nico jenkins the gravity of pure forces

8/2/2019 Nico Jenkins the Gravity of Pure Forces

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I. Maybe we're here only to say:house,

bridge, well,gate,jug, olive tree, windowat most:pillar, tower but to say them, remember,

oh, to say them in a way that the things themselvesnever dreamed of existing so intensely.

Rainer Maria Rilke,The Ninth Elegy

There is little more fundamental, preliminary, in the world than language. We use language, in the form of

speech, constantly, whether we are saying anything or not. Man speaks, Heidegger writes, and goes on to

describe in his essay Language (2001) the constant speaking that we do. We are always speaking, even

when we do not utter a single word aloud, but merely listen or read, and even when we are not particularly

speaking or listening but are attending to some work or taking a rest (187). Speaking is expression, an

utterance of something internal. It is a recognition of a world. It is a way of communicating thought and it is an

activity that we all do, inevitably. Speaking separates the human from the animal world, and despite advancesin primatology that seek to give voice to primates and other non-human animals, it can safely be said that our

form of communicationwhat we call speech and know as languageis the most advanced, the most

complicated. We use it to present and represent the world around us; through actual utterances (vocalization) orthrough the written word or through unvoiced thoughts and dreams. We use language, but more specifically

speechnamingto transmit moods, thoughts, desires, aversions, and feelings. These expressions, mereutterances, nearly always find a source in words, whether spoken or not. Heidegger writes that this common

view of language means that only speech enables man to be the living being he is as man. It is as the one whospeaks that man isman (187).

Speaking thenutterancesurrounds us constantly, whether in the form of careful thoughtin the form of

an academic paper, sayor in the half mutterings and forgotten thoughts of a nearly remembered dream. Like

scaffolding, the apparatus of speech sustains and explains the world, making, in a sense, the world rational,

making it apparent. When we speak, we describe, and in doing so, name the world. We use words, through thisprocess of naming, to interpret and sustain the world we see, and the world we imagine. Like Rilkes naming of

jug, and bridge, and window, and stream, we describeand inscribe uponthe world through an activity of

naming. Are we here, perhaps, to name?

Is it possible not to name? Is it possible to regard and to view and to look around without naming what we

see? Is it possible to feelto experienceworld without giving utterance to that feeling, that process?Sadness, grief, joy, ecstasy, hunger, thirst. Desk, light, room, pen, book, world. White, black, tomorrow, today.

Each of these words is a name given to a thing I see in front of me, or a concept that I imagine (in the case oftomorrow or world). What arises in my mind has already existed. If I imagine it, it is named. The word for

tomorrow and desk and light precedes me, and precedes my concept of it. The idea ofitis already pre-

informed, and I must, in a certain sense, bendmyideas to it. When I imagine a table, I imagine my own table (or

I imagine an idea of table) but that imagining must follow certain general rules; while, perhaps, it might not

always require four legs and a horizontal surface, it must, at least not be, say, a pool of water, or a pile ofexcrement. It must have some tableness to it to be a table. It must, with Heidegger, table. Otherwise, speech isreduced to gibberish.

For Heidegger however, the discussion of language points to something deeper than its scientific and

analytic study as a communicative device. Indeed, Heidegger seeks to understand language not in reference

to man or woman, not as an utterance of humanity, but in reference to itself. In doing so he abandons the

conversationthat is, he casts away the traditional arguments surrounding philosophy of language; that it is a

means of expression; that it is a human activity; and that it is somehow a representation of something that is

in order to seek to understand language as language, on its own terms. Heidegger is not a philosopher of


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language, but a philosopher of world, of being. Despite these correct ideas holding sway over the whole field

of the varied scientific perspectives on languagethey ignore completely the oldest natural cast of language

(191). What is this oldest natural cast of language? It is the act of language itself. Language is language and

language speaks. Most often, Heidegger writes, and too often, we encounter what is spoken only as the

residue of a speaking long past (195). Speech, as we normally encounter it, is like Echo herself calling out to

Narcissus, doomed to repeat what has already been said, a mere remnant of what was once language, a trace

left behind in the gathering silence of becoming.

