Date: Sun, 17 May 1998 22:03:35 +0200
Subject: Re: language


Michael Staples wrote:
This last sentence about poiaesis not being theirs. I understand you to
mean that the poetry transcends them. Am I reading you correctly?

Poetry is listening so that man may listen to what the poets hear. Art,
music and poetry are not language but ways of listening, i.e.
_Dichtung_. By listening poets make language into what it is. Language
as the saying is the House of Being.  

Michael:
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
allowing this for Heidegger's thinking as well?

Heidegger himself makes a formal distinction between thinking and
poetizing. He defines the task of thinking somewhere as the abandonment
of current thinking to the destination of the matter of thinking.
Somehow, I have the impression that he defines here a project -
something to be performed rather than experienced, although thinking and
experiencing are not opposita.   

Michael:
"Can music be language?" And I am asking further...at some level are
they the same?

Not if art, music and poetry are ways of listening. 

Michael:
[...] 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. 

The saying is the Dao, the way to the clearing. However, man can only
say it if he is consonant with language, i.e. with propriation's mode.

Michael, I hope that the above is less hermetic than it sounds and that
it is _an_ answer to your questions.

Thanks!

Kindest regards,
Henk



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