New Book Coming Soon:
Nietzsche's Labyrinth by Zenovia
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" I am your labyrinth Ariadne" Nietzsche
Everything that I write is invented, created and translated from "myth, fact and nonsense" Plato
Why write another book on Nietzsche, have not enough been written?
This is the question I have asked myself year after year, while all the while I wrote sections of the book, and quickly put them in a box, and quickly put the lid on, hoping that Nietzsche would not disturb me, so that I could walk away—while all the while I desired to quench my cavernous creative spark and fire in continuing with the formation of Nietzsche's journey as I travelled inward into the man and the creator.
Before Nietzsche was a philosopher, he was a man. He denounced being a prophet and a saint. That is what I desired to understand and to actualize—the creator, the man, the poet, and the philosophy that was from his life, his life.
Although the "why" did not stop, nor did the force and fire of creating his world, "his essence"—as I realized that creativity without any formulas and agendas does not let go, will not let go. Creativity has a life of its own, it owns the inventor, translator, it consumes the creator. "Creativity is carnivorous and it is most carnivorous when it smiles." It is a bond and pledge that is woven in silence between the creator and creativity.
The creator follows by will and enthusiasm, by all that makes and breaks from the banality of mediocre into all the adventure and journey of the uncharted, unmapped, and unknown. It will not allow the creator to rest. The story shapes and comes to life in every waking and sleeping moment, and it must and will be completed. That is how creativity comes into being, for it is true: "Creativity is carnivorous and it is most carnivorous when it smiles."
This "why" has been with me for many years, as I struggled with the for and against completing this novel, for many years as I weaved the many parts of Nietzsche's Ariadne in my thinking and my writing, and still struggled with completing and publishing it.
Why publish it? Is it not enough that I have travelled this journey?
This novel has been in incubation for many years. I have been crying inside of me for many years.
It is not that when I discovered Nietzsche in a second-hand shop when I was fourteen, that he changed my life—that was not his intention, that would have defeated everything he lived and wrote.
I am not a follower, I am not an ideologue, nor do I belong to the intelligentsia.
I do not believe that books change one’s life; therefore, reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra did not change my life. Even at a very early age, I understood by heart that my life was for me to live. Having said that, it is also vital to state that Nietzsche confirmed and legalized in print many of the things that I understood but did not share with others, in case they thought me "mad."
It finally dawned on me that I needed to complete this novel on Nietzsche because it is for me to travel, write and share. This leaf on the tree, this song, this book is important to the tapestry of my life.
Although many books have been written on Nietzsche, this is my journey and adventure with Nietzsche as the man and the creator, and dancing poet.
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A Small Section from the Preface
"Ariadne, I love you" — Nietzsche, January 3rd, 1889 – letter
What if I told you that Nietzsche, in his travels to improve his health, met a woman named Ariadne on the island of Samos in Greece, and she lived and epitomized the essence of his life? Which was his philosophy. He wrote about it. She lived it.
What if I told you that she challenged him to live, not just live on paper, not to just live in the space of his head and the safety of academia, but to live? And he spent two months in battle and dialogue with her in a remote village called Ambelos, that consisted of about two hundred souls?
What if I told you that Ariadne both fascinated him and frightened him, with her deeds, her thoughts, her music, her fearlessness, and vulnerability in life?
What if I told you that Nietzsche, for the first time in his life, truly and completely fell in love, without seeking or wanting to?
What if I told you that love between two equals of the mind, the soul, the spirit and the body requires the ultimate sacrifice — the forgetting of all that has been taught, the neglect of the ego, the surrendering of all that is safe and known — the ultimate sacrifice: jumping into the unknown? And how could anyone come back to what they knew before this?
What if I told you that she was not an academic or an intellect, but rather a fearless woman — a vulnerable woman because she practised the courage of truth, not a personal narrative — a "noble savage" that lived by her laws and true character, while keeping a reverence for life and a deep heart for the wounds that are inflicted in and by the world?
What if I told you that she lived all that Nietzsche wrote about, without ever reading a single word of his philosophy — she could not read, she was an illiterate peasant?
What if I told you that he found his female Zarathustra?
What if I asked you — "Could love kill Nietzsche?"
What if I told you that their separate worlds separated them?
When a fish and a bird fall in love, where do they live?
What if I told you that he did not stop being in her presence when he dived deeply inward after his breakdown?
Did love kill Nietzsche?
Could he not have made the impossible possible — in that he went into his internal world with her and did not return in the last eleven years of his life?
His best friend believed that Nietzsche's madness was self-imposed through spiritual masks.
Why is it so difficult to understand or follow the depth of love, devotion, and loyalty — the self-sacrifice that does not die with separation or even actual physical death?
Is not the loved one more present in their absence?
This "divine instinct" remains suspended and hooked into the soul, the spirit, the mind, and the body of both the lover and the beloved.
Does not the loved one take shape and form and is ever present in the grief and longing for them?
Why is it difficult to follow the unknown roads, the heavens and hells of the human heart, that is ever multiplying and creating, making the impossible possible and the possible impossible?
Why is it difficult to follow the labyrinth of the human heart in love, deep longing, and in searching, forever searching for the uncharted destination of lover and beloved?
For without love, no adventure or journey is begun.
Ariadne was a real woman of flesh and blood. And she also knew the path into the labyrinth of the inner self. She lived in chosen solitude in the forest and mountains, served others with humility and gratitude, and knew the treachery of the civilized world. Nietzsche met her on the island of Samos on a journey he never recorded or spoke of. How strange that one does not reveal the hidden secrets of their heart — one does not reveal what is from them and of them, for this "divine instinct" goes beyond any language. He never shared this physical woman with anyone. It is only after his breakdown that he wrote to her love letters — that she did not receive — and her name was Ariadne, the mistress of his labyrinth.
In man and woman, there is a development and formulation of the soul’s seeking and searching, and Carl Jung explains it as anima and animus. Anima describes the feminine unconscious factor in a man, while animus applies to the corresponding masculine factor in a woman's unconscious soul.
Nietzsche had already formulated and developed the image and flame of the woman he was seeking and longing for — the one from his soul. He found her on the island of Samos when he went there to rest and convalesce.
She was the secret of his heart, his soul, his body — she was his labyrinth.
Or as he wrote in one of his notes to her after his descent inwardly:
"Ariadne, I am your labyrinth."
While the world thinks he is writing to a woman of mythology, as he "seems" to have gone insane, he is actually writing to a living woman whom he met and loved on the Greek island of Samos.
"Be clever, my Ariadne.
You have little ears. You have my ears.
Tuck a clever word into them!
Must one not first hate oneself, if one is to love oneself?"
"Ariadne, I Love You"
(Nietzsche, January 3rd, 1889 – letters)
"Ariadne — from time to time, we practise magic."
(Nietzsche, January 4th, 1889 – letters: marginal postscript)
"I, together with Ariadne, need only the golden mean in all things."
(Nietzsche, January 4th, 1889 – letters)
“My doctrine says the task is to live in such a way that you must wish to live again.”
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