What did you expect when a dancer of the abyss and "forming stars" chooses a notebook with flowers!
My search and journey is not about heroes.
Brecht writes that "it is a sad country when they need heroes."
My search and journey is to discover and share the aloneness, the deep solitude of the maker, the creator of concepts, where only dogmas and cement form the collective hearts of stone.
I do not seek Nietzsche as a hero, one who will change my life, one who I need o follow. Rather I wish to understand with the fire of his creativity and the thoughts he kept to himself.
The play I am writing is about the anti hero.
"I dance after you, I follow you even when only the slightest traces linger. Where are you?
Give me your hand! Or just your little finger!"
So much has been written about Nietzsche, and so many have taken parts that they can use, but what I desire is to translate Nietzsche, the man, on stage and to be able to experience his turmoil and struggle in the belly of making and creating the Promethean fire; the courage to "look me in the face"; the desire to explore the abyss and the passion to follow the road of the labyrinth that has neither arrival nor departure.
I wish to understand the loneliness of the creator while exploring the roads and heart of this thinker, this "lover", "dancer" and "satyrist". My own thoughts on this topic can be found in the article About Creators
If there is to be music in the play I would like to use Nietzsche's own.
In corresponding with Tali Makell, Executive Director of the Nietzsche Music Project I found that music itself was of great importance to Nietzsche, the man.
As a boy and a young man, he wanted to be a composer, and that is when a good deal of his music was composed. So, between the ages of ten and 19, he composed some of his earliest music. His last composition, the Lied 'Hymnus an das Leben', or Prayer to Life, is based on a poem by Lou-Andreas Salomé.
It was transformed by his friend and amanuensis, Peter Gast, into a more extensive piece for chorus and orchestra in 1887, and it is mentioned in his correspondence of that time (and in Ecce Homo). He summed up his feelings about it by writing that he felt that "it summarized his thought".
"It is of no surprise to me that Nietzsche's first love was music. You can sense the dancer right through all his passionate creativity. He explains that music gives him the ability to "understand his feelings", of course by this he did not mean everyday emotions, but the emotions and desires of a creator and maker who desires to travel beyond the taught systems and dogmas of thought.
If you can visualize his writing, you can sense that he used to dance. In my research I have discovered that in his room he used to dance. He had nimble feet and beautifully formed hands.
It is only when his feet start to turn into the hooves of the satyrist that Nietzsche refuses to leave Ariadne "for man will follow Ariadne before he follows truth". That is when music was heard in the darkest roads of the labyrinth.
In seeking Nietzsche - the man - a completely new perspective was given to me by following the work of Gerry Goddard who in 1998 produced a study of the life of Nietzsche through astrology.
I felt I was looking at the invisible arteries that keep the earth and the sky alive, the roots of the impossible into the possible. Plato speaks highly about the mathematical world of the Stars, and Pythagoras who was also a dancer, heard the "cosmic music from the spheres" and knew of the stars and moon's influence upon our vulnerable beings.
External influences on the life of Nietzsche as viewed though Gerry's study may be found at The Eternal Return of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Probably one of the most useful books that I have read that provides an insight into the man has come from reading Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries. (1) The book concentrates more on the man than his work and for my purpose it is helping to complete the picture that I have developed of Nietzsche as a real man rather than being seen through a discussion of his work.
1. Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries, Gilman, Sander L., ed., (ISBN:0195067789) Notes from the Book with Flowers
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