I biked south to De Pijp under gray skies in the morning, riding wherever my whim took me. I passed streets I did not know. I didn’t know where I was half the time and I somehow would up in Amsterdamse Bos through the most bizarre trek I had ever made in Amsetrdam. This excusrions was my longest by far. I had only ever ventured further south by train, but this was different because I saw so much more on side streets from the twentieth century and even a few places that were under construction, twenty-first century building in a timeless city.
Still, there were bike paths everywhere, though it took some doing to figure out where and how to cross major expressways. Doing so required ventures into other previously unknown neighborhoods, each far more residential that the city to the north. There were pockets of shops here and there, much more conducive to motorized traffic and parking. A disappointment for me, but even so these areas were more bicycle and pedestrian friendly than most places in the U.S. I crossed a few roads that provided train stops; public transportation was available.
After a couple months in the older areas of the city these newer developments seemed exotic. They weren’t as architecturally interesting and the street layouts didn’t have the intoxicating urban designs of the city center, but taken together the diversity added something to the city. Had there not been bike lanes everywhere my perceptions would have differed. I probably would not have even discovered these places without them.
While some hills would have been nice to exercise different muscles while biking it was easier to cover long distances in a relatively short time due to the flatness. Even this far south there were some architectural wonders, often office buildings, some shaped like large eight- or twelve-story spacecrafts. Occasionally, I would come across one and the style matched none of the buildings around at all. In a less dramatic way, it reminded me of the Pompidou in Paris, a Borg cube that had landed in the midst of seventeenth or eighteenth century architecture. Some called the monstrosity ugly, but I found the stark contrasts of style, technology, and architecturally identifiable timeframes mind-boggling. I couldn’t wrap my head around such phenomena because the effects were so unlike anything else I could reference from any other part of the world. The effects in Amsterdam had less of an impact, but they still excited me.
Amsterdamse Bos was a massive urban park. I biked all over and occasionally parked to walk hiking trails. This was a taste of nature I hadn’t had since being in the Northwestern United States. This was different, of course, being so flat, having such easy-to-ride trails, and completely different trees and fauna. Still, it was a break from the city in sight, sound, and smell. I left the park after an hour of roaming then gradually made my way back to the canal ring, stopping on the way at a café for a broodje, coffee, and plenty of water.
I wound up around Leidseplein and continued on to Kerkstraat, turning toward my apartment. Not far down the street I saw the smart shop and remembered the comic book store was near. I parked my bike, locked it, and walked inside. I wandered around the stacks and found a section that was essentially horror-related. I flipped through several zines and comics. The art was cool. I never fully understood why, but I liked darker art, particularly in sketches. With paintings it was usually the opposite. I liked explosions of bright colors. I had yet to visit the Van Gogh Museum this visit and knew I needed to end my neglect. During my time in the store, I focused on the artwork displayed in books, zines, and comics.
I stumbled on a book called 100 Artists See Satan. The cover art wasn’t disturbing in the least, just a black pentagram against a red background. The title, though, intrigued me. I flipped through the pages. Most of the images were disappointing, but there were some that bordered on gruesome. The book, overall, would have been a failure, but one image stuck out. It was a photograph, possibly photo-shopped but it was hard to tell, of the Golden Gate Bridge taken from a hillside high to the north and west. There was an image of a demon or devil, red-bodied and naked, with a single horn coming out of its head. The body looked human. It was possible that a person used body paint and some type of home-made horn on the shaved skull, but the eyes were so dead, so wicked, that I was disturbed—and excited. It took a lot to disturb me so this was, in many ways, a pleasure. It looked so damn real and I could easily imagine evil making itself known in such a form in any environment that suggested wickedness was present. After all, what could me more disturbing than a human being other than a whole slew of them?
In Richmond, Chevron had a refinery and it pumped out toxins day and night like a devil exhaling sulfur. There were steel mills and refineries along the flats of the East Bay—when I lived in Berkeley I passed by them and I left the bathroom window open every night for the cool night air. In the mornings I would wipe the thick black film that had settled overnight from the white windowsill. Nothing can create grime and toxins like humans. So a devil on a Marin County hillside overlooking the bridge and the bay made sense to me. The realism of the image struck me most, though. I could feel its presence even more starkly than I saw it.
