GEORGE MELNYK

The power of language holds the world firmly in

its grasp. The experience of being amazed — within

and without —language is called poesis by author

George Melnyk. In Poetics of Naming, he conducts

the reader on a philosophical, mystical, and poetic

tour, exploring language as the ultimate metaphor,

the shaper of all our meanings. At moments the

text seems poignant, then whimsical. At other

moments its words force us to the very edge

of meaning, where we teeter over the abyss of

meaninglessness. Sometimes the words of poesis

are easy to traverse; sometimes they rise up

insurmountable, impassable, awaiting a signpost

that knows its secret ways.

The writer guides us to the brink of the poesis

experience, where we stand at the furthest

limit of language and look back on the ordinary

world. That looking back on understanding

establishes a distance between us and our every-

day world, creating a field of vision where all the

"beings" of our world seem far away and without

meaning. In their place we sense only limitless

being, where there are no boundaries, no shapes,

no forms, no reality, as we normally understand it.

Pure existence.

Drawing on the work on Heidegger, Foucault,

Gadamer, Derrida and Ricoeur, Melnyk weaves

a mesmerizing text that resonates with a powerful

drumbeat bringing us deeper and deeper into the

very heart of language, where pure sound becomes

an intoxicating wonder that calls us to escape into

our deepest selves.

poetics of naming
al introduction on naming metaphor the unum of the pre

Digitized by the Internet Archive

in 2011

http://www.archive.org/details/poeticsofnamingOOmeln
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poetics
I ^^ A GEORGE MELNYK

namin
The University of Alberta Press
Published by
The University of Alberta Press
Ring House 2

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2E1

Copyright © George Melnyk 2003

National Library of Canada cataloguing in publication data

Melnyk. George
Poetics of Naming / George Melnyk.
Includes biographical references.

ISBN 0-88864-409-4

1. Poetics. 2. Semantics (Philosophy) I.Title

P32S.5.P78M44 2003 i2i'.68 C2003-911151-2

A volume in (cjLBJRjLnla). a Canadian literature series. Jonathan Hart, series editor

Printed and bound in Canada by AGMV Marquis Printing Inc., Monmagy Quebec.
First edition, first printing, 2003
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The University of Alberta Press gratefully acknowledges the support received for its publishing
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acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing
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publishing activities.

Canada
to

T.L
R.K.

TG.
contents preface to poesis in my name: a personaF ir

preface to poesis ix

in my name: a personal introduction xv

on naming metaphor 1

the unum of the present 17

in/too poesis 27

out/of poesis 43

in/too metaphor 57

go/in circles 71

out/of death 83

past becoming 93
ending/beginning 99
postscript to poesis 111

sources 113
»nt preface to poesis in my name: a personal introductio

In interiore homine Veritas habitat

St. Augustine

No language can speak the truth about truth

Jacques Lacan

The truth we acknowledge about ourselves and our world is conditioned

by a nnultitude of personal experiences, valued family narratives, and

the unifying, as well as the divisive, discourses of our culture. There is

nothing radical or original in this view of the personal nature of truth;

truth is a personal interpretation of elennents commonly available to

those who share a culture and language, but whose combination within

each of us is different. Thinkers from philosophers to psychologists to

novelists and even theologians have made this claim.

Readers for whom the world ends with the view that a chair is

a chair is a chair need go no further However; if you already have a

'^
broader conception of truth, you may proceed with the hope of being
confirmed in your belief. Because this text is based on a mystical
approach to truth, readers will feel an instant tension between that
mysticism and the norms of philosophy as both approaches try to
inhabit the ground of interpretation. Kant would term this text "literary

mystagogy" because of its links to metaphor and poetic schemas.'

Each of us builds truth out of personal historyThis truth, commonly

referred to as meaning, comes to reside within us through the interaction

of the self with the world. Truth belongs to all humans as they inhabit

individual boundaries of time and space. There are times when we

imagine we are captains of our own truth, as we provide truth with a

patina of personal absoluteness, but it is the language we share with

others that creates truth for us. Without language there is no truth.

But, curiously, there may be meaning conveyed outside of language.

The relationship between truth and meaning may actually contain

disruption and fracture.

Language claims to offer us the truth of reality, an understanding

of what exists beyond our senses. However we know that reality is

separate from and beyond language because we experience it that

way At the same time we are not comfortable in a reality beyond the
explanations of our language. If we find ourselves in a situation that is

unexplainable we become either fearful or we struggle to find within

our language some explanation. Trapped in the discourse created by

our culture and our time, we are lost without it.

What happens when language no longer exists for the self —when
the meaning and truths that it offers disappear? This text arises from

an experience in which language disappeared, when consciousness of

time and space formed by language lapsed, exposing the psyche to an

alinguistic universe. This moment of directness, in which language was

no longer the bearer of reality no longer the messenger can only be

described as mystical. A mystical experience of rea//ty without language

is a momentary exit from language. There is return to language but,

after the experience of languagelessness, language is no longer the same.

