Bridge Poem by gershon hepner

Nietzsche said that life is not an endpoint
but a bridge.
Narrow bridge, said Nahman, mind-bend point.
I say ridge
above a precipice. Don’t look below:
if you do,
you’ll fall. Just look ahead, while you forgo
the scenic view.

Ian Buruma (“Desire in Berlin, ” NYR, December 4,2008) writes about an exhibition of the paintings of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner at MoMa, and the catalogue by Deborah Wye (“Kirchner and the Berlin Street”) . He reminds us that, in Dresden in the first decade of the 20th century, Kirchner was one of the founders, together with Karl Schmitt-Rottluff, Erich Heckel, Mach Pechstein and Otto Muller, of Die Brücke in Dresden. He points out that, unlike Emil Nolde, Kirchner was not attracted to National Socialism, although he flirted with it in the early 1930’s. “The name Die Brücke came from Nietzsche’s dictum that man was a bridge, not an endpoint. The cult of natural behavior Kirchner espoused was part of a larger movement in Germany: Wandervögel hiking through mountain and dale, nudists frolicking on Baltic beaches. And then there was the German tendency to spiritual brooding.” In this poem I link Nietzsche’s concept of life as a bridge to that of Rav Nahman of Bratslav (1772–1810) , who dead nearly fifty years before Nietzsche (1844-1900) flourished. Rav Nahman said: “All life is an extremely narrow bridge and the main point is not to be at all afraid.”


11/29/08