This Lyon maketh the Sun sith soone
To be joyned to hys Sister the Moone:
By way of wedding a wonderous thing,
Thys Lyon should cause hem to begett a King:
And tis as strange that thys Kings food,
Can be nothing but thys Lyons Blood;
And tis as true that thys ys none other,
Than ys it the Kings Father and Mother.
------The Hunting of the Green Lyon (1652)

"

Nietzsche's Esoteric Alchemy: Laughter and Transfiguration

"The Hunting of the Greene Lyon" cited as epigraph above, refers to the practice of alchemy, a central pre-occupation not for Friedrich Nietzsche but Isaac Newton. Although Newton is usually identified with the triumph of scientific reason over pre-modern superstition, founding scientific physics, precisely in its modern mathematical form, Newton was also centrally concerned with alchemy the arch-signifier of superstition, indeed, the paradigmatic pseudo-science.1 I am not here to argue that Nietzsche was an alchemical adept. Indeed, Nietzsche refuses the association: "I deny morality," he wrote "as I deny alchemy." (D 103)2 But because Nietzsche speaks of what he typically names "Alchymie" metaphorically, that is, in the same allegorical fashion prototypical for specifically Lutheran or Reformation alchemy,3

I will call attention to two aspects of Nietzsche's philosophical work of such an overtly or obviously esoteric kind. The first is the image of transformation (and indeed of transfiguration) in Nietzsche's writing. The second corresponds to Nietzsche's patently esoteric style and corresponding to this esotericism I use a musical metaphor, what I name concinnity, to speak of Nietzsche's musical style of writing.

It is Nietzsche who informs us that he writes exoteric books. Moreover he also tells us that by speaking to all, he "also spoke to none," a point repeated in the subtitle to Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Thus Nietzsche tells us that his are esoteric writings and this same overtness, Nietzschean and otherwise: constitutes the heart of esotericism, "whoever has ears to hear, let him hear!" (GS 234) But where the exoteric sees things from the extern's or outsider's point of view, Nietzsche claims the esoteric as the elevated perspective: "the esoteric sees them from above!" (BGE 30) To this extent, Nietzsche's esotericism does not reflect the Straussian routine of initiates and outsiders but rather the more classical division of above and below.

As an exoteric account of the esoteric, we are reflecting upon the author's specifically self-critical or reflective perspective. In the aftermath of both the intense ambitions for and the abject failure of Nietzsche's relationship with Lou Salomé,4 Nietzsche writes in a letter to Overbeck of his desperate need to find the way to a transformation of spirit, to somehow "invent" the "alchemical artistry" that would transmute the perceived backwater of his life into gold.5

In this way, Nietzsche addresses himself to alchemy's primary aim, the transformation of the highest gold, that is, the soul. This we otherwise call Nietzsche's self-overcoming. Plays upon such transformation run throughout his work. The chorus and then the audience in his Birth of Tragedy sees itself transformed, it becomes the god, and it itself in this transformation takes on the suffering of Dionysus.6

In this context, of transfiguration and music, I turn to Nietzsche's own writings on music and word and I reflect upon Nietzsche's image of the lizard, a metaphor for thoughts as one they occur to us, as sudden, external events, as they fall upon one, as glancing encounters. Nietzsche's Eidechse is a metaphor for ecstatic thought and for writing as the art of spearing such animals of the spirit.

To Have Ears for the Music of the Text: Nietzsche's Rhetoric for All and None

Describing tragedy as the offspring ("at once Antigone and Cassandra") born of the "mysterious marriage" (BT 5) between Apollo and Dionysus,7 this same union constitutes Nietzsche's most important alchemical image.

Beyond popular accounts of alchemy as it may be counted among what Nietzsche names the "preludes to science" (GS 300) and just as prototypically associated with the vulgar desire for gold or the image of spiritual transformation evident in an allegorical reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche's reference to alchemy makes its appearance at the start of The Birth of Tragedy when he speaks of the "wedding" of Apollo and Dionysus. This union is sufficiently consummate that subsequent discussions of Dionysus in Nietzsche's text reflect the assimilation of Apollo to Dionysus a yoke perhaps easier to trace from the other side of this same commingling in Marcel Detienne's studies returning the autochthonic myths of frenzy and blood from Dionysus to Apollo.8

Paired with Apollo in the mysterious wedding bond of Nietzsche's account of the genesis of ancient tragedy, even after tragedy's decline, Nietzsche's Dionysus acquires formative powers, becoming a deity of transformed energies and the orgy itself a means of life perpetuation, fertility and birth the sanctification of pain (BGE).

If Detienne shows a far bloodier, more savage and above all crueler (and so less rational) vision of Apollo than the purer vision of German idealism or its Victorian cliché counterpart (already in Winckelmann as much as in Reynolds or Ruskin), it is only because of an alchemical transmigration of qualities as detailed in The Birth of Tragedy. If Detienne's place- and myth-centered anthropological researches can show us such veiled aspects of Apollo, the primary means for such reflections remains, as Detienne himself would acknowledge, to be found in the resources of philology, practiced as Nietzsche likewise practiced philology as literal archaeology and only thence as anthropology.

Today, almost everything to nearly everyone, Nietzsche seems less and less the antipodal or "rare" philosopher he liked to think he was. But, and this reflection is key to the question of Nietzsche's "divine lizard," might an author who wrote such books as he did, reflecting in Ecce Homo on his work with reference to his early book "Daybreak: Thoughts About Morality as a Prejudice," be thought to have been aware of the effects of his books on those who read them? Berel Lang and others suggest that Nietzsche is to be held accountable in any case. Lang contends, in good Aristotelian and even better Sophoclean fashion, that even post facto, even posthumously, one is accountable for possible effects, "fascism, for instance."9

Here the question to be raised is whether the context of esoteric/exoteric writing and reading makes any difference for this kind of attributive/retributive "responsibility."10 What I am calling to attention is Nietzsche's writerly style considered in terms of his prowess as rhetorician, and hence as a modern master of an otherwise rarely achieved alchemical art. Not merely a writer, not merely a stylist, Nietzsche wrote for particular readers and he wrote to ensure that he be read in a certain way. So far, so good. Here I want to emphasize to what unprecedented extent this effort would exceed other instances of rhetorical achievement unprecedented enough to change and this should be alchemy enough the character of a language itself. Language scholars count Nietzsche as one of the great stylistic masters of German, ranking him with Luther and Goethe interestingly, this was the same status Nietzsche asserted on his own behalf.11

Such a ranking calls for the question, what did he do as a writer? How did he do it? As Nietzsche conceived his own achievement, his invention was a matter of rhythm and style: "Before me one did not know what can be done with the German language what can be done with language as such. The art of grand rhythm, the grand style of phrasing, as the expression of a tremendous rise and fall of sublime, or superhuman passion, was first discovered by me . . ."12

This sounds like native genius: an unprecedented novelty enters the German language with Nietzsche. Yet exactly this is odd. For Nietzsche is arguably the most calculated, cultivated of modern authors, apart perhaps from Paul Valèry. Nor is this poetic coindidence a merely accidental one. So far from the spontaneity and unguarded impetuosity of expression that is ordinarily attributed to him, here was a man who did not shy away from a constantly reflected application of the fruits of his scholarship and whose understanding of rhetorical style was brought very deliberately to bear on the question of what would be required in order to begin to say very complicated things, complex in themselves and particularly so given his readers and given the way readers read. Nietzsche's reader-directed and auto-deconstructive style13 is evident both in the books he prepared for publication and in the drafts of his letters.14

A student of the art of language, Nietzsche achieved not only a theoretical but also and remarkably for it is this accession that remains rare a practical mastery of the art of written composition or style.15

In fact, this mastery does not necessarily make Nietzsche easier to read. However, it does mean that much more is going on in his texts than is manifest at a first encounter or even after many such encounters. In part this has to do with Nietzsche, in part this has to do with his audience.