Such a powerful experience deserves the name of poes;s.

Poesis comes from the Greek word poiesis. that refers to "making" or

constructing, as in a poem. Using the term poesis to denote languageless-

ness alludes to the constructive role of language. After poesis, language

is exposed as a poetry a maker of meaning. After the poesis experience

of languageless reality the self returns to language with a feeling of

revelation, of seeing language as a completely metaphohc structure,

hiding rather than exposing realityThe directness of the poesis experience

challenges the meaning that language creates about reality It makes

 —

language seem an obstacle. Language, after poesis, beconnes more of a

self-reflective mirror rather than a doorway to the external.

The truth and meaning language presents to us becomes a gift of

itself a word, an idea, a term that encompasses and blocks us from

reality.The representational power of language is brought to the fore in

such a way that its only truth is representation itself or what Derrida

said was language's lack of what it represented.^ Thus, the experience

this text means to describe is absent for the reader who has never

experienced poesis. The representation of poesis, which this text is, is

nothing more than a representation filled with its own absences and

lacking. Putting languagelessness into language, which this text attempts

to do, distills Derrida's paradox of language.

The moment of poesis, the languageless event, happened for me

long ago. Poesis gave rise to a philosophical language of thirty years ago,

which in turn was based on philosophical concepts created in another

language forty years earlierThe truth of the mystical moment, when I

initially explained it, became coated with the hiding power of language
its fundamental untruth. In the very act of being written down or
translated into words, the experience was purged of its mysticism, its

languagelessness, and became a statement conveying the meaning or

truth of the mystical moment. By translating the languagelessness of

poesis into truth, I had to use language. To communicate the poesis

experience, I had to turn to its opposite.The rhetorical goal of creating

the truth of my being without language, leaves the reader outside the

experience both psychologically and temporally.The reader of a

description is both outside the author's words and outside the author's

experience of'the unrepresentable event"^ The reader is left with only

a linguistic/textual exercise, even though the founding experience was

the opposite of text.

Adding to this paradox of translating languagelessness into language

is the passage of time, which results in the creation of a history for

the text. Writing after the event is always historical. History makes re-

telling its truth problematic, because any later re-telling requires me to

acknowledge the changed thoughts on truth that the culture in which I

am writing has created since the initial experience and writing. Making
the language about poesis relevant and "up to date" is a challenge and

also a further alienation from the originating mystical experience. The

original text of this philosophy of truth as metaphor, written in a now
dated language, languished in obscurity until certain events brought it

forward many years later

What lay behind the drive to re-create the text in a form beyond
its original form? There are no simple, direct causes that can be listed,

such as a life-threatening illness or a sudden change of profession or

some retreat from the present into the past, or even a recurrence of
poesis, but rather factors that have been at play throughout my life.

These factors exist deep within and at a certain inexplicable moment

came together to force a return to the text. My personal history and the

intellectual history of the twentieth century now wrap themselves

around the original text and this subsequent text with endless echoes
of before and after The factors that caused my return to the text, and

its re-creation in a new form, are internal rather than external.They are

more entwined with my overall identity and the trajectory of my self

through life than with any immediate outside forces. It is a whole life

that is the overall ground for this text on poesis.The poesis experience

was powerful enough for me to produce an original text and then,

years later create a restating that would make public what had been
private for thirty years.

The new text is a confrontation between my semi-permanent sense

of self and the cultural evolution of language and thought that forces
continual reappraisals. Poetics of Naming is a text-after-text, a post-text

that has its origins, interpretively speaking, prior to poesis itself When
the rationality of language initially met the irrationality of poesis, the
result was literary creativity a learned creativity that encompassed
the creativity of others and their writing. Their writings were a fire

smouldering in the original text and their number has grown in this

text.The untruthing of language by poesis and its subsequent truthing in

two texts is an expression of the whole continuum of my intellectual

existence before and after poesis.The truth that came out of poesis

may seem very much a quirky personal truth, but the experience was
of such strength that it delineated the fundamental parameters of my
existence. I was thereby able to escape my own particularity on a
trajectory toward universality Since there are elennents of my own
story outside of poesis that serve as a personal introduction to my
interpretation of language, I begin with my own experience of the

naming power of language.

oesis in my name: a personal introduction on naming met

The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of

a multiplicity.