In both the essay Language and in his three lecture course The Nature of Language (1982), Heidegger

attempts to unpack the seeming tautology of language as language. In each, he focuses on poetry as a way

out, or into, a true discussion of the oldest natural cast of language. Poetry is pure speech. In poetry, language

is brought to language and language speaks (Die Sprach spricht). In the act of poetry, the act of pure speech,

the poet names (on the surface not different from how I name this table, this computer) but in the poet naming,

the naming does not hand out titles, apply terms, but rather the naming is a call, a calling forth of entities

that bring them into their own, allow them to take their place purely, without compromise. This calling,

Heidegger (2001) states, here calls into a nearness. But even so the call does not wrest what it calls away from

the remoteness, in which it is kept by the calling there. The calling calls into itself and therefor always here and

therehere into presence, there into absence (196).

II.

Window with falling snow is arrayed,

Long tolls the vesper bell,

The house is provided well,

The table is for many laid.

Wandering ones, more than a few,

Come to the door on darksome courses.

Golden blooms the tree of graces

Drawing up the earths cool dew.

Wanderer quietly steps within;Pain has turned the threshold to stone.

There lie, in limpid brightness shown,Upon the table bread and wine.

Georg TraklA Winter Evening

Heidegger is often given short shrift as an abysmally difficult writer, as one that makes no sense and is

needlessly difficult. In doing this though, we forget sometimes his eloquence, his simple beauty in writing. Of

the above opening stanza, Window with falling snow is arrayed/ Long tolls the vesper bell. he writes (2001),

This speaking names the snow that soundlessly strikes the window late in the waningday, while the vesper bell rings. In such a snowfall, everything lasts longer. Therefore the

vesper bell, which daily rings for a strictly fixed time, tolls long. The speaking names the

winter evening time (197).

The speaking names the winter evening time. It is almost impossible to comment on that one line by Heidegger.

It is as though itmustexist on its own completely, without elucidationas though in front of it we must stand

as we do in front of a painting by Klee, that is, we must abandon any claim. Silent and devoted. Thespeaking of

the poem here is not clearly different from common speech (rede) yet there is, via Heidegger, an invitation to

experience that auracular quality of light and stillness that a gentle, dusk tinged snowfall gives; words evoking a


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quality so clear, so poignant that, in a sense, Heideggers work, at this moment, has been done.

But what does this naming accomplish? What does the call call? Remember, it is not the poet that calls, but

the naming which calls. The poet has only brought the words forward; it is now the words snow, vesper bell,

window that take new life in the pure language of the poem. Entities are called forth into presence, like the

speaking that names the winter evening time. Not to be present amongst us now, however; naming table in

the poem does not place it in front of us in this room. Rather, the naming places entities into a gathering which

is also a sheltering. The naming brings them to be. In an act of appropriation, things come to be purely as their

own, unimpeded by a predetermined expectation. They are called to themselves into an arrival.

In Being and Time (1962), Heidegger famously describes the movement between present-at-hand and

ready-to-hand in his analysis of the hammer, and of equipment in general. This analysis is already known, if not

always clear, to most readers of Heidegger. Briefly, a hammer is ordinarilyzuhanden or ready-to-hand; it is part

of the background of the world, equipment used and never thought about, like this desk, this sheet of paper,

this room. Our interaction with it is temporary and it is historically different for each entity and each relation. We

need a hammer, we use a hammer. If all goes according to plan, the hammer remains ready-to-hand; it remains,

in a sense, undisclosed and certainly unobtrusive. Our world is undisturbed by the hammer. Only when the

hammer or the car or the computer is broken (or sometimes unused or unrecognized or missing) does it intrude

into our world, become conspicuous as an object present-at-hand, or vorhanden. In this case, we reach for the

hammer, it is broken and we suddenly notice its being, broken though it is. The thing which was always ready

to handhandyis suddenly abstract, something to be examined, if only in its absence or disfunction. Thiscan be exhibited for all entities, and it is important to note that in this analysis thezuhanden/vorhanden split is

not restricted to a specific form of constructed material;zuhanden does not refer to the car, and vorhanden the

sunset. No entity is ever exclusively ready-to-hand or present-at-hand; they are instead, interpenetrated with

each others mode of being, one informing the other in a way that both brings things forth into the world

discloses is the word Heidegger choosesand at the same time conceals them. As one mode is coming to be

so another mode is withdrawing. This flux and movement between modes is precisely what brings the world

forward, and what makes it manifest. It exists beyond where we tread and before man took dubious control of

the world. We go to find a book or turn on the computer and it is missing or broken and we become aware of

the object, as though for the first time. We walk to the water to glimpse the sunset and miss it, or it is less than

stellar; in the sunsets grayness, we become aware of its being sunset. The thing is disclosed in its withdrawal.

