My journey finding meaning in modernity/A mad man’s “manliness”/Nietzsche’s choicest rose

Toward the end of high school I started taking interest in philosophy - partly out of personal interest, partly to review for the philosophy classes that were part of my college’s core curriculum.

Looking back, I can remember expecting that tackling the subject would be like taking up a new language, just one more thing to add to my vocabulary of knowledge. I did not expect it to frame my thinking when considering any “profound” questions or thoughts.

Part of the reason for the paradigm shift was the fact that my reading philosophy correlated with my decision to no longer consider myself a traditional Christian. Dogma, theology, and the impossibility of being an “ideal” member of any organized religion made me recognize that life’s questions went broader than any one written book.

Before I got of copy of what has became one of my favorite books, I bought a book that reviewed some of the highlights of history’s greatest philosophical works which started with Plato’s Republic. It took me through the medieval era, the Renaissance, and ended with the existentialists. That section was the one that stuck with me – existentialism to this day is most often the framework in which we understand our internal conflicts on individual and social levels.

Names like Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Soren Kierkegaard started espousing a perspective that better-fulfilled a craving for truth inside me that the worldviews I was born into did not.

Existentialism sees humanity as being challenged by two things: the fact that existence in this world is temporary and the belief that a universe not ruled by a deity meant life has no inherent meaning. Existentialism says instead that one must not “descend into nothingness but have the courage to be” - that we are the stewards of life’s meaning.

Some time passed before I learned of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (A Tale for All and None), Nietzsche’s epic philosophical allegory. A fairly well-known movie Little Miss Sunshine highlighted the book as well as Nietzsche, first catching my attention. Dwayne, the son of the fictitious family, a stereotypically angst-filled pubescent late teen under a self-imposed vow of silence was reading the book throughout.

I’ve found a worthy discussion/synopsis of this movie from a blog called SpillSpace.com. Warning, spoilers:

“I really think that the whole movie was intended as a Nietzsche-esque morality tale. The moral of the story given near the end of the movie is similar to one of Nietzsche’s teachings, which is to embrace suffering. Nietzsche felt that suffering was the most authentic human experience, and also one that human nature sets out to deny itself of. And in denying itself, it inflicts it upon one another, and on the innocent.

Each character in the movie is discovering that the things they pursue are not only illusive, but ultimately meaningless. The grandpa is reflecting on his life regretting that he didn’t pursue his passions more when he had the chance. The father is desperately pursuing fame and success which seems to remain always out of his grasp. Frank, the brother, has pursued a love and a career that have ultimately betrayed him. The son Dwayne has already abandoned all his dreams in life save one, his quest to be a test pilot. Then life swoops down and strips him of his last and final hope when he realizes that he is colorblind – and thus ineligible for flight. The daughter seeks in vain to be a beauty queen; a quest that is so transparently harmful, meaningless and futile, and so obviously destined to cause her to cast aside her own natural authentic self in exchange for the generic plasticity that the pageant encourages.

All this ultimately sets the stage for the entire cast of characters to have to question not just the Little Miss Sunshine Pageant, but the pageant of their own lives as well. The Little Miss Sunshine Pageant serves as the vehicle for the process of group realization. The palpable absurdity of watching Olive trying to win (or even compete) in this ridiculous pageant, and the sadness of seeing her tempted to exchange her own authentic beauty for the imitation of beauty the pageant rewards, helps the group to see that their own life pursuits have been absurd and inauthentic theatre pieces as well. As they watch the little girl innocently striving towards something that will ultimately crush her, the group together comes to appreciate those “tawdry baubles” which we seem so willing to trade our authentic selves for are actually rather meaningless and absurd.

Nietzsche wrote that it is in that moment of discovery, when life has essentially defeated you and utterly destroyed you, that you are finally able to reflect honestly and realize that you have willingly exchanged your own authenticity for things that you are not. This becomes ones moment of awakening, and finally gives one the inner will to cast meaninglessness aside and embrace Authenticity.”

