Prophetic Men and Music

I am happy to say that I've got A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall pretty down pat. I just played it again after a few days not and made it all the way through without reading or stopping, which started one of the more satisfying rounds of music I've had in a while. Sometimes you get in a mood that you just don't want to change, but all things have a right ending. I played a few songs in between - an old original that has never been better, free falling (for old times sake, one of the first songs I learned on guitar freshman year - I remember being corrected on the strumming of part of it but just not getting it at the time), Josh Ritter's Potter's Wheel (another hard one to remember, though not quite as bad as Dylan's), and finally, just playing around with the sounds of the guitar and coming up with something right and letting it naturally end. I remember once seeing a spiritual show - I was recruited to help out ushering through someone I met at work - in a giant church in west downtown-ish Portland, by that long park with the statue fountains. There was chanting in sanskrit and spiritual sing alongs to lines like 'there is so much magnificence...near the ocean...near the ocean...' and I think my favorite part was when the husband (of the husband and wife duo) started playing a Beatles song and the wife wasn't too happy about it. (They also had an amazing young Indian-flute player.) But they were big on letting their songs fade out into complete silence; there was no clapping to cover that moment. They went so far as to say that that was the point, or the best part, which they probably meant (it was something to do with the spiritual part, I suppose). All this to say it is nice to play music alone and almost unheard so you can sustain the mood even after.
I wanted to follow up the last post about the Hard Rain with a quote from Nietzsche about prophetic men. Why? A lot of what I like about that song is its almost biblical feeling of prophecy - the young man comes home with mysterious insights which are portents to him of a certain kind of future. There's something powerful in prophecy, or at least in the ability to appear prophetic, which makes it something desirable - like, ooh, I would like to be like that. I'd like to write that kind of song, I'd like to make that kind of work of art (예술품), I'd like to be that kind of person. Enter Nietzsche with a response to this kind of feeling that arises in the admiring spectator. The passage is from the Gay Science (316):

Prophetic men.--You have no feeling for the fact that prophetic men are men who suffer a great deal: you merely suppose that they have been granted a beautiful "gift," and you would even like to have it yourself. But I shall express myself in a parable. How much may animals suffer from the electricity of the air and clouds! We see how some species have a prophetic faculty regarding the weather; monkeys, for example (as may be observed even in Europe, and not only in zoos--namely, on Gibraltar). But we do not heed that it is their pains that make them prophets. When a strong positive electrical charge, under the influence of an approaching cloud that is as yet far from visible, suddenly changes into negative electricity, these animals behave as if an enemy were drawing near and prepare for defense or escape; most often they try to hide: they do not understand bad weather as a kind of weather but as an enemy whose hand they already feel.

I like this passage - it's a good reprimand, and it is somehow comforting to think that prophetic men had to suffer for their 'gift' and didn't just get a handout in it - it makes the world seem both more expansive (there are whole feelings we don't know) and more just (if they had to suffer, they earned it). I also like the parable he uses to illustrate it just in itself - the idea that animals can predict the weather because they feel the pain from it, they feel it as an enemy - a good imaginative leap on N's part (more feelings we have no idea of), and dramatically-written. I'm curious about the pseudo-scientific reasoning he gives for it - a cloud's strong positive electrical charge suddenly changing to electricity to cause animal pain? Is that explanation really dated or naive or does something along those lines happen? (I clearly know no science.) And finally, I like that there actually are monkeys in Gibraltar, in England, and that Nietzsche took the trouble to point out that he knew this. I wonder, did he actually go there to look at the monkeys? Imagine that scene, complete with the spectacles and mustache. Or, as is more likely (and less funny), did he just hear an account of the monkey-viewing from an acquaintance or friend? Finally, telling us at the beginning of the passage that we "have no feeling for that fact that" prophetic men suffer humanizes them and is a call for us to feel compassion for them rather than applaud them as a phenomenon. I remember somewhere else in Nietzsche's corpus (I'm not going to bother finding out where) he characterizes the artist or poet more generally as one who suffers and tries to communicate his pain, only to be met by cheers and enthusiasm for it. It's an idea I've come across before - take one of Dylan's later great albums, Blood On the Tracks - he names it that for a reason. Those are some of the most pain-filled songs I know. "You're a Big Girl Now" "If You See Her Say Hello" and "Buckets of Rain," for instance. And a more living case - I once worked at a show for a singer-songwriter named Ellis, who was one of the most engaging performers in that between songs, she talked a lot and laughed like a dork in a way that made people happy and really like her. Her audience loved her, anyway. During the show, after a round of making everybody laugh, she said that she was so surprised at a show earlier that week when an audience member approached her and asked her how she could be so happy all the time. She didn't know she appeared that way, and told that girl something like, "Happy? Are you kidding? I was crying my eyes out an hour ago!" And everybody, her included, laughed about that one too.
Anyway, it's all well and good to wish to be prophetic, wish to be an artist, wish to be profound, what have you. But it's also good to recognize that in order to avoid being fake or superficial about it, to avoid pursuing an image of it (imagining yourself from an audience's point of view), going with this wish is also being okay with being unhappy for a lot of it. Maybe one does not want to suffer that much for it, maybe one is not strong enough to do so, and there's something to be said for that, too.
But the best part was about the monkeys on Gibraltar. It cracks me up that Nietzsche made a point of that. Apparently they're called Barbary Macaques, they don't have tails, and it is theoretically punishable by law to feed them.