Echoing Heraclitus, we can say that as something is coming to be, it is already becoming something other.

Of similar importance to the fact that things are never all of one, or all of the other, they are also never alone.The hammer is never a single object, but is in relation always to the whole. Heidegger (1962) states,

Equipmentin accordance with its equipmentalityalways isin terms of its belongingto other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture,

windows, doors, room. These Things never show themselves proximally as they are forthemselvesWhat we encounter as closest to usis the room; and we encounter it not

as something between four walls in a geometrical, spatial sense, but as equipment for

residingit is in this that any individual item of equipment shows itself. Before its does

so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered (97).

Equipment residesdwellsin its relations, in its proximal being to other beings. Within the structure of totality,

a series of relations is always occurring. The hammer is on the workbench in the carpenters hand in the

workshop in the village under the sky and under the sun. It doesnt stop there. Equipment surrounds us and thefocus is not on what it does, or what one does with itthe carpenter with the hammer, the writer with laptop

but with the fact that it is. Equipment occurs in relation and is always occurring around us overhead, underfoot,

by the stream and in the city. There is a constant exchange of relations happening, and as this occurs, so the

world occurs, so the world both discloses and withdraws, into and out of itself.

In a very real sense, language is also equipment. It is the thing that we use most often without thought, it is

ready-to-hand (except when its not.) As were-cognize the world around us, as we offer names for things and

make lists, we are using language much like we might use a hammer, that is, bluntly. Most of the time it is

invisible and we draw on it without wondering how we are going to say something. When language does


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intrude, it does so in an awkward moment, that moment when we cant remember the right word, when we

forget a phrase. At that second, it speaks itself as language, it reveals itself as malfunctioning equipment, and

we undergo an experience with language, in Heideggers famous formulation. Language is not a tool anymore

that we use to bludgeon an object, but something instead that we submit to, that we experience. In The

Nature of Language, Heidegger (1982) writes,

But when does language speak to us as language? Curiously enough, when we cannot

find the right word for something that concerns us, carries us away, oppresses or

encourages us. Then we leave unspoken what we have in mind and, without rightly

giving it a thought, undergo moments in which language itself has distantly and fleetingly

touched us with its essential being (59).

The poets words become themselves, become appropriate, only when they no longer function in the prosaic

world; they instead intrude as they come to be. Language itself brings itself to language. Names, like theentities they indicate, are always becoming something else. As noted above, language, through the poet, has

brought forth entities from words previously known. I thought that I knew snow, but through Traklsre-

presentation of the word, language calls forth a new image of snow, indeed calls forth snow itself. The vesper

bell tolls longer, the table is for many laid. In bringing forth things, language has brought the world to presence.In everyday naming, word occludes world, preventing, in its everydayness, its coming forth, its disclosing.

But what is this world that word has been brought forth into? In the same way that language speaks, worldworlds. World, left alone, un-interfered with, comes into itself. It worlds. Again, this sounds like a tautology, but

it is essential to Heideggers thought (and in my mind is more of a god killer than Nietzsche.) One of the most

overlooked (and under-appreciated) aspects of Heidegger is his later examination and enthusiasm for the

fourfold, or the system through which things come to be, through which things thing in a world worlding. The

fourfold is the interaction of earth and sky, mortals and gods. Things come to be in the interstices and gathering

of the fourfold. The fourfold provides both a place of being, and a sheltering, a place to dwell. Heidegger writes

that the things that were named, thus called, gather to themselves sky and earth, mortals and divinities. The

four are united primally in being toward one another, a fourfold. The poet has called, through the act of pure

naming, things to come forth. In the purity of the fourfoldthat is, when that is all that there is, when there are

no other distractions, definitions, thingsentities themselves can come to be. It is important to note that