At the time I had no idea that there were parallels between Nietzsche’s philosophy and this movie. I thought the movie’s message was ‘nice’ but with no knowledge of how it could be taken as ‘Nietzsche-esque morality tale,’ it only made me curious about reading a book by a philosopher I only knew as controversial. The reactions of people in the movie to Dwayne’s summertime reading made me want to read this book more. He seemed a sort of misfit philosopher, bacchanalian yet future-minded, passionate, and focused but at his heart an emotional space cadet. Nietzsche also grew up in a family of mostly females, something which I could identify with and something I believe greatly shaped my development.

I may have well had picked up Karl Marx, the book of Satan, or Mein Kampf in the eyes of others. Nietzsche was and in some cases still is a philosophical contrarian - someone who went against popular conventions/beliefs/thoughts of the time - not just for the sake of combating groupthink but because he could not be authentically himself any other way.

Living in the wake of the European Enlightenment, Nietzsche picked up on the conflict between scientific achievements and the old rule by the Church and monarchical states. He dared to write ‘God is dead, and we have killed him’ but cautioned against nihilism. He thought that, in order to do away with the dated conventions of our world and pave the way for a better future, we must transfer our need for the numinous away from a metaphysical exaggeration and into a religious zeal for living one’s life.

Well intentioned as we he was, Nietzsche’s reputation was dirty.

We all get a little concerned when we hear about a passionate German: Adolf Hitler peering at a bust of Nietzsche
 

Eva Cybulska: “Nietzsche’s name has often been associated with Nazi ideology, much of that owing to his Machiavellian sister Elisabeth, who invited Hitler to her brother’s shrine in Weimar in 1934, and made an offering of his philosophy. But did not Nietzsche court this destiny? ‘I know my fate.’ he wrote. ‘One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something horrific – a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified.’”

A chilling prediction from the grave. However, Nietzsche did not court that destiny, his sister helped force this destiny and poisoned the memory of him.

A 2010 article in UK’s The Telegraph goes on to outline how his sister ruined his reputation – to say nothing of how she might have ruined his personal life:

“Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who went on to become a prominent supporter of Adolf Hitler, systematically falsified her brother's works and letters, according to the Nietzsche Encyclopedia.”"Förster-Nietzsche did everything she could – such as telling stories about Nietzsche, writing false letters in the name of her brother, and so on – to make it seem that Nietzsche had been a right-wing thinker like herself. It was she who created the most destructive myth of all: Nietzsche as the godfather of fascism."“The Nazis selectively used Nietzsche's writings to bolster their ideology and built a museum in Weimar to celebrate the philosopher, though it is unlikely Hitler himself read much, if any, of Nietzsche's work.”“Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche edited her brother's writings after his mental breakdown in 1889 and quickly began to add, remove and change passages to align his philosophy with her own beliefs and those of her virulent anti-Semite husband Bernhard Förster. Along with her husband, she founded a Utopian "Aryan" colony in the Paraguyan jungle called Nueva Germania in 1887. It was a disaster: her husband committed suicide in 1889 and Förster-Nietzsche returned to Germany. When she died in 1935, Hitler attended her funeral.”“Of the collection of 505 of her brother's letters that Förster-Nietzsche published in 1909, just 60 were the original versions and 32 of them were entirely made up.”“In her edition of the famous book, The Will to Power, Förster-Nietzsche included only 270 of the 374 aphorisms her brother wrote – and most of them were incorrect. She cut out the maxim in which her brother condemned anti-Semitism with the words: "Have nothing to do with a person who takes part in the dishonest race swindle."

“While acknowledging some of Nietzsche's early writings could be interpreted as fascist and he shared an early friendship with the anti-Semitic composer Richard Wagner – a relationship that later broke down – the philosopher was never a fascist or anything like it. Rather, he was above all an iconoclast who was deeply contemptuous of both anti-Semitism and nationalism.”

While there is nothing quite as distasteful these days as anything paired to Hitler in any way, Nietzsche’s true literary intent lived on through Viktor Frankl, a Jewish psychologist who completed his life’s work ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ while in concentration camps. The horrors of the holocaust were a testing ground for Frankl’s hypothesis that we are driven by a search for meaning in our lives, inspired by Nietzsche’s quote “One who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” He renamed and refined Nietzsche’s concept from ‘the will to power’ to the much more palpable ‘will to meaning’.