G/7/es Deleuze

My name is George. Or is it?The name George is an English translation

of my baptismal name, Yuri. In Slavic countries, Yuri is as common as

George, the English translation of my Ukrainian name. My birth certificate,

which was issued in Germany, because was born there, I listed "Georg"
as my first name. In the space of my first three years I went from Yuri to
Georg to George. George replaced Yuri for me when a Canadian

immigration official in Halifax simply added an 'e' to the name on my

German birth certificate. This modification was the sign of my rite of

passage from Europe to North America. In a new land one could have
a new name and a new identity that went with it. Since I entered Canada

as a "displaced person" (refugee), my new name re-placed me with its

own national identity

Translating my name was a combined replacement and renaming

to fit me into the dominant culture of wherever I was. First "Georg"
was a symbolic way of being at home in Germany; then '"Yuri"' and its

various diminutive variations (Yurchik) was a way of being at home

within the family's Ukrainian nationality; and finally "George" was the
passport to eventual Canadian nationality In three years, three languages

played with my name. Because of this I have always felt the power of
language to create meaning and identity both generally and personally
I have known first hand how language and its power to nanne us

represents political and social energy that can connplicate identity, juggle

the acceptable with the unacceptable, and create, in my case, an outsider

with a blurred vision of cultural conformity. Even in the matter of my

Ukrainian name, naming was an act of translation that affirmed that the

name was I given represented a more powerful reality than my own.

My father gave me my Ukrainian name, Yuri, because it was his

father's name. was namedI after my paternal grandfather, whom I never

met and who perished as a result of World War Two. (My maternal
grandfather died as a result of World War One.) The name Yuri

symbolized my father's devotion to the memory of his father (whose

fate at the time of my birth was unknown to my father) and how his

first-born son was to represent familial continuity My grandfather had

been a teacher and I eventually became a teacher; a profession I resisted

entering for many years. My fate had been determined through a

naming rooted in family history traditional practice, and my father's filial
piety I had been translated into the past. But when I became George,
the meanings associated with the name Yuri slipped away from the
conscious and into the subconscious, where they remain to rise from

time to time as needed by the psyche. In these various namings lay the

beginnings of my distrust of language as truth. Here was the ground of

my grasping language as nothing but the ephemerality and oppression

of translation, name after name after name with no real core to it.

On the surface, the act of becoming a George and living in Canada

had wiped away the connotations and resonances of Yuri, replacing
them with a whole new set associated with George. (And if the family

had remained in Germany would have developed

I a Georg identity a

German self and never been a George.) It was not until I was in my late

teens that I finally saw a Yuri with whom I could identify He was Yuri

Zhivago in Boris Pasternak's, Doctor Zhivago, and he came to me from

Russia via Hollywood. My Slavic self finally had an image I could under-

stand in the context of the Canadian culture in which I had been

schooled.Translated, this Yuri's last name (Zhivago) means life. Pasternak's

Yuri Zhivago was a doctor, a romantic, and a poet, who symbolized life

and love against history and its children — politics and ideology When I
 I

was at university studying history —the shrivelled entrails of the past

as they were presented in words, sentences, pages, and books —

preferred life and love over history I preferred Yuri Zhivago over the

real-life George Melnyk. Life was personal, while history was public;

love was subjective, while society was objective. It was the romantic in

nne, the Yuri deep inside me rather than my official identity as a history

student, as George, that seemed to matter

Obviously there was a deep conflict here, represented by the two

names. George symbolized the making of history either as text or as

reality and Yuri symbolized the poetic victim of historical events. In

making/doing history one might say was victimizing I my poetic self Yuri

Zhivago was a victim of the Russian Revolution and civil war As a poet

he stood for that part of me that was a maker of art. In fact, I produced

a typescript of my university poetry at that time to which I signed the

name Yuri rather than George because I so identified art and the

romantic with the name Yuri. Later on, I produced a series of woodcuts

which I also signed Yuri. Obviously my Slavic name continued to reside

underneath the Anglo one because it represented the importance of

art over history But it was not a public identity It was a mostly hidden,

personal, and private one. I never became an artist or a poet of stature.

Publicly I became associated with politics, ideology and history with

being a George.

Different languages were creating different identities for me that

I had to reconcile in some kind of unity some kind of singular truth

about my self This fractured truth had resulted in a problematic relation-

ship to language itself Language seemed to stand in the way of creating

a single self an authentic self The naming process that I had experienced

seemed to be one of linguistic conflict, a conflict that mitigated the

creation of a unified self I gave up my historical studies. First, surrepti-

tiously when I audited courses in literature, theology and psychology

while in graduate school, and then, after my graduate degree, I turned

to philosophy Here I thought I had found a language that would describe

the relationship of self to the world.

But I did not stay with philosophy After writing the original poesis

text as an MA thesis, I went on a journey in the real world, trying to

make history as my George self was wont to do. I failed, and a quarter
of a century later I re-emerged as a historian, only to be creatively

worn out by five years of research and writing a two-volume literary

history of my adopted home — Alberta. In order to regain my Yuri self,

I returned to philosophy Philosophical texts existed for me as acts of

creativity —of which my Yuri self had been starved.

I had published a book of poetry in 1996, but poetry as an art form

did not have the depth of engagement with language that I sought. My
poems expressed momentary insights in a few carefully constructed

short lines. But the insights were of that event or moment. The poem,

as an art form, could not capture the deepen more profound, and
unsettling reality of language as a vessel in which I was trapped, and from
which I was seeking release. I craved something more fundamentally
engaging with language than poetry. Returning to my poesis experience,

and the text describing it, was the path that opened up. Poesis was
a term used by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (ah, the

forgotten Georg side of my existence) to explain a certain human stance

in the world, a way of being in the world that allowed one to experience

more deeply one's own reality and the surrounding reality.

