CHAPTER FOUR

Calina

MEDUSA’S CHAPTER will have to wait. For we have not yet finished with the Zarathustra plans, even though Nietzsche has in the meantime, that is, by April of 1885, brought his great work to a close. The note books preserve plans for a Part V, and more sweeping plans as well, as though Nietzsche’s book had yet to be begun.

From this cluster of plans, sketched from May through July, 1885, three outlines that will seem quite familiar in some respects, yet in others altogether uncanny (11, 541–42):

In this plan, Zarathustra dies for the last time. Dies, as Karl Reinhardt says he must, in order to make room for Dionysos philosophos. Is the latter, as a superhuman “conception of the world,” precisely that alienation from which Zarathustra returns and on account of which he dies? Or may we continue to insist that the Higher Men are alien to Zarathustra, beneath him, so that Zarathustra and Dionysos are recurrences of the same?

Whatever the case, hierarchy, government, legislation, and lordship are by now the central preoccupations of the plans. Which can no longer afford to let Zarathustra die and thus become the one he is. For the proposed “Zarathustra 5” (11, 541–42), death is reserved for the Christian God, and earth for a race of rulers. The following outline (11, 542) introduces the series of images that dominate the plans of the last years:

In August-September of 1885 a more detailed plan incorporates the features we have just seen (11, 620):

The plan goes on to elaborate the notions of hierarchy and dominion, garlanded by the imagery of medieval pageantry and girded by the nascent structures of “The Will to Power: Attempt at a New Interpretation of All Occurrence” (11, 619; cf. 629, 661). Zarathustra’s city is now far from Motley Cow, and even more remote from Acragas. Certainly no womancity. “Zarathustra pacing the walls of the battlement:—he hears absolute pessimism being preached. The city is surrounded. He is silent” (11, 628^†).

The next cluster of Zarathustra plans, from the autumn of 1885 through spring, 1886 (12, 47–48; cf. 61), reintroduces woman in the figure of Ariadne proper. But in eerie guise.

Green eyes of the voluptuous soul, iridescent with the emerald beauty of Dionysos. Dionysos among pirates, on his way to Ariadne on Naxos. The nuptials of Dionysos and Ariadne, the hymeneal “halcyon songs” that Nietzsche plans to write as a “recuperation” from the labors of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (see 12, 61 and 68). Yet the notes headed “The orgiastic soul” and “the orgiastic soul of woman” can be read in at least two very different ways. First, the fragments themselves may actually speak as the soul, so that the words “I have seen him” refer to the god as their object; the fragments themselves ought to stand in quotation marks, inasmuch as what we have here is an addendum to Ariadne’s lament. Second, the word him might be taken as referring to the soul itself, so that the titles would be, not indicators of the narrative voice, but the object under discussion. The first reading would require that we reopen the question as to why and how Nietzsche intends to speak (or write) through the orgiastic soul of woman. Difficult and dangerous enough. Yet the second would require even more astonishing upsets.

What could we possibly make of a radical inversion—rather, subversion—of genders, such that the soul (die Seele, feminine) is addressed as “him,” even when it is the orgiastic, oriental soul of woman? Such inversion occurs in a far less conspicuous way in the episode of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, “On Chastity” (4, 69–70; cf. 10, 24–25):

The dream of the woman in heat is dreamt behind the eyes of the male; her moist ground is the muck of his soul. Nietzsche’s focus here is on the male, the man infected by woman: “These people do restrain themselves: but the bitch sensuality leers enviously out of everything they do. . . .” Nietzsche is following an old tradition—although in what way these things are “given over” as a tradition is an arresting question, one that would alter our traditional use of the word traditio—that attributes sensuality as such, άφροδίσ⍳α άκολασία, to the female. To the female that looks out of a man’s eyes after she has ravaged his soul.²

In a note sketched during the year 1884 Nietzsche writes (11, 192):

Again the distancing dash separates the writer’s hand from both “woman” and “women.” Yet Nietzsche knows that without the soil at the bottom of his soul nothing in him that is writer or thinker can flourish. He knows that without the exchange and ringdance of male/female in him he cannot create. Hence the “doubling” of sex that appears so often in his poetry and thought. Perhaps we ought to pause to examine several examples of this, not the most obvious ones, not the examples most often discussed in the literature.

