Nietzsche and Heidegger—
not by fame,
not by any measure of greatness,
are they overmen while I remain an ape,
but because, in reading their works,
I am seized
by a biting sensation
called humiliation.
O modern ape of the city,
you are not even the copycat
of those fearless sages.
From fear
you piss where you stand.
From rage
you merely repeat.
Like a ship without anchor,
you are hurled against two rocks:
the rock of despair in the swamp,
and the rock of hope in a thick fog.
O tedious ape,
you are not in Sein,
not even in Zeit1—
you have merely fled
onto the weary shoulders of science.
From science
you take barren loans.
From philosophy
you borrow stale bread2.
You massacre religion,
yet in the corruption of your being
you still live it.
You are not even worthy
to drag your father’s name behind you3.
Your relation to him
is as a scarecrow to the farmer,
as a pit to a cave,
as an earthworm to a serpent.
O degenerate ape of imitation,
O accursed chameleon of vice,
O narcissist swollen with yourself—
your due is death.
Cease this farce of living.
From Poems of Madness
Zeit (“time” in German) deliberately echoes the title of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). The juxtaposition of Sein and Zeit evokes Heidegger’s philosophical framework in which the question of Being is inseparable from temporality.
The phrase “borrowing stale bread from philosophy” alludes to a Persian idiom meaning “to lend each other bread,” used to describe a relationship of mutual advantage in which two parties support one another with the expectation of reciprocal benefit. The poet adapts this idiom to suggest a transactional complicity with philosophy. The adjective “stale” further implies that the philosophical tradition being borrowed from is already exhausted.
The “father” mentioned here refers to Friedrich Nietzsche, whom the poet elsewhere names as his “true father,” acknowledging his intellectual and stylistic influence.