As Nietzsche taught his own students at Basel, an understanding of the classical (Greek and Latin) art of rhetoric included a review of the meaning of and the workings of metaphor, metonymy, and every trope of language written precisely for a given or specific and not and never for a general audience. One cannot write a "universal" book as Nietzsche invokes the example of the Bible (HHii, 98), without also writing a book for no one in particular, as Nietzsche himself would affect (or pretend to parody) writing such a book as his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There is no universal or objectively transparent mode of expression. The limitations of such "all-wordly" books are not to be attributed to some fundamentally undemocratic or anti-enlightenment tone generic to Nietzsche (or else the rhetoricians of antiquity) but just and exactly because no book can be written for a general audience without being quite inherently addressed to no one. 16

For Nietzsche, the same considerations that brought him to his musical (Apollinian-Dionysian) insight into the Birth of Tragedy opposing an empathically epistemic (Aristotelian) interpretation of the cathartic comfort of pure dissonance (tragic or musical drama), also had the consequence that his own book on the same theme, like any specialist or scholarly text, would inevitability have to lack general influence.17 To have had such an influence, he would write in a later preface to his first book, his writing "should have sung and not spoken."18

It is crucial to emphasize this point, namely, that esoteric texts are exoterically inaccessible, a provocation Nietzsche repeats again and again, because it inverts both the ordinal meaning of the "classic" as well as the positivist assumptions of modern scientific and logically analytic thought. It is the antipode of the similarly positivist ideal of clear (and simple) writing.

Elaborating on the limits of the rhetorical directionality of writing as the question of reading and the related necessity of learning to read, was what Nietzsche as educator would always do. It would take him as far as Thus Spoke Zarathustra A Book for All and None as well as Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, and even the (uncompleted) Anti-Christian. This was an expressly, explicitly exoteric concern as the concern to communicate in general. By contrast, the esoteric or internal problem of philology, would be the problem of writerly-readerly reciprocity: the problem of right readers. For Nietzsche, always archaic in his sensibilities, like was required to know (or even to begin to recognize) like. And for his fellow philologists, Nietzsche remarks in a note in The Gay Science, the disciplinary project of philology as an enterprise, the conservation of "great" books no matter the currently disputed denomination of such presupposes what Nietzsche confesses as philology's ultimate doctrine of faith. This is the bitterly ironic conviction "that there is no lack of those rare human beings (even if one does not see them) [my emphasis] who really know how to use such valuable books presumably those who write, or could write, books of the same type." And using a handily emphatic trope, Nietzsche repeats his claim: "I mean that philology presupposes a noble faith that for the sake of a few noble human beings, who always "will come" but are never there [my emphasis], a very large amount of fastidious and even dirty work needs to be done first: all of it is work in usum Delphinorum." (GS 102)19

For Nietzsche, the discipline of philology generates or produces "tidied up" source matter, in anticipation of a very valued and noble reader, needing however, in the sense that the Dauphin had needed, to be protected from the sullying aspects of this source material. Regarded with all the initiate's presumption, the "Dauphin" would now be taken to correspond to the scholars to come, or: to one's loyal fans, or to the generic ideal reader, vulnerable and precious "future readers" who are to be protected from the less edifying aspects (or work) of classical literature. Nietzsche loved painterly metaphors for restoration and compared the philologist's art to the work of a restorer of damaged paintings. But what Nietzsche never forgets (and today's philologists seem never to have really fully grasped)20

is that whatever the scholarly laborer engenders thereby is never to be taken for an original work. Such texts are dressed up or conventionalized restorations: exactly prepared (and, in the process, expurgated or bowdlerized) texts industriously produced for very particular eyes. And if we no longer have the moral justification or imperative for such a project there are no Dauphins today and the current balding Kings of France are either nonextant or unhonored as such the results live on in the methods of today's classical philology.21

Given the presuppositions of his philological assumptions, claiming his own works as written "for the future," Nietzsche offers not a personal love letter to the current era but a conscientious and painful rumination on the damnation of the author and the curse of the philologist's labor as utterly pointless. In other words, and again, Nietzsche wrote in the hope of those "who always `will come' but are never there." The ideal and best readers are always in the future, he claims, and he claims that the presuppositions of the discipline require this conviction despite the recalcitrant fact that there are no instances of such readers.22 But what writer does not write for such ideal readers, however imaginary they may be, and what writer does not fail to recognize their absence? Certainly not Hölderlin who wrote with a passion only a poet's voice could evoke, "Ah, my friend! we have come too late."23

Like the philologist, the writer's hope, for Nietzsche, will turn out to be a matter of vanity: vain in more than one sense. As Nietzsche looks back on his own writing in Ecce Homo, he claims "My time has not yet come, some are born posthumously" (EH Why I write such excellent books, 1). Nietzsche's reflection in this context is self-laceratingly consistent. That his readers have ears (and here he claims the metaphor of having hands) for his writings is an expectation that would go against the constitutional requirements needed in order to understand a book at all or in the first place (or even, but these are different things, an author) as interpretive preconditions whose importance and indispensability he had always presupposed.

As he tells us in so many words, Nietzsche intends "to split humanity in two." And he needs to distinguish or sound out his readers in such a fashion because he seeks a specific reader, a reader related to him in artibus. I describe Nietzsche's method for philosophizing with such a tuning (and attuning) hammer as concinnity, using a musical metaphor to characterize an inherently, quite literally musical writing style as concinnity. The key here, the complicating crux of the matter, as Nietzsche also like to say with respect to the problem of the Christian god, is the indigestible core or heart of the problem (crux, nux, lux). For it turns out that Nietzsche's first discovery and the impetus that sent him on the path that brought him to his stylistic, musical achievement, was about nothing less than the text as music: the Greek music drama or tragic poetry.

Music and Words: Rhythm and Measure

A more than merely metaphorical but, I argue, literal modality is to be heard at the start of Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where he thunders in Zarathustra's mouth: "There they stand (he said to his heart), there they laugh: they do not understand me, I am not the mouth for these ears. Must one first shatter their ears to teach them to hear with their eyes?"24

Nietzsche's rhetorical power is thus coincident with the singular and singularizing, even isolating and still today insufficiently attested (critically studied) discovery of his formative philological career.

When Nietzsche cries that one needs to "shatter their ears to teach them to hear with their eyes" scholars routinely read such talk of "shattering" ears, "hearing" with one's eyes, as effectively figurative language. These are metaphors, like the image of Zarathustra speaking "to his heart." But the metaphor conveys a particularly literal and key insight here. The young Nietzsche had argued in his first book that the phonetic texts of the past do more than merely preserve written markings but and he regarded this discovery as his great insight the texts, especially lyric poetry, are the "sediment" preserving the music of the folksong.25

In the folksong, in the lyric, Nietzsche argued, word and music come together. In the case of the written texts of ancient Greek (using a phonetically voiced alphabet and a rhythmic language of highly formalized metric rhyme), we encounter precisely literal "recordings"26

a frozen but still and barely decipherable or readable repository of lost sound.

