Commentary on The Work, or, How Nietzsche Taught Me to Love Cancer and Live Again
Brian Eckert, editor
Over the last two years, and probably even before that, there has been a phrase bouncing around inside my head incessantly: “do the work,” you must be “doing the work.” While this phrase is likely familiar, its significance is what I can’t seem to get around.
For many, this phrase refers to the mental work of self-improvement, being aware of negative thoughts, balancing pleasure and indulgence, and other active efforts to improve personal health, both mental and physical, as a requisite step to academic and professional achievement. We need to be firmly within our own minds and bodies in order to reach our highest potential. And as someone who has struggled for years with mental illness, addiction and substance abuse, and physical illnesses, I know the best thing for my art is my health, the ability to actually sit at my desk for several hours and put some thoughts down. So what makes the “work” of artistic longevity? What of maintenance? Of the mundane domesticity necessary to keep working?
I started reading Friedrich Nietzsche extensively throughout my initial battle with leukemia. This was 2019 and it felt like the right place to start as these questions were put to the existential mantle.
Nietzsche can be difficult to understand because his writing lacks organization, linearity, and is often closer to poetry than prose regarding how much figurative language he uses. But Nietzsche’s poetic aspirations are exactly what makes his writing and ideas so important and resonant to me, a poet.
There are several tenets of Nietzsche’s philosophy that apply directly to doing the work of art as well as the work of being an artist. These include “Brief Habits” (S295), “Amor Fati” (S125, S276), and most importantly, “to give style to one’s character” (S290). These appear in the Walter Kaufmann translation of The Gay Science, where Nietzsche writes, “I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses” (S295). He writes that these brief habits fully satiate his needs and desires, physical and mental, without the need for further stimulation:
But one day its time is up; the good thing parts from me, not as something that has come to nauseate me, but peacefully and sated with me as I am with it—as if we had reason to be grateful to each other as we shook hands to say farewell. Even then something new is waiting at the door, along with my faith—this indestructible fool and sage!—that this new discovery will be just right, and that this will be the last time. That is what happens to me with dishes, ideas, human beings, cities, poems, music, doctrines, ways of arranging the days, and life styles. (S295)
I believe this is vital to continued productivity, whether that be creating art, studying art, or even finding inspiration through daily tasks. Brief habits encourage a buffet-style approach to life. Try many different things and enjoy them as long as they are enjoyable. Read your favorite poet over and over until you find a new favorite poet, and repeat.
It’s exactly when things get their hardest that our ultimate desires for life at its fullest emerge. The rapturous miracle of being alive is captured in Nietzche’s Amor fati, or love of fate:
I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
Nietzsche is referring not to a political “yes-man” but instead to someone who authentically affirms all aspects of reality, all of the pain and difficulty and ecstatic joys the same.
I came across this principle while undergoing intensive chemotherapy for my leukemia and I embraced it. I came to love my time in treatment when all of my time was my own. I could read and write and watch classic films all day, every day. I also developed a serious opioid addiction for a couple of years and nearly died multiple times, but I wouldn’t change any of it for what I was able to achieve. I took my diagnosis, moved back in with my parents, and went on to read the rest of Nietsche’s work while completing my Master’s degree even as the Covid-19 pandemic began. To do the work, it’s imperative to maintain some level of the love of fate. Love the challenges and setbacks, and embrace the adversity because that in itself is part of the work of an artist, to persevere and continue creating and finding inspiration.
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We look some more to Nietzsche:
To “give style” to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye… In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste!
It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relaxes in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature…
Nietzsche associates self-control, self-discipline, and self-awareness with “strong and domineering natures.” These individuals are not ‘domineering’ others, but themselves and their own qualities. This is a blueprint for the artist. The artist must have self-control and self-discipline to maintain an artistic practice, but also an artistic lifestyle. It is important to balance artistic practice and lifestyle practice, to “do the work” of making time for art while reserving time for self-care, friends and family, and decompression, and all of this balance requires strong self-discipline. This ‘balance’ of life and art becomes more a dance than anything resembling sound planning, like finding time to write during a commute or discovering new sanctuaries within a mandated schedule: a secluded park, a formerly unknown coffee shop, new bookstores, new brief habits. And as artists, we must learn to love this chaotic styling of our non-traditional lifestyles.
The work of being an artist is not easy, but it’s still art, and that makes it all worth it. The goal, or the “work,” of being an artist is to have that artistic spark permeate every aspect of life. To approach your commute and employment and household chores and every “have to” in life like it’s an artistic prompt. How clean can I get these dishes? How efficiently can I enter this data? What kind of trees are those that I pass every day? Does my favorite author have a podcast that I can listen to when I can’t read?
Probably. Turn what you can into art and embrace the rest anyway.
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BRIAN ECKERT is an MFA dropout and unofficial Poet Laureate of Dish Pits everywhere. He has been a bartender, farm hand, fry cook, landscaper, and substitute teacher. Brian was born and raised in rural Indiana before attending Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. In 2019, Brian was diagnosed with leukemia and spent several years undergoing intensive chemotherapy treatments, while also completing undergrad, and then starting and finishing a Master’s of Liberal Arts degree at Johns Hopkins University in May of 2022. He has lived in Colorado for the last three years where he loves hiking in the summer, snowshoeing in the winter, driving through the mountains, and visiting every used bookstore.
Union Spring Literary Review 