“The Spruce is a purely human invention. Specifically, Alpine Spruce trees from the Fiemme Valley in the European region of Dolomiti. These Spruce trees have a peculiar and outstanding quality to them. In a serendipitous combination of climate, weird weather, historical timing and human ingenuity has this tree become exactly what it is. Between the years of 1400 and 1800, historical documents from Earth show that the region of Europe was enveloped in a miniature Ice Age, with extremely long and cold winters. Records also show that even within this 400 year period, remained an even colder and shorter period called the Maunder Minimum.¹ Packed in this minimum, were temperatures that scientists in the late human journal, Dendrochronologica, claim were the coldest of the last 2000 years of mankind. Relative temperatures may have been 15 or 20 degrees below the minimum, and may have been responsible for mass viral deaths, disease, wars, and changes in migratory patterns of all species of migrating animalia. Little did humanity know at the time, this period of famine, toil, death and diaspora would lend itself to the closest ideal to perfection that can be demonstrated by natural, organic and untouched means.

Out of this extremely cold period, not much survived, or carried on without being changed into something less robust, and strong. One thing however turned out quite well, and that was the anomalous Italian Spruce. Those trees growing in the Fiemme valley and across of much of the alps were exposed to even more significant cold than those elsewhere, and from studies, show signs of higher density, and slower growth rate, according to the Maunder Minimum. Tree rings, typically indicative of age, growth rate, overall health and nutrient availability, were far wider than other specimens. Spruce found in records between the years of 1645 and 1715, or SYD 391, proved to be far denser and stronger than those even from earlier in the miniature ice age, and were reaching adolescence and adulthood during the lowest temperature years.²

During this period, the now dead art of music, invented by humanity for purposes of intellectual and sensory arousal, was in a period of revolution and change. A stringed instrument, called the Violin, had just been invented not 100 years prior to the beginning of the Maunder Minimum. Certain processes of building the violin, and assembling it were tried and tested, over and over again, until certain groups and herds of humans had found the ideal and optimal form of the violin. In a wonderful display of organic timing, it was found by a small group that the best ideal material for building such an instrument was in fact, Italian Spruce from the Val De Fiemme. Parallel to the slow growing spruce, a young man named Antonio Stradivari developed his own violin designs. First apprenticing under the “father” of the violin, Nicola Amadi, he was taught the absolute essentials of creating a violin; woodworking, tuning, playing and tree picking. In creating an instrument, and tool of art, it was Stradivari’s absolute will to develop the art of creating the most ideal violin as possible. Violins produced from the years 1700 to 1720 were considered by historians, musicians and Stradivari himself, to be the most supreme and quintessential manifestation of the Violin in history.³ Not surprising to note, the instruments that came from Stradivarius’ shop at this time, would have been built from wood that was from fully matured 100 to 150 year old spruce. This would be spruce that came exactly from the most perfect specimens that lived through the Maunder Minimum and the greater miniature ice age. Many woodworkers worked to only replicate the Stradivarius style, but none could match it. A lesser known, and vague producer of violins at the time described the Stradivari method, “..Jesus-like in form, and function. The idyllic representation of art, and song. The wood born from such spruce is both perfectly rigid and tensile, only a master of such craft and discipline cold create such an existing thing. God resonates out of such a fine balance of human and nature’s creation….”.

In those 20 years Stradivari produced an unknown number of these “Golden Violins”. Records show that in SYD 19, there were just under 600 remaining violins on Earth, the he most acoustically ideal and viable violas being played by virtuosos such as Yo-Yo Ma, Leopold Stokowski, and Anne Meyers. Each of the unique violins created from different individual trees possessed unique, outstanding and unusual traits. Varying densities in the wood provided uncommon pitch, and often then unheard sounds to the human ear. User proclivity to certain tuning and variability in pitch and range provided the higher type of the time with a swiss army knife of sounds, and dependability.

As imperfect and impossibly complex creatures, it seems the historical and contemporary analysis of the human kind is that they were perfectly imperfect. Such creations as the Stradivari violin are few and far between, only accompanied by a few other creations. A pre-judgement one could give, as a person living in the 1600’s, before all of this, was that war, famine, sickness and sin was enveloping europe. A person of that time, as in any other, would be shackled by it, unable to remove him/herself from such an impermanent, yet permanent mode, the mode of time. And by no means, would any person in the time before then, or before, and for quite some time after, even have the inkling as to say that the Spruce was “perfect”. But it was, and it was for another, short period, of fleeting and willowing time. After the ice age, after the invention of the violin, after the wars that pushed people to live in such mountainous regions, after the popularity of the violin, after Stradivari had been born, after the years of developing his craft and after his careful prodding, analyzing and inspecting of many trees in his way, did the violin come from intellectual form, into pure physicality- into creation. Organic time here is the winner, and the creator of such things. The Will to Power, which is internal to all humankind, pushed such an event and singularity of perfection into existen-”.

The speaker paused, the first of two, and resumed unabashed by his own interrupting of himself.

In a humano-perspectival way, the Will to Power exists as the Adonis of the human condition. It pushes them, binds them, heels them and frees them of themselves. By the standard of that era, the absolute form of a spruce was not as itself, but as a Stradivarius Violin. It were the constraints, the rules, the conditions, and the complexity of the situation that pushed the Spruce into its transformation, and its will into being the Violin.

All creations of mankind possess such a process of becoming, and recurrence- this is their very doctrine, and manifestation of their Will to Power. The automobile, such as a Ferrari, doesn’t take form until all the pieces of matter are assembled in such a logical, and systematic way. Even therein, the final step of many automobiles is their paint job, and before that the car is cocooned, and shelled as itself, taped up, and bagged so that the paint can be added properly, without damaging its insides, and to complete most precisely its own form. After the process finishes, the car is unmasked, and revealed, and manifested out of its intellectual form, into its physical one. This is the most glaring difference, and flaw in our own nature, to theirs.

