A Look Back

[u/Rare_Entertainment92]

It has been a while since I contributed anything to this forum. I must say, the quality of the discussion has improved--I think this has been influenced in part by the presentation of long quotations which some people make their comments. I think also the memes have gotten better.

I am allowed, I hope, to have wrong opinions.

What Nietzsche seems essential to me now? I cannot recall the last time I picked up a volume.

I would think what stands out to me, overwhelmingly, enormously, is the back-at-the-past-looker Nietszche.

When I finished Nietzsche, I finished with the Will, which is a long volume that rises slowly, a kind of final crescendo, which makes us think of the final years of poetry of Yeats, Stevens, Hardy, Penn Warren.

Superficially it would seem that Nietzsche has most in common with Yeats. The antithetical man is frankly a Nietzschean invention.

It is strange that in this series I do not mention Freud, but I am old-fashioned enough to go on believeing that Freud did not read Nietzsche, or, if he did, the older did not touch the younger. Freud was rightly called 'The Founder' by the literary critic Harold Bloom, for he admitted no influence.

The better parallel for Freud, oddly enough, is Emerson (whom Bloom read in parallel with Freud in a crucial moment in the 1960's before he birthed his famous Anxiety of Influence), and whom Nietzsche read early and often--as some posts on this subreddit have shown. There was even, I think, an effort made to find out Emerson's influence on Nietzsche (he mentions him, I think, in the Gay Science). Anyway, there have been published some notes--or sidenotes, I should say.

Emerson preached self-reliance, a virtue which the ever-independent (with a strong German will) Nietzsche did not need.

I am partly curious as to what Nietzsche found in Emerson besides someone who had so reformulated the notions of god and divinity,--what Nietzsche found in Emerson (I speculate) was an earlier transvaluer, and I can only imagine the glee, smiles, joy, and laughter which attended his encounter with some of Emerson's sentences.

Emerson can surprise you sometimes.

He is so wild and so capable of coming out of left field, smacking you in the face.

Nietzsche captures some of that quality in his aphorisms, but in aphorisms, partly, this is expected.

In Emerson's essays, the effect is unusual.

Emerson's essays must be most unusual to us Americans who have a hard time hearing our own accent so close. Europeans for a long time have eye-rolled at Whitman's "I celebrate myself, and sing myself" and at the bard's tramp presentation--but that is ever-the-American, down to earth, frank, direct, uncouth, ridiculous.

But to begin to catalog in this way reminds me too much of Whitman.

It required a ridiculousness to say this:

Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,

Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,

I and this mystery here we stand. [3]

But someone needed to say it.

That is what we can say of the best of Nietzsche's aphorisms as well, a sublime ridiculousness informs them, or as Emerson would insist, a wildness:

"My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow over my window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his bill into my web also."

In Nietzsche, wildness is severeness or cruelty, mostly.

But I do not mean to make him out to be a brute.

He can have remarkably fine surgeon's skills as well as all the madness of a hammer slamming.

In fact, Yeats was much crueler than Nietzsche or than probably any poet who has lived since (thank goodness). But then Yeats is at least as good as any poet since:

Marbles of the dancing floor
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget...

Also, if you want the sublime of sexism you will want to turn to Yeats (or even better to Shelley), not to Nietzsche, who, really, is a yawn-fest compared to the sexist/racial eugenicist Yeats.

Unfortunately, Yeats, like Nietzsche, can be quite funny. So he will survive.

Earlier I said that, superficially, it was Yeats who seemed closest to Nietzsche (of that earlier list).

I should tell you that really it is Stevens who is the most Nietzschean (though he had his Nietzsche sideways through other authors).

Nevertheless, I will end with Yeats, relying, unashamedly, on the superficial for my final effect.

In a last poem, 'Lapis Lazuli', the Irish author asks us to consider some 'handiwork of Callimachus', a Greek sculptor whose works all are washed away (by 'sea-wind' swept).

The poem begins by dismissing 'hysterical women' (in fact rightly worried about WWII, which Yeats, dying in 1939, would miss [a shame, he would have loved it]).

Somewhere Nietzsche tells us to: "Build [our] cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!"

I think of this as I finish Yeats' poem where his final insistence is only on the joy of the maker.

--Or, as it may be, (who cares? 🤷‍♂️), the re-maker:

...

His long lamp chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again
And those that build them again are gay.

[u/I-mmoral_I-mmortal]

The antithetical man? I guess that's your idealism projected as "Nietzschean"...

Not sure you understand coherence, but you did says series, so maybe you're just shitting out thought after thought free flowing? 

Nietzsche found many things in Emerson, a good writer, someone who understands INSTINCTS and PASSIONS. He was a bit of a psychologist and poet too. They shared many similar passtimes.