Also sprach Nietzsche

Long time ago, when the world was young, Nietzsche's "Zarathustra" was my guide through the forest. It was so serious and successful, that I had to literally drown it in a river, as a first batch of kitten, in the way of my independent thinking.

After few decades, more exactly, quarter of a century, Nietzsche's book found his way into my hands. This time in a bit modernized, eInk edition, in English. Good, as I would not like a smell of rotten fish when reading it.

In difference to the previous version, which travelled with me for max. 80km from Zagreb, this one accompanied me from Taiwan to Europe during the last year, and appropriately I finished it in the air, somewhere above India. Really appropriate!

What new brought to me this re-reading of Nietzsche's anti-philosopher, pompous poet and dancer on the wire?

In the first place, I was not impressed at all by his independence on the opinions of others. In my previous readings I admired it a lot, and today it seems obvious to me. Obviously I absorbed well his teaching during my early days, so it became my second nature.

Similar was my (lack of) reaction at morder of the gods, idols and authorities-30 years ago he taught me all needed lectures in this, so it seemed all "obvious" today.

Poetic form, chosen by Nietzsche, is not foreign to me, and I still consider it appropriate for Zarathustra, but it was sometimes tedious in its litanies. In English it was even less impressive than I remember from Croatian translation. In original he is even more popmpous, when he wants to be so, as German can be ueber-pompous, oh yes! A seam for the lowest sewer pipe can be pronounced in German so that it will sound as the most important part of a spaceship! Jawohl!

So, this time Zarathustra did not teach me much, except showing me that i read it on time in last about 20 readings, and that it left an imposing trace in my weltanschaung. Probably this was the last it had to teach me, before disappearing in Black Forest?

Even a century after it's writing, "Zarathustra" has a word for us. In fact, I think it is even more needed today than at his birth. At that time there were many voices agains conformism, and they were louder and louder, we even fought wars for it. Nietzsche only added to a mighty river one independent stream. As a real philosopher, not philosophier, in the sense of R.M. Pirsig's definition from "Lila", he gave his vision of both the problem and the solution.

Today we definitely do not live the epoch of a super-human. I think that since 1968. when the 2nd rennaisance so utterly failed, we only de-evolutionized... I was born after that, so maybe this would explain why a prophet laughing of a divine seriousness was, and still is, so attractive to me?

Lu Xun: "Wandering"

I found this small collection of Lu Xun's short stories at the marvellous 2nd hand bookmarket in Rue Brancion near Porte de Vanves Metro in Paris XVe. Naturally, most of books is in French, but there is also some choice of English books, most of Far East provenience. A place worth visiting, if you are into such things.

The collection I bought bears identation as "1st Edition 1981", translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, published in Beijing by the Foreign Languages Printing House. Very well done, in my opinion.

Not everyone knows about Lu Xun (Zhou Shuren), although he is a writer of fame in China. To make it clear, he was not a communist, although he was a leftist: he was lucky enough to live in times when it was still possible: 1881-1936. Probably he could be termed something as a George Orwell of China?

Checking in Wikipedia about him will bring you into the very interesting period of Chinese history, and following some of the links you can learn a lot (I did, even after living 10 years in Taiwan), I think Lu Xun is a good entrance to learm about China which did not happen...yet.

The short stories are about anything unusual, unhappy marriages, happy and unhappy times of ordinary people, solitary teachers in the province... In a sense it is like compressed Gao Xingjian from one of his two thick novels, but he is not as soft in writing, is more focused. Good, well written stories. One can learn well about Chinese ways of thinking from them. I think they mature well, too, but then, in Chinese world things usually mature well, often becoming a mummies of itself. Lu Xun writing stayed alive. Highly recommended.

A Slave

T. Hoover in "The Zen Experience" relates the following episode from Ch'an cannon:

A local governor asked venerable Ma-tsu, Ch'an master of T'ang dinasty time: "Master, should I eat meat and drink wine?"

Master answered rather straightforwardly: "To eat and drink is your natural right, to abstain from meat and wine is your chance for greater blessedness".

I doubt a Zen master of such posture would be so plain.

My answer, accross the centuries, is:

To eat meat and drink wine, or not to eat mean and drink wine, both is your natural right.

A need for an answer is your natural slavery.

Miroslav Krleza and his cycle on Glembay family

Miroslav Krleza is a Croatian writer of XX ct., loved and hated by Croatians, for his rather unsympathetic and unflattering picture of his fellow citizens. His politycal posture, strenghtened by a veiled friendship with a Yugoslavian dictator Tito from the times before the WWII, enabled him to survive turbulent times and become an Editor in chief of the Yugoslavian encyclopedia, his pet project for more than 30 years. Today the fruit of this effort is called Krleziana, and is one of the monuments of this great man from another epoch.

His works encompass novels, essays, drama, poetry,... It is Krleza, from the former Yugoslavia, who should obtain Nobel prize for literature, not Ivo Andric (a Bosnian Croat shfting voluntarily into being a Serbian writer, hardly there could be a more politycally correct writer for former YU)- but this would be too much for Serbs, so Krleza never made even to being an official candidate from the Yugoslavian side. Something similar to a case of Zbigniew Herbert in Poland (where he definitely would be a logical pick instead of Wislawa Szymborska, after Milosz was already awarded it). Award itself here is not important, but it brings wider knowledge of a writer, and it is indeed a cultural crime to rob the wider world audience of writers like Herbert or Krleza.

