This chapbook is the first, stand-alone expression of my Index poems. In many ways, it is their fullest expression, too.
The title, format and purpose are all selected from amongst Friedrich Nietzsche’s “most personal of all books”, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. (“la gaya scienza”). The layout is a typographic re-construction of the index of Walter Kaufmann’s canonical English-langauge translation, which indexes both Nietzsche's mainbody and Kauffman's extensive contextual footnotes, gathering references to the past, present and future influences on and of Nietzsche into one list. For Historia Abscondita, Kaufmann's index provides a site and concealed syntax.
The poem takes its cue from two aphorisms in Neitzsche's strange text. One is about "concealed, secret or unknown history"; the other a rhetorical challenge, "What good is a book that does not go beyond all books?". While re-oragnising the content of the paratext, the simple gesture of this chapbook is to unachor the original index and make all its reference locators disappear, allowing the word relations structured by alphabetised coincidence to become affectively intense. The sheets of the chapbook are folded and stacked but remain unbound, to be pulled out and further re-ordered, so that the whole reference system remains joyously unstable.
"Every act of reading is an act of generative deformance, producing a text anew. In a gesture of deliberate selection, Nick Thurston gives us Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science through its translated index. These word lists stand as signposts to an intellectual terrain recoverable only speculatively, through indexical trace. The familiar order of the alphabet provides its own illusion of coherence, within which the peculiar juxtapositions of happenstance offer their surprises and conundrums. Nietzsche the author is long vanished from this text, which is Walter Kaufmann’s posthumous translation of his original, and the loss of history that is a central theme of that book becomes enacted in this Index of Joy. All we have is what is left behind – enough to give a glimpse of what has vanished? or to put us in pursuit of the rest of that lost history? A conceptual work that enacts its polemical operations through a deceptively simple device, Thurston’s Historia Abscondita uses visual and material references to call forth the associative process through which the impossible task of recovery is provoked."
– Johanna Drucker, University of California, Los Angeles
"Pointing with clever concision to Nietzsche’s signature genre of clever concision – the aphorism – the lists in Historia Abscondita engage the philosopher with his own serious playfulness, lyric philosophizing, and a difficult obscurity of Dionysian proportion. Although he meticulously replicates the entries in the Index to Walter Kaufman’s canonical translation, down to the typeface and layout, Nick Thurston has also eliminated all the corresponding page numbers, crippling the indexical gestures of the lemmata and establishing a recursive series of detachments and reference: the headwords are detached from their page numbers, the pages are detached from their binding, but every level gestures – though facsimile and reproduction – inevitably toward the source. Necessity and chance, precision and ‘pataphyiscs’: a gay science indeed!"
— Craig Dworkin, University of Utah