Emphasizing the origins of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche found the key to the tragic dramas of antiquity in the folk voice of lyric poetry, once the lyric is distinguished, as Nietzsche insisted it must be, from its modern literary rendering as personal or "subjective" expression. Cast as the opposition between epic and lyric poetry, the opposition between Homer and Archilochus thus provides the missing link to tragedy interpreted as Ancient Greek "music-drama." This poetic contrast, Nietzsche claimed, "indicated the only possible relation between poetry and music, between word and tone." (BT 6)27 The score of this music was lyric poetry; its pathic expression, the music of the written word.

Nietzsche argued that by means of philology he had uncovered the lost music of the ancient tragic art in the metric rhythm of the past.28 Philology, as we have noted, must be conceded as the only archaeological means for this inquiry but Nietzsche insisted that he found it only by cultivating the art of reading musically: attending to the music of the text.29

Where Nietzsche differs from other exponents of this same conviction is in his dedication to taking his metrical studies as music, parsed as a music exactly alien to modern or contemporary ears. Ancient texts were characterized by an inherently musical form, a form marked by rigidity (stress or ictus) but a stress lacking the variably interpretive/emotive emphasis preferred by modern ears, as Nietzsche claims and as attested by scholarship ancient and contemporary.30

What kind of music would this be, what would such verses "sound like"? Of one thing Nietzsche was certain: they would resonate in an utterly different manner from what we today call music. As a music available only in time, in fixed or masked time,31 and thus set or measured only in accord with a certain metric interpretation, it could only be conveyed through tradition and was consequently profoundly instable. It is intriguing to point out that a close parallel to this musical tradition is found in a tradition otherwise wholly associated with the written word: the tradition of Torah instruction, that is the transmission of the law of the fathers from teacher to son, bar mitzvah, as this tradition has with fits and starts, interruptions and restorations, come down to us.

Nietzsche's insight here is not a matter, to employ the related formula Nietzsche would use to such effect in his Nietzsche contra Wagner (and contra general cultural philistinism), of mistaking the libretto for the opera, or indeed (to use the opposition Wagner preferred), of relegating the music beneath the total work of art, as Wagner himself conceived the music as only part of the whole.32 Rather, in the case of antiquity there is only the text and what is here invoked as the lack of music (the failure of "musical" reading in Nietzsche's sense) does not ground the assumption that we are lacking what would have been the music (as we would be able to hear and identify such music as music). It is not that we lack the "score" or the sound of Greek music drama, had we at our disposal, as we do not have, a recorded version of truly genuine or originally authentic Greek music drama or tragedy. Nietzsche's claim is that the "music" we are missing cannot be restored by a reconstruction of likely instruments and of what bare traces of such late musical scores as have in historical transmission come down to us.33

Written against Aristotle on two counts: refusing the myth of the myth (that is, the plot) as Nietzsche opposes Euripides' dramatic rationality in the name of Socratic harmony and refusing the audience's catharsis as an edifying response (BT 22, cf. GS 80),34 Nietzsche argues here as he argues against the supposed origins of altruism in the forgetting (rather than the more likely re-inforcement) induced by repeated praise. For Nietzsche, as his point of departure for On the Genealogy of Morals, the English utilitarian account of the origins of morality simply made no sense. In the same way he argued in The Birth of Tragedy that Aristotle's aesthetic analysis of tragedy made no sense except by dint of repetition (in just the way repetition works to guarantee automatic or unthinking reception). In place of Aristotle's account, Nietzsche pronounced the mystery of nothing but musical (or perhaps better said in this context nothing but metrical) dissonance as the key to the essence of tragedy, exactly as music-drama. For an understanding of the Greek music-drama, as for an account of The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, Nietzsche turns to the residue preserved in the words that remain as the evidence of lyric and tragic poetry.35

Nietzsche's strange and radical claim was that the text itself was the music, a music that can no longer be heard (as we do not know how to scan ancient Greek, we do not exactly know, although Nietzsche felt that he could intimate on the terms of an utterly alien measure, the limits of that "music," that is, just as indeed today's scholars, at once more distant from and closer to the problematic than Nietzsche was, likewise suppose how Greek verse might be declaimed).36 Sounding rather like Heidegger here as he mourns the birth of what is from the start already lost in its first aletheic beginning, Nietzsche claimed that the tragic music from which tragedy had its origins was elided almost from its inception. Even at its height, even in its most accomplished instaurations, that is already in Aeschylus and already in Sophocles, an unequivocal understanding (familiarity with) the experiential, ecstatic practice of music had already begun to give way to another more readerly, declamatory, and logically rational expression which would culminate in Euripides.37

Literally born of music in its origins from folk song, tragedy was always embodied in music,38 and born and borne, it would be as a result of the loss of that same ecstatic or Dionysian musical spirit that tragedy would suffer its own death at its own hand, which subtext (the death of the tragic artform) was of course the explicit subject of The Birth of Tragedy.39 For Nietzsche, "Tragedy went to ground on the basis of an optimistic dialectic and ethics, that is to say as much as to say: music drama went to ground owing to a lack of music."40

Writing of the consequences of the lack of orchestral accompaniment where, Nietzsche notes, the Greeks lacked the resources and range of instrumental accompaniment of the modern, melodic musical kind, the ancient world depended to a far greater extent than we can imagine (and this imaginative limitation was Nietzsche's scholarly point in his book on tragedy) on a purity and rigor of traditional form. Deviation from that earlier tradition, the kind of deviation that is inevitable over the course of time means only that such a tradition had to be lost to itself almost from the start except that it sound each time and recover itself in itself, in song, that is, in the singing. This µMoT was the poet's art as a singer of tales, this was the rhapsode's art knotted into that same tradition.41

For if the music of the artwork had nothing to do (so Nietzsche charges, as the emphasis of expression had nothing to do) with the sensible or intellectual meaning of the verse expressed in words, then no kind of literary analysis or interpretation can restore the music. It is revealing less of simplicity than of an unbridgeable distance that, Nietzsche argues, we can only approach the lost art of Greek culture by the meanest of techniques.42

Nietzsche offered the comparison to the middle ages and a time when taste and convention had fallen into such disparity that one could no longer, failing suitable conventions, compose music for the ear but only for the eye. The result yielded literally "illuminated" scores, to what seems the absdurd extreme of matching "notes to something's color: like green in the case of plants, or purple for vineyard fields" (KSA 1, 517). With regard to the spoken texts of ancient music drama, we are like the medieval scholiast so charmingly absorbed by color. Merely reading a score, by contrast here, the musically trained reader hears what an untrained reader can only see.

Given the stilled musical resonance of ancient texts, given the purity of a musical score in advance of any realization for the ear, we have an opportunity for conceptualizing and thus for "hearing" both ancient and contemporary musical texts, provided only we have taken pains to learn, as Nietzsche constantly emphasizes the pain of learning, the art of reading. In this sense we can understand Nietzsche's short aphorism, "A Word of Comfort for a Musician," in The Gay Science, written in the quotation marks of a word overheard from an extern's point of view from an exoteric or outsider's perspective:

"Your life does not reach men's ears; your life is silent for them, and all the subtleties of its melody, all the tender resolutions about following or going ahead remain hidden from them. True, you do not approach on a broad highway with regimental music, but that does not give these good people any right to say that your life lacks music. Let those who have ears, hear." (GS 234)

"'Let those who have ears, hear.'" The biblical allusion, of course, is to the sower's parable. For Nietzsche, the task was to find responsive ears an image corresponding in turn to Nietzsche's touchingly fetishistic preoccupation with ears; with his own small ears, as Lou Salomé tells us and as Nietzsche tells us in verse Du hast kleine Ohren, Du hast meine Ohren 43 and his constant invective against the long ears of those he found all-too present (and all-too deaf). 44

Beyond Nietzsche's life-project of putting the music back into tragedy and into the "music" of his writing and back again into thought itself, his related effort to write for those "who have ears to hear" presupposes rareness, understood as an uncommon achievement and as the inspiration for that same presupposition, as an enabling goal or ambition.

