Nietzsche’s poetry, which we too often try to unlock with the code of his labyrinthine philosophy, is accessible to existential empathy. He was a loner whose body was signaling its imminent demise but whose spirit could still rouse itself to flights of incandescent illumination. I’ve known that condition since my student days. I know what it means to lift off to the heights of thought and feeling evoked in Nietzsche’s loner poems. In “Venice,” his solitary soul in flight sings softly to itself. I know what it’s like to ask, Does, or will, anyone hear my soul’s music? I know how to sniff out the erotic undercurrent of those mental transports, but I also know that there is more than sublimated sensuality to this arousal.
The crack-brained European stranded in the oasis of the “waxing desert” is spiritually and sensually aroused, jacked up by censoriousness, hunger, and horniness. He tells us so. The “cat-girls” Suleika and Dodo beckon! He longs to be bitten by their pretty little white teeth, gulped down like a sweet palm date. An erotically swaying palm tree must have already had one of its limbs bitten off, he muses. Eating and knowing, knowing in both the Kantian and biblical senses, are linked ways of taking things in. He is, as we say, up for it. Proclaiming, like Luther, “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise,” he mimics the reformer’s stand on principle, even while admitting an irrepressible erection. In apostrophizing the desert as “glowing brown,” with death and life as facets of digestion, its brown glow calls to mind a glistening turd—the base residue of life as engorgement and evacuation. Life is a process of being born and dying. Thought is rooted in desire and fertilized by death. Otherwise it can’t blossom or bear fruit but remains stunted without depth. This is why they avoid me, my shallow acquaintances. They’re afraid of death and incapable of any serious reflection. They suffer from Seinsvergessenheit. They are oblivious to Being. Bracing for the next blow of artificial intelligence, they are downsizing their minds as radically as possible. Their intelligence has probably always been artificial.
Now that my spirit is stranded in this shrinking oasis of my body—now that reflecting, ingesting, and shitting are such essential manifestations of my moribund existence—I get these poems more than I ever got them before. I appreciate their whimsy, intimacy, and humor. Intimacy and reflections on life and death are nowhere more incandescent than in “Die Sonne sinkt.” It’s as clear and as deep as an Alpine lake approached near the end of a warm day’s solitary hike on spectacular mountain trails. The poem’s narrative overlay is precisely such a hike, a metaphor for the wandering path of life ending in the calm and eager anticipation of death. Like Goethe’s most beloved poem, this one is a “Wanderer’s Night Song.” Absorbed in the symbolic calm of nature, the wayfarer yearns for the final peace that surpasses all understanding.
My translation is inadequate. Nietzsche’s German is simple and conceptual. Like “Die Wüste wächst,“ “Die Sonne sinkt” is supposed to appear in “Zarathustra’s shadow,” but it can stand alone without the pretentious framework of Thus Spake Zarathustra. I’ve tried to give the reader an inkling of this exquisite and moving meditation on death.
The Sun Sets 1. No longer shall you thirst, Oh scorched heart! Premonition is in the air. From unknown mouths it blows hither— the great cooling comes… My sun stood high overhead in the noontime: welcome now, you sudden winds, cooling spirits of the afternoon! The air wafts strange and pure. Doesn’t night look askance at me with its crooked seductive stare…? Be resolute, intrepid heart! Ask not: what for? — 2. Day of my life! The sun goes under. The smooth flood Already stands gilded. Warm breathes the rock: Did the noonday sun Find there its afternoon rest? In green luminosity The brown abyss conjures up fortune. Day of my life! Inclining to evening. Already the eye gleams Half blinded. Already streams the dew Of your gushing tears, Already steals across blank waters The purple hue of your love, Your last hesitant bliss. 3. Serenity, golden, come! You of death’s Sweetest, most secret premonition! Did I run my course too quickly? Only now that my foot grows tired Does your gaze catch up with me, Does your fortune catch up with me. All round—only ripple and play. All that had been heavy Sank in blue oblivion, Now my bark sits idle. Storm and voyage—how to unlearn that? Longing and hope have drowned, Calm lie soul and sea. Seventh solitude! Never felt nearer My sweet certitude, Nor warmer solar gaze. —Does the ice still glow on my crests? Silvery, slight, a fish, My bark now swims out.
This poem effects what it signifies: a mystical union of the inner world of spirit with the outer world of nature. The reader will notice, even in my poor translation, how the merest flashes of Alpine scenery fully evoke the experienced landscape and how the experience intensifies toward something sacred and mysterious.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 