My philosophy thesis was a work of creative philosophy (no foot-

notes, no authorities) inspired by my study of Heidegger and by poesis.

Although it was informed by Heideggerian terminology and sentiment,

the text of the thesis
— "Metaphor and Interpretation" — ^was my own.
It languished in a drawer for twenty-eight years because I had never

become a philosopher or teacher of philosophy I had no use for it.

Because of its academic unorthodoxy it represented my Yuri self As

a work of creative philosophy it existed in my memory primarily as a

symbol of my rebellion against my historical training. From time to time,

I had a nagging feeling that I wanted to do something public with it

because it still spoke to me: saying that it was from me, and a part of

me. During those twenty-eight years. I continued to read continental

philosophy It was not until my five-year dance with historical writing

was over in 2000 that I turned to "Metaphor and Interpretation" as a

respite from, what I termed pejoratively the world of factoids.

My writerly work as an historian had involved the linguistic construe-
tion of the past using words as a substitute for reality. The constructed

chapters of the two volumes of Alberta's literary history becanne a

scaffolding that allowed the reader to climb through time into each

writer's overview (a life told in a paragraph; a book summarized in a

sentence or a couple of adjectives). In the end, I realized that the history

I had written rested on the creation of an elegant metaphor The

metaphor gave the book its structured meaning. In spite of the wall of

facts I had constructed, was dealing with nothing more than metaphor
I

and interpretation, the title of my philosophy thesis. How ironic that my

George side and my Yuri side were so intertwined.

I was profoundly interested in meaning, how it was created and

how it lived in us but was not interested
I in it as constructed meanings/

truths/metaphors of history which I had just finished creating. What

meaning mattered (what was meaningful about meaning) to me was
philosophically/poetically constructed meaning which was creative,

energetic, and relevant to the individual rather than the historical meaning
presented in a history text. In 2000, I made a leap from history into

poetic philosophy much as I had made the same leap thirty years

earlierTo move from my public persona (George) to my other persona

(Yuri) meant a paradoxical move from my present into my past because

the text I was going to use was now history had to I translate my own
words from the English text of long ago, formed in a language that no

longer resonated in intellectual culture, to a new English text, which

spoke in a contemporary idiom and took into account the philosophical

developments of the past thirty years — ^the monstrously ovenA'helming

intellectual phenomena collectively known as postmodernism.

How does one translate oneself? What happens to one's old words?
How are they and the new ones to be judged? this exercise in trans- Is

lation no more than putting on a new verbal suit, an idiomatic wig, the

latest in intellectual eye-patches and, presto, one is someone else and

one's text is now 'Cool'. Or, is it a frightening walk on a tightrope where
one struggles to balance the forces of the past, the present, and the
future as they yank at one's authenticity? When a writer translates
himself what is he doing with the new words? A remake? A rewrite? A
rehash? A repackaging? Euphemisms like "new edition" or"major revision"
are genuinely superficial. I have experienced the creation of this text as

a trek from interiority into exteriority My act of translation turned nne

into an archaeologist of my intellectual self I dig; I find an old text that

has sat on a bookshelf for decades; I then recreate the text for others

to understand in such a way as to rewrite my old self into a new self,

its modernism made postmodernist. After thirty years, the original text

becomes other to me. It is exterior like my thinking created long ago,

when was someone else.When

I I turn to the old text, my role is reversed.

I am no longer the writer of it but its reader; I was the addressor and
now am I the addressee. My turning to the old text and creating a re-

statement is, in the words of Lyotard,"the testimony of a fracture.'"*

By approaching the original text, I am turned around — ^to the past,

to the poetically philosophical, to being a reader as much as a writer to

the private rather than the public. I am obliged to this first text because

I have returned to it, embraced it because I was unable to begin anew

without it. My thirty-year forgetting of it has turned into a process of

bringing it back from memory and memorialization, turning what was

dead into the living. So bring the words and the experience out of the
I

past. Removing the text from its hiding place, I make it a presence for

me. It is no longer other to me but becomes part of my present self

This present self addresses my former self and seeks to make the former

self and its language speak for me now. I want it to represent me as I

currently am, not as I was. For example, the Heidegger that the world

knew before his death in 1976 is not the Heidegger the world knows

today "Metaphor and Interpretation" knew only the pre-1976 Heidegger

It also did not know the bulk of postmodernist thinking produced by

Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, etc. that began to be widely known and

translated into English after 1980.

So Poetics of Naming filled up with this necessary sense of afierness.

The "post" nature of the new text was part of its obligatory reality

of its being beholden to. Sometimes I imagine that the original text

summoned me, that it called out to be put into a new form and that

form demanded publication. Just as I stood both before and after the

original text I now stand before and after the new text with this difference.
In the initial instance, there was poesis and its text. Now there is poesis,
followed by what is now the old text, followed by what is now the new
text. There is a double intermediary, a double translation occurring.