The experience of “Sils-Maria,” both as place and poem (3, 649), is essentially one of reduplication—when “one became two,” and Zarathustra was suddenly there in full poetic power. Nietzsche’s “Aftersong” to Beyond Good and Evil, “From High Mountains” (5, 241–43), also emphasizes a doubling and a movement toward alterity. When the singer’s friends return to Sils in order to visit the poet after a long separation, they are discomfited by what they find:

The poem’s concluding verses, added in the spring of 1886, invoke the poetcharlatan-wizard of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part IV, and the doubling at Sils-Maria that spawned Zarathustra:

Friend Zarathustra is “the guest of guests” at the “wedding of light and dark.” The festivities last long: Giorgio Colli reports (5, 421) that the only lines of his oeuvres that Nietzsche ever tried to recollect during the years of his insanity were lines of “From High Mountains.”

The doubling of the sex of the narrative voice, or the blurring of the lines between such sexes, occurs throughout Nietzsche’s work. In “Little Women, Old and Young” (ASZ I; 4, 84–86) it is not entirely clear what Zarathustra is “so anxious to protect” beneath his “cloak.” The only thing that is clear about this episode—the most notorious of Nietzsche’s misogynist texts—is that the whip Zarathustra carries to women never leaves the hand of Lou.⁴ We have already witnessed the bizarre duplicity of Sorcerer and Ariadne, a duplicity to which “the orgiastic soul of woman” would return us. Yet the remaining lyrics of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part IV, all of them destined to become Dionysos Dithyrambs, betray the same exigency. The doddering magician’s second song, “The Song of Melancholy,” destined to become the dithyramb “Only Fool! Only Poet!”, is introduced in the following way (4, 370–71):

Finally, the most astonishing doubling occurs in the song of Nietzsche’s own (or Zarathustra’s own) “Wanderer and Shadow,” the song entitled “Among Daughters of the Desert” (4, 379–85). From its extravagant parody of German (and European) exotica from Luther to Goethe let me cite only a few lines.

Zarathustra’s shadow goes on to picture himself surrounded by two exotic “maiden cats,” intimate Dudu and, fresh from the West-East Divan, sultry Suleika; not merely surrounded but “transphinxed” by them: umsphinxt. That word is crammed full of meanings, the singer warns us, begging God’s forgiveness for his “linguistic sin.” The neighboring datepalms he pictures as the fluttering skirts of dancing girls—girls who have “lost a leg”:

The shadow now tries to cheer the maiden cats that surround and transphinx him. He urges them not to cry, in fitting words:

No comment. Except to say that umsphinxt means (if more linguistic sins are possible) not merely surrounded by sphinxes but transformed into a sphinx, ensphinxedy as it were, become the “young woman’s body” that “seduces us to existence.”⁵ Zarathustra’s shadow wanders fairly far.

But enough. It is time to restore order to my own text, which is getting out of hand. Losing whatever leg it has to stand on. Evading the issues. For the hilarity, histrionics, and hysteria ought not to be allowed to conceal the astonishing ambivalence of Nietzsche’s sensuality, its doublings and folds, its blurrings and confusions. This same hilarious Nietzsche can praise the Stoa for its aloofness “in the midst of Hellenistic civilization, in an atmosphere suffused with Aphrodisiac fragrances and gone lecherous” (5, 110); can bemoan the lewdness of the Higher Men, who subserve their “inner beasts,” cater to their “swine” (4, 362–63; cf. 377); can extol “the victor, the self-compeller, the commander of the senses, the master of his virtues . . . , square-shouldered in body and soul” (4, 90). Yet he can at the same time and almost in the same breath be the unerring anatomist of “moral castratism” and flight from the body. We dare not forget the keen analyses in Twilight of the Idols (6, 74; 82–83) in which even the epistemologist’s denigration of the senses is traced back to the flight from sensuality; or those unsurpassed pages of Toward a Genealogy of Morals, Part III, “What Are Ascetic Ideals?” (5, 339–412), which reveal the extraordinary depth of Nietzsche’s genealogy of the genealogist. Himself.

