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Halemaʻumaʻu Crater at the Summit of Kīlauea
Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park
August 2020
Tim Freeman

For believe me—the secret to harvesting the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from existence is to live dangerously! Build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius!

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyous Science, §283

Philosophy and Art from the Summit of Kīlauea

The Abode of Zarathustra

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Lake Silvaplana, The Engadine, Switzerland, Tim Freeman, May 28, 2019.

Not all thoughts are alien to places. Not all are such that thinking them requires disregarding the particular place where one happens to be at that moment. Not all thoughts can be thought just as readily in one place as in another. Not all are such that they can be thought—indeed with the same clarity and intensity—anywhere. Not all thoughts require a thinking elevated above and beyond everything local and concrete.

John Sallis, Topographies, 70.

In Topographies, John Sallis recounts the famous tale Nietzsche tells in his autobiography Ecce Homo concerning the place where the thought of the eternal recurrence first came to him. I got to go there in the spring of 2019, after a conference in the Netherlands. I took the train down from Amsterdam, with my friend David Jones, who had talked me into taking that seminar on Thus Spoke Zarathustra so long ago when I first came to Hawaiʻi for graduate school in 1985. That time, coming to Hawaiʻi, that seminar, and that book would mark a critical turning point in my life. Thus it was quite a thing to go there with David all those years later. We spent a morning in Basel, strolling through the grounds of the university where Nietzsche once taught and where he wrote The Birth of Tragedy, a work that was a central focus of my dissertation. This concerned, in short, why Nietzsche thought the high point of Greek culture was not Socrates and Plato, but rather Aeschylus and Sophocles. We didn’t stay long in Basel as we didn’t have much time and we wanted to spend more time in Sils-Maria, the place in the upper Engadine region of the Swiss Alps where Nietzsche spent several summers writing parts of Zarathustra and other works. Our goal was, of course, the famous rock along Lake Silvaplana, the place where Nietzsche tells us the central idea of Zarathustra came to him.

The train ride up from Basel takes one along a route that is a Unesco World Heritage site which many consider the most spectacular railway journey in Europe. I think we were both filled with ecstatic exhilaration as we made our way up through the mountains with the incredible vistas, and I imagined that even despite his poor eyesight that Nietzsche must have felt something similar on his first trip up along the same route. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche notes the difference that the climate and meterology of various places had in his experience, and laments that much of his life, up until he began his ten yeas of wandering, “only played itself out in places that were wrong and practically forbidden to me” (Nietzsche 2007, 22-23). As he made his way up and could feel the change in elevation, I suspect he must have felt an exhilaration as he was leaving those forbidden places with their constricted cities and towns in the lowlands below; and perhaps he might even have felt some anticipation that he was finally at last finding his place, coming home, at least the place as close to a home such a nomad philosopher would ever find. The place would become for him the abode of Zarathustra. I felt a tingling anticipation and excitement as we approached our destination.

We arrived in Sils-Maria late in the day and checked into our lodgings just a short walk from the house where Nietzsche stayed. We had arrived in between seasons and thus everything was closed in the town except for a little store where we found some vegetables and pasta and some wine for dinner. So after we settled in, had our dinner and wine, we took a little stroll under the stars to the Nietzsche-haus. It too was closed, but I had made an appointment for a private tour the next afternoon. But first we planned fon getting up early and taking the hike around Lake Silvaplana to the rock.
It was cold, sharply cold, when we started out on our hike. There was ice and snow still along the trail along the way around the lake through an alpine forest. I don’t think I’d ever seen a lake quite that teal blue color before and it was shimmering calmly in the soft light of the cloudy day. Occasionally the clouds would part, revealing glimpses of magnificent snow-capped peaks. About half-way out we could finally see it in the distance through the trees, a little spot along the far side of the lake. We lost sight of it through the thick of the forest for a little while and then, finally we came down a little slope and out of the forest and there it was right before us. Here is what Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo about his experience in coming upon the rock:
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The Zarathustra Stone, Tim Freeman, May 28, 2019.

