Reciprocity Nexus

“The Greatest Weight” — "The Greatest Weight" is a tour-de-force through Nietzschean thinking. In his collection of aphorisms "The Gay Science" ("Fröliche Wissenschaft"), Nietzsche famously declared "God is Dead" and in so doing, inaugurated a kind of aesthetic existentialism, liberated from what he called "slave morality". The recurring "round-and-round" motif is an eponymous nod to what he called his "greatest thought" (and "greatest weight"!), "the thought of eternal recurrence". Lou Salome was a French Huegenot/German thinker and later psychoanalyst whom Nietzsche as a young man had unrequited feelings for.

All of the concepts – and many of the lyrics – are direct, verbatim lifts from Nietzsche’s various writings:

• His idea that “God is dead” comes from aphorism 125 in his collection entitled Fröliche Wissenschaft;

• The motif of the freed bird comes – tellingly! – from the aphorism that precedes it: In The Horizon of the Infinite

• The motif of Zarathustra’s announcing Nietzsche’s “super man” comes from Also Sprach Zarathustra

• The lyric “Nerve stimulus transferred into image / Into sound /
Metaphor / Speak to us!” is a direct lift from Nietzsche’s early essay “On Truth & Falsity in their ExtraMoral Sense” and posits our essential relationship with the world as a profoundly aesthetic one – an idea that has haunted me since I first encountered it as a guitar picking undergraduate

• The reference to the Apollonian and Dionysian comes from Nietzsche’’s first published work Die Geburt Der Tragedie / Birth of Tragedy and refers to the idea that only the aesthetic, art, balms the horrors of life by veiling them in “beautiful illusion”

• The reference to “slave morality” comes from his 1887 book “On the Genealogy of Morals”.

• The chorus “Round and round and on repeat / Each moment, every heartbeat / The moonlight through the trees / The circle is complete” references Nietzsche’s concept of “Eternal Recurrence” which he himself considered his most profound thought, in the aphorism Der Schwerste Gewicht, again from Fröliche Wissenschaft – the middle two images, verbatim. (Alas, I could not make the reference to a spider work!).

Why these references to Nietzsche – especially given he is a somewhat controversial figure and is sometimes taken as a forerunner and apologist for Nazism. (Which stance, BTW, I profoundly disagree with – I believe he was appropriated through the agency of his sister). In this context only because he is the first western thinker to really posit the idea of a post-religious humankind.