I shall restore order by turning now to the very last plans for Nietzsche’s Zarathustran drama. Let us examine three of these plans quite closely. First, a detailed plan from the years 1885–86, perhaps the last such plan Nietzsche sketched. It summarizes much of what we have seen already, yet omits several crucial aspects and personages of the earlier plans (12, 128–29):

The centrality of Zarathustra’s death in the third act is made evident by its position on the page. It may be intimated already in Act II by the striking phrase, “Enjoyment, among the ones who go down [der Untergehenden], of the one who is perfect [an dem Vollkommenen]: those in withdrawal [Abziehende].” The grounds for Zarathustra’s demise appear to be bifurcated into the two columns of Act III. We are familiar by now with the grief Zarathustra experiences when his disciples forsake him. Yet what is the precise relationship between the death of God, as a propitious event, and Zarathustra’s own death? On the one hand, joy and encouragement, the open seas espied in The Gay Science and in several poems; on the other hand, the turmoil among Zarathustra’s friends (the Higher Men), who are unprepared for the thought of eternal return. Only in the fourth act, over Zarathustra’s dead body, will the oath of unstinting affirmation be sworn.

One further postponement, the last, involving the remaining two plans (12, 93–94). Among these “friends” who abandon Zarathustra and so occasion his death, where is Pana? Or Corinna? Ariadne? Or has the name changed again?

Here we witness the transition from the project of “Zarathustra” to that of “Midday and Eternity,” the latter devoted to hierarchy and lordship. The thought of eternal recurrence remains the apotheosis. Yet it is no longer entangled in the story of (the) woman; it is no longer the burden of downgoing and mortality. It is a doctrine for the lords of the earth. And the earth herself? Who, or what, is this “Calina”? Calina, “for ‘Zarathustra.’” Is she the third woman, the third casket, of leaden love?

Her identity is clear—if it is a she—inasmuch as the words “Shatter the good and the just!” appear in an earlier plan (25 [453] 1884; 11, 134) as the very words of the “pious” woman who murders Zarathustra. Auburn-haired Calina would then complement the ugliest man, who murders God out of shame. Yet how would the pious woman elicit such epithets of forbidden pleasure, of the risk of death (“And who says this is not what we want?”), gnawing poison (as of a plague), irresistible allurement, music and seduction? The words immediately above these in the plan read: “Sipo Matador.” A reference to the romance of far-off Spain? Ogygia? A number of poetic fragments suggest it (see, for example, 11, 332 and 621). But no: a passage in Beyond Good and Evil (5, 207) identifies “Sipo Matador” as a Javanese plant, a parasitical vine that winds about the sturdiest trees, clambering to their crowns and killing them. “Calina” might refer to salina, salt pits, which would account for the pungency; or to alkaline earth, the caustic base that Hegel identified as the specifically womanly power of universal, elemental nature, Kali; or to the saline solution of the blood, which would explain the color. And the danger. Yet whoever or whatever Calina may be, why is the sun at its zenith? It is midday, to be sure, the hour of eternal recurrence; but what binds Calina (or any woman) to noontide and to Nietzsche’s thought of thoughts? Finally, and most enigmatically, how can the sun at its apogee be “ghostlike,” gespenstisch? As though midday and midnight were the same. As though Calina’s were the ghostly beauty of the sailing ship, the dream and the risk of death.

Calina is cited twice in lists of poems from the autumn of 1884, the time of “The Travail of the Woman in Childbirth” (11, 312–13^†). The second of these lists bears the title “Midday Thoughts.” Calina is number 24 in the first list, number 11 in the second:

Somewhere someone sees clearly and distinctly—with Maenadic sharpsightedness—who or what Calina is. He or she at this moment is writing about her or it. Checking the Diccionario de la lengua española of the Royal Academy in Madrid, noting that Calina (from the Latin caligo, caliginis, “mark upon the brow,” or “darkness and obscurity”) is a feminine noun referring to an atmospheric disturbance caused by either water vapor or dust that pollutes the air, wondering whether Calina is the Fata morgana transferred from the Straits of Messina to the Castilian Meseta. By way of Java. “For ‘Zarathustra.’” Obscurely. We ourselves will be patient, trusting in science. We will not mislay our umbrella, will not lose our leg.

