Zarathustra and the Eel

How strained our relationship. It is nothing that could be called verdant or even healthy. It is built upon mistrust, mutual antipathy, and lies.

I presume—I hope—others have a less turbulent relationship with reality, but for me, I fear we have insulted each other too much to ever live calmly together. We have our good moments to be sure, detentes when I begin to think everything is fundamentally alright and will be for all time to come: the storm has finally passed and the sun emerged. But where one storm has struck, more will inevitably follow no matter how sunny the intermission.

I read my writing: on one day I despair; on the next I run outside and can hardly help from yelling in jubilation as my feet glide over the earth. On those glorious days, I believe I move to the rhythm of the universe. I hear at last that hidden melody that set in motion the stars and the planets, the irresistible music that brought to life the light feet of Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s dancing prophet, who breathed the thin air of his mountain hermitage and with it inhaled the only coherent commandment that can possibly govern life: thou shalt dance! Perhaps my dichotomous reaction to what I have written represents no real problem: some writing bears the face of an angel while other texts, produced by the same hand, are gargoyles. Surely then inconstancy is no reason for my jaw to set like concrete and my eyes to glare in suspicion as though reality were an infidelitous lover? The problem, however, is this: the pieces of my writing that drive me to despair are precisely the same ones in which I later exalt.

What is the difference then? Why do identical marks on the same paper inspire on one occasion the desire to dance and on another the need to vomit? What is true, I ask myself, and what is false? How can the same thing be alternately angelic and abhorrent? What can I trust, and what will, in the next year, next day, next hour, reveal its duplicity? Look into my life more widely: the pattern repeats. I dare to believe myself capable! I stand, briefly, in triumph. I have hiked thousands of miles through the wilderness, confronting myself along the way. I have dragged back toward life people who made a valiant attempt to die out there. I find grounds for pride in this one moment, evidence for vanity the next as I instead consider times I intervened to preempt what I saw (erroneously?) as inadvertent attempts at self-destruction. Did I overreact? Did I foresee a desperate situation where none existed? It’s my anxiety, isn’t it, that pulls my nerves taut until they thrum with unjustified fear.

During one hike in Yosemite, a group of students wished to leave the trail and make their own route over the tilted granite slabs, which in May were covered in an inch of melting snow and ice. That was the only time as a wilderness guide I ever insisted: if they refused to follow the trail, they would instead follow me as I found a safe route around the acres of steep ice-slick granite faces. We ultimately descended, slowly and safely, to Tenaya Lake. But had I overreacted? Other guides discussed the question after we returned. One was adamant I had (“I don’t get what was such a big deal”). Or had I acted courageously, preventing disaster before it became inevitable? Another told me privately this was exactly what I’d done. She’d been appalled to hear what the students tried to do. What then, I ask myself, is real?

This is how truth becomes an eel, too slippery to grasp:

I may think I glimpse an eel, in the deep pool say at the foot of a waterfall. I may circle the edge of the pool, cautiously stepping across stones to confirm what I have seen. Yes, I whisper. Yes! There can be no doubt: I have spotted truth! The only thing that stifles my cry of triumph is the fear I may yet scare the truth away before I can trap it. I shout within myself then: you’ve found it! What sunlit glory! Fine, it may be small, hardly more than a juvenile, but it is truth nonetheless, and solid as myself. I slide back to where I first observed it and look again. I decide the angle from there is actually the best for what is to come. I find crevices between the stones so my feet will not slip when I lunge. Anticipation turns to electricity in my body. I crouch, feeling the tingle in my legs as I coil myself. I hesitate, though I cannot say exactly what I’m waiting for. Perhaps I worry I will somehow manage to turn even this opportunity—so ripe!—into failure. At last, with a sudden impulsive burst that I could not have anticipated, I leap. I sail in a beautiful arc that will drop me like a stone onto the eel. It suspects nothing. I see how, in that frozen moment, its mouth opens to draw water calmly over its gills. Then the splash and the chaos: I strike the water like a stone dropped from the sky. I immediately slash at the froth my landing throws high. At first, I feel nothing solid. I flail in growing fear that I have missed my target when my fingers brush a writhing object and snap closed around it. I laugh, forgetting momentarily that I am underwater. My glee releases no sound, only a wreath of bubbles. I inhale water, but I don’t care. I maintain my stern grip on the twisting slick-as-satin creature. I draw myself from the heavy water and lumber back to the stony river bank. I shake the eel at the sky and roar in defiance. I’m so overcome, I feel my feet begin to move of their own accord. First they tap, crunching in the gravel. Then they lift higher. The crunching maddens in proportion. Hah! Higher still and now they thump the ground as if I were thumping my chest. I feel each impact as I come to dance on that riverbank. I shout to the sky, which must be the seat of reality if it has any throne. I spin as my feet respond to a secret melody that has been playing all along but which I only now hear. I leap and land, then leap again, sending a spray of gravel into the pool where the eel once resided. I raise the eel over my head to shake it again at the sky. Only as I do so do I realize how pale the eel looks now that it’s out of the water. It used to be the brown of shade and mud; now it glistens in sickly translucence. I can even trace blue veins beneath its skin. I stop dancing. Suspicion clouds the sky, and from those dour clouds, a fine rain begins to fall. Among the rain falls laughter as well. Only then do I see what a fool I am. I danced in the certainty I’d apprehended an eel when all I hold is my own wrist.