280 Nietzsche
in the dancing are the ones who register its inherent profundity. Keeping
a distance preserves the mystery. Anyone who wants to dance should
not meditate on it. Life is to be lived, not to be deliberated. But
Zarathustra stays remote from the circle of dancers and is alone in his
"wisdom." He considers wisdom an advocate of life; it "reminds me of
life so very much" (4,140; Ζ Second Part, "Dancing Song"), but wisdom
is not the same thing as life. And what is worse, his 'Svisdom" was meant
to lure him into life, yet it drove the dancing girls away from him, since
they want to dance and not to be analyzed. Zarathustra, left alone with
his wisdom, lapses back into the "unfathomable" realm of his own
design. Only in dance do the questions that preoccupy him become
superfluous. As soon as the dance floor clears, they come back to haunt
him once again:^4 What! You are still alive, Zarathustra? What for? How
so? Where to? Where? How? Is it not folly to stay alive?" (4,141; Ζ
Second Part, "Dancing Song"). Wisdom, which seeks to apprehend life,
also insists on distance. Is this still "Dionysian wisdom" if it drives away
pleasure? In any case, when he is with the dancing girls, Zarathustra does
not achieve his desire of becoming Dionysus. He has scarcely achieved
anything: "one looks through veils, one snatches through nets" (4,141).
"The Tomb Song" is presented just after 'The Dancing Song."
Zarathustra goes to the grave of the unfulfilled dreams and hopes of his
youth. He speaks to them as though they were ghosts who have betrayed
him, and reproaches them bitterly. They struck up a dance and then
spoiled the music for him. Why? Had the past made him so weighty? Did
his unlived life impede him or confine him to a past that did not seem to
pass? Zarathustra uses the image of a "monstrous owl" (4,144; Ζ
Second Part, 'Tomb Song")—a perverted figure of the philosopher's
bird, the owl of Minerva—to describe what is holding him back.
Zarathustra quarrels with his wisdom, which ruined the dance for him.
"Only in dance do I know how to speak in parables of the loftiest
things—and now my highest parable stayed unspoken in my limbs!"
(4,144). Zarathustra is exhausted and hurt, but not for long. He soon
recovers from his injuries and, as he proudly explains, arises once again