If this chapter began as a circumvention of Medusa, let it remain that to the end. We shall abandon Calina now for Ariadne, reverting to the central figure of the very last plans and sketches. Where we began.

A long plan from autumn, 1887 (12, 400–02^†), proffers “for consideration” a project Nietzsche calls “the perfect book.” Certain traits of this perfect book remind us of the drama plans from 1870 through 1886. The perfect book is a “monologue of ideas,” and is innocent of scholarly trappings or argumentative demonstrations; it is “absolutely personal,” yet there is “no ego in it”; it is like a conversation of “spirits,” even though the most abstract things present themselves in “flesh and blood” on its pages; its words are explicit, even “military” in their commanding simplicity, although the perfect book describes the states of the “most intellectual” human beings. Most intriguing is the notion that the book is to be constructed along the lines of a tragedy, “aiming toward a catastrophe.” Other plans (12, 100; cf. 5, 409) cite the necessity of such catastrophe, one of them as follows (12, 395):

And following the catastrophe, succeeding upon it, as at an Athenian festival:

These notes allow us to see why the final lines of Nietzsche’s “Plaint of Ariadne” have such a jarring effect and seem so out of place. They are in fact lines from a satyr-play. They are essentially “displaced” from the tragedy. Ariadne’s own words here have lost their tragic pathos as well: while Theseus is becoming absurd, Ariadne grows sardonic. When the tragic hero moons over her, she refuses compassion: “I shall see to it that he perishes.” Yet even here the Labyrinth pertains to her, and not even Dionysos can dispossess her of it. Another fragment from the same period (12, 510) reads:

Nietzsche had been trying his hand at such satyr-play for some time. Indeed, it constituted an essential part of his strategy from 1885 on. In Beyond Good and Evil (5, 42–43) he called for a free-spirited philosophy that would always and everywhere be satyr-play: the philosophy of the future was not to be a pious martyrdom for the sake of a Truth from which the saving grace of humor had been drained, leaving only a noxious sediment of vengeance and asceticism. Nietzsche knew full well that to define philosophy from the satyr’s point of view would be to transform it from tragedy to farce. The philosophy of the future, beyond good and evil—“merely a satyr-play, a fareical postlude, an extended proof of the fact that the long tragedy proper has come to an end: presupposing that every philosophy, in its genesis, was a protracted tragedy.”

Consider, as an illustration, the astonishing note on “Morality and Physiology,” from the summer of 1885 (11, 576–79). The note expounds earnestly and at length the complexities of the human body, when suddenly one of those double-dashes appears— —and then the following:

Karl Reinhardt notes (331), with some justice, that this risible anecdote, like virtually all the others of Nietzsche’s final years, is worthy of the Journal des Goncourts; he observes also that if Ariadne’s philosophical education is in arrears it is only because Nietzsche is trying to revivify a myth that comes two millennia too late. In these repartees between Dionysos and Ariadne, Nietzsche is aiming at a particular kind of inanity (adventavit asinus), the high hilarity of “The Ass Festival” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part IV. Aiming, but missing.

A second specimen. In a note from spring or summer of 1888 (13, 498) that was taken up into Twilight of the Idols (6, 123–24), Nietzsche discusses the anthropomorphic character of aesthetic judgments. A higher judge of taste, he says, might overthrow all our most confident aesthetic judgments and principles. The text then shifts dramatically to the following dialogue, without the double-dash, but with ellipsis points. . . .

Warum sind sie nicht noch länger? The implication is that Ariadne already has donkey ears, that she is the Eselin who is always on thin ice.⁷

In September and October of 1888, the months of intense activity that produced The Wagner Case, The Antichrist, Twilight of the Idols, and Ecce Homo, we find the very last plans and titles that invoke the name “Zarathustra.” “Zarathustra’s Temptation” and “Zarathustra’s Songs” are juxtaposed (see 13, 589–90). The latter are soon to be called Dionysos Dithyrambs. Among the scattered, disjointed fragments of verse that we find from the summer of 1888 there are two that expose the fate of an Empedoclean thinking that feels so compelled to legislate that little is left for song (13, 570):

In the towering law, in the clinkers of legislative, valuative thought, a disarming violence. More than disarming.

