OPM 196, August 29th Meditation (2004 & 2014)

Picking up from yesterday, the legend continues…Don Quixote takes his leave and Zarathustra, now roused, contemplates how he will leave the wasteland. “‘Which direction shall I take?’ he asks himself.  ‘Surely I will not follow the path of that madman, who I see is now rousing a rather rotund figure who is sleeping in the shadown cst by his more round ass.’”(8/29/04…all direction citations are from this day ten years ago)  The sleeping figure is, of course, Sancho Panza, described as the “trusty, albeit slightly drunk, squire.”

Zarathustra turns away from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and is appropriated by the sublime horizon, which, I gather, was a description of what I was myself experiencing, or had experienced, during that day when we were still camping.  There are references to both the location where I was when writing (the East End of Long Island) and also to some details from Nietzsche's Zarathustra:  “Beyond, on the horizon, Zarathustra sees a great cloud of mist rising and moving quickly to what he now recognizes as the South.  He was facing East, for the sun was just now beginning to rise in the full force of an August morning, and was breaking through and burning the mist, so that the cloud now appeared as like a herd of beasts charging away from a ravenous leviathan who was bearing down on them…Zarathustra felt himself drawn to the scene he saw unfolding before him, seized by the play between sun and mist, this battle between the forces of heat and cold.”  The placing of the scene in an August morning was probably intended to remain within the moment, but the lack of context works against the description, because an the details of an August morning on the northeast Atlantic coast has a specific meaning…and the scene I am imagining was not taking place there.   Nevertheless,  I am trying to convey the force of the sun with the description.  Zarathustra is said to be “drawn to the scene” and when he “turned around again and looked back at the spot where he had been sitting for so long a night…he scarcely remember having seen the sun so bright.”  The phrasing is a bit awkward, but the indexing of Plato’s cave allegory is deliberate: he has awoken from a deep ‘sleep’ (dogmatic slumber?): “‘Have I been dreaming all this life and have now awoken, or do I sleep still, soundly, and is this not the landscape where men can fly, and children play alongside the characters of their tales...? Zarathustra felt the heat on his back, and he turned around again.  What he beheld silenced him.  He was seized by the wonder of one who for the first time encounters an awesome range of mountains rising up from a plain.  Majestic green against an azure sky.  ‘Lajward,’ he muttered to himself aloud, unconsciously, so that the sound of the Persian astounded him.”

Here I have introduced the direction of the legend:  the mountain to which Zarathustra will ascend and where he will remain in his cave until Nietzsche has him descend again.   His speaking the Persian word for azure indicates the first moment of his becoming Zarathustra, whom Nietzsche derived from the Persian prophet of the 6^th century CE.  In the note: “Zarathustra ‘ascends’ from Zoroaster, founder of the ancient religion of the Magi, ‘sometimes called fire-worshippers.’ As I write in the endnote tagged to Lajward, azure is derived from the Latin azura, and related to the Arabic lazward, and the Persian lajward, lazhward, from which the Latin lapis lazuli is derived.  The color of the sky is meant to indicate the distance of the mountain, as azure (Lajward) means something like ‘from beyond the sea.’  “Lapis-lazuli: the deep blue of the sky; the vault of heaven…”

“For the first time he did not recognize the sound of his own voice, nor understand the word that came from his mouth, if that sound was indeed a ‘word.’  He was confused and taken aback by the strange feeling of disorientation. ‘I must surely be awake!’ he insisted and reassured himself, ‘and that madman roused me from the deepest slumber from which I am still not wholly cured.  He is the Great Awakener! I am aroused by The Awakening One and I am lightened by the power of that Star that rises in the East! See how he roused that pathetic little round figure who slept in the shadow of the donkey? But who am I to call that little brother ‘pathetic,’ for he now rides content upon the back of his friend, his ass, and alongside the One who Awakens, the greatest knight this wasteland has ever known!’”

This whole scene is intended to merge the irony of Cervantes with the humorless and solemn quality of Nietzsche, specifically, the author of Zarathustra. There references to the Star in the East is straight out of Nietzsche.  But the irony is actually a moment of comic self-criticism that stops short of mockery but has the sensibility of satire.   The figure of Zarathustra is almost a representation of myself, and the satire is made through the total mis-recognition of Don Quixote as the Great Awakener.   I purposely phrased this as an awkward play on the Buddha as the Awakened One.  In this sense the legend, which is an abrupt break from the meditation I had been composing for the past 190 days or so, is a satirical rendering of the moods I had experienced during the writing of much of those meditations!  

The writing from 8/29/04 is, however, not entirely satirical, which is to say, not entirely a joke.  Indeed, in the description of the scene that concludes the writing from this day ten years ago, I disclose the very real anxiety felt by one whose life has been turned around. Zarathustra runs after Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, who have disappeared from the scene.  His chase is in vain, and the description is one that anticipates the physicalism I have been exploring ten years late: “He stood dumbfounded, sweat beginning to run down his back…It was too late to pursue them, although his heart beat with the anticipation of joining their company.  His anxiety and sudden loneliness, which had replaced the bitterness of despair and cynicism…He ran what couldn’t have been more than a few moments, for his legs, which were still recovering from the long slumber, grew tired quickly.”