Ah yes, Nietzsche.


Zarathustra's Flies

Part of the reason is the desire
to keep pace with the frantic show
of tomorrow, yesterday in the bin
swept toward the infinity of amnesias.
Everything is a deliberate parable,
the fly who drifts away
with his delicious meals, unretrievable -
that wiley thief -
to the great dreams we cannot recall.
Limbo! Oh paradise of purgatories
is the hell of the ancients, this sphere
a masterpiece of vain and partial speeches.
The people come and go, unaware, save a few.
They wipe their brows, carry bricks and lipsticks,
dance their jigs. Everyone is so familiar here
with marks on their foreheads to the tightening
of their ears. Smiles, sighs, puffings.

The sea is only a tremendous bucket swarming
with a few fish where currents are
mysterious maps under the most popular of orbits,
she keeps her gemstones there, near the edges
yet the divers want so much more,
want to see the habitats of the blind.

Limbo is this contiguous shore,
is the great divide between salt and drink,
is this mountain under this dome described
and traveled, such slight migrations to and fro.
We are the weakest birds who fall in April
to be found in those sad positions
without ceremony or feather.
They do die trying don't they.
Smile. They die trying.



*One should not read him until you read the other I thinks:

For the moment though lets shift focus to Islam again, and specifically the Quran. Anyone who has read the Quran will tell you (as I am about to do) that is quite non-linear, composed of independent chapters (or Suras) of incredible beauty which have complex interplays of themes and historical accounts that run through the entire book, and illuminate a topic, character, person, idea, or event in astonishing detail and clarity while preserving the wonder of the subject. Anyone reading a Nietzsche book will realize that there are some parallels between the format of his books and those of the Quran. The partitioning, the complex and intense treatment of subject matter, the multiple references across the text, and the independence of each unit are all striking similarities between these two texts that are separated by over a millenia.

http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1163227