In the famous Preface to Beyond Good and Evil (“Presupposing that truth is a woman—”) Nietzsche ridicules the dogmatic philosopher who tries to force revelations and seize truths. And in “The Flies of the Marketplace” Zarathustra enjoins, “Do not be jealous of things that are compelling and unconditional, О lover of truth! Never yet did truth cling to the arm of something unconditional.”

Among the verses for “Zarathustra’s Songs,” the following lines late in 1888 (13, 557–58), lines of weariness, desperation, and postponement beyond recovery:

“Force alone!” appears to bring me full-circle to my initial doubts and suspicions, my initial desire to disengage Nietzsche’s identification of truth and woman from the banalities and analities of misogyny. Yet the acrid obscurity of Calina frustrates such disengagement, as it deflects and defuses all “Force alone!”

But is it necessary—or even possible—to confront these postponements I claim to have espied in Nietzsche’s thinking and writing? What would such confrontation be like? Is it not otiose to force the face-to-face of confrontation onto the back to-back of postponement?

Let me review the curious ideas and images limned in this book and try to make a case for them. If no law. Let me try—because I do not want Nietzsche’s destiny as my own. Would prefer to lose him. Yet only the hand of woman, the writing hand, the hand back to which the trace of thread always leads us, can loosen the grip of that destiny. Gingerly.

Derrida believes that Nietzsche possesses such a hand. So do I. Must it wither?

I began with the ambiguity of apotropaic sails and spurring spars, advancing to the theme of distance, the evanescence of pure presence, the embarcation of every in-itself on a journey with no destination. For Nietzsche himself, as “We Artficers!” betrays, the action at a distance of woman itself calls for distance, if not flight: the naturalness of the sensuous, sensual body, the body (of) woman, fundamentally concealing and deceiving, radiant and dissembling at once, evokes the terror that comes to a head in Medusa. Yet a genealogy of the pathos of distance would presumably show that distance from the sensuous body is essentially Christian-ascetic and not at all Greek.

My question therefore became: In what way do woman, sensuality, and death form a single constellation in Nietzsche’s thought; and why does Nietzsche’s thinking postpone confrontation with that triad? In order to prevent Nietzsche’s postponements from becoming my own commonplaces, these four chapters tried to discern the postponements as they take place in Nietzsche’s work, especially in the notebooks. I began a second time, taking up Karl Reinhardt’s analysis of Ariadne’s lament. Reinhardt’s thesis, pushed to its extreme, is that Nietzsche’s later philosophy tries to become woman. Tries to reach Dionysos by exposing itself without reserve to all the agonies and vulnerabilities of Ariadne. However much the complement Dionysos Ariadne may degenerate into burlesque, satyr-play, and farce, the seriousness and risk of Nietzsche’s venture cannot be doubted.

That venture begins with a search for the mothers of tragedy. At first Dionysos does not make a very good mother, inasmuch as his domestication deprives her of all his accoutrements. At least until Nietzsche contemplates the orgiastic soul of woman—and all his traits. Even then the question of how one can show Dionysos, reveal what is essentially concealed as concealed, remains baffling. The fate of Oedipus, the last philosopher, the last human being, the last voice, having transgressed against all the limits, dispels our expectations concerning any straightforward revelation of Dionysos. He or she is the abyss of sensuality on whose verge philosophy experiences vertigo. Not in Kant first of all, nor even in Plato, but in Empedocles. The tragic philosopher. Actio in distans, love and hate, the unity of myth, art, and science in the physician of culture: Empedocles. Not to be included in a treatise on philosophy in the tragic age of the Greeks but to act out the tragedy as such, to be put on stage, or, at least, be portrayed on the theatrical page. In order to perform, if not as an over-hero, then as a kind of under-hero.

