Write with blood

October of Zarathustra

The first bit of this post makes me a bit uncomfortable to write. I will admit that. But writing something doesn't mean endorsing it! 

The obvious read of "The Pale Criminal," the sixth chapter in part one of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is that the criminal really wanted to kill to feel alive. He did the robbery so it wouldn't seem like he was just abjectly killing, but the killing was what he wanted to do. 

This made my brain suffer. It doesn't like to consider a positive valence for killing. 

But we can see it in the boxing ring and in ultimate fighting. Men like to get up just on the edge of death with another man, to do the wrong thing (violence).

My brain just didn't want me to access what I was seeing there. So I went to farmers market and got away from it. I wrote a stub of a post that really said nothing (click the versions below and you can see it — I've pinned it, to use Blygger protocol lingo). 

On the way back, I let Substack's robot voice read some blog posts to me, and one of them concerned how AI-created slop has renewed the public's interest in phenomenology, as we all try to get better at seeing and appreciating that which is not slop.

(As the author explains, it's not quite so simple as made with AI and made by human, in his view).

The part that struck me as I listened was this part: 

The reason we knee-jerk accept the definition of slop without necessarily accepting a further non-materialist explanation of things is because we have an intuitive understanding of the Platonic realm, if not an explicit one. We feel a natural revulsion to slop, and negative emotions are much more powerful than positive emotions. So we’re much more likely to give a hard definition to a negative phenomenological experience than to a positive one because, like evil, it insists upon itself. Again, though, the negative form suggests the existence of a positive form.
—taylorforeman.com

The chapter after "The Pale Criminal" is "On Reading and Writing," and it really has nothing to do with the act of reading or of writing. It more seems to concern taking on the spirit of liveness while writing — or doing anything.

"The Pale Criminal" ends arguing that the criminal just wanted blood. Then in the next chapter he says to "Write with blood." That is, write with liveness.

And this brought me back to what Foreman says later in his essay, and it connected both of these chapters in Zarathustra for me.

You see this illustrated well in Fight Club. Norton’s character has a well paid 90s white collar office job, which is effectively bullshit. Of course, he deeply intuits that he’s participating in a parasitic relationship with a corporation that hates him but cannot fully identify and cure itself of his parasitic load. The conclusion of the movie is kind of dark. It seems to think there’s no such thing as true creation. The only thing that exists is destruction, and it’s better to participate in destruction than to be a nutless parasite. That insight might be helpful for people who are nutless, but it’s far from the final answer.
—taylorforeman.com

The final answer is that you can create something born of your real hunger for life. This is much harder to do than to feel alive by hurting others, being destructive. There's much more to overcome, mentally, to get there.

Because again the negative emotions are stronger than the positive ones, for obvious reasons. Negative emotions are good at helping you to not die. Positive emotions help you really live. You can do a lot of living without really living, but you can't do any kind of living if you don't manage to continuously not die.

But there is that opportunity for writing with blood, to create with liveness, rather than to create with caution. 

That's why I think Nietzsche put these two concepts one after the other, with blood as the bridge. 

V. On Enjoying and Suffering the Passions

This one seems to deal with how virtues can stifle people and how they can conflict and get people into real trouble, but even I think this is probably a facile read.

VI. The Pale Criminal

A criminal's whole existence is defined by one thing he did. Maybe. It might also be about a specific criminal who didn't so much want the thing that supposedly made up his motive. He just actually wanted to kill. 

Honestly I think some part of my brain is not letting me access this speech.

VII. On Reading and Writing

This one seems to be less about the act of reading and writing, and more about the state one should enter into in order to do either. That state should be rising and not lamenting, to Zarathustra.

VIII. On the Tree on the Mountain

"But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away the hero in your soul," Zarathustra tells a young man who is lamenting the darkness he's found in himself.

Seeking to rise leads us to evil, but that's no reason not to try to rise. 

One line

"I want to have goblins about me, for I am courageous. The courage that scares away ghosts creates goblins for itself—courage wants to laugh.”—From VII

When I read this seven years ago, I wrote a little note on this line saying that philosophers should use more supernatural language. I stand by it.

—Brady Dale
October 3, 2026

Next Zarathustra: My brothers in War! I love you thoroughly