“It is too early in the sparkling day for tones,
Golden splendour is not yet in the roses,
There is still enough left of the day,
Much of the day for poetry,
Skulking and loneliness
My luck! My luck!”

Just as it is Nietzsche’s destiny to be a prophet of strength forever suffering from ill health, it is also Nietzsche’s luck to be forever addicted to unrequited love (Cosima Wagner, Lou Salomé). Weak and forlorn, he revelled in an essentially lonely fascination with nature, and the often solitary and melancholy pursuits of music and poetry. Nietzsche perhaps knew that even if he could have ushered in a new era of the will in his own lifetime, the gloves-off competition and un-bridled eroticism of such a world would not necessarily leave Nietzsche with all the girls, even as the will-to -power’s high prophet. Moreover, perhaps the world which Nietzsche is at pains to affirm is mystical and lonely in its very substance. As Jean Baudrillard has hinted, perhaps there is something essentially melancholy, and perhaps lonely, secreted within the very air itself.

It is clear that the German forest, loneliness and poetry are obsessively linked in Nietzsche’s work. Indeed, Nietzsche’s most lyrical work emerged after a humiliating turn down by Lou Salomé, leaving us with the lonely forest dwelling Zarathustra. As this collection reveals, the equation of forest, poetry and loneliness begins early in Nietzsche’s work. In a youthful poem: ‘I stand naked on a cliff,’ written while Nietzsche was presumably still nominally a Christian, we find him naked on a mountain top, swathed in darkness, waiting for the sun to rise, a resurrection of force which he associates with the power of god. In a later poem: ‘Pine and lightning,’ we see a now godless Nietzsche still standing to attention and awaiting nature’s blessing. However, in this case the blessing is even more mixed than before, with Nietzsche barely disguised in the figure of a pine tree that has grown too tall to commune with the rest of the forest, waiting for the gift of lightning that will destroy it:

“I wax high over humans and animals;
And I speak – no one speaks with me.
Too lonely I grew and much too high –
I wait – what do I wait for?
Too close am I to the seat of the clouds, –
I wait for the first lightning.”

We see here a morbid desire for cold death-dealing lightning that is not to be confused with his more famous messianic demand for iconoclastic storm-and-stress. In both the early Christian poem and the latter pagan ‘overman’ piece there is a sense of a man stripped bare ready to destroy himself or leave himself open to madness. In the second example there is, to be sure, a sense of the overman ready to burn himself out for his mission. But both these poems share the same nihilism despite their ideological differences and their distance in time.

Nietzsche’s work can be seen as a wholesale attack on the way that Christianity equates the world with pain, and Christianity’s subsequent rejection of the world on that basis. Nietzsche tries to redeem the world by affirming its joyfulness. This attack on Christianity’s unworldlyness is crucial, but is there not something equally unworldly in such a zealous denial of the essential reality of pain and the occasional futility of living? In any case, a world dedicated to the cut and thrust of the will to power would generate definitive losers as well as winners, and not all the losers would be inherently ignoble or weak, because of the sheer chaotic nature of struggle and the nature of chance (elements that Nietzsche admits to and tries to affirm in their turn). Of course Nietzsche tries to get round this, affirming the world despite its horror, and even to an extent because of its horror. He comes up with the aesthetic of tragedy, which views pain in a distanced intoxicating form, and also comes up with a certain cult of strength that can withstand and even enjoy the greatest pain. But one must note how Nietzsche only faces up to the horror of the active struggle between different wills to power, which can be easily affirmed as at least dynamic. One kind of pain that Nietzsche cannot easily turn into aesthetic capital is physical illness, which is always turned via slight of hand by Nietzsche into a call for convalescence and thereby turned into a dormant strength. Another form of irreducible pain is sheer romantic isolation. In a sense, Nietzsche’s love of despairing poetry brings him back to us, to those who live in the real world of disappointment and the freezing of the will that is unrequited passion. For, as Nietzsche admits in his most heartbreaking poetry, it is often the inability to share one’s joy at being in the world that, ironically, becomes a worldly torment. This poetic pessimism, paradoxically, rescues Nietzsche from too closely mirroring Christianity with its unworldly imperatives and false cheer.

In the battle between lovers over a beloved in a finite world dominated by the will to power, one can end up alone and lonely; a fool babbling poetry. Such a poet/fool tries to throw himself at the lonely beauty of nature in sheer desperation, in a tree-hugging, talking-to-the-flowers and roaring-with-the-thunder false eroticism, in a tortured attempt to maintain the correct spirit of life affirmation. But, alas, the German forest is a kind of jungle, and the wanderer and his shadow are led deeper and deeper into its secret loneliness. That’s just how it is.

David Johnson has a D.Phil. in English Literature from York University, an MA in Continental Philosophy from Warwick University and a BA in Literature and Philosophy from Middlesex Polytechnic. He is author of the book, ’The Time of the Lords: An Attack on Bataille’s Slave Aesthetic of Transience’ (Leicester: Ephemera Books, 2001); articles - ‘Getting the Real On: Baudrillard, Berkeley and the Staging of Reality’ – (International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Issue 2, July 2004), ‘Why View All Time from the Perspective of Time’s End?: A Bergsonian attack on Bataillean transience’ (Time and Society, Volume 12, Issue 2, 09/2003) and ‘Kafka’s God of Suffocation: The Futility of ‘Facing Death,’ in ‘Making Sense of Dying and Death’ (Editions Rodopi B.V., New York, 2004)

© 2004 Laura Hird All rights reserved.