Report to Grego (49 page)

“God is dead,” you proclaimed, bringing us to the edge of the abyss. There is only one hope: Man must surpass his nature and create the Superman. Full administration of the cosmos will fall upon his shoulders then and he will have the power to undertake such a responsibility. God is dead, His throne vacant; we shall enthrone ourselves in His place. Do we remain all alone now in the world? Has the master passed away? So much the better! From now on we shall work not because He commands us to, not because
we fear or hope, but because we ourselves want to work.

Eternal Recurrence was devoid of hope, the Superman a great hope. How could these two clashing world views be reconciled? Untold anguish. From that time onward your soul beat its wings over the abyss of madness. Zarathustra remained only a Cry. Abandoning this tragic poem in a half-completed state, you fought now to prove scientifically that life's essence was the will to power.

Europe is perishing, you cried. It must submit to the strict discipline of the leaders. Today's reigning morality is the work of slaves, a conspiracy organized by the weak against the strong, the flock against the shepherd. With cunning self-interest the slaves have turned values upside down; the strong person becomes bad, the sickly and weak good. They cannot endure pain, these slaves; they are philanthropists, Christians, and socialists. Only the Superman, who first of all acts harshly himself, is able to inscribe new commandments and give the masses new, superior goals.

The nature of these goals, the proper organization of the elect and the multitude, the role of war in this new tragic period of European history: these were the problems which harassed your final years of lucidity. Unable to answer them, your mind tottering, you devoted yourself again to your old Dionysiac poems, and with most bitter foreboding sang your swan song.

The
sun is setting.

Soon you will no longer thirst,

O my burning heart.

A freshness is in the air,

I feel breaths from unknown mouths—

the great coldness comes. . . .

The air is strange and pure.

Did not this night cast

a wry and seductive

glance at me?

Keep strong, O my brave heart!

Do not ask why.

Eve of my life!

The sun is setting.

You saw what man is not permitted to see, and your sight was taken from you; you danced beyond human endurance at the brink of the abyss, and into the abyss you plunged.

The darkness quickly overwhelmed your mind. This darkness lasted eleven years, until your death. Sometimes you grasped a book in your hands and asked, “I wrote splendid books also, did I not?” And when you were shown Wagner's picture, you said, “I greatly loved that man.”

N
ever had a more heart-rending cry sprung from a human breast. And never had I lived the life of a saint with such intensity, not even when I read the holy legends as a child. I believe that after my pilgrimage to the new Golgotha came to an end and I returned to Paris, my heart (more than my mind) had changed. To such a degree had I experienced this great atheist martyr's anguish, so severely had my old wounds begun again to rankle as I followed his bloody tracks, that I felt ashamed of my staid, well-ordered, cowardly life, which dared not destroy all its bridges behind it and enter, completely alone, the realm of utmost bravery and despair. What had this prophet done? What did he tell us, above all, to do? He told us to deny all consolations—gods, fatherlands, moralities, truths—and, remaining apart and companionless, using nothing but our own strength, to begin to fashion a world which would not shame our hearts. Which is the most dangerous way? That is the one I want! Where is the abyss? That is where I am headed. What is the most valiant joy? To assume complete responsibility!

Sometimes I suddenly felt his shadow next to mine as I strolled beneath Paris's chestnuts or along the banks of its famous river. We proceeded side by side in silence until the sun went down. He was always short of breath, gasping, and tinged with the smell of sulphur. It occurred to me that he must be returning from hell—my own breath caught in my throat and I began to gasp. But we did not wrestle now; we had become friends. He looked at me, and I perceived my face in the pupils of his eyes. Anguish is contagious, however. He had given me all his troubles. Together with him I had begun my own battle to match the unmatchable—to reconcile utmost hope with utmost despair, and to open a door beyond reason and certainty.

One evening as the sun was setting and we were about to part, he who never spoke to me turned and said, “I am the crucified Dionysus—I am, he is not!” His voice was full of envy, hate, and love.

