Man is a rope stretched

“Man is a rope, stretched between the beast and the Overhuman, a rope over an abyss.”

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The multiple suns, besides the fact that they give each protagonist their own hour, are like re-presentations of the same form. This is not a world organized around the One… around unity.
Nor is it a world shattered into a thousand pieces.
These red spheres, the undulating volutes, the incandescent shapes around the dancer evoke an omnipresent fire: a cosmic, inner, creative fire.
This fire does not destroy for the sake of destruction: it is the Dionysian fire that purifies, transforms, and forces invention.
To play with fire is to accept that creation involves danger, a burn, a loss of self.
It is to prefer a vivid, risky existence to a lukewarm life without intensity.

The dancer crosses this flaming arena not to master it, but to attune himself to it—like tuning an instrument to a new key.

— And these ropes, Félix… what do you make of them?

— Linking the past and the future, the rope vibrates beneath the dancer’s steps…

Yes… he dances… on the tightrope and plays with fire…
The donkey represents what society devalues, what it judges inferior, almost laughable.
This dancer dances, and not just anywhere, he dances on the edge of the void and shows that he refuses submission.
He frees himself, he rebels, and transforms his donkey-status into creative power…
while on another rope, identical in every way, perch the parrots… about which you still refuse to speak…”

Félix continues as though he had not heard, or did not wish to show that he had.

— Look at the tightrope walker, Félix. He makes me think of Nietzsche’s philosophy.

— You see, Lucian, these are the vibrations of the present… playing with the forces of chaos. That is what allows him to dance rather than fall.
Transformation begins precisely where one assumes what others condemn.
The candidate for the Overhuman does not bear the glorious face one might expect, but the mask of contempt.

“— Is it still acceptable today to speak of the Overhuman?”

“— Certainly, ‘Overman’ immediately evokes political or biological fantasies…
but the German word does not mean ‘better than,’ a hierarchical superiority.
It means over, beyond (über) — in the sense of a passage, a crossing.
The Übermensch is an horizon of self-surpassing, a figure of transformation, of the creation of new values.
He is not a being superior to others: he is a new relation to oneself.

Our donkey-dancer is not an Overman who dominates others.
He is a vulnerable being, mocked, unstable, yet he dances nonetheless; he hears what others do not, and he walks a wire stretched between chaos and light.”

Félix pauses, then continues:

— And those long ears, which provoke laughter, become here the essential symbol.
They indicate that this dancer hears—in both senses:
to hear as in perceive the vibrations of the world,
and to hear as in understand, grasp what others ignore.
The one called ‘beast’ may be the one who listens the farthest.
He perceives the trembling of the rope, the birds’ breath, the murmur of the open book, the rumblings of the surrounding chaos.

— And the role of the therapist in all this?

The supervisor turns toward Lucian:

— You, in all of this, appear as a possible third term.
A third who does not cut through, who does not reduce everything to ‘a single truth,’
but who supports the coexistence of doubles, contradictions, fragmented times.
If you interpret too quickly, you risk breaking this fragile construction—forcing the two back into one.

If, on the contrary, you can recognize the intimate coherence of this world, a burning book, a dancing donkey, a shadow that writes, a tightrope walker watched by two parrots, helpers running about, waves returning,
then you offer the patient the possibility, one day,
to allow a third element to emerge: a word, a phrase, a story.

You do not have to ‘understand’ in his place.
You must hold the stage, reflect it—both as thought and as mirror, and allow time for his shadow-writing, there on the page,
to become one day readable… to him. Perhaps.

He grows quiet, then adds gently:

— In short, the drawings he brought you, as well as this one—surely from the same hand—are anything but naïve.
They are a topography of his internal world.
The fact that he entrusted them to you is already a great step of the tightrope walker toward you.

— Tell me, Lucian… Is that not Igniatius on this image?

— Surprisingly enough… yes… it is him!
But what is he doing on that tightrope…?
And it is high time you spoke to me about those parrots!