Being Fools, Being Poets

The poets lie too much, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says and criticizes the poets for creating heavens and Übermenschen for their heavens, high-flying ideals and flowery language with which to approach a monster, trying to find meaning in life not through facing life squarely and then, from out of the womb of this confrontation, having arise an honest if meager meaning, but through dreaming, giving way to whatever nonsense happens to meet them in their cloudy apartments and lying on it like a bed, or holding onto it for dear life. He adds: WE lie too much, for he, too, is a poet. Only a fool, only a poet! is the lament heard even later in the work, on Zarathustra’s travels to a kind of enlightenment. He regrets having still to be a poet, and sighs when he says that on the great bridge human beings are crossing, between beast and Übermensch, he still figures as a cripple on that bridge.
This comes from the mouthpiece for a man who also mocked truth as anything attainable with more life, with more reality–than a dream. Dream on this philosopher said in his Gay Science, so we must ask whether and in what way there is irony in Zarathustra’s condemnation of the poets, and his subsequent lamenting of his own poetic position. We must ask whether perhaps Zarathustra, and Nietzsche, saw something, heard something in poetry that relates to truth, even to ugly truths? Poetry could be the only gift we have to approach the world, to hear what the world says and give our piece of song to its song. To hear it out, and be heard: that’s poetry. The eloquent and stirring phrases poetry, as well as the stuttering words and halting brevity poetry. Poetry all around, in every direction. Maybe we are weaving stories all along, maybe even the greatest positivism remains a poetry! Maybe Nietzsche’s fit of lamenting all this, since it is poetry all around, even what we find hard and unendurable, was a piece of bad manners! Maybe–if we want to affirm this life, however damnable it might all seem, however ghostly of a dream it is, however much cruelty and misdirection we are forced to endure–we have to affirm being poets! Being–fools!