Spearing the Divine Lizard or How One Becomes What One Is

In a book Nietzsche wrote to tell the story of his books if not quite and by that same measure the story of his life ("I am one thing, my writings are another"),45 Nietzsche looks back upon a lifetime by reviewing his achievement as a writer writing wise, clever, and above all, such "good books." What is important in the midst of this self-assertion is his claim that he "never had any choice."46

"Thoughts," Nietzsche argued, simply came to him washing over him, catching him up with their own rhythm and movement.

Correspondingly, the art of writing would be the art of catching his thoughts as they flashed by, ideas as they came to him, the art of freezing impaling such "godlike" moments. The best metaphor for that would is a recording device, that is, writing itself. And for the German-speaking author (the non-authorizing author or Schriftsteller) who mused upon himself as only a poet, taking dictation from a source that came from without, over which he had no choice, a mere enthusiast, ecstatic poetologue, "nur Narr, nur Dichter" only a mindless fool, only a poet writing, like poetry itself, is inspiration: Dichtung.

But the problem for Nietzsche went beyond a claim of mediumship, of an authority beyond himself, compelling him to "express" himself a romantic claim familiar to readers as far back as Socrates, that inveterate reader of other people's writings, the first critic as Nietzsche named him. Instead, Nietzsche is here concerned with the functioning of thought itself for the thinking, knowing subject, capable of as much reflection as observation and capable of writing, indeed, as an art. The metaphor he finds for the quick object of that art is the lizard: Nietzsche's Eidechse is a metaphor for his insights: for lapidary, illuminated insights, fleeting insights.

Like Nietzsche's other metaphors, the Eidechse works in more than metaphoric fashion in his text but has exactly metonymic resonances. In sound, as this gives us a hint of the musical force of Nietzsche's writing, a force we need to hear in German. Eidechse invokes "idea" along with the iconic philosophical associations that are thought together in the idea as such (Idee, eidolon). In addition, the lizard, the signified animal itself, has a characteristic brilliance in appearance: particularly as Nietzsche describes it. Small and clean, clear and precise, the scales of a lizard are increasingly variegated or detailed in complexity the closer you look at it. And in spite of the reptile's proto-typical association with stolidity (such as turtles or as exemplified by the nineteenth-century invention of the dinosaur), the lizard moves with striking speed. And its movement is reactively directed, and patently in response to a sensed observer. The lizard's movement is so very much a response to consciousness that the viewer is inspired to hold him- or herself magically still, so to prevent the lizard from taking flight. The reptilian dimension, the cool, the cold, is always clear to Nietzsche and in its connection with transfiguration would seem to be related, at least in the metonymic order, with the amphibian salamander and thereby and once again to alchemy.47

Reflecting on his book, "Daybreak: Thoughts About Morality as a Prejudice," Nietzsche develops his claim that the ultimate poetic (or musical) task is to learn to see as if from out of a thousand eyes, "shuddering with recollection," to catch the moments he called "divine lizards," flashing, slithering moments, as these moments change and transform the thinker. (EH, Daybreak, 1)

In this context, reflecting on the art of the book as a whole (and by the same token, the core of aphoristic achievement which has as its goal to say what others do not say in a book) is described as the extraordinary art of freezing such elusive insights: "making things which easily slip by without a sound, moments which I call divine lizards, stay still for a little not with the cruelty of that young Greek god who simply impaled the poor little lizard, but nonetheless still with something sharp, with the pen ..." (Ibid.)

Apollo, we will need to recall when Nietzsche speaks of young Greek gods, casual in their cruelty, was also celebrated for playing with reptiles the god was said to have received the gift of the first lyre when Hermes chanced upon the shell of a dead turtle, upended, a shallow vessel, tautly strung with dried tendons. The invention of the lyre is thus attributed to Apollo (if by way of Hermes), and one may imagine that the lyre would have been made from the shallow shell of a sea turtle thus explaining Nietzsche's reference to a sea animal, but the lyre could just as well have been fashioned out of the shell of the box turtles that one can still find by the heights of certain Greek temples, animals in either case with dimensions that could serve a god for a lyre.48

The pure rationality of the Apollinian, which Nietzsche named a dream image, is an image that endures in spite of dissonant mythological associations, particularly of a Homeric kind.

Nietzsche here characterizes his Daybreak as a book of clear peace and calm: presenting the quiet demeanor of an animal "lying in the sun, round, happy, like a sea-beast sunning itself among rocks." (EH: Daybreak, 1) Nietzsche will confess that ultimately "it was I myself was that sea-beast." (Ibid.) Here, with the same metonymic resonance, we find another word for Nietzsche's claims that his writings are so many fish hooks.49

In this case, he speaks of his writing like Apollo's fisher's lance: "a spike with which I again draw something incomparable out of the depths: its entire skin trembles with tender shudders of recollection." (Ibid.) But who is speared, who does the spearing? One is almost compelled to imagine that as the author, as the wielder of pen or spear, Nietzsche considered himself on the terms of his youthful reflection as he writes in a Nachlass note from the Winter of 1880-81, "sly and joyous, like a lizard in the sun." [Schlau und fröhlich, wie eine Eidechse in der Sonne] (KSA 9, 388)50

Nietzsche had earlier compared the lizard with the convalescent in his introduction to Human All too Human: recalling the needfulness of all and every means of knowledge, spoken of as a "fish-hook," "which may not dispense with wickedness." This is the time when the convalescent truly convalesces, the moment of a turning that is recuperation. In this sense, this is a time that is grateful for the patience of the course of recovery and the small comforts of the same, as the convalescent comes to herself, as if for the first time: "Only now does he see himself and what surprises he experiences as he does so! What unprecedented shudders! What happiness even in the weariness, the old sickness, the relapses of the convalescent! How he loves to sit sadly still, to spin out patience, to lie in the sun!" Like a lizard, Nietzsche continues, "Who understands as he does the happiness that comes in winter, the spots of sunlight on the wall! They are the most grateful animals in the world, also the most modest! these convalescents and lizards again half turned towards life. . ." (HHi, Preface 5) Between externality and internality, the convalescent moderates his own return to health, like the poikilotherm, the ectothermic lizard, stilting to regulate its body temperature.

If the image of inspiration, the absence of any subject for and of thought itself, points to the vulnerability of the idea that, as Nietzsche says, glances away when one looks directly at it, this is opposed to his example of philistine creativity which is precisely productive for the sake of appearances and so that (this is the feminized aspect of bourgeois invention) it may be seen. By contrast, because the thought comes when it wants, the idea of the writer, as an idea, is falsified almost immediately: it is a consummation maculate or spoilt in every sense of the word.

Music and Happiness: Bagpipes and the Smallest Joy

As writer, Nietzsche's procreative sensibility wants the kind of differences he called musical not in the sense of the lost music painstakingly measured out of the lyric texts of antiquity, not in the sense of the then-contemporary music he himself attempted to compose, but the kind of music he also claimed to have written, precisely where for his metaphorical vision such wild aspects could be regarded as the children of eternity, his own texts. In this sense, he claimed in his Ecce Homo that one could count as music "the whole of Zarathustra." (EH, Zarathustra, 1) The musical thoughts in question would call for a "rebirth in the art of hearing" and have only the value of seeming and here Nietzsche repeats his reptilian image. They are images of the briefest and most transient values, the seductive flash of gold on the belly of the serpent vita" (KSA 12, 348). It is indispensable to an understanding of the meaning of these fleeting values in terms of Nietzsche's expression of the lizard, of thoughts that flash by unremarked, to underscore them as values of appearance. Only poetry or the music of artistic invention can mark such flashing values as the highest will to power: marking becomingwith the character of being, the seeming of being.