After finishing a primary look into the important points in the complex background of Nietzsche and his works, I was primed to receive Thus Spoke Zarathustra’s message properly.

Zarathustra, the book’s protagonist, is an allusion to the ancient Persian religion whose namesake came from the prophet Zoroaster. I recognized the name Zarathustra from the name of the religion a best friend of mine was born into, Zoroastrianism. Judeo religions were heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism, though after centuries of persecution the number of practicing members today has dwindled greatly.

It is a complex and beautiful religion that inspired Nietzsche, but its attachment to a theistic worldview led Nietzsche to a conclusion for how he shall take up the name Zarathustra in the modern world:

“Zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. ... Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must also be the first to recognize it. ... His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the highest virtue; this means the opposite of the cowardice of the "idealist” who flees from reality ...—Am I understood?—The self-overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness; the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite—into me—that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.” - Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

The book is styled like a religious text, rich with wordplay and reiterating several themes, the most important of which (according to Nietzsche) was the eternal recurrence. The question prompted by the eternal recurrence is that, if your life should repeat forever, exactly the same, over and over, would you embrace the highs and lows of your life, or would you be tortured by the idea?

I’m currently on my third re-read of the complex book, the same way many re-read religious texts. Without the need for the faith in a god, the faith that life is worth living became my new religious challenge. Every time I read it I pick up on some more secret cracks and crevices of meaning in the heavily-figurative language. Every time I read it, it helps me force me to reexamine myself and to see how I’ve progressed to being a more fulfilled person – to look back at myself in my last reading and mediate on how I’ve changed (or if I even have).

Even when Nietzsche through Zarathustra seemed to voice unsavory things about the nature of and separate destiny for women, I found something to gain from reading him – refining my own understanding of women, my relative truth. There is still much debate about the true nature of Nietzsche’s thoughts on the place of women in this modern world he anticipated, so I will outline the background of two passages from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

“’You go to women? Do not forget the whip!’”

“There is little of man here – therefore, their women make themselves manly. Only he who is man enough will – redeem the woman in woman.”

Lou Salome (more on her further on), bearing the whip on Paul Ree and Nietzsche

The line came from a chapter where Zarathustra was asked by an old woman to tell her his thoughts on women. Hesitantly he describes woman as a the essential piece to bringing about better human beings in the world, seeming to leave not much more than motherhood as a woman’s aspiration. The old woman agrees with him.

But Nietzsche was supposed to be a future-thinker that did not protest change but embraced it wholeheartedly – why did he seem to want to admonish the world for disagreeing with what is usually known as a Roman Catholic sentiment? According to most Nietzsche’s scholars, in his early life he was quite sympathetic toward the plight of nineteenth-century women. Why did he seem to preach a rather reactionary behavior in his later publications? It seemed to have a basis in his meeting, falling in love with, and romantic rejection by Lou Salome as well as the influence of his rigidly religious mother and conniving sister.

Lou Salome was a Russian-born psychoanalyst and author who courted the respect and attention of some of the great thinkers of the day including Freud (whom she studied under) and the poet Rilke. At the age of 17 she persuaded Dutch preacher Hendrik Gillot to teach her philosophy, theology, world religions, and French and German literature. He was so enamored by her that he planned to divorce his wife, leave his family, and marry her. Ultimately, that same preacher would be the one she asked to officiate her marriage.

In the 1880 Lou’s mother took to Zurich, where the University was the first to open its doors to women. The completion of her studies there was cut short by signs of TB which led her and her mother, among other reason, to move south to Rome where in May 1882 she met Nietzsche. Their meeting was preceded by various letters from Ree tempting Nietzsche to meet the woman. Nietzsche started to believe might the woman who could be the lover he dreamed of – however desperate a dream.

During Nietzsche, Salome, and friend Paul Ree’s time together traveling through Italy, Nietzsche is said to proposed to her 3 times, all of which she rejected. Even when Salome did marry, she never engaged in a sexual relationship with her husband but had many sexual relations with others while still married, including famous thinkers of the age, all of who spoke very highly of her intellectually. She believed that marriage love and sexual love should not be mixed and that experiencing love through sexual relations allowed her not to be possessed by it – a radical concept at the time and legitimate position for both males and females alike, provided they are not partial to monogamy.

