The dancing God

The colossus, by Francisco de Goya

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote that he would only believe in a god who knew how to dance. One of Nietzsche's mistakes was not being morbid enough, was to consider himself too poetic and artistic, which caused him to overlook the fact that the fictional God (who dominates the minds of the Abrahamic half of the world) does dance, and he dances quite a lot! Yet, he does not dance in the way Nietzsche would have found appealing, in the way you and I dance to sublimate life's miseries into moments of relaxation and joy, those Dionysian moments of bodily ecstasy that merge us with the immanence of becoming. Nothing of the sort. This God, against whom Nietzsche turned his sights, dances and laughs atop the dismembered parts of semi-rotting bodies and over random victims who weep in intense pain while pleading for his mercy, a mercy he does not possess. He is a God who dances while drenched in human and animal blood. He is a concentration camp commandant who brutally tortures inmates and executes them at random, following a schedule designed to ensure that none escape, yet one that guarantees enough of them will produce new inmates.

If he weren't so determinedly cheerful in his worldview to the point of being a true masochist, Nietzsche would have loved the Abrahamic God. Were he alive today, had he witnessed American evangelical Protestantism and its Latin American bastard offspring, Nietzsche would have become a preacher. They dance like crazy at their "services"! Nietzsche would have loved it. There is no asceticism there. There is only affirmation of life, affirmation of the world of becoming. They even reinterpret biblical passages in which Christ states in no uncertain terms that the rich, without exception, will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. These materialistic churches claim that yes, the rich do enter the Kingdom; the powerful and the strong who trample the weak do enter the Kingdom. Nietzsche would have loved it. I am referring here, of course, to Matthew 19:24, Mark 10:25, and Luke 18:25. These are identical passages in which Jesus says it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to go to heaven after death. In three of the Gospels Jesus says this to his disciples right after a rich young man asks him what he must do to get into heaven, and Jesus tells him to give away all his possessions and follow him, at which point the young man becomes disappointed and walks away.

In those dancing churches that affirm the material world, none of that happens. The wealthy person, even someone born into a life of privilege, like the figure in the eye of the needle passage, is more than just accepted: they are viewed as proof that God exists. Money is God. Power is God. Dancing wildly on stage is a sign of the divine. I call it a stage because, let's face it, it isn't an altar. There is no altar there at all. And that is certainly something else Nietzsche would have loved. It is a pity Nietzsche didn't pay attention to these churches; he would have had a field day. I say he didn't pay attention to them because this type of church where people dance in ecstasy already existed in his time, particularly in the United States. Schopenhauer even mentions one of them: the Shakers. But, in Nietzsche's defense, the Shakers, despite their dancing, loathed the world of becoming and shared everything communally. They opposed reproduction, and today, only two Shakers remain alive. Yet the fact remains that "revivalist" Christian movements already existed in the US and England during Nietzsche's era — movements that affirmed everything the commercial, anti-ascetic churches preach today. Ultimately, it is a shame he didn't witness any of this, given how he lumped everything together while claiming to be different. In my opinion, he would have felt right at home.

These are life-affirming religious expressions that say an absolute "yes" to life, to the point of forcing ten-year-old girls molested by their fathers to bear children. In these churches, there is zero mortification, zero asceticism, zero anti-life morbidity. On the contrary, they dance atop the bodies and the injustice their God produces. They dance and prostrate themselves before the world's rich and powerful. It is a wild celebration of the love of life! You see more energy there than at a Rio de Janeiro samba venue. In fact, nowadays, it is very likely that a significant portion of those at Rio samba venues are filled with evangelicals, or people who come from families where the grandmothers converted to that mercantile, world-affirming Christianity, the dancing Christianity that puts the powerful and the strong on a pedestal. So, it doesn't make much difference whether it's a samba circle or a "Christian service." The truth is, God is dancing while smeared in blood right in the faces of all beings that feel pain, reproduce, and die. He laughs. He thinks it's a blast. Truly, my interpretation is completely different from Nietzsche's. God dances like a son of a bitch.

God dances a lot in the samba venue, he dances a lot in the "service", he dances a lot in Bukowski and Casa da Matriz (two famous nightclubs in Rio) — he dances while, outside, homeless children sell cheap candy, sniff glue, are beaten and murdered. Not to mention what happens to animals other than humans. Both those animals that live in urban environments, such as street dogs, cats, rats, pigeons, insects, and those that live in nature, being destroyed and in constant fear, something that has been common for hundreds of millions of years on this miserable planet that had the misfortune to sprout life. As I wrote in my Thanatosphere essay, we should use the concept of thanatosphere, invented by me, to oppose the concept of biosphere. Mercury, Venus and Mars are not "dead" planets. They have no life in the first place. If they did, as in the case of Mars, which perhaps had life, it was extinct a long time ago. And there is still the possibility that it was not sentient life, that is, there was no harm in a moral sense there, there was no pain. Now, the Earth, our mother Gaia, is a cemetery, in addition to being a torture chamber that ranges from the most basic physical torture to the most complex psychological torture. Earth is where death truly reigns, not on Mars, Venus or Mercury.

