The gnawing of a worm: October of Zarathustra

October of Zarathustra

O my soul, I taught you to say "today" as well as "once" and formerly and to dance your dance over every Here and There and Yonder.
O my soul, I delivered you from all nooks, I brushed dust, spiders and twilight from you.
O my soul, I washed the petty shame and the nook virtue from you and persuaded you to stand naked before the eyes of the sun. —Zarathustra, from “On the Great Longing."

What do you make of this?

Weird passage right?

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is full of weird lines like this. You've got to dodge and weave around them to find the bits that you can actually follow.

Yet this probably does make sense in a way that I just don't get. I bet Nietzsche scholars love parsing passages like this, to dig something out of them. I just don't have the context to do it. It's like trying to read Braille. Without training, I don't even know where to start. 

As I've been reading the book, I try to appreciate passages like this for their sheer weirdness and lyricism. I try to understand what they literally say, without worrying much about what they mean. Then I try to keep my attention clear for something I can make sense of. 

But let me take a stab at this. In the first sentence he's talking about time: "once" and "today." In the last chapter, he discussed eternal recurrence, which is a concept that might mean that time is something of an illusion. But then the next part of the passage goes into words usually associated with locations, rather than times. So he loses me again.

The next two sentences might relate to going up. Nooks and spiders and twilight might all relate to dark things and low things. Zarathustra looks forward to the Great Noon — which I think is his phrase for the age of the Ubermensch. So he's maybe saying he got his soul to turn its face upward rather than giving in to the temptation to go under. 

Maybe that's something? 

I'm reaching. Either way, you just have to be ready to wade through a lot of strangeness, to find a way to enjoy it, but also not let it make you lose attention and make you miss what actually can be made sense of.

It's like going to a party where what you need to do is make business contacts but there are lots of really attractive people there who want to talk to you. I wouldn't know, of course, but I bet that makes it hard to think about business cards.

One place to look

The funny thing is that the books can be so weird that you can miss very obvious logic at times, that's right in front of you.

So, the first chapter that I read today was "The Convalescent." Zarathustra chimps out and then has a nice coma. He wakes up and talks to his animals a bit about the cycle of existence and how it impacts little men and big men. At the end he's in a meditative state and, we are told, talking with his soul.

Then in "The Great Longing" he's talking to his soul. That's what that chapter is about. Well I was almost at the end of the chapter before I realized: "This is what they meant in the last chapter when it said he was talking to his soul. This is that conversation."

I might not be making myself clear here, because it's hard to explain a misunderstanding. This book is so strange that sometimes when you're reading you are so focused on just making sense of the immediate words in front of you that it can be hard to connect a few paragraphs. And it's surprising when something legible like plot sits right in front of you amidst all the bizarre poetry.

It's not much of a plot, but it is a plot. In one chapter, Zarathustra became bed bound for a long time and ended it in a conversation with his soul. Then in the next chapter you are given that conversation. It's actual continuity! 

So much is incomprehensible in this book that it can be easy to miss comprehensibility. 

One of the points Clancy Martin made in the video I watched before starting my first morning of reading of Zarathustra is that the book does have a plot. Two points:

• He's right, though I'd be hard-pressed to walk you through it in much detail.
• On the other hand, it does really help to look for the plot points, to make the legible connections like this one. One chapter tells you he's talking to his soul. The next chapter you hear the conversation. That is an actual thread! 

ChatGPT

I always run these blog posts through ChatGPT to catch my many, many typos before publishing. It couldn't resist making its own interpretation of the opening lines I quoted above. So here's the robot's read, if you're curious:

I taught you to stop living cramped inside inherited coordinates—past/present, here/there, shame, little virtues—and to become broad enough to stand exposed before existence.

The convalescent

Zarathustra wakes up suddenly with an "abysmal thought," becomes almost dead for seven days and then has a conversation with his animals about how everything repeats endlessly.

On the great longing

He talks to his soul about all the ways he has taught it to rise up toward the effervescent. 

One line

“You teach that there is a great year of becoming, a monster of a great year: it must, like an hourglass, turn itself over again and again, so that it may run down and out again.” —Zarathustra’s animals to their convalescing master.

—Brady Dale
October 20, 2026