Monogamy or not, Lou Salome would not be a woman to sacrifice all her aspirations to honor the will of her man.

Scholar Carol Diethe: “Nietzsche and Lou Salome believed that women are entitled to enjoy their sexuality…this is what places Nietzsche outside the circle of conventional male opinion, medical or otherwise, where the view at the time prevailed that genteel women did not desire sexual gratification…”

Given his early beliefs, it seemed to me to suggest that Nietzsche’s attitude toward changing and rethinking the place of women in society was greatly shaken by the rejection of a woman who likely loved him sexually, but could not commit to a life with him. The story reminded me of many similar tales where women had undergone a similar occurrence and reacted with anger and hatred, rather than understanding and empathy- or were simply unable to find companionship or empathy in their mourning.

Lurking in this change is a kind of insulting slap-down of everything Lou aspired to. It is not hard to see what has happened. In the aftermath of the affair, Nietzsche [seemed to ease] his pain by taking a kind of fictional revenge.

In the sorrow of rejection, rather than overcoming his emotions and seeing a resilient truth, Nietzsche seemed to despise the empty shallow society women of his time; but the societal contexts which made them empty-headed appeared not to have concerned him as much.

During the first reading of the book, the line, “There is little of man here – therefore, their women make themselves manly. Only he who is man enough will – redeem the woman in woman,” was something I adopted as a sort of mantra in my relationship at the time. Without an understanding of the background of that statement, I ascribed to the quote a simple command to myself, however imperfect I was at fulfilling it: to allow the woman I was with to be fulfilled, I must be the type of man she needs to encourage her where needed, caution if necessary, and always be there to comfort her when the time comes.

This might have helped on an individual level when I had that understanding of the sentence, but when I was shown the deeper context of Nietzsche statement, my impression of the man changed again.

He appeared to not be picking up on women’s need to strengthen themselves and each other in a modernizing world, he was answering a question about women and the “need” for redemption.

There is scholarly debate about whether Nietzsche was caricaturing the Christian view of womanhood that still lives on today (that a woman is to be the right hand of her husband) or expressing his desire to usher in a greater generation of humans born from ‘overmen’. Now we can even speculate that his anti-Semite sister altered his writings to more properly align with Nazi ideologies. We do know Elisabeth Nietzsche despised Lou Salome and had unpleasant interactions with her, the extent to which this impacted Lou and Friedrich’s relationship post-rejection was uncertain.

The scholar Frances Nesbitt Oppel interprets Nietzsche's attitude towards women as part of a rhetorical strategy: framing the conversation within the context that it was understood by the masses at the time. “Nietzsche's apparent misogyny is part of his overall strategy to demonstrate that our attitudes toward sex-gender are thoroughly cultural, are often destructive of our own potential as individuals and as a species, and may be changed. What looks like misogyny may be understood as part of a larger strategy whereby "woman-as-such" (the universal essence of woman with timeless [often stereotypical] character traits) is shown to be a product of male desire, a construct....Nietzsche’s picture is beyond caricature; it is satire…in degrading women, these references challenge the myth of the Ewig-weibliche, the eternal feminine as moral guardian and redeemer of men, a dominant middle-class ideal across much of Europe at Nietzsche’s time…the situation of the speaker in the text must be considered. He occupies a negative and reactive position in relation to real women: dogmatic and essentialist, Zarathustra believes that he knows what is good for the “true man” and how to solve the “riddle” of woman.”

Whatever the passage in his autobiographical book Ecce Homo that answers how one ‘redeems’ a woman truly meant about Nietzsche’s belief about the role of women in modernity, speaking-out-of-place as a male, Nietzsche brought up difficult questions that later feminists are said to have been inspired by. He observed a sort of dissonance between those in conventional female roles and those who sought a polar-opposite world where there is a matriarchy.

I can only imagine how Nietzsche might have interpreted the changes in the life of a modern woman and the science that has developed since then. After all, we are ultimately affected by the different levels of neurotransmitters & hormones that we have in our brains, not what lies between our legs. Masculinity and femininity as they are commonly understood are merely cultural memes.