Heidegger is not saying that there are four formal things in the world, autonomous entities unto themselves. He

is not evoking a pre-Socratic formula as to what makes up the world; instead, the four mirror each other

constantly. (Heidegger calls this the mirror-play.) They interpenetrate in the same way that the modes of beingof things interpenetrate themselves. There is no discrete exclusivity in being or the fourfold. What makes up

things is not a precise recipe of the four main components; what makes up things is theaction of the fourfold

coming together, the movement of the fourfold which is a becoming. Heidegger (2001) writes that this

gathering, assembling, letting stay is the thinging of things. And he later adds that thinging, things are things.

Thinging, they gesturegestateworld (197).

Language brings the world to be. It works not again as a recipe added to things, but instead it is a bridge, or

more precisely, a relation. Language relates world to thing, brings world to thing. In a sense, it does not say

anything; rather it allows, or calls in its movement. Heidegger (2001) writes that,

The intimacy of world and thing is not a fusion. Intimacy obtains only where theintimateworld and thingdivides itself cleanly and remains separated. In the midst of

the two, in the between of world and thing, in their inter, division prevails: a dif-ference(199).

It is in this inter that language prevails. Language is difference, it is the differential aspect between world and

thing that brings world to thing. In the final stanza of Trakls poem The Winter Evening, Trakl evokes this

difference in the second line when he writes, Pain has turned the threshold to stone. Christopher Fynsk, in his

essay Noise at the Threshold, draws attention to this point when he writes it is the figure of the threshold that

is language itself, inasmuch as language is defined as the articulation of difference by which difference comesabout (25). Language, as used in the pure language of the poem, draws together world and thing, bridging

relation between entity and world. The calling of language calls world to thing, world to being. Heidegger (2001)


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describes this difference as unique; of itself, it holds apart the middle in and through which world and things

are at one with each other (200).

III.

Neither reading nor writing, nor speakingand yet it is by those paths that we escape

what has been said already, and knowledge, and reciprocity, and enter the unknown

space, the space of distress where what is given is perhaps not received by anyone (99).

Maurice Blanchot

The Writing of Disaster

So far, we have allowed Heidegger to put forward what language does, how it functions as a relation and

how it operates as a threshold, as a bridge. What interests me is what happens beyond language, beyond the

relation. What happens to the thing without the naming, without the poet, or even without the everyday chatter

Fynsk calls this noiseintruding on being? If language allows things to become by bringing thing to world,

what happens when we remove this bringing, this threshold turned to pain?

In The Nature of Language, Heidegger examines the work of the poet Stefan George, specifically TheWord:

Wonder or dream from distant landI carried to my countys strand

And waited till the twilight norn

Had found the name within her bourn

Then I could grasp it close and strong

It blooms and shines now the front along

Once I returned from happy sail,

I had a prize so rich and frail,

She sought for long and tidings told:

No like of these depths unfold.

And straight it vanished from my hand,

The treasure never graced my land

So I renounced and sadly see:

Where word breaks off no thing may be.

That final line, Where word breaks off no thing may be is evoked on nearly every page of Heideggers essay. It

is the line to which he returns over and over and bears repeating. Where word breaks off no thing may be.

Where naming ends, no thing. We can interpret this in two ways (at least.) Where wordnamingbreaks off,then there isnothing. Or, as I choose to read it, where word breaks off no thing may be. In this I see a hint

forward, a marker left behind by Heidegger. What could this look like? What does no thing look like? Like a zen

koan (there is no mirror) it is as thrilling and horrifying as contemplating what preceded the Big Bang. Because

language as naming wasnt always here; we werent always here. One or maybe two aspects of the fourfold

(depending on your view of gods) were not always here, and there is no guarantee that we will always be

around. What then? Heidegger (1982) describes the landscape that the poet finds, It names the realm into

which the renunciation must enter: it names the call to enter into that relation between thing and word which

has now been experienced (65). The poet, in renouncing, allows for the may be of where word breaks off no

thing may be. This may be becomes a kind of imperative, a command which the poet follows, to keep it


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from then on.