Where there was once only a single donninant influence, there are now
nunnerous ones.The singularity of modernism has been replaced by the

multiplicity of the postmodern.

What am I doing to my previous self when I self-consciously translate

that self into a contemporary persona? The implications of the act of

rewriting a long-hidden text are complicated and disturbing to our sense

of what language and meaning is supposed to be. Many authors refuse

to use their past unpublished writing in a new text because they feel

the attempt to link the self of the past with the self of the present is an

inauthentic camouflage of change and time. How long do we stand

behind our words? What meaning do they carry for us decades and

many books later? What is the point of mining a past creation and using

it as raw material for a new one? Is it a sign of literary impotence? Is it

an admission that one may have nothing or little new to say and so

must dig up the past and offer it as an example of contemporary

discourse? Bringing my old manuscript to light as a rewritten text

results in a new shadow created by the untruth of language.

A book that blends old words with new words suggests continuity

between the past and the present, just as the continuity of a person's

name overtime suggests a unified self for that person. The continuity

suggested by my father when he gave me my grandfather's name is the

same continuity that characterizes the creation of this text. What seem
simple and obvious acts of naming and rewriting become tainted and

confused as soon as one digs into the motivation and history behind

the choice of name or the reasons for rewriting. When the reader

grasps for the continuity between this text and the earlier one that he
or she will never see or know, the reader is mirroring the tortured

continuity between my grandfather and myself, a continuity I will never

understand, in spite of everything that I may say about it Because my

father does not speak for himself in this text, he is the absence that

makes my truth an untruth. The reader only hears me and what want I

to say

All naming is a metaphor of continuity The naming of a baby after a

relative. The naming of a book after it is written. The secret naming we
carry within us. When one asks what is the continuity between a long-

deceased Yuri-named school teacher and principal in Ukraine and his

Yuri-named Western Canadian writer and university teacher grandson,

any personal truth that has been formed between them is marked by
the silences of those who cannot or do not or are not allowed to

speak. Likewise, asking about the resonances of continuity between a

momentarily "German" Georg and German intellectual history of which

I was never a part, ends in murkiness and tenuous speculation. Surely

the continuity exists, but in strange and convoluted ways where meaning
and identity are constructs of a searching psyche. When we ask such

questions and others like them, do not personal subjectivity and

historical circumstances overpower the objectivity of philosophical

language and its claim to universal truth? The unknowing in knowing

requires creative engagement.

That others translated my name has made translation and naming

the central problem of my existence. Being moved physically and culturally

between worlds and being forced to live in a multicultural and multi-

lingual way has meant that the mysterious bridges of continuity created
by translation were the places I got stuck. The very bridge my father

wanted to build between generations as a sign of familial piety unity

and continuity became, for me, because of the circumstances of history

a place of impasse. I felt like a person standing perpetually on a steel

bridge spanning a wide river that created a border between two worlds.
From one side I could hear one name being called out to me; from the

other side another name, while echoes of a third came from the water

underneath. Unable to go one way or the other in response to the

calling, I was stuck on the bridge of translation responding neither to

the land ofYuri, nor to the land of George, nor to the flowing water of

Georg, trying to be both, neither; or none. So in reworking an old private

Yuri text into a new George book that vaguely echoes the philosophy

of a German thinker meant I was translating, acting as the historian of

my own creativity In the original text, I presented myself as making a

statement of philosophy albeit a rebellious one. In this current text, I

am representing myself in a similar light, which means I am hiding my

essential role as historian of my own text (any sense of the history of

this writing appears only in the preface and introduction).

Philosophers generally create their edifices on the foundations of

previous philosophers. In this case, I ann re-interpreting my own foundation,

whose foundations themselves (the foundations of the foundation) were
only implicit in "Metaphor and Interpretation" but have become explicit

in the re-writing. In going back I have found myself going fon/vard, which

is typically postmodern, just as much of the going fon/vard of this text is

a return. I am myself when I am translating myself/my words, but, in-

stead of being a writer who translated the experience of languagelessness

into words, I am a translator of my previous translation of that experi-

ence. Understanding what I had written long ago and creating new
meaning from these past words is a poetic act. It has to be because a text

that is anterior to this text has an interior that I cannot enter When I

remove the surfaces of that earlier text and cut away at its inner mean-
ing, I destroy it I use bits of it to build something new so that the

meaning it once had is gone. As I write the new, I erase the old, leaving

only hollow footprints.

In preparing this translation of my own writing, I have found that

the interplay of text and names involved the phenomenon of variation

as well as the phenomenon of fracture that underlies every continuity

The name Yuri has its variations. There isYurko (Georgio) andYurchik

(Georgie), which I continue to be called from time to time by my

Ukrainian relations. The variations reflect class, age, and familial status.