Those who decry with sincerity the “masculation” of women in modernity are resisting a trend toward shifting cultural gender expectations where there are a myriad men and women who can be defined as exhibiting both traditional “masculine” and “feminine” behaviors. It’s the same with those who seek to criminalize or devalue homosexuals - modern psychology has now refined its understanding of homosexuality with the advent of neurology.

In a world where women anticipate a reaction of violence from angry fathers males - whether a woman in an abusive relationship or a girl whose abusive father conditioned her to overact to any angry male – it should be expected that a woman would take arms in the traditionally “masculine” sense against predatory males. It speaks to a crisis in men more than any sort of crisis in women which requires “redemption.” Perhaps this realization is what Nietzsche wanted the reader come to themselves.

As I write this, on my latest reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I see that in my previous readings of the book I was more like Dwayne in Little Miss Sunshine before his dreams were crushed than after. My setbacks in life and relationships had nothing to do with my behavior in my mind; they were all a result from faults with my culture and my world – a world that should be forsaken. I didn’t have the humility to expect life to rip the rug from under my feet, my egoism overtook my creative/productive potential, and the valleys of life that were to follow my peaks came unexpected and painfully.

Nietzsche teaches that one must be destroyed to become authentic, but perhaps a better way to phrase it is that to “place one’s hope and security in the inauthentic things, one will ultimately suffer and feel destroyed as a result.” Nietzsche’s writings have been a huge help for someone like me in extracting meaning from the peaks and valleys of my life. Nietzsche’s life has helped me learn from my own feelings of rejection and not dwell in sadness, helped me learn what I can expect from idealistic thinking and expectations, and that I need to actively refine my pursuit of happiness and meaning in the wake of life’s storm. I can’t dismiss the idea that anyone who hopes to call themselves wise will think at least once: I was wrong.

AFTERTHOUGHTS, NOTES

-A thorough examination of Lou and Friederich’s relationship.

-Another stain on Nietzsche’s reputation came from a rumor perpetuated after WWII that he had died of syphilis, though it’s widely understood now to have probably been a slowly-developing brain tumor. Part of the reason Nietzsche may have never sought love again, never ventured into the rosebush once more, was the understanding that he was not to live much longer. If the affair with Lou shook his understanding of women, then his life did not allow for a final overcoming. After their relationship and in declining health, he retired into loneliness to finish his work before death and his posthumous besmirching. If he couldn’t fulfill his desire to start a family, he would give birth to a literary baby, a “book for all and none.”Ida von Miaskowski on Nietzsche and women: “In the 1880s, when Nietzsche's later writings containing some of the oft-quoted sharp words against women appeared, my husband sometimes told me jokingly not to tell people of my friendly relations with Nietzsche, since this was not very flattering for me. It was just a joke. My husband, like myself, always kept friendly memories of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s behavior precisely towards women was so sensitive, so natural and comradely, that even today in old age I cannot regard Nietzsche as a despiser of women.”

-Medical News Today recently reported on a study focusing on ancient skulls that suggested early humans' breakthrough in tool-making 50,000 years ago coincided with a lowering of testosterone levels in our species.

-"One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something horrific – a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man, I am dynamite.”

-Lou Andreas-Salome on love: “Whoever reaches into a rosebush may seize a handful of flowers, but no matter how many one holds, it’s only a small portion of the whole. Nevertheless, a handful is enough to experience the nature of the flowers. Only if we refuse to reach into the bush, because we can’t possibly seize all the flowers at once, or if we spread out our handful of roses as if it were the whole of the bush itself – only then does it bloom apart from us, unknown to us, and we are left alone.”

-Nietzsche seemed to me to exhibit signs of manic-depression/bipolarity. If true, it puts his philosophy in a very interesting, clearer context.

-In his last letters to Lou, Nietzsche still referred to his former lover as his friend. I don’t think we would know him the way we do now had they not crossed paths. A meeting to two minds thats eternal recurrence is easily welcomed.