I felt disoriented being so enraptured by that image. I was disturbed, but in a way that made me feel energized. To an extent, I think I felt that way because someone else got it, they understood that the world was filled with cruel intentions. The devil as an image, even one created so well, was less frightening than oil refineries or massive cattle concentration camps. California’s central valley was more disturbing on those fronts than any other place I had seen. Add the maximum security prisons as well as the poverty and the central valley was just a foot or two from hell. Inland California smog was sometimes so thick I had to pull over on the side of the road because I couldn’t see. Once, a crop duster spraying poisonous pesticides buzzed over the top of my car only fifty feet above and I put the car in gear even though I couldn't see. I didn't want to take the risk of breathing the poison dust into my lungs. I couldn’t open the vents, couldn’t open the windows … I saw Satan right there, and Satan was a white haze of smog, dust, and pesticides. The smell of twenty-thousand head of cattle mashed together in a square mile gave off an odor that made me wish for sulfur. Being in that environment for more than a half hour caused headaches, blurred vision, nausea, and difficulty breathing. Yet, people lived there their whole lives, farming there and working in refineries. If the place kept going like that I expected a new humanoid species to evolve that thrived in poison.
I took the book to the man sitting behind the counter. He was reading the day’s newspaper and looked bored. I put the book on the counter and pulled out my wallet. The man closed his paper and looked at the book. “So, you’re a Satanist, huh?” I had an impulse to laugh, but I said with a straight face, “Yes, I am.” His eyebrows went up. “Hmmm …” He stood up and shook a finger at me. I watched his face come to life. “I have something that might interest you, something that is not so … pedestrian.” The glint in his eye was almost sadistic yet, again, I was excited. He walked around the counter and opened a curtain to an area of the store not for customers. He motioned for me to follow him.
“Hold on one minute.” He walked toward another curtain, pulled it back, walked through, and the curtain fell back into place. I heard his voice. “I don’t keep this book in the store for general sale, but I believe you will find it interesting.” There was another man in the back area; whether he worked there or not, I didn’t know. He was strange looking, disheveled, creepy. He looked like he had performed many roles throughout life: manning glory holes at smut shops, wearing gags and black leather-faced masks while being led around on a leash by strangers at rape clubs, and conversing with ten-year-old children on Internet chat sites. He was fiercely disgusting, wore an unbuttoned short-sleeve shirt exposing his protruding belly, the type of bloated belly seen on malnourished children in Ethiopia, and sagging skin over xylophone ribs. His shirt was stained and there were marks and sores on his skin. When he straightened his arms I saw puffy redness and dark purple spots in the pits of his elbows, hallmarks of needle usage. Heroin, meth, speedballs?
I didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Hell, I didn’t want to look at him, but I couldn’t turn away. He was looking at me the whole time I was looking at him, his hair sticking up all over the place, greasy and seemingly hardened, like it had been weeks since he had showered. It smelled like he hadn’t either, but I couldn’t tell if it was just the smell of the musty room. Something approximating a smile was stuck on his face. His teeth were crud-caked and a couple were missing. His eyes had the largest black circles under them I had ever seen and that made his bugged out eyes look even creepier. A photo of this guy in 100 Artists See Satan would have blown away every other image, including the Golden Gate Bridge devil. I wasn’t disturbed by him; I was nauseated. There was no thrill in seeing him and for the first time in eons I was frightened while being completely sober. I could have snapped him like a twig, but that wasn’t the point. I was in physical proximity to a guy who presumably worked as a cum-cleaner at a smut shop by day and by night shot heroin while being brutally raped as he molested a child. Chills went up my spine.
Had he done any of those things? Maybe, maybe not. But I could see the creep in him when the shopkeeper came back into the room with the book. He said something in Dutch to “freakshow” and the freak cackled like a madman, his eyes bugging out even more. He walked over to me as the shopkeeper approached. Fuck. The shopkeeper had an intelligence about him and I was concerned by his association with the other man. Maybe freakshow was his Pulp Fiction “Gimp.” With a gleam in his eye, the shopkeeper handed me a book that had a plastic sleeve around it. He said, “Prepare yourself.” The title was in French, translated as The History of Cruelty. The cover was a collage of sepia and black-and-white images cobbled together to form the most horrifying image I had ever seen.