From childhood I remember that one variation of my English name,

George, had a negative connotation for me. Georgie Porgie was the

name that haunted me in the schoolyard. "Georgie Porgie, puddin' and

pie, kissed the girls and made them cry," was the chant that rang in

my ears. But this name-calling was balanced by the soaring image of

St George the dragon-slayer, encouraged by my mother St George
redeemed Georgie Porgie and of course my consciousness clung to

St George as an identity while Georgie Porgie disappeared into the

not-so-deep recesses of childhood memory an image to be repressed.

Then there was my middle name, Roman, pronounced in Ukrainian

as roh-mawn. It was never changed but seldom used except in official

 —

documents like a driver's licence and citizenship papers. And Ronnan I

was to be. I was born into one Catholic religious rite and raised in two
the first was originally termed "Greek Catholic" and then renamed
"Ukrainian Catholic," and the second was that of the Roman Catholic

Church, which educated me and taught me pre- Vatican Two Latin. The

Old Slavonic of my childhood was thus Romanized. I returned to my

Roman identity by creating a working title for this manuscript when it

was still mostly unwritten: In Nomine/In the Name, a reflection of my

linguistic and religious multiplicity /n nomine carries resonances for those

schooled in Roman Catholic Latin. It is an invocation leading to bene-

diction. It also carries resonances forthe philosophical tradition because

of its reference to a medieval school of philosophy The unusual title

also expresses postmodernist erasures relating to the act of translation.

But this working title, my original naming of this text, like the original

naming ofYuri, did not last long. It was translated into something else.

It became a new name, but the original working title demanded to

remain like "Georg" has remained in George. It remains in the text

through the use of Latin terms.

Latin, as a so-called dead language that had once lived for me in

religious ritual, provides me with the comforting pleasure of its mystery

My attachment to Latin found its mirror in my father-in-law, a professor

of Classics. For her doctoral dissertation my mother-in-law had translated

a major medieval crusader text from Latin into English. Their daughter

whom I married, had studied some Latin as I had. And when our son
refused to study Latin in the only public high school in our city that

offered it, I felt that a terrible symbolic break had occurred, a rupture with

the past and a new beginning that did not belong in any way to me.

In middle age I was captivated by a Latin inscription experienced in

the neo-classical garden created by the visual poet, Ian Hamilton Findlay

at Stonypath in Perthshire, Scotland. At the entrance to his property he

had placed a large granite stone carved with a Latin saying from Virgil

and translated by him. When I began my own poem garden on an

island in Western Canada inspired by Findlay's work, the Roman gods

and myths were present as well. Could it be that the name Roman is

the elusive synthesis, the unifier of myself the connection between

cultures, languages, and identities? The quest for unity in diversity is

reflected in that other nanne for my religious roots, which is the term

"Uniates" (those united with Rome), which is the Orthodox name for

the Ukrainian Catholic Church.The minority other is bonded or united

to a majority yet remains distinct.

Name.Translation. Symbol. Sign. Interpretation.The naming experience

of my life is the origin of this text though it was not in any way an origin of

the previous text completed three decades ago. It is my angst over

naming that has interceded itself between poesis and the language of the
originating text to give this text its propellant energy Not only was
the original title of the thesis jettisoned, so was the In Nomine working
title. The re-naming of the manuscript fits with my own experience of

being re-named, of naming being about fitting in a context. A new logic

replaced the old one, which was in turn replaced. In Nonnine (In the

Name) comes from the Christian Latin invocation, "In the name of

the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.... "The sense of invocation

that the title implied reflected my desire to invoke the lost experience

of poesis. An invocation suggests a certain helplessness and a prayerful

stance. Since I had to find my own truth in a maze of inherited and

imposed languages, I had to attack language in its conventionality

and break it up so that a space for new meaning could exist. I had to
do my own naming by occupying the space between languages, by

speaking translation.

The first translation I did as the author/translator/author was the

translation of the title of my thesis "Metaphor and Interpretation"

into In Nomine/In the Name. Since I am now, which I wasn't then, self-

consciously stuck on the bridge of translation, it is fitting that at the end

of the writing of this new text, even more titles appeared. One can

symbolize this dialectically as "Metaphor and Interpretation" meeting its

antithesis in In Nomine/In the Name, and synthesizing into a third title

Poesis: The Language of Being. Poesis:The Language of Being maintained

the duality of In Nomine/In the Name in its title, as well as the duality in

the thesis title. The need to translate, and so to escape, however

momentarily the tyranny of a single language exists in each of the titles.

To translate is to enter the mystery of meaning. What is retained

and what is lost when translating the original title of the founding text

into first one title and then another? There is no direct equivalence

(literal translation) between "Metaphor and Interpretation" and In Nomine/

In the Name, or between In Nomine/ In the Name and Poes/s.The Language

of Being, except that in postmodernisnn all is possible when a translation

takes into account the original intent that was only subsequently
revealed. But if this introduction had not been present in this text, the

process of naming the book and the history of that nanning would have

never been revealed.The postmodernist impulse embraces a fuller under-

standing of one's own life through linguistic wordplay The revelation of a text

buried within the text may seem to some an irrelevant reminder of as

inconsequential a matter as re-titling or renaming.The quality of the

end result is what matters, many would say But the reader who reads the

preface and the introduction, learns of this book's personal antecedents

and, by doing so, becomes as troubled as the author about what has

been done.
Finally the title Poesis seemed to make the most sense to me.