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David Jones and I at the Zarathustra Stone.
“Now I shall relate the story of Zarathustra. The basic conception of the work—the thought of eternal recurrence, this highest attainable formula of affirmation—belongs to the August of 1881: it was dashed off on a sheet of paper with the caption ʻ6,000 feet beyond man and time.’ On that day I was walking through the woods along Lake Silvaplana, not far from Surlei I stopped next to a massive block of stone that towered up in the shape of a pyramid. Then this thought came to me" (Nietzsche 2007, 65).
Nietzsche’s attention to the significance of place, to a thinking that is not elevated above place, and thus the importance of things like climate and meterology, follows from his perspectivism, the view that we see reality, not from some God’s eye perspective or view from nowhere, but from particular perspectives of time and place. Nietzsche's favorite thinking places, encountered in those last ten years of wandering and writing, were for the most part extraordinary places, especially the place where the thought of eternal recurrence came to him. In Topographies, Sallis takes up a reflection at such extraordinary places, as Bernard Freydberg explains: “The places (topoi) that occupy Sallis’s attention are one and all extraordinary, but in a very special sense: they are seductive insofar as they elicit a response that dis-places any everyday sense of familiarity” (Freydberg 2012, 216).
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The Abode of Zarathustra, Tim Freeman, May 31, 2019

I can relate to this very much as my own philosophical reflections and my art are inspired and situated from a most extraordinary place, both seductive in its beauty and also quite dangerous—the place called Halemaʻumaʻu, the inner crater within the caldera at the summit of Kīlauea on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi. The name of the place means “the house (hale) lined with aʻumaʻu ferns," and it names the place long regarded by Hawaiians as the home or abode of Pele, the volcano goddess celebrated in Hawaiian myth. Over the years I have had so many incredible experiences at this place, and so that it seems, by way of introduction to my philosophy and art, I must share a few stories.

The Abode of Pele

Mai Kauaʻi nui a Oahu, a Molokaʻi,
Lanaʻi a Kanaloa, mai Maui a Hawaiʻi,
Ka Wahine — O Pele —i hiʻa i kana ahi
A á pulupulu, kukuni, wela ka lani:
He uwila kuʻi no ka honua;
Hekili paʻapaʻina i ke ao;
Pohaku puoho, lele iluna;
Opaʻipaʻi wale ka Mauna;
Pipili ka lani, paʻa iä moku.
Nalo Hawaiʻi i ka uahi a ka Wahine,
I ka lili a ke Akua.
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Pele Rising from Halemaʻumaʻu
Tim Freeman, December 2020

From famed Kaua'i to Oahu;
Thence on to Mother Hina's isle;
To Lana'i of Kanaloa;
To Maui and, last, to Hawaii:
This the route of the Woman — Pele.
Then she rubs her fire-sticks to a blaze:
Up flames her touchwood, kindling the heavens.
Earth sees the flash of lightning, hears the boom
Of thunder echoed by mountain walls —
Rocks flung in space bombard the day,
Shaking the mountain to its base.
The firmament sags, clings to the earth;
Hawaii is lost in Her smoke,
At the passion-heat of the Goddess.
(Emerson 2005, 229-232)

The Abode of Pele
Paper presented at 2013 PACT conference at the University of San Francisco
And and 2015 CCPC conference at the University of Iceland.

The Kōan of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence and Albert Saijo's Zensational Rhapsody
Paper presented at 2022 CCPC conference at the Tallinn University, Estonia on May 14, 2022.

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Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Comparative & Continental Philosophy
Philosophy of Art
Environmental Philosophy

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Ceramic Artist

Specializing in Pit-Fired Ceramic Vessels
Evoking the Volcano Landscape


Timothy J Freeman
University of Hawai`i at Hilo
200 W. Kawili St.
Hilo, HI 96720

freeman@hawaii.edu

Timothy J Freeman
P.O. Box 2224
Volcano, HI 96785


tim@tfreeman.net