This piece might appear very grim. When I wrote it, it certainly felt that way. However, I'm really not a ‘doomer’. At all. Nor a nihilist. I don't think any such human judgements on existence, be they optimistic or pessimistic can really capture what ‘all this’ is. I think thinking is always limited and therefore ambiguous in what it concludes. Reality envelopes and includes thinking, but not the other way around (I think!). In this piece - a play on the Nietzschean paradigm of course - I depict Zarathushtra as representing the full intellectual power of human consciousness. The woman he meets is Nature which embodies consciousness- intellectual, instinctual and intuitive. The scene and the theme are certainly very dark and gloomy if taken as a prediction, but if it's understood to be merely a possibility in this dynamic existence where all ‘possibilities’ are just the ambiguous character of the world -in other words where possibility and actuality are simply abstract concepts from experience, it becomes less of a prediction of doom and more of a description of one aspect of what can never be either doomed or destroyed. In other words, reality/being/experience/existence etc ‘itself’.
Thus Heard Zarathushtra
As a fresh-faced boy had he ascended, young Zarathushtra, to the summit of the high hill of winds, aloft on Earth's lonely crown.
Now, three-hundred thousand years have passed. He has travelled without moving, journeyed the full expanse of the labyrinth of the intellect. Zarathushtra rises again from his meditation. Well wrought is he, in full bloom of beauty, wise and grave. He tires of his lonely wisdom, high and alone ‘neath heaven’s glowering plain.
Down goes Zarathushtra, mighty sage, bringing the world below the fruits of his mind’s age-long labour.
But, Lo - what is it that shrieks beyond the howling of the wind?
Treading the pine-needled path, he sees a dreadful flash of light. He hears- a blood-freezing scream! a groan, blood-curdling! He feels a warm breeze, stinging. And then a great, a world-aching sigh.
Down the shadowy slope, in the half-light of a haunted glade, there Zarathushtra meets the woman, the veiled one.
There the bold sage sees the world-mother.
She speaks –
“no, Zarathushtra, come not down!
Too early you left the world, too late you now return!
They are gone, my Zarathushtra: all the children of the Earth you knew. Wisdom was not there enough with them. But greed, deceit, cruelty the more.
Heedlessly upon me they walked, taking more than I would give, despising what was given, desiring more than was their lot.
They fell to the wolves grown up among them:
those gentle babes by lust for power made beasts.
False phantoms they worshipped, at spectres they grasped.
Willful, dividing themselves among empty gods :
race, nation, dire inequality of wealth-
All these did they long clasp before me.
Go back, dear Zarathushtra. Come no further down.
Go sit again on the high hill of winds,
Go rest beneath the dark plains of heaven,
Go journey again in thy thought.
Sleep while light and shadow dance out this cycle.
Then, shall you reawaken, beyond aeon’s turn.
For I go now to lament on my lost children,
and gather their spirits to my mind again.
I go to my home in the blessed night beyond days.
There all things will I withdraw to my womb.
Go think, and rest, and sleep beloved son.
When again I birth time, when next the world I bear- in that world, Zarathushtra, perhaps you will succeed.
When that time comes around,
Perhaps they then will hear”
did u write zarathustra new?