Another note captures this same reflection as a reflection on happiness. In a list of titles, between "Beyond Yes and No" and "The Last Virtue" we come upon `We Lizards of Happiness:' Thoughts of a Thankful Man."51

We are invited to reflect on Nietzsche's happiness, the happiness that he will later characterize as specifically his own: the happiness that should correspond to a love of fate, of divine blessing. And here too the image of the lizard recurs as a gliding allusion. Thus the parodic fourth movement or "act" appended to his Zarathustra prefigures images recalled in his Ecce homo to write of music and happiness in a transposed time. Here in his song not to night but to noontide, but still with a word for the burnished and "brown" reflections he will later recollect, now, when the day forgets its morning, it beats out a certain still point in time:

Take care! Hot noontide sleeps upon the fields! Do not sing! Still! The world is perfect. Do not sing you grass bird, oh my soul, O my soul! Do not even whisper! Just see still! Old noontide sleeps, it moves its mouth: has it not just drunk a drop of happiness an ancient brown drop of golden happiness, of golden wine? Something glides across it, its happiness laughs. Thus does a god laugh. Still!52

As "its happiness laughs," gliding across the sleeping noontide, the fleeting movement catching the eye of the midday lover, seems to be the lizard or its kin: "Precisely the least thing, the gentlest, lightest, the rustling of a lizard, a breath, a moment, a twinkling of the eye little makes up the quality of the best happiness. Still!" (Zarathustra IV: Noon) This littlest of things, the little it takes to make us happy, is music, Nietzsche writes. We hear the merest note of a bagpipe and we are transported evidence for him of how little one needs for real joy. The French say: there is no happiness, but little or minor happiness, "il n'y a de bonheur que le petit bonheur," and Nietzsche recalls this when he speaks of the small woman he imagines to himself in Ecce homo, a woman of the south, a woman who is a metaphor for music.

Writing a passage-poem, a poetic array of mixed titles and observations or "Halcyonic Expressions" and beginning with "Caesar Among the Pirates," Nietzsche explains his thoughts of gratitude, lizards of happiness, as the happiness that, precisely finding itself among what we descry as all too Wagnerian companionship (Zwergen), wishes for and embraces misunderstanding. This happiness is not merely a quiet, small happiness, but the thankfulness of a convalescent grateful for the spots of sun in winter, like a lizard, a chance to stilt into the warmth: this Pindarian gratitude is thankful for being misunderstood, especially (would this be Wagner or his ghost?) finding itself in the company of dwarves and children.

Halykonische Reden.
Cäsar unter Seeräubern
Die Stunde, wo die Sonne hinunter ist
Die Menschen zu lieben um Gottes willen
Für die, welche golden lachen.
Dankbar für das Mißverstanden werden
Am goldenen Gitter.
Wir Eidechsen des Glücks --- Unter Kindern und Zwergen. . . .
Nietzsche, Nachlaß

Endnotes

. Hardly an accidental dabbler, Newton spent by far the greater part of his energies occupied with concerns other than "astronomy, optics, and mathematics." B.J.T. Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy: or: `The Hunting of the Greene Lyon' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 6. Following Newton's death in 1727, his books and papers were put in order by Thomas Pellet, who effectively made a plain distinction between Newton's "scientific" and "unscientific" papers, judging Newton's alchemical papers "not fit to print." (Dobbs, p. 12) The alchemical works were remanded to a box, shared between heirs and various academic cataloguers, and finally returned to public view in 1936 when those papers were auctioned. The sale came to the attention of John Maynard Keynes by way of the Sotheby catalogue prepared for the sake of the auction. Catalogue of the Newton Papers sold by the order of The Viscount Lymington to whom they have descended from Catherine Conduit, Viscountess Lymington, Great-niece of Sir Isaac Newton (London: Sotheby and Co., 1936). Cited by Dobbs, Footnote 31, p. 13. The original catalogue of the papers prior to the sale had been published as A Catalogue of the Portsmouth Collection of Books and Papers written by or belonging to Sir Isaac Newton, the scientific portion of which has been presented by the Earl of Portsmouth to the University of Cambridge. Drawn up by the Syndicate appointed the 6th November, 1872 (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1888). It is important to note that Newton's "esoteric" writings were not preserved (as a "national treasure" as Keynes lamented their loss), but were ultimately sold piecemeal just because of their presumptive irrelevance and patently unscientific character. That is, the very fact of the auction itself betrays the received prejudice of even our own enlightened, modern era. As the first catalogue of Newton's papers makes clear in its own titled division of these papers, writings of interest to science were presented to Cambridge University and none of the alchemical papers could perforce be presumed of interest to science. See the above title cited in the preceding note above. Dobbs notes that the "Alchemical manuscripts were catalogued by the Syndicate but were returned to the family as being non-scientific." Dobbs, The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy, p. 13. Keynes undertook to re-acquire as many of the dispersed papers as possible and studied them before his own death to reach the following conclusion: "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago." John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, "Newton, the Man" in The Royal Society Newton Tercentary Celebrations 1519 July 1946 (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1947), pp. 27-34; p. 27. Cited in Dobbs above. For the work of reassessment that only began with Keynes himself, only "between one-third and one-half of them" were re-acquired. The rest are lost to historical analysis and the effort still incompletely begun of understanding the historical importance of alchemy in Newton's thought.

2

. See for an account of another such perfectly "scientific" adept or "magician" in Keynes' language, Lawrence Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) as well as a straightforward and exactly iconoclastic study by Patricia Fara, Newton: The Making of Genius (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). One can also and one should read Frances Yates (particularly on Bruno in this context) as well as Richard Westfall's careful reconstructions, etc.

3

. For this notion of allegorical alchemy among chemical, theological, and existential kinds see John Warwick Montgomery, Cross and Crucible: Johann Valentine Andreae (1586-1654) Phoenix of the Theologians (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1973), Volume One, pp. 17ff. In Volume Two, Montgomery offers a translation of the Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.

4

. See Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche, particularly his Chapters Two and Three.

5

. "Dieser letzte Bissen Leben war der härteste, den ich bisher kaute und es ist immer noch möglich, daß ich daran ersticke. Ich habe an den beschimpfenden und qualvollen Erinnerungen dieses Sommers gelitten wie an einem Wahnsinn Es ist ein Zwiespalt entgegengesetzter Affekte darin, dem ich nicht gewachsen bin Wenn ich nicht das Alchemisten-Kunststück erfinde, auch aus diesem Kothe Gold zu machen, so bin ich verloren " Letter from Nietzsche to Overbeck, Christmas, 1883.

6

. Perhaps most famous of all such examples is his invocation of the metamorphosis of the spirit. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra in "Of the Three Transformations" to the Camel and the Lion, Nietzsche adds the strangest animal of all: the Child, as Oedipus recalled the human infant as an animal of the four-footed kind to solve the ambiguously footed animal of the riddle posed by the Sphinx. (Z I)

7

. From the first section of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche uses the language of a productive union between Apollo and Dionysus as precisely a pairing that generates the art of attic tragedy: " in dieser Paarung zuletzt das ebenso dionysische als apollinische Kunstwerk der attischen Tragödie erzeugen." (KSA 1, 25) In addition to the cited image of a marriage bond between Apollo and Dionysus, see also BT 22 and 25.

