Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 08:03:31 -0700
From: Mike Staples <mstaples-AT-argusqa.com>
Subject: Re: language


Henk van Tuijl wrote:

> Remember the documentary about Glenn Gould's second recording of
> Bach's
> Goldberg-variations? He listens to the music while he plays - and he
> plays it as a listener, not as a performer. As Dylan Thomas listens to
>
> his _Under Milk Wood_ and says the sounds of the words as a listener.
> If
> there is _poiaesis_, it is not theirs.

Hi Henk. This last sentence about poiaesis not being theirs. I
understand you to mean that the poetry transcends them. Am I reading you
correctly?

> Michael:
> If by "Poetry" Heidegger means to point to something ineffable yet
> common to both poetry, and art, and music, then it seems as though I
> understand what poetry is better than I understand what language is.



> I do not know what Heidegger means by _Dichtung_. His thinking is not
> a
> listening. It has more the character of a performance.

I can't buy the notion that Heidegger's thinking is not a listening,
even though I understand the idea that his thinking has a character of a
performance. What is wrong with looking to your first paragraph that
speaks of the relationship between listening and performing, and alowing
this for Heidegger's thinking as well? It seems as though this is a
wonderful approach to considering how an artist works. And this applies
to Heidegger as well, does it not?

But what of my attempt to link this to language? the question was asked,
"Can music be language?" And I am asking further...at some level are
they the same?

There is always this layer of  "stuff". For language, there are nouns
and verbs. For music there are measures and times, for art there are
shadings and colors. But beyond this, or under it, or in it, or more of
it, there is also something else. When Heidegger says something like,
"When we go to the Well, we are always going through the word Well" he
isn't talking about a noun's surface. He's talking about something
else...perhaps the essence of that name...perhaps the essence of
language. Do you think so? And if so, then when we anwwer the question,
"What is language?" we might also be addressing the question, "What is
poetry?"

Michael Staples



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