Читать книгу Bad Boy Nietzsche! and Other Plays - Richard Foreman - Страница 9

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The perspective offered by this play—about a philosopher who preached “perspectivism”—is from within the seeds of his own madness, which we choose to hypothesize as having been present not only in later years, when he flew to embrace a horse being beaten on the streets of Turino, but also in healthier years (and may we all productively touch such hidden madness!), fueling the fire of his epoch-shattering philosophy and, in effect, turning everything provocatively upside down (as if he were walking upside down on the other side of the world—in China—as this play fantasizes!).

Nietzsche himself was a kind and gentle man, celibate most of his life, who turned against his friend Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitism and, during crucial years, worshipped a wise and powerful woman who esteemed him above all others, while refusing to add him to her long list of lovers. The following lines, included in the play, are taken from Nietzsche’s poems and letters—doodles on the margins of his philosophy—which nevertheless reveal secret fears and obsessions:

My dear friend. After you discover me, you find me. The difficulty is now to lose me.

The divine art is flying—to great heights, from which one throws what is oppressive into the ocean, into the depths of the ocean.

I write on table, write on wall / with foolish heart a foolish scrawl. / You say—the hands of fools deface the table and the wall / erase it all! / I try to help the best I can / I wield a sponge, as you recall / but when the cleaning up is done / let’s see this super sage emit / upon the walls, sagacious shit!

The one thing necessary / is to keep pen in motion, over the paper. / The pen scribbles? / I say to hell with that. / And I say no / to belief systems of all kinds. / Am I condemned to scrawl? / Boldly I dip it into the well / and with thick strokes / my writing flows / so full and broad / So what if it’s illegible / Who reads the stuff I write?

Oh why is she so clever now, and so refined? / On her account a man’s now out of his mind. / His head was good before he took this whirl. / He lost his head to the aforesaid girl!

—I do not love my neighbor near / but wish he / were high up and far away. / How else could he become my guiding star?

—Lest your happiness oppress us / cloak yourself in devilish tresses / Devilish wit and devilish dresses, / all in vain! Her eyes express / her angelic saintliness.

Was I ill? Have I got well? But those are well who have forgotten!