File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_1998/heidegger.9802, message 2


Date: Sun, 1 Feb 1998 17:11:52 +0100
Subject: Re:  ME's new article (3)
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)


Cologne, 01 February 1998

Henk van Tuijl schrieb:
> "Naming quietly" in order that the Other remain coming ("die Kommenden
> bleiben") might be seen as Heidegger's - enlightening - view on the
> essence of the I-You relation. Aren't we whispering when entering a
> church? When we embrace the one we love? Heidegger may have a point
> here. It may be that we are trying to keep a distance. Mutatatis
> mutandis, if the distance is too great we - at least those of us with a
> Judean-Christian background call God to account (_an-klagen_) and cry
> out: "Where are You?" The same goes for the one we love (most texts in
> popular music are variations on this theme).

Such quietness is associated with the awe before God, because the 
Judean-Christian God is awe-ful. It has struck me repeatedly in Buddhist and 
Taoist temples I have visited that these are not awe-ful places; that the 
indigenous visitors to these temples have a relaxed, but nonetheless serious, 
relationship with the divine. 

The quiet naming of the gods or the other seems to have to do with sheltering 
that to which we are closest, as if in the very closeness the other necessarily 
remains veiled. The abyss cannot have a spotlight shone upon it.

Celan:
>  >"Du hoersts regnen
>  >und meinst, auch diesmal
>  >sei's Gott."
>  
>  >"You hear it raining
>  >and think that this time too
>  >it is God."
>  
> Heidegger rightly says, that being a poet is "In-der-Mitte-sein" between
> the Being of God and man. And if God is "nichts als Zeit" (nothing else
> but time; GA39:54), Celan might have meant to say here: "You hear it
> raining and think that this time too it is Time". 

Henk, thank you for pointing your finger in this direction. 
It is not easy, and perhaps also entirely inappropriate, to try to link 
Hoelderlin with Celan too immediately, but we can attempt it nevertheless. 

The first half of the above-quoted poem runs as follows:

"Die Entsprungenen
Graupapageien
lesen die Messe
in deinem Mund."

"The escaped
grey parrots
read mass
in your mouth."

So, you parrot mass and think that God is everywhere. This image of relgious 
ritual that has worn itself out in mindless repetition is far from the godly 
dimension of time into which the poets reach up from their lonely summits. Time 
is the dimension of history, and the "creative ones" persist and endure in their 
loneliness in opening an other historical timespace in which time constellates 
an other historical world.

Is god then the personification of the dimension from which history comes 
towards us? The creative ones have the job ("Auftrag", GA39:58) of opening up 
this historical time through word, music, painting, sculpting, acting... History 
arrives from the gaping chaos of time and needs the creative ones to give it 
definition.
 
Michael
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-  artefact text and translation _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_- made by art  _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-
http://www.webcom.com/artefact/ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ artefact-AT-t-online.de-_-_ 
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ Dr Michael Eldred -_-_-_
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