My heart's calmness always returned when I went to hear Bergson's magical voice the following day. His words were a bewitching spell that opened a small door in the bowels of necessity and allowed light to pour in. But the wound, the blood, the giant sigh—all those elements so fascinating to youth—were missing, and I used to go and walk once more beneath the chestnuts in order to meet the other, the one who wounded.

In those days the wound never penetrated me deeply. I shared his hurts, but only superficially. Like Saint Francis, I was stamped with stigmata wherever the fierce prophet had a running wound; my skin turned black and blue, that was all. It was later, when the apocalyptic angels he had envisioned finally plunged down upon mankind, that my own wounds began to open. This was in London, I remember, many years later. Autumn had come again; I was sitting on a bench in some park. The air was filled with terror. Somewhere the Superman had been born; somewhere a bloodthirsty tiger imagined he was a Superman. Unable to fit in his lair any longer, he was possessed by the rage for domination. Genghis Khan wore an iron ring with two words engraved upon it: Rastí
Roustí
—“Might Is Right.” Our age had donned this same iron ring. The demon of our age was like that legendary African king who mounted his highest tower with twelve women, twelve singers, and twenty-four goatskins of wine. He was as tall as a steeple, fat as butter, and covered with hair. The entire city shook with dancing and song; the oldest huts collapsed to the ground. At first the king danced. Then, growing tired, he sat down on a stone and began to laugh. Then he grew tired of laughing and began to yawn, and in order to pass the time he hurled from the tower first the women, then the singers, and finally the empty wineskins. But his heart felt no relief, and he began to bewail the inconsolable suffering of kings. . . .

A newsboy came along proclaiming the latest war communiqués. People stopped short in the street, as though their hearts had ceased beating. Some ran headlong toward their homes; they seemed anxious to see if their children were still alive.

A shadow came and sat down beside me on the bench. Turning, I shuddered. It was he. Who was the man who proclaimed that the essence of life is the longing to expand and dominate, and that only power is worthy of having rights? Who was the man who prophesied the Superman, and in prophesying him, brought him? The Superman had arrived, and here was his cowering prophet, struggling to hide beneath an autumn tree!

It was the first time I felt such a tragic sympathy for him. For it was the first time I saw so plainly that we are all the reeds of some invisible Shepherd, that we play whatever melody he blows into us, and not the melody which we ourselves desire.

I gazed at the sunken eyes, the sheer brow, the drooping mustache.

“The Superman has come,” I whispered. “Is this what you wanted?”

He cringed even more, like a hunted and wounded beast attempting to hide. His voice rang out proud and sorrowful from the other bank. “Yes!”

I could feel his heart ripping in two.

“You sowed. Observe now what has been reaped. Do you like it?”

Once more from the other bank came a despairing, heart-rending cry. “Yes!”

Alone again, I rose from the park bench in order to leave. Just then a bomber roared over the blacked-out city. The airplane, imagined by Leonardo da Vinci as a kindly artificial bird which would carry snow from high mountain peaks in summertime and sprinkle it over cities to cool them, now passed overhead laden with bombs.

Similarly, I reflected—keeping the peaceful prophet of war always in my mind—similarly, thoughts spring from the human brain like skylarks at dawn, but as soon as man's rapacious glance falls on them, they are transformed into famished flesh-eating vultures. Their unfortunate sire calls out and protests in despair: “That is not what I wanted! That is not what I wanted!” But the vultures pass screechingly overhead, reviling him.

It was solid, leonine nourishment that Nietzsche fed me at this most critical, most hungry moment of my youth. I had waxed luxuriant, and now I found myself too constricted both by contemporary
man in the state to which he had reduced himself, and by Christ in the state to which He had been reduced by man. Oh, how crafty of religion, I cried out indignantly, to transplant rewards and punishments into a future life in order to comfort cowards and the enslaved and aggrieved, enabling them to bow their necks patiently before their masters, and to endure this earthly life without groaning (the only life of which we can be sure)! What a jew-higgling Table of the Lord this religion is, where you lay out a farthing in this life and collect immortal millions in the next! What simplicity, what cunning, what usury! No, the man who either hopes for heaven or fears hell cannot be free. Shame on us if we continue to become intoxicated in the taverns of hope or the cellars of fear. How many years had I lived without comprehending this! It was necessary for the fierce prophet to come along and open my eyes!