8

. See Marcel Detienne, Apollo le couteau à la main (Paris: Gallimard, 1998). See also his earlier Dionysos mis à mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1977).

9

. More recently than Berel Lang's more obliquely focused study of Heidegger's Silence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), see his "Misinterpretation as the Author's Responsibility: (Nietzsche's fascism, for instance)" in the collection edited by Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, Nietzsche, Godfather of Fasism: On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 47-65, as well as, for another "instance," in the same collection, Daniel W. Conway, "Ecce Caesar: Nietzsche's Imperial Aspirations," pp. 173-195. On a more elevated level, see Ivan Illich,"I Too Have Decided to Keep Silent," "The Right to Dignified Silence," and "Silence is a Commons," in Illich, The Mirror of the Past: Lectures and Addresses, 1978-1991) (London: Boyars, 1992). For a different approach to the philosophic problem of the ethics of silence regarding the particular politics and the problem of Heidegger's silence, see Babich, "Heidegger's Silence: Towards a Post-Modern Topology," in Charles Scott and Arleen Dallery, eds., Ethics and Danger: Currents in Continental Thought, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 83-106 and "From the Ethical Alpha to the Linguistic Omega: Heidegger's Anti-Semitism and the Question of the Affinity Between Ancient Greek and German." Joyful Wisdom: A Journal of Postmodern Ethics. (Fall 1994): 3-25.

10

. I attempt to raise this very question of fortune as the question of ethics and amor fati in the latter part of Babich, "Nietzsche's Imperative as a Friend's Encomium: On Becoming the One You Are, Ethics, and Blessing." Nietzsche-Studien, 33 (2003) .

11

. Nietzsche makes this assertion in a letter to Rohde in 1883, following the completion of the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

12

. "Man weiss vor mir nicht, was man mit der deutschen Sprache kann, was man überhaupt mit der Sprache kann. Die Kunst des grossen Rhythmus, der grosse Stil der Periodik zum Ausdruck eines ungeheuren Auf und Nieder von sublimer, von übermenschlicher, Leidenschaft ist erst von mir entdeckt" Ecce Homo, "Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe." 4.

13

. See Babich, "Nietzsche's Self-Deconstruction: Philosophy as Style." Soundings. 73 (Spring, 1990): 50-12 and "On Nietzsche's Concinnity: An Analysis of Style." Nietzsche-Studien. 19 (1990): 59-80.

14

. Nietzsche was not above writing the same letter to each of his friends, composing a draft and then rewriting it in appropriate variations on the same base theme to his different correspondents. See the Nietzsche Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987ff).

15

. In this context (and ergo contra the recent tempest in the teapot of the Nietzsche-Studien), the relevance of Nietzsches's reading of Gustave Gerber's Kunst der Sprache, so much of which would find its way into Nietzsche's own (unpublished) Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense, would be less a case of suppressed influence than a taken for granted handbook and presumptive referential context, more so rather than less so, given the then era of exactly non-mechanical (non-photocopy based) means of reproduction.

16

. In another expression of this inherent stylistic limitation of specialty or esoteric texts, the problem with classical philosophy in its quite specific context, as Pierre Hadot, but also Foucault, Ricoeur, Gadamer, and certainly as Ivan Illich, and I could also count MacIntyre, have all and differently reminded us (if we'd not learnt this from Nietzsche), philosophy in its origins and as a way of life is not quite an open book, but its special dialogical forms, its confessions and meditations, are practices of a very particular kind: practices in some part lost to us, who quite literally do not and cannot know how to understand or hear what we read.

17

. In contrast to influential books and tracts (Nietzsche was thinking in particular of the New Testament, and we shall see below how important this paradigmatic ideal of influence would be for Nietzsche) "every purely scientific book is condemned to live a lowly existence among the lowly, and finally to be crucified never to rise again." Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Volume II, section 98.

18

. "Sie hätte singen sollen, diese `neue Seele' und nicht reden!" (KSA I, 14).

19

. The phrase a variant on ad usum Delphini refers to the perfectly paternalistic project of creating editions of Greek or Roman "for the use of the Dauphin," referring to the son of Louis XIV. See P.D. Huet (dir.), collection de classiques latins Ad usum Delphini (1674-1691), 67 volumes, dont 39 auteurs, 5 dictionnaires, as well as Puget de Saint-Pierre, Histoire de Charles de Sainte-Maure, duc de Montausier (Genève, Paris: Guillot, 1784). See also: Bossuet, Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Ecriture sainte, (Paris: P. Cot, 1709) and Géraud de Cordemoy, De la nécessité de l'histoire, de son usage & de la manière dont il faut mêler les autres sciences, en la faisant lire à un prince, dans Divers traités de métaphysique, d'histoire et de politique, (Paris: 1691). Examples of the project include Jean Doujat, Abrégé de l'histoire romaine et grecque, en partie traduit de Velleius Paterculus, et en partie tiré des meilleurs auteurs de l'Antiquité (Paris: 1671) and Esprit Fléchier, Histoire de Théodose le Grand (Paris: S. Mabre-Cramoisy, 1679). Manifestly, the practical impetus and cultural character of the classicist's philologist's guild remains indebted to this literally paternalistic project and stands behind the high moral tone usually imagined to belong to the "great books." The connection between this standard philological convention and Nietzsche's reading of Machiavelli or Rousseau on the question of politics has not, to my knowledge, been explored.

20

. See Catherine Osborne, Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy: Hippolytus of Rome and the Presocratics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). Osborne's study appears to have been relatively without report or fallen upon deaf ears n from the press and she has turned her attention to other, perhaps not incidentally more populist themes.

21

. Nietzsche's most extreme exemplification of this manufactured or idealized representation of antiquity is evident in the citational methods he employed in his Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, with its notoriously creative variations on received the pre-platonic "fragments"). Beyond the reactionary moves of an Allen Bloom, or indeed the counter-reactionary moves of today's ethno-classicist cum literary studies anti-philological students of classics, the more sober implications of this project for the branch of philosophy most dependent on philology, which is, of course, ancient philosophy, see again, Catherine Osborne, Rethinking Early Greek Philosophy.

22

. One is reminded of Lewis Carroll's rueful Alice, that fantasy mouthpiece, like James Joyce's Molly Bloom, of male cupidity. "It is always" said Alice to the Red Queen, "jam yesterday and jam tomorrow but never jam today."

23

. "Aber Freund! wir kommen zu spät." Friedrich Hölderlin, Brot und Wein.

24

. Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, "Vorrede" 5. This is an inversion of Aristotle's exposition of the function of proportional metaphor, helping one's hearers to "see." Cf. Aristotle, Rhet. Bk III: 10 and 11.

25

. See KSA 8, 100.

26

. For an account of the signal discoveries and the implication of Milman Parry and Albert Lord in the early part of the 20th Century, see Albert Lord, A Singer of Tales (Belknap Press: Cambridge, 1960) and Adam Parry, ed., The Making of Homeric Verse: The Collected Papers of Milman Parry, see Milman Parry, l'Epithète traditionelle des Homère (Paris, 1928) as well as Eric Havelock, Preface to Plato (Harvard University Press: Belknap, 1963). See also Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, (London: Methuen, 1982), Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders, ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1968), etc. One can see further, in a different direction, the pioneering work of Alexander Luria to trace out the cognitive consequences of a literate culture: for as one writes, one apparently, and in a very Nietzschean way, writes oneself. See for an account of some of these implications, Barry Sanders, Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham, eds., The Challenges of Ivan Illich: A Collective Reflection (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), pp. 89-100.

