The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Reflections: Barbara Knott

Reflection on Wallenda Walks on Air (See Presentations)

The poem contains a reference to Nietzsche's idea expressed in this quotation from Thus Spake Zarathustra:

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under.

Both this quotation and an elaboration of its metaphor can be found in James Hollis' Hauntings: Dispelling the Ghosts Who Run Our Lives (Asheville: Chiron Publications 2013, pp. 117-8). Here is a taste of what Hollis says:

What a peculiar metaphor this is, and yet in it we finally see the possibilities of stepping out of the haunted house. The overman of which the haunted prophet of Basel spoke is the evolved person, the more conscious individual. But what a metaphor ... a rope across an abyss? ... The German word for abyss (Abgrund) suggests the ground of certainty and predictability, dismal as it may be, falling away from beneath our feet. Yet without such an event, what would ever change, what would ever bring us to a truly different place? Like Orpheus or Lot's wife, we may look backward, nostalgically, to that dismal past and lose thereby, or we may step into the unknown future, heart in hand, and experience what it might bring us.

Thus it would seem that we have to walk across ourselves, that is, our own imaginative possibilities to cross over to another possible place. The abyss is our engulfing angst, our diminished sense of possibilities, our foregone conclusions. The crossing over is the possible step into our larger selves.

My poem echoes this material in its conclusion.

Recognizing that there are other points of view than the two mentioned most prominently in the poem, I want to include an image of protest against the spectacle from some people in the Navajo nation.