There is the anecdote about Rubinstein and Picasso: Rubinstein notes that Picasso has been painting the same bottle over and over, and wonders how someone can be so transfixed by one thing. Picasso replies that for him it is not one thing at all, but each time he paints it, it is new, original. I think this demonstrates the distinction Kierkegaard draws between recollection and repetition, the former being what the primitive aesthete does with his endless seeking of something new which inevitably turns old, leaving a vacuum and motivation for a new form of entertainment. The latter is Piccaso biting the head off the serpent. The bottle is certainly recalled, and Picasso is well aware of multitude of bottle experiences he has had; but it is in the release from all of these that he can move forward. This is the joy of a child, a Buddhist, a monk bent on knowing God. True creation happens now, in the eternal present, bring forth the next moment as if it were the first. It is what K might call the juncture where eternity meets finitude.fooloso4:
The eternal return is a riddle. One key to reading that riddle the problem of creation. If all is eternal return then there can be no creation, but above all Zarathustra wants to create are creators.
I am reminded of Baudelaire and how the serpent can be construed:
Beneath a broad grey sky, upon a vast and dusty plain devoid of grass, and where not even a nettle or a thistle was to be seen, I met several men who walked bowed down to the ground.
Each one carried upon his back an enormous Chimera as heavy as a sack of flour or coal, or as the equipment of a Roman foot-soldier.
But the monstrous beast was not a dead weight, rather she enveloped and oppressed the men with her powerful and elastic muscles, and clawed with her two vast talons at the breast of her mount. Her fabulous head reposed upon the brow of the man like one of those horrible casques by which ancient warriors hoped to add to the terrors of the enemy.
I questioned one of the men, asking him why they went so. He replied that he knew nothing, neither he nor the others, but that evidently they went somewhere, since they were urged on by an unconquerable desire to walk.
Very curiously, none of the wayfarers seemed to be irritated by the ferocious beast hanging at his neck and cleaving to his back: one had said that he considered it as a part of himself. These grave and weary faces bore witness to no despair. Beneath the splenetic cupola of the heavens, their feet trudging through the dust of an earth as desolate as the sky, they journeyed onwards with the resigned faces of men condemned to hope for ever. So the train passed me and faded into the atmosphere of the horizon at the place where the planet unveils herself to the curiosity of the human eye.
During several moments I obstinately endeavoured to comprehend this mystery; but irresistible Indifference soon threw herself upon me, nor was I more heavily dejected thereby than they by their crushing Chimeras.