I was transfixed. I forgot the other two were in the room until I heard them laugh. The shopkeeper said to me, “I think you like this, huh?” I looked at him, shocked, and merely nodded. How could I like this? Images of men in gas masks and hazmat suits connecting tubes to the orifices of an infant whose intestines were being removed by a doctor who had a gun pointed at his head by a Nazi soldier whose penis was penetrating the eye socket of a screaming woman who was being urinated on by a Klansman with a white hood. Other women with disfigured faces and limbs were being clubbed bloody by an assembly line of automated hammering devices until they plummeted into a meat grinder, the meat flowing out in strands into a child’s mouth being held open with sharp metal hooks on chains attached to a bulldozer pushing corpses into a mass grave. All of these images were cobbled together, real photos from newspapers, magazines, historical books, government documents (official seals of various governments were evident).
That was just the cover. The image itself gave me goose bumps, but the images were obviously real and the artist had truly put together a collage of the history of cruelty. Amazingly creative and, discomfiting as it was, it was not the artist who was malignant, but the human beings who had done these things. Yes, the artist was creative in linking up images, but each separate image was fucked up in its own right. Pasted together they were a condemnation of humanity. Yet, I couldn’t look away.
I asked the shopkeeper if the book was for sale. He threw his head back and laughed. When he looked back at me, his mouth agape, he said, “You really are a Satanist, aren’t you?” He chuckled then said, “Yes, it is for sale. I carry very few copies because it is, let’s say, not for the squeamish. That is why I keep it back here.” The Gimp said to me, “You like it, right?” I didn’t know what to say. “Yes” was not true, but neither was “no.” I said, “I think it’s the most accurate depiction of history I've ever seen.” The Gimp practically salivated. The company I was keeping now.
I asked the shopkeeper if I could leaf through the book. Page after page of images of sexual brutality, mass murder, medical experimentation, radiation poisoning, racism, slavery, torture, and more. Astounding. I couldn’t get over it. When I handed it back to the shopkeeper I was quivering, whether from horror or delight I couldn’t tell. I was freaked out by my reaction to the book even more than the book itself. One thing I desperately wanted to do was get away from the Gimp so I walked through to the main area of the shop. The shopkeeper followed behind me after saying something in Dutch to the Gimp. The Gimp cackled again and a noise followed that made me think he had cum while shitting his pants.
The shopkeeper walked around the counter and rang up both books, looking me over quizzically. He said, “100 Artists See Satan isn’t in the same class. Are you sure you want it?” I picked up the book and flipped it to the page with the devil on the hill overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. He nodded and said, “Ah, okay. Yes, that is quite a picture.” He put the books in a sack and seemed to be waiting for me to say something. I realized how absurd the situation was and said, “I was really just looking for a couple of good coffee table books today.” The shopkeeper laughed. “Oh, I'm sure they'll be a big hit with your friends.” I smiled and turned to leave. I heard him snickering, “Coffee table books,” as I walked out the door.
I unlocked my bike and as I got underway toward my apartment, I wondered about the experience. “That was fucking bizarre!” A haphazard interest in a book somehow turned into a scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie. What freaked me more was how electrified I was by violent and cruel images. It was a split—no, more than a split, a multitude of fragmented reactions. Abhorrent while being exultant, divine while being nauseating. I thought of my own history of violence, everything I had witnessed and the mix of emotions I had always had in violent and malicious situations. I had to entertain the possibility that within me was something that craved that which frightened and terrorized others. Perhaps Paulette had been right in some way when she commented on my sketches.
The rush of cruelty may exist within each human or, perhaps, just in those of us who had been exposed to terror and torture early and often. I had been a victim, a witness, and a perpetrator. Most often I was observer. Being a victim seemed to lead to becoming a perpetrator. I thought, to some extent, that turning the tables might be a means to recover a sense of self, confidence, to avoid remaining a victim. But that was early in life; I had found healthier ways to climb out of victimhood into helpful participatory activities and even leadership roles for the benefit of others. I benefited as well because those actions healed wounds.
Still, this latent passion for hatred and cruelty puzzled me. Why should it exist? I had read Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals long ago, at least parts of it, and I remembered how distressed I became reading about his comments on cruelty. I rejected the case he made not on any critical grounds, but because I found it personally distasteful and it went against my belief system. However, there was little denying that so-called “primitive” cultures celebrated cruelty as a sublime pleasure. And Nietzsche had illustrated that princely weddings and public festivals inevitably included executions and torture. His idea that seeing others suffer takes a backseat only to making others suffer was hard to take, but if I really examined my past there was truth in that perspective. I had witnessed so many different types of violence, from verbal to physical, and in the right settings it was like watching a spectacle being performed for my benefit.