In his large opus, Krleza is today most often present in theatre and TV with a cycle of three drama works on a North-Croatian family of Glembay, notorious petty-bourgeois post-feudal capitalists. It is a violent drama cycle, with corpses of lovers and ruined existences falling at the floor in the finals. As Krleza was pre-cursor of existentialism (writing such works well in advance, 10 years before Sartre), his heroes mainly theatrically kill themselves, after a vicious and ruthless self-questioning, tortured by the equally vicious and ruthless reality of their doings and shortcomings.

A drama cycle "The Glembays", "In agony" and "Leda" are three works where Krleza gave a tomography of rotten patrician bourgeouis world of Zagreb at the beginning of the XX ct. Nothing is real here, everything is rotten and false, guided by lowest instincts and money. Honesty is virtually non-existant, even-or especially in-emotional relationships.

Mixed with Krlezian existentialist observations of the world, this work lucidly shows an agony of the falling society. While local in its scope, it is of a general austro-hungarian spirit, and could be well understood all through the lands of the old Empire even today. In this sense it is definitely defining a wider Central-European experience.

Peter Nadas: "Love"

This short novel by the author of immense "A book of memories" and short "The end of a family story" is a report on madness. Madness of love? No. Madness in a lover himself.

Maybe this should be at the obligatory list of school readings, now when marihuana is to become legally allowed in many countries? Namely, the novel is about a night of madness which the main character lives through after smoking a joint. It must be it was a bad one, (or/and the character himself was bad), since it produced a fly-away for the night, a kind which can easily happen after a stronger variety known as skunk.

What was to be a relaxed night spent with the lover became a paranoic nightmare. Maybe it was triggered by a strong contradiction in him: he actually came to tell to the woman that he will not be coming the next time... but he knows he is not able to tell it to her, as it would be too much off beat. So he skips into paranoia.

Nadas gave here a different relation than in his aforementioned books, as it involves only one person, which is separated from the world. We follow his paranoiac visions-very good and thorough description is telling; author probably just gave a relation from his own experience.

Advisable for anyone who would like to know how it is when one gets a slight overdose of a psychotic drug, without actually trying it in vivo. Soft, thoroughly true Nadas' writing.

Che the motorcyclist

For quite some time I wanted to read "The motorcycle diaries" by Ernesto "Che" Guevara. I am not a fan of Che, too many people were killed around him and by him, that I would like anything about him, but by an old Marxist maxime, it is good to know the enemy.

To be just, Che, or what he was involved in, I would not think the worst thing in the world, at his time. It was definitely more moral doing than what his opponents were doing. And, also, I respect the fact that he died the way he lived. He did not dodge, become worthless politycal shit-mouth only, but actually died doing what he considered right thing to do.

The book itself is a short text worth reading, as a first-hand raport from the places which at the time he visited them, were not exactly the touristic attraction.

The title is a bit misguiding, as he and Alberto made in fact less than half of the trip by motorcycle, the rest was ship, boats, a raft, lorries which they hitch-hiked...the title should be "A tramp's diary".

Thanks to the fact that they travelled with minimum finances, the trip became a school of life-there is no better school than getting to know the bottom of the ladder. Keen observer, Ernesto noticed things which would not be noticed by some fatty brain of some ordinary tourist.

He lived only 15 years after the trip, then he was killed.

Obviously what he saw, what he learned on this trip was important to him... important enough to go and invest his life (and lives of others) into the idea.

Who are we to judge? South America, Africa, were batttlefields at those days, battlefields of ideologies, visions... I am not certain that the taken course brought us closer to happiness for the peoples of both those continents, but my uncertainty is that of an armchair observer. Che was a participant and a creator of one viable option. Which, eventually, lost, and we got a rabies of rabbis, priests, imams and mullahs instead. In package with suicide bombers at age 7-77, refugee crises and USA becoming a 3rd world country. Russia becoming an agressor in wish to make others even poorer capitalists than they already are. China becoming the wealthiest communist party in the world, leading the largest rampant capitalistic economy in the world.

Really an advance?

In this book one can also see a child, like there is one in every of us. What becomes of a child, depends on so many things. But one is admirable: this child went for an adventure, lived it, learned from it. Parents of today should remember to relax their love-ties a bit, not to cripple the new generation.

Recommendable read, indeed.

A Small Courtyard

I wrote in http://mikidkolan.blogspot.com/2007/12/literature-without-borders-milan.html about a Serbian writer Milan Jovanović.

His recent book, from 2012, "Malo dvorište" ("A small courtyard") is an interesting historical detective story. Located on the mountainous Balkans, Serbia proper, at 13th century. Story happens in a small monastery in which are placed, in fact detained, daughters, wives or widows of Serbian royal families, which are for some reason unconvenient or dangerous for the family or the kingdom.

Jovanovic tells of escape of some of the detainees, and unexpected plots around seemingly static places and situations.

In the narrative method Jovanovic returned to the method of his debut, the novel with the similar topic, "Monk". In both novels the story is told through relations of the participants, building the story that way. Very successful, probably because such a narrative corresponds to the historical context, and evokes something of the slowness with which the information was transmitted in the Medieval times.

In an anthology edition, which Jovanovic's works will surely once obtain, "Monk" and "A small courtyard" will form a couple that would not shame any literature.

One does not often find stories told with so much genuine feeling ... it seems as if the writer spent decades in Hilandar, Serbian monastery at the Greek Holy mountain, Atos, that he would be able to tell the story in such a way.

Shortness - both novels are only about 100 pages - adds brevity resembling rather the Zen Buddhism than Orthodox eloquence and lavishness - but wisdom is transmitted in a short, not overflowing form, and Jovanovic knows this very well.