However, a philosopher friend of mine, who had never read the manu-

script but who had listened to me describe it, suggested a new title for

a work resting uneasily on a mystical experience. She said that I ought

to drop any philosophical pretense and instead title the book The Poetics

of Naming: A /Vletaphysical Journey. Such a title would come closer to

the poetic nature of the text and its inherent creativity as well as its

mystical roots. With this title I would be free of having to meet the
requirements of academic orthodoxy and so speak with a liberated

voice. I agreed, marvelling at how the tortured agonizing over a title

could be so easily resolved by someone who had never read the text

but had listened to it being described. It was a triumph for orality over

literacy Eventually I dropped the subtitle because I feared that some

might think it was associated with "new age" thinking. But the philosopher
had done one very important thing. As a stranger to my obsessions

she was able to liberate the title, lessening its duality moderating its

entrapment in translation, and thus provide a greater sense of unity The

preposition "of" made all the difference, its connotations rich with

implication about the meaning of the title and its history

 The second act of translation this text involves is the translation of

a thesis into a text that is a book. Of course, this happens often as the

author erases the formulation required for dissertation connmittees

and replaces it with the form preferred by academic publishers. This

ordinary event is not so ordinary when three decades separate the

writing of the thesis from the writing of the book. The author is no
longer the same person.The text no long carries the same urgency and
excitement. The new text may retain some of its previous values but

they are transformed and expressed in a different way In translating a

youthful graduate school self into a middle-aged professorial writerly

self, I am using the same genetic material but it has grey-haired into a

time-evolved sense of personhood.What has happened by adding three

decades of life and language? When the play of postmodernism washed

over the polemical certainty of the modernist text, was the resulting

hybrid an improvement? To the reader who will never see the first text,

this is a mute question, but to the author it is important: Which work of

art is better? The obvious retort is that the latest is better because that

is what has been published, If the first was "better," the author would

have chosen to have it published instead. But for me that question of

"better" concerns which text is more true to the poesis experience.

Publishing this version and not the earlier one does not mean that I

have made a definitive decision. It only means that I judged that the

earlier version could not fly in today's intellectual culture. Its language

called first for a translation into a more contemporary idiom.

Every time I faced a sentence in the old text I had to translate it for

the self that I am now by searching within memory and within the text

for clues to its meaning, trying to remind myself of its original intent.

Correctly judging the current validity of my earlier words became

paramount as I self-translated. The present was tearing up the past,

remoulding it, updating itThe consequence of that action was a rejection/

acceptance syndrome that permeated each sentence. I would go into

my more recent philosophical reading (and notebooks) to augment

and change, to supposedly deepen, believing that time and age and

reading improved the once energetic and youthful words that now
seemed old-fashioned.
 The best way to understand the change between the old text and

the new text is to tell you about the cover —the one that bookbinders

used to put on hard copies of theses. In my case, the thesis has a

nnarbled green cover reminiscent of a ledger Inside the front cover is

a small sticker with the book binder's name, address, and its motto "the
highest level of craftsmanship" playing on its name, "High Level Book
Bindery Ltd.," and the double entendre of high quality and the colloquial

name for a bridge in Edmonton, near which the book binder was
located. Now know the bridge metaphor
I is a haunting one because of
its current association for me as a metaphor for translation. The ledger

cover graced a few copies. It had only to look serious and be serviceable.

In comparison, the colour cover of a trade book with its contemporary

market eye appeal and all the information on the copyright page

bespeaking ownership and corporate legitimacy is a radically different

object. The plain and unadorned says private; the graphically and typo-

graphically designed says public.The spirit of the private and the personal

that underlies the public text of this book is not just an accident of

history It is a statement about the nature of text and the use of language
in the public domain. Underlying all the constructed reality of a narrative

held tightly and neatly within two, completely different covers is the

chaos underlying a textual persona.The translation of the private thesis

into a public book is a chaotic balancing act on the trestle of a railway

bridge along which the translator walks. As author and translator I feel

that I am going back and forth, up and down between the past and the

present, carrying material from the present to the past and from the

past to the present, creating something that is neither and wanting each

rail to be the same.

Struggling with the problem of naming and identity and playing

with the issues of continuity and variation in translation, I have to ask:

Is this a George text (historical) or a Yuri text (poetic) or a Georg text

(philosophical) or all three, whatever that might mean? And is the replaced

Latin title of /n Nomine something that haunts the present title, whisper-

ing to me that there is yet another level of naming that I have rejected

and left out? Is it the Roman-tic in me that represents the ultimate

interpretation of this text? Is the Roman name, the one in the middle,
my ultimate interpretation of language as translating metaphor — a bridge

that holds two opposites together and on which this text sees itself

standing and, perhaps, falling down? After all the Roman is both outside

of me and deeply inside.

