She is an  

Eternal plane of possibilities

Of stillness, plateaus and peaks

Flowing as water falls on rock and soil

Leaving pearls of wisdom

On the brow of animals

 

She holds my head

When the day is done 

Warming our cold fields of endless mornings

Hides in mists and mimics nature

Or is it nature mimicking her?

 

Now she’s just her sex,

Revealing

She is everything’s mother.

Even words were born by her pretending

To understand 

 

Her wisdom is weightless and immortal

She forgets it while

Men who count

Objectifying 

Even her – in a bid to outsmart all

 

As I close more and more books and raise my eyes instead I see

That she is in all places where she does not meet resistance …

 

“Hurry, hurry!” echoing in my life: “I have to move on and on.”

 Guided by nymphs

Who speak a language I do not understand

The more I doubt everything

The more a meaningfulness glows

As if in my cupped hands.

My sight flaming its light

 

When I seek firmness she answers with chaos

When I seek Chaos she answers with firmness

When I am hard she answers with softness

When I am soft she answers with softness –

until that is, she stops answering…

And that is the only thing that I know.

And here I am.

 

I will not disarm but

I surrender everything else. “

-Rocaktansky

—

The picture for this essay was painted by Klimt in 1918.^. I once heard an expert on the arts calling Klimt an expert on women and I think I agree.

—

Nietzsche must have been thinking along the same lines about women when he half humorously pondered if the biggest philosophical problem is whether women are right.

What Nietzsche probably refers to here is for instance the fact that women’s basic wisdom and advice such as drink tea with lemon when you have the flu actually works and that a man’s advanced philosophical systems may rather confuse than shed light on the essence of being.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), who was such a sharp a thinker that Nietzsche,the story goes, never ventured anywhere without a Montaigne’s essays in his pocket, wrote in the fifteenth century that women were leaders in our home and in our schools, so he had the men who began teaching women in mathematics, rhetoric and for example astronomy suspected of doing so, just in order to be able to control them.