Sunstruck, a green hill.
The lone tree bleeds green shadows.
Racial memory!
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| Anonymous: after Adrian van der Venn The Sun Striking a Small Mirror Engraving from Emblemata by Johannes de Brune, 1624. (1888 was Nietzsche’s Year Zero for Umwertung aller Werte, ‘Revaluation of All Values’. So we might assume the rigour of his thought would have at once rejected the mediation of Christian atavism in interpreting such raw phenomena as a tree and a hill and the sun, reproachful, lest he see them shrivel into the absurd artifice of the emblemata of Redemptory Faith — the one immortal blemish of mankind.) |
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From Logos to Blood.
Hannah Arendt seems to almost explain Nietzsche when she writes of another conflicted cradle-Christian in these terms: ‘The main thing was to have no illusions and accept no thoughts – no theoretical systems – that would blind you to reality.'
Nietzsche’s mission to reforge the German language and fashion it into a revolutionary polemical weapon is as reformative as Luther's and Goethe’s trail-blazing testaments to enlightenment, yet characterised by a new muscular effortlessness that made his Thus Spake Zarathustra an exemplar for modern aphoristic brevity.
The reader of Nietzsche’s works can trace this reshaping of German and Germanity in – remarkably – a single key text composed of one recurring phrase that seems to stand as an article of faith across four centuries for five Germanophone thinkers: Luther, Goethe, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Hess.
The text? The New Testament (John Verse 1, Chapter1): ‘In the beginning was the Word . . . ’
Luther’s Bibel (1522): Luther rejects the original Greek concept of Logos (wisdom) for the primal Wort, the Word of incarnate belief.
Goethe’s Faust (1808): Faust determines to restate John Verse 1, and hesitates on the word ‘Word’, wavering between choices of ‘Thought’ and ‘Power' until, finally, he settles on ‘Deed’. — ‘Und schreibe getrost: im Anfang war die Tat! And write assured: In the beginning was the Deed!’
Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885): ‘I have brought the German language to a state of perfection. After Luther and Goethe, a third step had to be taken . . . look and see . . . if vigour, flexibility, and euphony have ever consorted so well in our language . . . my style is . . . a play of symmetries of every kind . . . This enters the very vowels [assonance]. Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it even becometh populace. I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.’
So, at the end of the 19th Century, the upholder of the German spirit no longer hesitated between Word, Thought and Deed when the sought-after impulse towards creation appeared to him to be a belief in Dionysian Blood.
Until . . .
Hermann Hess’s Peter Camenzind (1904): ‘In the beginning was the myth.’ (Opening sentence of first novel by a tyro-mythologist.)
Before the return to a post-Luther Goethean tradition.
Ludwig Wittgenstein On Certainty (1951) written in the year of his death. As to the perception of truth revealed by language ‘ . . . it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game.’ (Then Wittgenstein quotes Goethe’s Faust) ‘. . . and write with confidence “In the beginning was the deed.” '
Nietzsche’s mission to reforge the German language and fashion it into a revolutionary polemical weapon is as reformative as Luther's and Goethe’s trail-blazing testaments to enlightenment, yet characterised by a new muscular effortlessness that made his Thus Spake Zarathustra an exemplar for modern aphoristic brevity.
The reader of Nietzsche’s works can trace this reshaping of German and Germanity in – remarkably – a single key text composed of one recurring phrase that seems to stand as an article of faith across four centuries for five Germanophone thinkers: Luther, Goethe, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Hess.
The text? The New Testament (John Verse 1, Chapter1): ‘In the beginning was the Word . . . ’
Luther’s Bibel (1522): Luther rejects the original Greek concept of Logos (wisdom) for the primal Wort, the Word of incarnate belief.
Goethe’s Faust (1808): Faust determines to restate John Verse 1, and hesitates on the word ‘Word’, wavering between choices of ‘Thought’ and ‘Power' until, finally, he settles on ‘Deed’. — ‘Und schreibe getrost: im Anfang war die Tat! And write assured: In the beginning was the Deed!’
Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885): ‘I have brought the German language to a state of perfection. After Luther and Goethe, a third step had to be taken . . . look and see . . . if vigour, flexibility, and euphony have ever consorted so well in our language . . . my style is . . . a play of symmetries of every kind . . . This enters the very vowels [assonance]. Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it even becometh populace. I love only what a person hath written with his blood. Write with blood, and thou wilt find that blood is spirit.’
So, at the end of the 19th Century, the upholder of the German spirit no longer hesitated between Word, Thought and Deed when the sought-after impulse towards creation appeared to him to be a belief in Dionysian Blood.
Until . . .
Hermann Hess’s Peter Camenzind (1904): ‘In the beginning was the myth.’ (Opening sentence of first novel by a tyro-mythologist.)
Before the return to a post-Luther Goethean tradition.
Ludwig Wittgenstein On Certainty (1951) written in the year of his death. As to the perception of truth revealed by language ‘ . . . it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game.’ (Then Wittgenstein quotes Goethe’s Faust) ‘. . . and write with confidence “In the beginning was the deed.” '
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Palimpsestic effect on the senses.
For a similar palimpsestic effect on the senses see the House that looks like Hitler:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/07/a-simile-is-deceived-appearance-house.html
For an intimate insight into the psyche of a committed Nazi, whose Anglophobic thoughts are preserved within the covers of Goethe’s Faust, see:
Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/07/a-simile-is-deceived-appearance-house.html
For an intimate insight into the psyche of a committed Nazi, whose Anglophobic thoughts are preserved within the covers of Goethe’s Faust, see:
Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast
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Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence,
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