Until now we had entrusted God with the full administration of the world. Could man's turn to undertake the responsibility have arrived—our turn to create a world, our own world, with the sweat of our brows? A satanic breeze of arrogance blew across my temples. I saucily declared that the time had come when man must receive into his breast all struggles and all hopes, must bring order out of chaos without expecting God's help—transform it, in other words, into a cosmos. We had to maintain our personal independence stiff and unbending so that we might be found standing on our feet amidst the contemporary world-wide delirium when the moment came for us to convert the inarticulate cries into a message which was simple and true—into a Gospel.

I heard this Gospel within me like a distant warbling, like the very first puffs of spring. My heart resembled the almond tree. While winter reigns around it and the sky above is everywhere dark, this tree, having already received the secret vernal mandates, suddenly appears before our eyes covered with flowers—covered with flowers in the heart of January, though it stands trembling in the icy wind. So too my fully blossoming heart stood trembling. A strong wind might blow and strip it, but little matter. It had done its duty, had cried aloud that it saw the spring.

One night I had a dream. Throughout my life dreams have always been infallible guides. All the problems tormenting my waking mind,' twining and intertwining in a hopeless effort to
discover a simple, certain solution, have been refined in my dreams. They throw off all superfluity, are reduced to the exceedingly simple essence, and this essence is liberated. During this entire period I was pierced through and through like Saint Sebastian by the arrows the tragic prophet of Eternal Recurrence had shot at me. My mind toiled in vain to discover, amid the darkness that surrounds and suffocates us all, what constitutes man's duty. Then, one night, I had a dream. It seemed I was at the shore's extreme edge, gazing outward. The ocean was pitch black, seething, full of terror, the sky above it similarly black, heavy, menacing. It kept descending lower and lower; in a moment it would touch the sea. Not a puff of breeze; the silence and stagnation were horrible. I was suffocating, unable to breathe. Suddenly a luminous white sail flashed in the narrow crack still left between sea and sky. It was a minuscule self-radiant skiff between the two darknesses, pressing forward swiftly, precipitously, in the suffocating calm, its sail bellied out to the bursting point. Extending my arms directly toward it, I cried, “My heart!” and awoke.

That dream was of great help to me throughout my life. What a shame I could not run to find the hopeless, despairing father of hope and inform him of the hidden meaning brought me in my sleep. Wasn't this the solution to all his anxieties? Hadn't he, amidst utmost despair, invoked this intrepid skiff which sails of its own wind, shines of its own light, and has no need of anyone?

How many times in moments of difficulty, when everything about me began to grow dark and my most precious friends and most assured hopes were abandoning me, had I not closed my eyes and seen this little skiff between my lashes? And my heart always took courage, leaped to its feet with a cry of “Luff the helm and do not fear,” and ripped through the darkness!

The wounds opened in me by Nietzsche were deep and hallowed; Bergson's mystic salves could not heal them. They relieved them temporarily, but soon the sores opened again and bled—for as long as I remained young, what I desired most deeply was not the cure but the wound.

It was at this point that my battle with the Invisible became conscious and merciless.

Indignation had overcome me in those early years. I remember that I could not bear the pyrotechnics of human existence: how
life ignited for an instant, burst in the air into a myriad of colorful flares, then all at once vanished. Who ignited it? Who gave it such fascination and beauty, then suddenly, pitilessly, snuffed it out? “No,” I shouted, “I will not accept this, will not subscribe; I shall find some way to keep life from expiring.” For I pitied man's soul and marveled at its achievements. How was this lowly silkworm able to extract such divine silk from its entrails?