27

. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 6. "Hiermit haben wir das einzig mögliche Verhältniss zwischen Poesie und Musik, Wort und Ton bezeichnet: das Wort, das Bild, der Begriff sucht einen der Musik analogen Ausdruck und erleidet jetzt die Gewalt der Musik an sich." Nietzsche goes on even more explicitly: " In diesem Sinne dürfen wir in der Sprachgeschichte des griechischen Volkes zwei Hauptströmungen unterscheiden, jenachdem die Sprache die Erscheinungs- und Bilderwelt oder die Musikwelt nachahmte. Man denke nur einmal tiefer über die sprachliche Differenz der Farbe, des syntaktischen Baus, des Wortmaterials bei Homer und Pindar nach, um die Bedeutung dieses Gegensatzes zu begreifen; ja es wird Einem dabei handgreiflich deutlich, dass zwischen Homer und Pindar die orgiastischen Flötenweisen des Olympus erklungen sein müssen, die noch im Zeitalter des Aristoteles, inmitten einer unendlich entwickelteren Musik, zu trunkner Begeisterung hinrissen und gewiss in ihrer ursprünglichen Wirkung alle dichterischen Ausdrucksmittel der gleichzeitigen Menschen zur Nachahmung aufgereizt haben." (KSA 1, 49).

28

. Nietzsche would make this announcement in his first Basel lecture after his Eintrittsrede, a lecture also privately read to Richard Wagner in the summer of 1870. "Das griechische Musikdrama," (KSA 1, 515).

29

. Cf. BT, 17.

30

. See Michael S. Silk and Joseph P. Stern. Nietzsche on Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Barbara von Reibnitz, Ein Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsche, ,Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik" (Kapitel 1-12), (Stuttgart, Weimar: Metzler, 1992). But see also A. M. Dale's papers (on metric and lyric poetry) as well as Martin West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992). Like Silk and Stern before him and like von Reibnitz in her account, James I. Porter lists an array of scholars whose reading of ancient metric is summarily challenged by Nietzsche's account, a challenge which very quietly has come to ascendence in today's thinking on ancient metric if also and to be sure, without drawing attention to the role of Nietzsche's dissonant voice in the earlier standard account of the same. See Porter's Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, esp. pp. 136-137. Porter's recent books detail his account of the state of the art "reading" of Nietzsche and the scholarly discipline of what scholars today call Classics, which of course counted for Nietzsche as philology. For a specific reading of Nietzsche's account of meter, see Porter's critically informative chapter on "Being on Time" in Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000); Porter's (calculatedly exoteric) other book is Inventing Dionysus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). See too Christopher Middleton, "Nietzsche on Music and Metre." Arion 6 (1967): 58-65.

31

. See for a discussion of such a fixed or masked time my discussion of Thrasyboulos Georgiades and other commentators on ancient Greek music in Babich, "Mousike techne: The Philosophical Practice of Music in Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger," Massimo Verdicchio and Robert Burch, Between Philosophy and Poetry: Writing, Rhythm, History (London: Continuum, 2002), pp. 171-180. See especially my notes on this point on pp. 200-201.

32

. See Moody Campbell, "Nietzsche-Wagner to January, 1872", PMLA 56 (1941), 544-577; but see also Udo Ruckser, "Zum Fall Wagner-Nietzsche", Allgemeine Musik-Zeitung 11, 1913, 1481-82. Holger Schmid has my gratitude for drawing numerous aspects of this issue, as well as notice of these reviews, to my attention.

33

. Realised as musical recordings, these would still correspond to what have been called "paper creations." This is Albrecht Riethmüller's judgment. See for a discussion of musical scores Thomas J. Mathiesen, Apollo's Lyre: Greek Music and Music Theory in Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). Even the extraordinarily careful M.L.West does not remark upon the extreme attention paid to the relatively meager evidence for musical notation (West, Ancient Greek Music (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), where notational evidence is listed as the last source of five such sources for our understanding of ancient Greek music, but which then is addressed in exacting detail: to be fair, this least evidence has now grown to 65 fragments, at last count. And, to be sure, this emphasis is not an accidental one for West. See Egert Pöhlmann and Martin West, Documents of Ancient Greek Music: The Extant Melodies and Fragments edited and transcribed with commentary (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001). In his monograph, West cites J.F. Bellermann, Die Tonleitern und Musiknoten der Griechen, (Berlin, 1847) as well as Curt Sachs, "Die griechische Instrumentalnotenschrift," and "Die griechische Gesangsnotenschrift," Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 6 (1923/4): 289-301 and 7 (1924/5): 1-5, respectively, but apart from Bellermann cites no more recent monograph. See too A. Rossbach and R. Westphal, Theorie der musischen Künste der Hellenen (Leipzig, 1886). Although Warren D. Anderson in his own appendix on "Saclae Systems and Notations" to his Music and Musicians in Ancient Greece (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) rightly singles out West's study as outstanding he also observes the dangers of generating so much theory (and musical notational apparatus) on the basis of so little evidence: before the Harmonics of Aristoxenus (born in 360 BC), we gave no history of a system of tonoi: in "varying degrees, the same lack of knowledge characterizes our dealings with harmoniai and scale systems generally during the Hellenic period." (Anderson, 202.) And Anderson notes that "We have almost no trace of any system of Greek musical notation that can be securely dated as early as the fifth century." What we have are the symbols recorded by Alypius "Which provide our only means of attempting to understand the melodies of Greek antiquity." (Anderson, 203) Because Alypius is usually assumed to have lived no earlier than the fourth century AD, Anderson concedes that it "would have been a miracle if he had succeeded in preserving the musical practices of the Hellenic period, six or seven centuries before his time. Hence (albeit with qualified sympathy), Anderson cites Reithmüller's contention that "the more complex and subtle they are, the stronger becomes the impression that what we are dealing with here is a kind of paper creation." (In: Anderson, 202. Cited from: Albrecht Riethmüller and Frider Zaminer, eds., Die Musik des Altertums: Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft, Carl Dahlhaus, ed., vol. 1[(Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1989].) This still ongoing debate turns upon Dionysius of Halicarnassus, De compositione verborum 63-4, Nietzsche's own same antagonistic source, for the claim that the principle of music subordinates words to melody, a claim opposed to traditional grammatical and rhetorical practice. See for additional consideration of this issue, the above cited Pöhlmann and West, eds., Documents of Ancient Greek Music.

34

. Note Nietzsche's comment on Aristotle's reductive role in the death of music in tragedy in its transformation into a reading-drama: "Gegen Aristoteles, der die oKT und das µMoT nur unter die oYµ der Tragödie rechnet: und ganz bereits das Lesedrama sanktionirt." (KSA 7, 78) Key here in addition to the aspect or appearance of tragedy is µMoT which as Liddell and Scott remind us refers in the first instance in Homer to a limb or the frame of one's body, refers to the musical strain of a song or a tune. Melos is all about the lineaments of song, especially lyric poetizing: O µMï oKKO and choral song.

35

. Nietzsche, claiming a parallel development in music and philosophy makes the claim that is a concession in context that "Die Musik freilich nur aus ihrem Niederschlag als Lyrik uns bekannt." KSA 8, 100.

36

. For Nietzsche, exactly such modern suppositions had intrinsic dangers.

