“We grope like the blind along a wall, feeling our way like people without eyes. Even at brightest noontime, we stumble as though it were dark. Among the living, we are like the dead.”–Isaiah 59:10
“and you will grope at noon, as the blind man gropes in darkness, and you will not prosper in your ways; but you shall only be oppressed and robbed continually, with none to save you.” Deuteronomy 28:29
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“And the blindness of the blind one, and his seeking and groping, shall yet testify to the power of the sun into which he hath gazed,–did ye know that before?”–Nietzsche
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Compare the quotes above Nietzsche gave a very non-Biblical (shamanistic) meaning to his aphorisms. He thought it was funny to take portentous Biblical words and change them into ideas that oppose Biblical trains of thought with more naturalistic ones. For instance, he thought that knowledge had to do with realizing just how necessarily and interminably irrational reality is. The more one gazes into this fact, the more one loses one's illusions about any overarching rationale for human existence.
In opposition to the Biblical views, which imply that blindness to the light is the result of not acquiescing to God's will, Nietzsche maintains that blindness is the result of gazing too directly into reality -- that is too much into "the light". One can see reality through the filtering device of metaphysics, as one employs a thin screen when gazing at a solar eclipse. However, this view of reality is not a direct view of it, because it is filtered by a fabric that changes what is really out there
Marechera must surely have read Nietzsche, as his parodic humor suggests that the blinding light of knowledge emerges out of the Devil's ass, that is, from the capacity to confront danger/evil.
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