There were specific incidents that had engendered pleasure. Watching a friend of mine repeatedly bash another’s face with a garbage can lid created something akin to ecstasy within me. All of my senses were heightened: the sounds, the sight of the vicious and aggressive movement, the cheering of the enthusiastic crowd, watching fellow high school students, both boys and girls, interlocking arms to prevent security guards from getting through to break up the fight, the crackle of fists striking faces, the groans of pain, and the roars of domination, victory, all of these combined to send surges of energy through my body. For hours after that event I was in a state of raw energy, unable to concentrate because of my emotional intensity. Sitting in a classroom after that was … excruciating. Nothing happened, a droning nothing, studies of others who had lived moments fully.
In all of this, Nietzsche had been right. I had ignored my past even when I first read what Nietzsche had written. How blinded I had been to my own reality, moralities that had been ingrained prevented me from seeing my reactions as pleasure. And yet, there was not only pleasure. I was also awed in some conscious way, especially by the interlocking of arms to keep the security guards from stopping the brutality. I saw humanity in its most visceral form. I didn’t make judgments, I just marveled at the viciousness of these people I had seen day after day in classes, seemingly harmless, typical students who, at what I thought was their worst, gossiped way too much about him or her. But in those moments, the prom queen was interlocking arms with a stoner who was interlocking arms with a nerdy math whiz. Every class and clique of individuals had within them the same hunger to not just witness violence, but to maintain the conditions in which it unfolded.
Judging by how pumped up I was and many of those in the class that followed who had also witnessed the event, it was clear that each of us had, in some way, landed the crushing blow ourselves. I talked with a few who were so jacked up they wanted to start something with someone, anyone. They wanted to fight—no, they wanted to hurt someone and stand over them as the person screamed in pain, to feel the rush of total power over another. The more I thought about this, the more convinced I became that every person, under the right circumstances, could become a lover of cruelty.
I locked my bike outside the apartment and went inside. It was mid-afternoon. I made a snack and continued thinking about cruelty, about Nietzsche. He described humanity as prey to religious thinking even in secular and economic practices, a morality of putting off living for the sake of tomorrow as just another version of waiting until after death to live in God’s glory. To love the moment as an artist, a creator, was a Dionysian delight, a conscious act of will, a coming alive to commune with the sublime, a realization of living, the transcendence of the traps of morality. A hunger for cruelty was but one pleasure of humanity; to deny the evidence of “natural” pleasures that conflicted with morality was to live in the dark. The ugly truths needed to be viewed with eyes wide open or risk becoming a slave to that which lurked beneath awareness; better to confront reality and believe in the power of one’s will, however discomforting it might be to look into the abyss. According to Nietzsche, freedom was an act of courage because it meant becoming responsible for oneself rather than allowing the dictates of society or any other external body to rule one’s life, one’s thoughts and beliefs, one’s will.
As I ate, I realized that the living process I was practicing was an act of putting Nietzsche’s ideas into practice. I was liberating myself from the moralities I had internalized as “mine.” My suffering was created mostly by failing to live up to ideals which were never my own. I found joy in self-direction, play, creativity, spontaneity, reflection, meditation, adventurousness, exploration, friendship, inebriation, and sex. A Dionysian life, maybe, or perhaps Epicurean. No matter the label, I was exercising my will and creating my own path. By examining my fascination with images of cruelty, the emotions they provoked, I “looked into the abyss.” What I found was not a lurking evil, but a connection with my own humanity and insight into how I was living my life. None of this required me to act violently or to celebrate violence as an end in itself; instead, I took another step toward liberation on this winding path I was forming.
I took a couple puffs of hash and as I put down my dugout I saw my notepad. “Che, De Peper, 7:00.” Fuck! I was seeing Che in the evening. If I hadn't smoked the hash I wouldn't have seen the note. Che. I hadn't thought about her for a while. I needed to clear my head and get ready to see her. I saw an image of her in my head, the odd mixture of colorful clothing. Whatever was within me that was jacked up from the pleasures of cruelty were calming in my daydreams of Che crossing the bridge.
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