Several of Nietzsche’s most beautiful poems can be read as contemplations of death. As such they can be both unsettlingly strange and grotesquely funny (not unlike the Mexican artist Jose Posada’s crazy strutting and partying skeletons, though Nietzsche is deeper and more layered). For someone facing off with our cartoonish Grim Reaper, this sort of humor can have a palliative effect (unless you are the morose kind who can’t take a joke about such matters).
I’m thinking in particular of Nietzsche’s longer poem “Die Wüste wächst.” In English it’s “The desert grows” (but that unfortunately sacrifices the terse alliteration of the original.) Reading Nietzsche’s poetry can require a layered perception. Implicit in a poem like this one is a narrative overlay which isn’t allowed to harden into a story but instead hovers like a veiled intimation, borne by the mental monolog of a wanderer or of an adventurer of some unstated kind. An explorer crosses unchartered waters. A solitary hiker contemplates the shifting mountain terrain of his day-long peregrination. As in our loneliest ruminations, the inner life and the outer world can merge. In merging, their union releases whole registers of larger and deeper connotations.
The narrative overlay is that of a European, alone and perhaps lost in Saharan Africa. His biblical locutions (“Sela,” “Amen”) and clerical exhortations suggest a missionary, but one whose delirious judgments are directed against Europe and whose mind has been befuddled by fantasies of exotic, erotic female spirits. He is disoriented, lost or “swallowed up” in an oasis where he addresses his “dearest female friends” and fantasizes about being eaten like a date by their sharp white teeth. Comically, he ogles a palm tree erotically swaying on one leg, and ponders with a touch of dread where its twin has disappeared to. Lions are mentioned.
His delirium summons forth virtue against lust and finally rises to horror as he imagines the desert as an all-consuming Death whose life is the same as its monstrous eating. The clamor of virtue is above all European lust and longing: “And here I stand (he ironically paraphrases the great Luther at Worms) and cannot do otherwise, so help me God! Amen.” The comic voice then declares aghast: “The desert grows: woe to the one who bears deserts within him. Stone grinds against stone, the desert wolfs and swallows. Monstrous death, glowing brown, stares at you and gnaws—its life is this very gnawing.” Comic titillation turns to dread which rises to an exhortation that sounds like the poet’s undisguised voice, addressing both the missionary and the reader: “Forget not, oh man, hollowed out by lust: you are stone, you are desert, you are death.” It could have served as an inspiration for T. S. Elliot’s “Wasteland” and “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which are perhaps funnier poems than commonly thought. Franz Kafka reportedly read aloud the grim narrative of The Trial to the uproarious hilarity of himself and his friends.
What is comic is the European missionary, adrift and hallucinating in a desert oasis, preaching and at the same time calling forth the erotic female spirits that have bewitched him. His aroused sensuality mingles with European moralism. He parodies himself in parodying Luther’s famous stand on religious principle as an erection. What is truly dreadful is the final vision of an all-consuming death that swallows the oasis and strands the homo spiritualis in a wasteland of annihilation. Perhaps the desert is his consumption and evacuation (“glowing brown”), the gnawing death that grows within him: nature consuming itself like the ourobouros of the alchemists. This can symbolize our all-consuming, all-destroying greed and insatiability, but there are other possible interpretations as well. At the very least, Nietzsche teaches us that the distance between pathos and ludicrousness is hardly a millimeter.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 