Dwayne might have posted this on his Facebook :P

Bolivar Peninsula’s Island

For those seeking a remote vacation spot in the Gulf Coast area – where you can enjoy experiencing isolation in a beautiful area – a lesser-known beach town beckons. Here is how to find it, why it developed the way it did, why it means what it does to me, and why it will stay the same until the ocean swallows it up:

I first found out about High Island, TX and its history after visiting nearby Crystal Beach with a significant other and wondering what more-isolated beach lay northeast. For the unfamiliar, Crystal Beach/Port Bolivar and its surrounding cities lie across the ship channel dividing Galveston Island, south of Houston, and the Bolivar Peninsula to the north. You can reach the peninsula from Houston either by traveling east on Interstate 10 and south on TX Highway 124 at Winnie, TX or by taking the ferry from Galveston to Port Bolivar.

The ferry to Bolivar peninsula has been in service since 1898 when even railcars were ferried across the bay. The ferry takes you from Galveston’s East Beach area to Port Bolivar’s Highway 87, near old Fort Travis. This dated military facility is a relic of how rich a history this poorly-located spot of land has.

A Spanish explorer built an earthen levee there to protect his men from the Kawakawa Indians of the South Texas coast. Dr. James Long and his wife Jane, accompanied by 300 troops there to free Texas from Spain, defended the fort during the war for Texas Independence. Jane eventually gave birth to the first person of English descent in Texas. The confederates held the fort in the 1860s and the fort was expanded during WWII to keep watch over the entrance port to Houston. After the war, the fort was decommissioned into a sort of park and even served as a community hurricane shelter in the 1960s.

Highway 87 winds you closer to the beach as it runs northeast to the mainland, where beach house developments line the choicest spots, the sand is regularly cleaned, and dunes are maintained by bulldozing a mix of sand and seaweed against the existing dunes. However, the occasional powerful hurricane will clean Crystal Beach of everything, including houses.

Many from the greater Houston area will choose Crystal Beach over Galveston to visit for a few primary reasons: fireworks are allowed, driving on the beach is allowed, contained campfires (no bonfires) on the beach are allowed, and the public beaches are all free of charge (a note about that). BBC’s Stephen Fry delighted in the driving liberty when filming his Stephen Fry across America. Surf fishing is more common here, as the beach is less crowded than Galveston and allows for some buffer zones between fishing lines.

The highway moves past Crystal Beach until you cross over what’s called Rollover Pass, an artificial channel popular with fishermen, dug from the Gulf of Mexico through the peninsula to Rollover Bay. Recent controversy arose when there was talk of closing the Pass in an effort to desalinize Rollover Bay and stop the expensive dredging of coastal sand that pours into the Bay because of Rollover Pass. Technically, Rollover Pass makes Bolivar Peninsula into an Island.

The first time I traveled all the way out to High Island I was travelling alone and seeking solace. Myself a cross-country runner, I took a therapeutic jog down the desolate beach one fine, rainy, misty, foggy afternoon and evening. I ran north along the beach until I couldn’t see civilization anywhere around me, where the Hwy. 124 bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway, visible far from High Island, was completely out of site.

At that point, I stopped my mp3 player (I sweat too much to afford to run with an IPod).

I took out my earbuds and put them away. I took a look around.

The mist of the rain was all around me, blown up by the sea winds, scattering the soft blue dusk light in all directions. When I looked out onto the water, the similar blue hues of the sky and ocean made it difficult to discern where the two separated. When I looked back inland, the coastal marshes stretched out into a misty blur of green, occupied by the sounds of hundreds of birds nesting in low-lying bushes. That level of sublime solitude is truly unique. We can all attempt to clear our heads of distractions in our busy daily lives, but actually removing all distracting stimuli offers a solace that’s unmatched. If I close my eyes for a little bit, I can still remember how the feeling tasted.

I left that day knowing this was a special place, a sort of monk’s cave offering a path to some kind of peace.

My second trip was at the dark of night. Occasional nights of tense insomnia creep into my routine – when you’re unwillingly awake, it helps to make those twilight hours productive.

I set out on a meditative journey on the road, filling my car with music, thoughts, and a jacket. Again, I wanted to shut off all unwelcome distractions to orient myself in the direction I needed to be heading – a direction that my state of mind at that time hid.

