Verily, he believeth only in gods that make a great noise in the world! Full of clattering buffoons is the market-place,- and the people glory in their great men! These are for them the masters of the hour.
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Chapter 12, The Flies in the Market-Place)
Yes, lots of clatter around us in the market place, which you have depicted as the media, retail and major shopping complexes. We might consider heeding Nietsche's words 'Be like the tree again, the wide branching tree that you love: calmly and attentively it leans out over the sea' (TSZ - Of the Flies of the Market-place, Penguin: 1969:78) I'm certainly attempting to do this, for general clatter disturbs me from my solitude.
ReplyDeleteOne of the themes of Zarathustra I think are ideas about burdens, for example Zarathustra carries a dead body around for a while before stashing it in a tree. Burdens are acquired and manoeuvred up hills, kind of the opposite of leaping from peak to peak.
ReplyDeleteMaybe it has something to do with the spirit being light, but the body a heavy weight (Parmenides)? Or vice versa. Or maybe it relates to Nietsches 'eternal return' and an embrace of life - it's joy (lightness) as well as its burdens (heaviness). Kundera in 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' seemed to be addressing the paradox of Nietsche's notion of lightness and heaviness. Kundera (from memory) equated generative creativity/sexuality with lightness, although the body and its desires appears to some of his characters as heavy. Sometimes the weight of attempting to give meaning to life can be a burden and to some it is light. Many cannot bear the burden of just being alive. Leaping from peak to peak sounds to me like something the Ubermensch might do & in this case the body sounds incredibly light.
ReplyDeleteLeaping from peak to peak is what FN exports our thinking and writing to do.
ReplyDelete