And it is here on planet Earth that God dances a lot, drenched in blood from head to toe. I actually view the abysmal and unimaginable amount of physical pain existing in this place ever since evolution introduced the "innovation" of pain as a response to negative stimuli in certain organisms as proof of God's existence. Plants respond to negative stimuli, as do single-celled organisms, but not in the same way. Life, that beautiful thing, did not turn the fleeting existence of these organisms into a living hell, it did not inflict upon them the wretchedness of feeling pain. Pain does not dwell within the simplest or even the most complex plants and fungi. But in animals, the unluckiest members of the tree of life, pain only intensifies and deepens as complexity increases, reaching a paroxysm of nastiness in the most intelligent and self-aware mammals. It’s absolute crap. And I confess that, at times, it is hard to believe that all of this — all this torture — is the work of a natural world that is blind, or at least devoid of any kind of reason, yet guided by certain simple parameters that give rise to complexity.

At times, I confess, this strikes me as the handiwork of a caricature of a God, Nietzsche's dancing God, found in churches that say "yes" to life — a God whom I personally believe Nietzsche, were he alive today, would love so much he'd post on social media announcing his conversion. I have little doubt about this. All that talk about the Dionysian, interesting as it is, and something I partly agree with, would fall by the wayside. We'd see Nietzsche receiving the Holy Spirit and trembling on a Christian stage. Money, power, dance, and the love of a God he always longed for but was intelligent enough to know didn't exist, what more could he want? Only a God who dances in the face of all dignity could create glioblastoma, spongiform encephalopathy, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, random diseases that strike the lives of people who never even asked to be here. There is a certain macabre precision in the existence of countless species of parasitoid wasps, whose life cycle necessarily depends on capturing other arthropods; the wasps deposit their eggs inside these creatures, and the eggs hatch into larvae that devour their hosts alive, killing them slowly.

It took hundreds of millions of years of natural selection for this to become the norm among countless wasp species, species that are indispensable to the ecosystems they inhabit across every continent except Antarctica. Was this the work of blind natural selection, or the handiwork of a dancing God drenched in the blood and entrails of animals? Don't go thinking he is a vegetarian God, because he isn't. He likes to pet cute animals, only to later place not-so-cute animals near them, animals whose larvae damage the skin and the eyes, causing permanent blindness. Incidentally, this happens to humans, including many children. One example of this kind of affliction is onchocerciasis. A blackfly bites someone infected with the Onchocerca volvulus parasite and then transmits the worm to other people. Another example, more confined to West Africa, is loiasis. It occurs in much the same way, but the vector is another fly and the worm is named Loa loa.

Of course, no god exists. But, in a poetic sense, we can view the very world of becoming, the immanent world we inhabit and take part in, as that dancing, mad, and sadistic God. That metaphorical God does exist, and he does dance, Mr. Nietzsche. So don't worry, you can believe in him without a second thought. Your dancing God is a monster that laughs in the face of anyone who believes themselves an ally of his simply for saying an unconditional "yes" to life. He laughs in your face, Mr. Nietzsche. You will never be in the divine dancer's good graces, because he couldn't give a fuck about you, even less than he gives a fuck about me. In fact, people like me are his true enemies, precisely because we try to warn others that this place is no-man's-land and that the best thing we can do is not produce an army of new victims. My saving grace is that he doesn't truly exist beyond being a metaphor. My saving grace is knowing that the world of becoming is evil and wants ever more living beings to participate in its chamber of horrors.

In literature, no one portrayed this better than Machado de Assis, in a famous passage from The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas in which the protagonist experiences a delirium and dreams precisely of the monstrous Schopenhauerian will to live. This occurs shortly before his death, right at the beginning of the story. The Will, that monstrous, dancing god, has a brief conversation with Brás Cubas. Here is the excerpt:

“Call me Nature or Pandora. I am your mother and your enemy.”
When I heard that last word I drew back a little, overcome by fear. The figure let out a guffaw, which produced the effect of a typhoon around us; plants twisted and a long moan broke the silence of external things.
“Don’t be frightened,” she said, “my enmity doesn’t kill, it’s confirmed most of all by life. You’re alive: that’s the only torment I want.”

by Fernando Olszewski