendary dragon: the mass-mindedness, the subordination to authority, and the moral orthodoxy, all principles of the Old World, all opposed by Prometheans. Commitment to these doomed the order imposed by the Aesir just as it doomed the Old World, but Surt suggests that even this makes possible our life and his own life, and therefore we may think of it as purposeful.

In the traditional version, the mythical fire giant Surt (or Surtr) leads the cohort of Muspelheim, the world of fire. At the End, he sweeps his fiery sword over everything, setting the nine worlds ablaze to sink into the sea as cinders and rise again, green and fresh after the holocaust, a new and better world for its inheritors, named Lif and Lifthrasir (Life and Eager-For-Life). In the traditional version, the Aesir god Heimdall blew his great horn to summon the gods to battle. In the dream, this continues through to the End, wakes the real-life Promethean Surt at battle's end, as though it echoes still in his mind.

Well then, I shall move on to weaving my main thread now that I have built a frame for it. You may have guessed I found more to interest me in Surt's notes than instructive Norse imagery, something other than what I sought. That much only serves as background to a much deeper consideration, my compulsion to raise the subject.

I'll tell you why I fixate on these Fragments, now that I found them for another reason. At last in Fragment 1665-4311 I found some contemporary verification of the three-headed dragon from Dracocide's legendary vision, but from my viewpoint now, I no longer care much about my earlier problem. Yes, making an academic contribution to a specialty now seems minor, even incidental. Strange that some massive unknown tugs at me now, almost a — yes, a distraction. Upon careful reading, Surt's vision explicitly distinguishes the threat known as Nothing identified with both the wolf that swallows the sun and the wormlike dragon Nidhogg from the three-headed dragon representing the three human Scourges we have already seen in Long Dracocide's vision. And somehow, this symbolically-alluded nihilism appears more fearsome than those three more immediate and monstrous threats. What can this all mean?

To approach this as a puzzle assumes one principle first of all: that I have within me some mentality capable of relating to the puzzle, and solving it. I am not sure that I do. But, I thought I might assemble some pieces from some unexplained references in these notebook pages which were not culled from Norse legends and storytelling. These I thought might reflect on the Ragnarok narrative, which I comprehend more readily, and serve as my Rosetta stone to understand Surt's Nothing.

Some other references appear to come from other traditional mythology, such as the Hydra metaphor. And "Pitch," perhaps a folk nickname for the demon armed with a pitchfork in popular Christian mythology, more commonly known by other names such as Devil (perhaps from deva, Angel), Lucifer (Light-bearer in Latin) or Satan (Accuser in Hebrew). The image of a pitchforked, dark demon obscures the agglomerated origins. This demon usually functioned to personify the abstract polarity of Evil. Evil was an article of faith commonly identified with "Darkness" among many different kinds of formerly numerous ditheists since the original Zoroastrians and therefore worthy of mention by Surt, who it seems had something else in mind and wished to clarify what he did not mean. The word "Pitch" could simply mean black, of course, and "Surtr" means black literally in Old Norse. But "not Pitch nor midnight" would be redundant in that case. Both made for familiar kinds of darkness, symbolically and phenomenally. All these references give comparative illustration, as part of a sequence of thoughts all suggesting that this threat is far more slippery than anything that can be fought directly, familiarized, or even understood as a quantum of something. These references all seem to belong.

But the philosophical problem of "eternal recurrence" stands out, early on, apparently an idea instrumental to sparking Surt's contemplative sequence before his dream. In Die fröhliche Wissenschaft Nietzsche posits this question of Das grösste Schwergewicht, "the greatest weight" or "the greatest stress", as opposed to insignificant weightlessness:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence — even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: "You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine." If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are and perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?" would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

In the same work Nietzsche speaks of accepting the eternal recurrence of war and peace, which history tells us Surt would have known familiarly in his life and work. He saw horrors.

As an aside, I wonder if that contemplation of weight occurred to Nietzsche because of his own awareness of his future significance and posthumous influence? Any expression he recorded might have repercussions, any thought, untold ramifications. He saw the eyes of the future upon his books, neglected in his present, but instrumental to the reformation of philosophy and the transformation of numerous fields in the history of ideas ever since. Living with consciousness of a destiny could, to a lesser extent than the eternity thought experiment, also transform any act from the disposable to the valuable, from the careless to the responsible, but also from light to weighty, in burden as well as emphasis.

I am not sure whether that observation was directly relevant to the puzzle of the Promethean or a digression, but to return to the references of which I spoke, another probable reference to Nietzschean imagery, "Abyss," appears later. In Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil) Nietzsche wrote "Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein." Translated into English for you: "He who fights with monsters should see to it that in the process he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." If we account the way the Prometheans fight monsters, it seems Surt feared the corruption of fighting the most hopeless monster of all, an enemy so terrible we cannot face it. We would see "only infinity looking back at us" so we can only "deny it battle" by living, and (thereby?) banish this hungry phantasm. Curious. But nothingness has no characteristics, except those of combination with an observer. What in nothingness could inspire such a dread visage? The closest thing to an infinite abyss is surely the empty void beyond innerspace, looking out into vacuum and light-years of timespace. Yet human colonists travel through vast intertimespace to the farthest stars of the Fringe, and some come back... do they learn something (or rather about nothing) which I do not?

But then an even clearer Nietzschean echo can be read in the idea of the "Great Noon." Compare this to the "Nadir Solstice" of which Surt speaks. At Noon, all things stand illuminated for a mighty reconsideration, and revaluation. At Solstice, the night appears so dark one might even forget the light will return (especially at Scandinavian latitudes on Terra). Under such adumbration scarce light would illuminate nothing of significance, in other words bringing nihilism, the subject of Nietzsche's frequently recurring admonitions. I cannot really conceive of pointlessness such that one cannot invent values, or a mood so profoundly mired in its own moment that its victim cannot remember the source of light which signifies evaluation and all sense of purpose. But I notice that against the cycle of the day, a favorite evocation in Nietzsche, Surt intersects the cycle of the longer year, accentuating remoteness from that enlightenment rather than its imminence. So maybe for me to empathize, it would be necessary for me to personally experience some arc within the revolutions of life on Terra, or those of one's own life, with that degree of apparently extreme alienation from any significance — and not merely its vivid descriptions.

These are some of the many considerations I have uncovered so far. Yet the more information yielded from my pursuits the more I sense that I come no closer to uncovering some mystery. I will continue to contemplate and meditate on the significance of these things as time allows. The answers I am looking for must not be obvious or my searches would have found them already. Therefore facts are not the issue, my inability to relate psychologically must provide the elusive factor. I must try to internalize in an effort to understand Surt's dread of nothing. In the meantime, the chasm I must bridge between myself and one who comprehends that Void seems all too taunting.

Kwa heri,
ADITI