Reading about Nietzsche and his attitudes toward women led me to his association with Lou Andreas-Salomé, famous psychoanalyst, sociologist, socialite, polyamorist. Then I found this 1892 photo of her with Nietzsche and Paul Rée, with whom its reputed she had a ménage à trois. She gets added to my “favorite broads” list! Always knew of her writings, including her study on Nietzsche, but not her Die Erotik, 1911, theories conceived before she met Freud. My effort to find excerpts from the latter led to this quote on love below, which I like coupled with the image (photographer unknown). I’ve also attached the poem Rainer Wilke wrote for her. No wonder she’s called the Intellectual Femme Fatale, however ironic that is since she was also obviously quite sexual. How about “intellexual femme fatale”. I can relate to that more:) Enjoy!
All love is tragic. Requited love dies of satiation, unrequited of starvation. But death by starvation is slower and more painful.” Lou Andreas-Salomé
To Lou Andreas-Salome
I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives’ roundedness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself; looks, opinion, curiosity.
Who knows: perhaps eyes form in space
and look on everywhere. Ah, only plunged toward you
does my face cease being on display, grows
into you and twines on darkly, endlessly,
into your sheltered heart.
As one puts a handkerchief before pent-in-breath-
no: as one presses it against a wound
out of which the whole of life, in a single gush,
wants to stream, I held you to me: I saw you
turn red from me. How could anyone express
what took place between us? We made up for everything
there was never time for. I matured strangely
in every impulse of unperformed youth,
and you, love, had wildest childhood over my heart.
Memory won’t suffice here: from those moments
there must be layers of pure existence
on my being’s floor, a precipitate
from that immensely overfilled solution.
For I don’t think back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don’t invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you’ve gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when,
for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.
Translated by A. Poulin
Rainer Maria Rilke
