Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

There seem to be two things that people get wildly, carelessly wrong about Nietzsche--the sort of ignorance that comes from having read a few decontextualized quotes or believed one's undergraduate intro to philosophy class a little too willingly.  The first is that Nietzsche is a philosopher at all.  There are no reasoned propositions here, no analyses, proofs, or theses to be found.  This is poetry first, and philosophy only insofar as all poetry has a secondary claim to that label.  This book, and what little else of his I've read, is neither rational nor objective, but the pure and beautiful wailing of an anguished spirit, put into words where such should have been impossible.

Which leads rather naturally to the second thing people--by which I chiefly mean tepid, unremarkable straight white men with a desire to appear profound but nothing interesting of their own to say--get wrong about Nietzsche.  If one approaches a book like this with a meatheaded belief that it will be philosophy, the natural next question is, "What school of philosophy is it?  What label can I put on it, and then on myself to spare me the realization that I have nothing interesting to say?"  The answer that some come up with to that question is "Nihilism", a term which then gets further warped into "belief in nothing", and ultimately results in conveniently unassailable laziness.

But to assert that Nietzsche believed in nothing is manifestly ludicrous.  The passion with which this book seethes is in stark contrast to the numb, mushy life that so many who say they embrace Nietzsche live.  Nietzsche believes, not in nothing, but in nothingness: in the wild and creative power of the void.  When he wrote in "Beyond Good and Evil" that if you "gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you", he was referring to its power, not its danger.

That abyss, void, longing, desire, against which so many rail and resist is for Nietzsche not an enemy.  The gaping maw that yawns at our core is terrifying, and so many make the mistake of fleeing from it, covering it up, or trying to fill its insatiable mouth.  Its hunger begs to be satisfied, but is there a more Sisyphean task?  The desire of the abyss cannot be silenced, and neither is it meant to be.  That desire is the reason for its existence, and it is out of that desire, if we stop and gaze, that truth comes.  The abyss does not devour; it delivers.  It does not consume; it creates.

How ludicrous to suppose that Zarathustra in this book--and Nietzsche, to the extent the two overlap--have any truck with Buddhism.  The latter's dismissal of desire is completely incompatible with the former's embrace of it.  The sky calls to Zarathustra, to be sure: the soaring, liberating abandonment of this world's petty concerns.  But so does the earth call to him: desire, rage, and struggle.  There is an upward motion to our journey, an ascent to the peak of a mountain, at which point we have no choice but to sprout wings.  But there is also a going-under, a return to the darkness of discontent and agony, that is equally necessary.  It is this darkness, in fact, from which we get some of our truest light, if we can bear its gaze.  Wonderful things can come from the void, and Nietzsche here helps us to look at it without going mad, resting a comforting, but rough, hand on our shoulder as it opens up in us and produces, for example, verses like this of mine, a tribute to his vision:

Becoming a tree means grasping the earth, as surely as clutching the sun,
Seizing the soil for all that its worth, in the forest of two unfolding as one.