Perform how? Do what? Fall in love, with a woman. A beauty. An infestation. Woman as nature and the sufferings of the world, Schopenhauerian will, will o’ the wisp, and woe. Whose love is a curse, a plague, an access of pity and fear, up to the final fiery purge. And so Empedocles is made to take the plunge. Not alone. With woman. Made to fall . . . in love. To restore the heat that remained around the middle of her body. To play at being Dionysos. To act a part, ridiculously infatuated with Corinna, and then to run. Dionysosflee ing in the face of Ariadne, skirting her like the plague. Corinna-Ariadne, the mortal woman in whom the announcement of rebirth unleashes an ecstasy of death.

Ten years later in Nietzsche’s life comes the announcement proper: the thought of eternal recurrence of the same. It comes in the reduplicated figure of Zarathustra, who goes down to humankind in order to teach overman. Who postpones the consequences of his own teaching, invents a consolation for himself, flirts with eternity, skirting the gateway of time and the dance of life like the plague. Who follows the footprints of Empedocles up to the crater’s rim. But not into it. Unless to fetch the devil.

Meanwhile, in the notebooks, Nietzsche is plotting Zarathustra’s demise. Zarathustra will die as a result of the pain inflicted when his followers recoil from eternal return, a teaching that is always premature; of his own task, whereby the mildest must become hardest, and all rigor go to rigor mortis; of the vision of eternal return itself, and the joy that Zarathustra cannot sustain, inasmuch as he himself is not overman; of contact with a woman in the plague-ridden city, a woman Zarathustra heals. Radically. Or Zarathustra will die of snake bite, from his own discernment. Or, having embraced the cadaver of the woman he has cured and killed, he will choke (as the Greeks said) on bread baked in cold ovens. His own golden sarcophagus will then plunge into fiery Etna.

Or he will die of knife wounds, self-inflicted, or proffered by Pana. Pana-Ariadne. Will die of pity for her pity. Because of the suffering his felicity has caused her, or the pangs of his own contempt. Will die because “We killed him.” Will die when his happiness and fortune stand in horrific contrast, when his way up is his way down. Will die, until, finally, in the plans for Part IV, the grounds for his dying at all will have become hopelessly obscure: Pana wants to kill him; she lies there, shattered; he laughs, ascends the face of the mountain, dies his happy death. Embracing the earth, but no longer Pana. Dies his happy death, rapt to the face of consolation. On the head of Medusa.

Calina, burnt sienna, pungent earth or vapor at high noon: an exotic of midday and eternity. A ghost. Nowhere to be seen at the festival of roses, amid the pomp and circumstance of legislation, on the hobby-horse of revaluation. Nor at God’s wake. Calina tarrying in the vicinity of Ariadne, somewhere between Java and the Straits of Messina, between defiled and salubrious water, histrionics and seductive music, desert and jungle, bloody and azure skies. CalinaAriadne. On the emerald green sea. Slippery, sleepy, trembling superficies. Heaves the sea that is his eyes. His. The orgiastic soul of woman behind the eyes of poet and thinker, thinker and poet of the doubling. Umsphinxt.

Why does Nietzsche (not to lose him just yet, lest the question recoil) never write the perfect book? Why does he sketch only a scene or two of the satyr-play that is to cap it, the tragedy and its catastrophe postponed from beginning to end? After scores of plans, projections, and sketches? One may certainly look for plausible explanations in the realm of what we call Nietzsche’s “life.”⁸ Seeking Ariadne where there was only Cosima, Corinna where there was only Trampedach, Pana where there was only Lou. Not to forget the mother of the tragedy—who when Nietzsche was pronounced incurably harmless and released from the asylum enthused to Overbeck, “Again and again my soul is filled with gratitude to our dear, good God, that I can now take care of this child of my heart. . . .”

Yet may one also look elsewhere? To the ineluctable necessity of displacement, doubling, and blurring of the lines in Nietzsche’s own writing? To satyr-play as postponement of the tragedy, but a postponement that is in pursuit, relentlessly? Theseus chasing the Ariadnic thread. The under-hero, and not the god, unless as Zagreus: Dionysos in pieces. Who loses the thread, never gets out, is lost. Or who is ultimately more dedicated to groping his way through the labyrinth than to escaping or fleeing in the face of it. No matter what is eating away at him. Or who.

Corinna, Pana, Calina. All the pleats and plaints of Ariadne. Not to be skirted. All the duplicities.