CooL alternative Poster for SCORPIO RISING

~ IT'S ONLY ROCK N' ROLL ~

"Nihilist was originally a term of abuse. Dictionaries from the early 19th century, when the word first came into use, define a nihilist as 'one who is politically impartial' and 'good-for-nothing', while Louis-Sébastien Mercier's dictionary of neologisms, published in 1801, states:  “Nihilist or nothingist (riennist): one who doesn't believe in anything.”

(...)

Commonly misidentified as a nihilist himself, Nietzsche was the first to treat the subject as a serious philosophical matter. He recognized the fires of nihilism burning across swaths of  Europe as the result of collapsing traditional morals and values. God - long regarded the source of absolutes - was dead, concluded Nietzsche. Dead in the sense that traditional religion no longer held sway over modern culture. In the absence of absolute values, a vacuum had been created and, for a time, it would seem that nothing existed… nothing was real.

For Nietzcche, though, this nothingness was temporary - a momentary void out of which history was meant to give birth to something entirely new. He saw the collapse of absolute values as the opportunity to reexamine our fundamental truths, to retool our systems to better fit our world.

Around the same time, Russians were embracing the term 'Nihilist' differently than their Western European counterparts. The word began to shed its pejorative overtones in the 1860’s, following the publication of Turgenev’s Father and Sons. Bazarov, the novel’s hero, was long seen as the prototype of 'the nihilist' Turgenev’s definition, voiced through his protagonist, has become a classic: 'A nihilist is someone who bows to no authority, who accepts no principle at face value, no matter how much respect that principle may be held.'

The definition is offered proudly. “Nihilist” is not a term of abuse for Bazarov, but one of honor: “Few,” he says, are chosen for the “bitter, hard life.” When an opponent asks him,“You deny everything?” He replies emphatically, “Everything.” “And that is called Nihilism?” “And that is called NIHILISME!”

Nihilism is a declaration of meaninglessness, a sense of indifference, directionlessness or, at its worst, despair that can flood into all areas of life. For some this is the defining experience of youth - witness the deaths of numerous young romantics, whether Keats, Shelley, Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain or GG Allin; and their numbers continue to multiply - for others it lasts a whole lifetime."

(TOO COOL 4D)

"A 'death mirror' held up to American culture - Brando, bikes and black leather; Christ, chains and cocaine. A 'high' view of the myth of the American motorcyclist. The machine as totem from toy to terror. THANATOS in chrome and black leather and bursting jeans."

(K. ANGER)

Iglesia del Surf del Cristo Risueño de la Costa LTD. MMXXIII ©