The beach was empty, it seemed. I pulled up after the hour and a half drive to the unofficial beach entrance, parked, and prepared myself for a little walk. Behind me, a large white pickup truck’s lights turned on. Initial paranoia faded after their engine idled for about a minute then finally pulled away.

Now there were no distractions. Neck tilted, I took in the ancient lightshow going on above my head. The view of the stars is fantastic at High Island. With clear cloud cover, comfort can be found even in the faint glow of High Island’s city center and traveling tankers flickering like distant torches at sea. The foamy crashing of waves was white noise I welcomed. I walked, finding that same ease in introspection and listening from before.

I left, deciding to head to the ferry instead of toward I-10 for my return to Houston. The reason that both highways 87 and 124 only end at High Island, rather than pass through it, is because the southeast TX coast is retreating.

The stretch of Highway 87 between Port Arthur and High Island has been closed continuously since 1990 after a hurricane left it in a state of complete disrepair. Now, when you hit the end of the road at High Island, you drive onto a crushed gravel roadway that eventually leads you to crumbling remnants of the old road bed – unmaintained, not-driven, unsettled for over 20 miles. Fortunately, most of it is a wildlife preserve. The further in you go, the less evidence you find of any road or accompanying civilization

I know this highway closure was what made it the sparsely populated beach I was looking for. I had to learn more about the city, so I started looking.

High Island is a rise in elevation resulting from what’s called a salt dome –ancient salt pushing its way up the earth’s crust and out through the surface, bringing minerals and petrochemicals up with it. According to some legends, the pirate Jean Laffite would have parties in the grove of oak trees on the hill. Many speculate that he stashed treasure there too.

The discovery of mineral water in the area - at the height of the “healing mineral springs” craze in America - played an important role in developing the community. A railroad running to High Island offered excursions to the community so that people could visit the springs and the beach. High Island had a large ornate hotel, facing toward the Gulf and appropriately called The Seaview, built in 1895.

There was a mule-drawn rail car to take guests to and from the beach several times a day. The Seaview survived the 1900 hurricane that devastated Galveston Island, remained an active destination for many years, but was abandoned during WWII and eventually burned in 1947.

The city today rises far above the surrounding marshes, providing the only favorable conditions for trees and shrubs for miles around. This makes it a vital home to birds migrating from Central and South America for summer breeding. The variety of birds nesting in High Island is almost unmatched.

During a spring northerly storm on the coast, what’s called a “fall out” occurs at High Island. Migrating birds encountering strong head winds arrive at High Island utterly exhausted and in such numbers that almost every tree and open space on the Island is covered with birds. They are so exhausted, most of the time you can walk directly up to the bird. Of course, don’t touch the bird.

Owen Wilson was in a comedy that took him to High Island for such an event, recently.

The Island’s elevation, 45 feet above sea level, makes it the highest geographic point on the Gulf of Mexico from Alabama to the Yucatan peninsula. When a hurricane’s storm surge advances on the coast, High Island actually becomes  an island.

(Smiley N. Pool)

My third trip to High Island was to live out dream I had – a sunrise beach run. I left Houston around 4 a.m. one morning to make it out there in time.

My trip there, a groggy blur of mostly pickup trucks and 18-wheelers on the trek there, was broken by growing light splitting apart the fog clouds on the coastal grazing fields as I approached the city from I-10, heading south on Highway 124.

The tall bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway materialized in front of me through the fog. Climbing the peak of the bridge my window fogged up – I thought it was from the inside until I moved my windshield wipers and saw something amazing.

At the top of the bridge, with the best view, I saw that from that height the marsh was invisible. I parked at the top to take it in – it was one of the few incredibly beautiful things I’ve seen that brought a tear to my eye.

The clouds of fog made every spot of ground invisible making it look like I was driving a bridge on Heaven’s highway, where power lines weren’t founded in dirt but in clouds. A lush green island appeared before me in the midst of this ocean of clouds – High Island’s elevation breaking through the cloud cover. The creeping dawn light made the sky a melt-worthy hue of pink.

A car honked as it drove past me and I quickly hopped back in my car and headed south – stopping at the top of the bridge is illegal, I do not advise you to do it.

In a short time I was on the beach and ready to run.