No thingis lacking. Where word breaks off, theremaybe, a totality, a completion. If we place the emphasis

onmay be, we make it affirmative, make it positive. One allows it. No thing is where the word, that is the name,is lacking. If we remove then (if we can remove) the word, the name, than that is where no thing is, that is where

no thing mayblossom, enrich, belong, become. What is no thing? Heidegger writes that thing is anything that

in any wayis. And just after this he writes that the world alone gives being to the thing. But what happens if

there is no word?

Word, in this formulation can be seen as an enframing, a challenging of language. By naming, by drawing a

perimeter around an object, we hold it, by its definition (that is a brick) to an ordered future. If we borrow from

Heideggers essay The Question Concerning Technology (1993) the idea of this standing-reserve of an

ordered future, we see that everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed

to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering (322). What happens if thereis no naming of

the thing? Silence perhaps. Stillness.

We can nameand do namethat which we know. We equate knowledge with knowing the name ofsomething. A brick is a brick, a hammer is a hammer, the universe is the universe. By naming a thing, we

create, and draw its parameters, the parameters of the thing, not as thing thinging in the fourfold, but as bluntobject apparent. In the four dimensions relatively available to us, we observe (and name) that the brick takes up

possibly six by four by two inches and is, in the sense that it currently occupies this time slot. It fulfills itsdestiny, its being, its brickness,it bricks. But what happens when we remove the name for this brick. We no

longer know what to call this no-thing (if indeed we can even arrive at the point of uncalled calling.) In fact theit(this brick) is no longer a thing in the sense that by not namingby removing the nameit still occupies the

same dimension but is indiscernible from the world. Itsimplyis, un-reliant, un-needed by me. By removing the

subject (me) from it (the brick) do I not then also remove the objector at least the duality objectifying it?

Why is this important? Why does this matter? I have not really removed anything. I have not changed

anything,per se. The brick still occupies the same space in geographic and temporal dimensions. I have

literally not even touched the brick sitting on my desk. But what I have done is removed the name, removed the

word(the bridge, according to Heidegger) and in this (again, if thisis even possible) there is something

vertiginously liberating, not only for me (and my way of thinking) but also for the brick itself. Like the poet who

calls the thing forward, by refusing to name, by avoiding any thing that demands me to name it, I release the

thing into the fourfold. I am no longer challenging the thing to be there forme; I do not enframe it throughlanguage. Rather I, in an act of extreme responsibility, am refusing the challenge. By refusing the name (refusing

to name) one allows, (or no one allows no thing) the brick to be all things, to manifest its manifold being, to

incorporate all things into its thinging. Itbecomes, quite literally, everything. Because, in its infinite

manifestness, it incorporates everything; the mud that gave it its current being, the water that formed the mud,

the sun, the stars, the universe and it also allows it to become mud again, to become landfill, to become again,

water and sun and stars and universe in an endless, infinite cycle of coming to be something (else).

Perhaps this is what Heidegger is suggesting when he talks about the stillness at the end of his essay,Language (2001):

The dif-ference stills particularly in two ways: it stills the things in thinging and the world

in worlding. Thus stilled, thing and world never escape from the dif-ference. Rather, they

rescue it in the stilling, where the dif-ference is itself the stillness (206).

It is in this stillness that I can imagine agellasenheit(here I mean both releasement in the Heideggarean sense,

as well as Meister Eckharts use of the term meaning letting the world go and giving oneself to God) of thing

and world, a releasing into the stillness and silence of no thing beyond where word breaks off. It is here where I

may no longer be, and yet no thingis, butmay be.


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WORKS CITED

Fynsk, Christopher. Language & Relation...That There Is Language. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,1996. Print.

Heidegger, Martin. On Time and Being. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row, 1972. Print.

---. Basic Writings. Trans. David Farrell Krell. San Francisco: Harper, 1993. Print.

---. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper, 1962. Print.

---. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Alfred Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 2001. Print.

---. On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco: Harper, 1982. Print.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. Trans. A. Poulin, Jr. Boston, MA: Houghton

Mifflin Co. 1977. Print.

Trakl, Georg. Index of All Literary Texts of Georg Trakl. Trans. Jim Doss and Werner Schmitt. n.pag. Web.

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