by Steve Gimbel
We begin with song, with a Wagnerian primordial harmony, a simplistic melody that eschews the false refinement of the times, instead speaking directly to primal self with lyrics in the imperative. It does not, like the Priests before it, forbid action with “Thou shalt not,” nor does it request from a position of submission. No, it commands that parts are put in, taken out, and shaken about as the Aristocrats assertively did before their souls were poisoned by the ressentiment of the weak.
One at a time, the hands and the feet are put in and taken out, right first and only then the left. The privileged position of the right over the left is understood through the etymology of the terms in which “right” moves from an indicator of orientation, a mere side, to something more profound—the word “right” came to mean correct, morally approved, protected by law but originated in the terms for strong, beautiful, beloved of the gods. “Left,” on the other hand—for it literally is the other hand—stems from a different origin. In the Latin and Aramaic, it represents untrustworthy, poorly constructed, and ooooh, that’s got to hurt. In Swahili, it derives from the notion of “unlikely to be granted tenure.” And in high mid-Germanic it is a variant of “will spend Friday nights alone, unable to get a date, even if he does grow a moustache of notable size.”
But the distinction stops when it is the head that is put in and taken out and shaken all about. For the head is neither left not right, yet appears in the lyrics only after the feet that climb mountains and the arms that may be raised in triumph. The head only becomes important with the priestly elevation of soul which removes the focus away from the instinct and urgent desires of the flesh. But within the confines of the hokey pokey, the head is the crown of the material body, the überist of the pieces of the Mensch who is himself über. It is recognized as just yet another part to be shaken all about, though it is only in using this part that those capable of hokeying or pokeying have become both insightful and neurotic.
But these parts are mere elements. They are not the thing. The parade of parts builds to a crescendo in which all is subsumed. Steadily the Dionysian reverie grows until it peaks with the whole self put in and the whole self put out: the whole self, the entirety of one’s being. In this way, the assertion is implicitly made that the self is the body, it is a denial of the immaterial soul, the basis of the Judeo-Christian bad faith slave ethic and when that whole self is shaken about with the force of the will to power, it is breaking loose and thereby exorcising this failed attempt to historicize away being itself.
Finally, upon doing the hokey pokey, you turn yourself about, that is, the self is moved away from the gaze of the masses, the sheep, rotating to where none are visible. It is into the void that one turns around staring into nothingness that demonstrates once and for all the atomistic nature of the self, that it is you and you alone who must transcend your limitedness and strive for full triumphant self-affirmation. It is only when that is complete that your revolution is finished, when you return to the group as a being above being and knowing that is, indeed, what it IS all about.