It was another fulfilling experience – but being the first sunny time I had visited the beach, I discovered another interesting migrating group – nudists.

(Self governance – “NO CLOTHES. NO KIDS”)

A few miles down the beach I start to get to the point where it’s much harder to drive on the beach. Hidden behind dunes of sand I found a gathering of cars and my imagination immediately painted stories of drug traffickers who might use the isolated beach the way pirates were reputed to, but my paranoia turned to surprise when I saw some of the most leathery skin I’d ever seen.

Apparently, the tedious terrain of this meetup spot lies right across the Galveston County border in which High Island lies, and it would involve a huge amount of effort for the neighboring Jefferson County Sheriff’s to patrol the spot.

A Suesslike assortment of different, shapes, sizes and shades of human presented itself before me. There’s groups of nudists as well as the occasional creepy loaner that heads out there to bear all, but it is still a technically illegal nude beach. Law enforcement rarely makes an appearance if there are no complaints.

While passing the group of mostly aged charcuterie gave me an initial shock, passing sandy disheveled campsites with zipped tents hiding unseen faces stirring inside made me more cautious.

I remembered approaching the figure of a guy standing outside of his car and tent. He must have seen me from a distance, because by the time I reached his campsite he zipped himself up and out of site. I turned around at that point to start jogging back to my car.

I’ve continued my returns to High Island, and expect I will intermittently. As I write this, I’m thinking about planning another trip.

I’ve returned with dates - hoping that if I met someone who could enjoy outdoors and see beach as more than just a giant pool where you can ogle at some skin, maybe they were a soul I’d want to swim around in.

On one trip, what I thought was driftwood from a distance revealed itself as a black-stained deceased dolphin on approach. On another trip, I realized how easy it was to find some sort of half-buried hurricane debris, usually with some digging. In my mind, I already didn’t hold High Island to any ideal standard of some tropical paradise, but my repeated visits helped me see that the beach’s isolation meant that it would inevitably have a dark underbelly of secrets too.

Dean Corll, the “candyman” killer of Houston, used a spot just inland of Highway 87 as a site to bury his victims. It wasn’t until accomplice Elmer Wayne Henley killed Corrll that Henley led authorities to Corrll’s known dump sites.

(Henley with fellow accomplice David Brooks guiding state authorities, Corbis)

Seemingly since then, “undesirables” have been drawn magnetically to the area, including a man whose recent kidnapping of a Virginia college student started a national manhunt. His creepy glance at a beachgoer led to his arrest:

It’s not uncommon to see random tents on the barren beaches, nor for sheriff’s deputies to encounter people who don’t want to identify themselves, Trochesset said. “We get lots of weird folks,” Rob Faupel, 45, an air conditioning technician, said. “It seems like a good place to seek refuge. It’s kind of remote.” 

As far as the campers, beach maintenance crew member Cliff Reichel said, “We don’t bother them unless they flat out are doing something wrong.” Reichel, 62, of Galveston, recalled one woman who was noteworthy because she had puppets on stakes outside her tent. She stayed for five months, then abruptly left. “You get people who stay a month at a time, a week at a time,” his partner, Jacob Huffstetler, 25, of nearby High Island, added. “We get some strange ones that come through here. Some have stayed. It’s like a magnet”, said 54-year-old Becky Sosa

This dark underbelly hasn't taken the magic away from the area for me. I’m not seeking a family vacation destination. I’m seeking an adult’s retreat.

High Island has offered me great solitude. I’ve even camped a night alone out by the beach, mediating, running, reading and writing – I recommend everyone camps alone at least once in their lives.

While it offers me this peace, the fact that the beach will never be favorable to long-term permanent habitation, hurricane-ridden as it is, serves as a cautionary metaphor for me:

Such isolated retreats of the mind are not homes - they are not a place you want to live in and the reasons are usually clear.

Isolated retreats are migration camps, a place to visit, a bridge to the next permanent spot, the next safer ground. They are limited islands, not untapped wells of worth, purpose, and self-meaning. Obligatory cliché: no man is an island. Very few birds nest permanently in High Island.

Here’s some pictures from my solo camping trip, if you visit, please share your experiences &/or pictures with me.

A glob of Uranus' seed

A Great Blue