On Being Other
(after Heidegger, on Holderlin)
Broken off from origin: gods, family, homeland.
Early switched direction – turning back, against, since.
No belonging. No church, no community of mortals.
Reliant on the peaks and the abyssal.
No lasting love, but efforts toward convention –
when giving up –
even offspring, domesticity,
varietous employment,
almost friends.
No lasting commerce, always in-between,
feeling resistance and restraint,
constraints of discipline and need,
of longings, love, and lust.
Searching Other
fueled by others – across the times –
creators of the peaks and their abysses.
Oscillation.
Not yet rational, it commences –
undone in the unknowing, uncertain constant flow
generates turbulence toward an opening
or a gap, some kind of fold –
“run up hard against the unsayable.”
the closing line is a quotation from Heidegger’s
lectures on Holderlin’s poems “Germania” & “The Rhine”
If all the voices coalesce, if all these glances focus to a point, if all rotations found a one equator, one word only would be enough, perhaps..
for me “undone in the unknowing” resonates. i guess that phrase is probably true of most of us at one time or another. i just wish we would all keep striving for more knowing instead of being content with things as they are.
Language is a bottomless ocean, and there is no better way to drown.
I wish I could share something profound here, but I’m at a loss. Just know I’ve been wandering round this same field, not quite in the world, not quite out, warring with myself.
In other words: if my insides could be envisioned as a Gary Larson cartoon, you would see that the chickens are restless. (for reference: https://www.amazon.com/Chickens-Are-Restless-Gary-Larson/dp/0836217179)