Defacing Eternal Re-Coming

Abstract

The first time I encountered the Rock, I tried to imagine Nietzsche’s experience and what it must have felt like to come to the rock for the first time. He tells us, of course, of the thought that changed it all for him – that everything comes again, nothing new in its re-coming to us, again and again and all in the self-same way in its timeless enfolding into itself and unfolding into the world. I viewed the Rock from as many perspectives as I could – I even viewed the rock from the lake side as much as I could manage without getting my feet too wet on this cold Lake Silvaplana day in May. On this day, I touched the rock, smelled it, and wondered about its taste. Did Nietzsche ever do these same things? I imagine he did. Is he eternally doing these things if he once did? Did he ever taste the rock out of curiosity? At least just once? I might have, but I’m keeping this a secret and will accept and affirm a life that pronounces the taste comes back to me, time and time again, eternally re-coming. I also sat on the rock, leaned back on it, and tried to enter the stone as Isamu Noguchi once said to his assistant, but this time, in my time, without a hammer or chisel. I wanted to get into the rock’s silence and just be in its world, just like the Rock of Eternal Re-coming. I spoke to the rock, as if it could listen, and it only replied to me in its silence amidst the heightening sounds of the winds moving clouds over and through the peaks of the vertical mountains around Silvaplana. The clouds came to us too on our portion of the land that surrounds Silvaplana Lake. As I listened to the monolithic rock’s silence, I saw more clearly the syntax of its utterances of silence coming again, and again – eternally – until they were silently audible. What feeling had possessed Nietzsche when the thought came to him? Did he spontaneously disperse as the cloud of his self converged with the peak of this pyramidal rock that positioned itself between land and lake? Did he diffuse floating over the lake’s water and swirl upward to the monumental peaks of the surrounding alpine mountains in the Engadin? I tried to channel the nearsighted philosopher and retraced my steps as I came upon the rock down the pathway, from the direction he must have come from his rental lodging with the Durisch family in Sils Maria Village. Is this the spot where he saw the rock first when he turned the corner that I was now turning? With his poor vision, it is unlikely he saw it from the distance as we did when we approached. My guess is that he was just walking and waiting for the thoughts to come with his notebook in his jacket pocket to jot down his insights. And then, the Rock came into his view, as it re-came into mine, once again. What this Rock meant to Nietzsche was everything; for him, everything crystalized in this pyramid-shaped rock that embedded its base in the earth and with its peak reaching for the sky. Although Nietzsche never read Levy-Bruhl, I think he would have appreciated his idea of primitive participation that was reinstated in this rock’s language. In its fractal congruence, the Rock resonates with the surrounding peaks of the Engadin – for it displays a self-similarity of all that is becoming in its world; all that is world. I thought about this again at the Rock and