LIFE AS SELF-OVERCOMING

Nietzsche was right about life as self-overcoming, but one has to distinguish, unlike him and most historical writers, the female self-overcoming somatically of will in spirit from the male self-overcoming psychically of ego in soul, before one can realize just how difficult the latter is while the former still obtains and has not been definitively neutralized.

Picked off from the Y chromosome of youthful idealism by the XX-chromosomal cosh of female beauty and love, whose goal is worldly resolution in strength and pride, few males ever recover from the XX-X predicament (their isolated X in marital partnership with the female XX) of worldly compromise in which they exist as the proverbial 'slave of a slave' and 'trickle in the sewer' of Baudelairean notation, mere adjuncts to a female norm which is the resolution of will in spirit, and the acquirement, via beauty and love, of maternal strength and pride, the acquirement, one might say, of a surrogate plenum (the child) which is the solution to the initial - and fundamental - vacuum of female existence.

It may be that, in this compromised position, males yearn nostalgically for their 'lost paradise', the Y-like idealism of their youth, in which so-called spirituality counted for so much more, but it is hardly likely that many of them will return to the heights from which they were seduced, even if conventional religion - that 'bovaryization' of true religion - likes to palliate their predicament by introducing the concept of resurrection as a kind of divine principle and salvationist right, with the attendant notion of moral progress.

But salvation is not so easy and is, besides, something that could only be imposed upon the generality of males of a certain axial stamp (avowedly church-hegemonic) from above, meaning by those who already relate, no matter how theoretically rather than practically, to metaphysics, and would be mindful of the correlative necessity of the counter-damnation of females to a position a plane down from the saved males in antimetachemistry, a necessity less the responsibility of the godly metaphysical than of the antidevilish antimetachemical.

Only then could male self-overcoming of ego in soul actually become a permanent, indeed eternal, reality, with no threat from either will or spirit to contend with, the female effectively neutralized in what would be the equivalent of St George with his foot on the prostrate dragon of that which is no longer free to hinder male self-overcoming from a position contrary to it in which, as noted above, the overcoming of will in spirit is of the utmost necessity from a female standpoint and explains, in no small measure, the world as that compromise between female resolution and male co-option which will always keep heaven or, more generally, 'kingdom come' on hold, so long as it has not been overcome.