37

. "Wer heutzutage von Aeschylus Sophocles Euripides spricht oder hört, der denkt unwillkürlich zunächst an sie als Litteraturpoeten, weil er sie aus dem Buche, im Original oder in der Übersetzung hat kennen lernen: dies ist aber ungefähr so als ob jemand vom Tannhäuser spricht und dabei das Textbuch und nichts mehr meint und versteht. Von jenen Männern soll also gesprochen werden, nicht als Librettisten: sondern als Operncomponisten." (KSA 7, 9)

38

. "aus dem Volkslied aber ist die gesammte antike Dichtkunst und Musik hervorgewachsen."(KSA 1, 529)

39

. "Die griechische Tragödie ist anders zu Grunde gegangen als sämmtliche ältere schwesterliche Kunstgattungen: sie starb durch Selbstmord, in Folge eines unlösbaren Conflictes, also tragisch." (GT 11; KSA 1, 75) Commentators continue to uncover this paradox with some surprise, yet Nietzsche makes the point of his explication of the decadence of ancient tragedy in terms of its original genesis equally explicit: "wie die Tragödie an dem Entschwinden des Geistes der Musik eben so gewiss zu Grunde geht, wie sie aus diesem Geiste allein geboren werden kann." (GT 16; KSA 1, 102).

40

. "Die Tragödie gieng an einer optimistischen Dialektik und Ethik zu Grunde: das will eben so viel sagen als: das Musikdrama gieng an einem Mangel an Musik zu Grunde." "Socrates and Tragedy," (KSA 1, 533). In a note-list originating from the same period he writes "Socrates war das Element in der Tragödie, überhaupt dem Musikdrama, das sie auflöste: bevor Socrates lebte. Der Mangel der Musik, andernseits die übertriebene monologische Entwicklung des Gefühls nöthigte das Hervortreten der Dialektik heraus: das musikalische Pathos im Dialog fehlt. Das antike Musikdrama geht an den Mängeln des Princips zu Grunde. Mangel des Orchesters: es gab kein Mittel, die Situation der singenden Welt festzuhalten. Der Chor herrscht musikalisch vor." (KSA 7, 14).

41

. See for one instance, Gregory Nagy, Plato's Rhapsody and Homer's Music: The Poetics of the Panathenaic Festival in Ancient Athens (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

42

. The instrument required demands neither art nor skill: "beating a drum" would offer a conduit to such a lost art of "music appreciation." But this is an ironic if also accurate point just because the song tradition in question is ineluctably lost to us as a tradition. The words remain if on the terms of antique music we can learn to read them musically/metrically, if we conscientiously restrain our all-too-modern musical intuitions, attending to another framework of measure and time.

43

. KSA 6, 398.

44

. The image of ears and its biblical allusions recurs in (and is perhaps known from) Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the third book, in the section entitled "Of the Vision and the Riddle." There Nietzsche invites his readers to identify themselves with bold adventurers, that is with scholars who see themselves as such, relating Zarathustra's friendship to those who like to see themselves as living dangerously: "to you who are intoxicated by riddles, who take pleasure in twilight, whose soul is lured with flutes to every treacherous abyss." Advocate of courage, Zarathustra offers a litany of what courage can do, it attacks, its overcomes, it destroys dizziness in the face of the abyss, and invites the eternal return: "and where does man not stand at an abyss? Is seeing itself not seeing abysses? . . . as deeply as man looks into life, so deeply does he look also into suffering. . . . Courage, however, is the best destroyer, courage that attacks: it destroys even death, for it says: `Was that life? Well then! Once more.' . . . He who has ears to hear, let him hear." And again in of Old and New Law Tablets (17) we hear Zarathustra declare "And you should first learn from me even how to listen, how to listen well He who has ears to hear, let him hear." Finally it appears in The Case of Wagner, section 10: regarding Wagner's cleverness [ Klugheit] "The system of procedures that Wagner handles is applicable to a hundred other cases: let him who has ears, hear." See for the phrase in the Bible: Mt 13:9; 13:43 and Mk 4:9, etc.

45

. "Das Eine bin ich, das Andre sind meine Schriften." EH, "Warum ich so gute Bücher schreibe." 1.

46

. Nietzsche writes "ich habe nie eine Wahl gehabt." EH, "Also Sprach Zarathustra, 3."

47

. Thus in this section entitled "Of Immaculate Conception/Knowledge [Erkenntnis]," Nietzsche describes the lizard's lascivious cunning, employing an image Ernst Bertram and Angèle Kremer-Marietti long ago reminded us to count as an engagement with Wagner's Ring-Mythos, "Schlangen-Unflath und schlimmen Geruch verhehlte mir die Ferne: und dass einer Eidechse List lustern hier herumschlich." Zarathustra II, "Von der unbefleckten Erkenntniss." (KSA 4, 516) This is hardly the worst allusion. Nietzsche's drafts in May-June 1883 take the metaphor from reptile to insect: "Zerbrecht mir diese göttlichen grinsenden Larven! war ich der Narr eines göttlichen Grinsens und vergaß ich die Eingeweide mit denen die Larven gestopft waren? Zerreißt mir die Häute, auf denen die Seele eines Gottes zu spielen schien! Schlangen-Eingeweide und -Unflath vergeht aus dem versteckten Leib der Eidechse: der gethürmte geringelte übelriechende In eines Gottes Larve verkroch sich ein greulicher Ringelwurm. heilige Gelächter." (KSA 10, 350) The allusive association here would appear to trade upon the transformational quality of the lizard as a pupal form: "Einer Eidechse List schlich mit göttlicher Larve herum!" (KSA 10, 415)

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. And, again, we recall Detienne's brilliant studies of Apollo reflecting the complete range of his multifarious aspects, as these aspects not only include cruelty but are "soaked in blood" to use a Nietzschean metaphor.Cf. Detienne, Apollo, le couteau à la main.

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. It must be said that another sort of metonymy is at work here as David Farrell Krell reads Nietzsche as sunning himself, lizard like, and as Joachim Köhler in his Zarathustra's Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) reminds us of the ancient metaphor for a lover's penis. But one need not go so very far afield here. The lizard in the sun is the one who stilts, and in this way maximizes the heat of his physiological life: lizards are poikliothermic and to the degree that the heat they absorb exceeds the ambient air temperature, to that same degree they have an advantage. And the perception of the passivity of the reptile is inaccurate. I cannot here resolve such issues, but see note below.

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. And certainly his commentators, such as Joachim Köhler, have made this association one of a prurient certainty, speculating on the mystery of Nietzsche's sexual preferences. The lizard for Köhler turns out to be a phallus (perhaps Köhler, given his age, is taken with a certain now dated pop music "lizard" eidolon or icon). We recall that Köhler informs us that the poet Sardes speaks of his lover's penis using this metaphor (and it seems, to this reader, that Köhler is also, mayhap unconsciously?, drawing upon the pop cultural icon, Jim Morrison's proclamation, "I am the lizard king!") For his part, using imagery that is more on holiday than Köhler's erotic allusions, Krell draws the association in terms of Heidegger's reference to the metaphor to criticize Heidegger's notorious charge of the animals world-indigence. Krell, Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).

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. Nietzsche writes: "`Wir Eidechsen des Glücks.' Gedanken eines Dankbaren.' (KSA 12, 43)

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. The translation here is by R. J. Hollingdale, with alteration. "` Zum Glück, wie wenig genügt schon zum Glücke!' So sprach ich einst, und dünkte mich klug. Aber es war eine Lästerung: das lernte ich nun. Kluge Narrn reden besser. Das Wenigste gerade, das Leiseste, Leichteste, einer Eidechse Rascheln, ein Hauch, ein Husch, ein Augen-Blick Wenig macht die Art des besten Glücks. Still!" (Also Sprach Zarathustra IV: "Mittags"; KSA 4: 32)