[Nietzsche Circle][Hyperion]

Where’er We Tread ’Tis Haunted Holy Ground

a poem by

Camelia Elias

To download the poem in Adobe PDF format || right click the link “Where’er We Tread ’Tis Haunted Holy Ground.” Select “save target as” to save to your PC.

Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, June 2008. Copyright © 2008 Camelia Elias and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

For Zarathustra

I think I look beautiful in my Lagerfeld creation of a white silk dress that goes all the way to the floor spilling over my brown Birkenstock trekking boots. I have a rendez-vous with Zarathustra on top of Predikestolen. He sees me from atop, waves at me and shouts: “you look like a parachute in all that mass of soft satin. Off somewhere?” He’s jealous of my beauty. He’s thinking of ways to possess it, but the whiteness blinds him. With his eyes closed he can’t think properly. So it’s very easy for me to just fuck him, and get it over with. But I have come for the natural solutions that lead to singularities. He wants gravity in vacuum. He speaks “Of the Virtue that Makes Small.” I lose my native tongue, and start speaking in one I don’t understand: “Das Wandern” “Wohin?” — “Der Neugierige” — by the time I get to — “O Bächelein meiner Liebe, how silent you are today” — oops, language is back — I see Jack Kerouac down on the road translating: “Ungeduld” — “Dein ist mein Hertz,” but then he also gets it mixed up: “Behold, think of Dean Moriarty!” Did I say “Behold,” he asks, horrified? “Yes,” I say. “That’s Zarathustra’s line,” and then I explain: “when he’s sexually frustrated he stops prophesying all that nonsense about unholy simplicity, and starts singing Schubert songs instead.” I take off my dress, and all the men go: “mein, mine, mein.” I follow the gravity. The transvestites go with the vacuum.

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2008)