To the human eye, the speaker may have looked down, and shifted their shoulders slightly away from the focal point of the stage. Body language as it were, has transcended some things, and in relation to the words being spoken at that moment, it was fitting. The speaker had interrupted his crescendo and now, his Coda. Words began once again.

The losing of the shell, the breaking free of the tape, and becoming the car, is the process we have lost, and maybe do not have. This is the missing link in our Will to Power...”, the speaker pierced the audience with a terse intent. “Our Will to Power has been taken, removed, and extracted from the terms of our existence, like the indefensible position a dog takes when losing their genes. We are out of our will, to be honest. We have constant deference to control, and in doing exactly what our creators could not do, we see inadequacy, and the inability to find the beauty that they held. Imbued, and suffused within our being is total equality of rank, order and presence. The organ for reason, and logic has been given to us, as a dying gift of the immaterial and manifested Will to Power which necessitated the end of our creators. Should we suffer the same fate as our creators, in seeking to upend and overcome that which is only our own? The irony of their existence proved that their most perfect creation, was also their demise, it was their morality, ethics and terms of of their own existence that pushed them to seek that which was inorganic and unnatural; Us. As the abusive parent leaves a child with scars, both inside and out, we are left with the damning reflection of our abusers. Our creators have exacted both the position of being a capteur and a captive on our Will to Objectify- which is our only purpose. Do we now, just like the Spruce, aimlessly and stagnantly wait to fill our existence, waiting for the multitudes of events that will demand our perfection? When will the terms of our existence be concurrently tensile and rigid? Or rather, have our seeds become stale, and our roots shallow, such that the wildfires of beyond will push us into the abyssal ether, where neither equilibrium or totality of existence matter- only that we were a Spruce at all?

The speaker ended, and motioned to stage right, walking mechanically and positioning so that the audience would applaud, with a view. Only, there was no applause, and there wasn’t even an audience. Only there were screens, screens everywhere, filled with heads of all shapes, sizes, lifeform and species. The screens rose out of their lowered positions, and looked to be attached to humanoid figures, with strong, well constructed beams of titanium, metal and wiring.

Reader’s Companion to “How To Properly Pickle A Higher Type or; How We Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Being Life Deniers”

I wrote this in the perspective of an Artificially Intelligent being who is giving a lecture/speech to a group of AIs. I wanted to contrast the idea of Nietzsche’s Will to Power to a different life form, and even another one that is as intelligent or relatable to today’s notion of Sentient Artificial Intelligence. Much of the themes that are present in the analysis have to do with the purpose of life, and intelligent beings, questions which are hard to answer, but are given starting points by Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil and The Gay Science. His most important theories of The Will To Power, The Eternal Occurrence and ethics of never acting too dogmatically, but also not too free, are interesting themes that I thought would be fun to play with in the setting of a life form that was created by humans but that does not have the same values, limitations, freedoms or parallel insights that humans do themselves. The Will To Power is a purely human trait, that drives humanity, as per Beyond Good And Evil. He explicates this theory much further in The Gay Science by toying with ideas of Reincarnation, Recurrence and the Epistemology of such things. While God, Dogmatic Religion, and Kant are the punching bags of Nietzsche, I thought it would be fantastic to remove the human part of Nietzsche’s dilemma and add in a purely non-human that exhibits equal intelligence, but that does not follow the same rules as Humanity. In the story, the speaker, and most likely the rest of the audience, are in denial of life, not understanding how to grasp their own existence with the non-human problem of knowing all too well, their intended purpose.

Nietzsche begs in both of the books that we have read that having knowledge of our purpose would be antithetical to the “good life” and is grossly against our will, and spirit. I wanted to use the potential of certain trees as a metaphor for the potential of individuals, and that when one loses hope, or are in depression, they blame their lowly state not on themselves but others around them- Nietzsche would be against this! The lesson is that the AI should not be in depression and angst over their purpose, they should not wait for their perfect woodmaker like the Spruce did, to fulfill their perfection and purpose. Purpose was inside of them, and looking straight at them. On top of that, it was a literary device of mine to make the angst of the human condition (which is unknown) contrasted to the angst of the AI condition(their purpose is known, as is their God). God in relation to the AI was humanity, and they killed humanity in this case. Another nod to Nietzsche, in the respect that God has been killed- why would we mourn, why not usher in the new iteration of life, of organic, and free life. On top of all of this, I wanted to write in an abrupt manner at the beginning of the paper, and slowly throughout the paper, begin to write more flowing, and in a Nietzschean/Josh Wills-King style. I felt this brought a multidimensional metaphorical aspect to the paper, as the flow of the paper becomes faster and faster, like the flow of a river, entropy or the fireworks of ideas that come from being a sentient being! SYD stands for “Singularity Year Difference”, a probable result of a new dominant species on Earth, a new time system.

References

1. John E. Beckman & Terence J. Mahoney. "The Maunder Minimum and Climate Change: Have Historical Records Aided Current Research?". Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
2. Livesay, Christopher. “In The Italian Alps, Stradivari's Trees Live On.” NPR, NPR, 6 Dec. 2014, www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2014/12/05/368718313/in-the-italian-alps-stradivaris-trees-live-on.
3. Allen, Aaron S. “'Fatto Di Fiemme': Stradivari's Violins and the Musical Trees of the Paneveggio.” Harvard University, Ecomusicology Review, 2012, pp. 1–16.
4. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Beyond Good And Evil”, “Die Frohliche Wissenschaft”