Yuri/Georg/George Roman Melnyk

lot on naming metaphor the unum of the present in /toe

We think in words and words nnake us think. Human culture guides

each of us through language and ideas in our interaction with the world.

As a historical collectivity, human society may be the originator and

inheritor of languages that express humanity's engagement with the

world, but each one of us experiences human culture individually We
use, misuse, and create words. We express and transform language and

ideas in everything from swearing to singing. Our personality flows in

all we name. We possess language and are possessed by it.

In naming, whether everyday usage or idiosyncratic messaging, we

express both the power of the past and the importance of our present

activity of the collective inheritance of a culture and our desire to

express ourselves both conventionally and radically Language is our

belonging with others and with ourselves. In naming, we are free to

choose to be the same as others in our world or to be differentThrough

our language we blend and stick out, assert or become invisible.

Often we name ourselves in ways that are opposed to the names

others give us. A name is a description with historical connotations,

personal meanings, and cultural resonances drawn from our conscious

environment but reflective of our subconscious selves. Nicknames

result from a socially designated form of re-naming that breaks through
inherited naming and formality Self-generated nicknames represent
another identity that we want or that we, or others, feel we have within

us. It projects some other self or selves that we desire to express in a

name. The nickname, because it is not inherited but a reflection of

personal attributes, is more meaningful as an identity than an official

conventional name.

What does this discussion of nicknaming have to do with metaphor?

A nickname is an obvious metaphor for the self an attempt to articulate

a truth about oneself that is meaningful to that self Because naming is

the use of language to express meaning, we live in our naming and the

meaning we find in it. A name is a metaphor for the self

Language is a combination of metaphor interpretation, and naming.

Personal names, how they come into being and how we relate to them,

express all the dimensions and elements of language because they are

metaphors for us, interpretations of who we are, in our culture(s). In

personal names reside the totality of ourselves, our realities, the universes

we inhabit both physically and psychically Language contains both the

conventional power of culture and its collective norms, and the power

of the self to articulate creativity imagination, history, personality:

everything that moves us in life, from the simplest of social interactions

to the deepest personal meditations.

The concept of naming applies to more than personal names and

their implications and resonances. It applies to every word in a language.

Every word is a naming. Two American philosophers, George Lakoff

and Mark Johnson, view our conceptual system as "largely metaphorical,"

whose "truth is always relative to a conceptual system that is defined

in large part by metaphor"^ Truth and metaphor converge when we

"understand one kind of thing in terms of another kind ofthing."^
Lakoff and Johnson's basic definition of metaphor creates an equivalence
between words that represent "things" that are meaningful to us.

While not denying their views, this text does not approach metaphor

through equivalence or translated substitution. Instead, it seeks to

understand the metaphoric structure of reality by stepping outside of

language itself

When we speak of language we are speaking about truth, a word

that claims a relationship between consciousness and reality. When we
say language is metaphoric, we are claiming that truth is a metaphor
and we are privileging the concept of metaphor by equating it with

language or truth. If the ultimate or absolute meaning of language is

 —

metaphoric, then the Western philosophical tradition's claim to

"absolute and unconditional truths" is nothing but a metaphor.'' In the

philosophical tradition of the West, metaphor has been viewed as a

tool of rhetoric, a comparative exercise in which language creates

an equation that suggests an associational truth in the mind of the

creator For this tradition, metaphor is an ornament upon the trees of

propositional discourse.^

Lakoff and Johnson consider the metaphoric structure of language

as the fundamental way "for creating new meanings and new realities in

our lives."' We think metaphorically, especially in the case of personal

naming, where names have certain cultural associations or attributes.

Associating language with personal meaning lifts metaphor beyond being

simply a rhetorical or literary tool with overtones of sophistry or verbal

trickery to a level in which the comparative and equative power of

metaphor becomes the basis on which we live our lives. The truths we
live by are the metaphors we live by
Those who view metaphor as too limited or misleading a basis for

truth and meaning in a person's life are reacting to its linguistic usage

and their own desire to grasp reality beyond language. Warnings about
the untruthfulness of metaphor are real. The untruthfulness of metaphor
does not stand in opposition to something that is all-truthful, rather it

stands in a unity in which both truth and untruth are made one reality

through language. Martin Heidegger states that "un-truth proper [the

concealment of beings] is present in every revelation" i.e., in every truth. '°

The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur who has developed a powerful

theory of hermeneutics, writes that "Myth is believed poetry Myth and

poetry are a metaphor of two kinds."" Linking language as mythic story

and truth as poetry and metaphor Ricoeur makes metaphor and poetry

central to language. While metaphor is usually treated as a literary device

among many Ricoeur goes beyond this literary specificity He shows

that myth, poetry and metaphor are fundamentals of language. The
American thinker Norman O. Brown went even further when he wrote,
"Everything is only a metaphor; there is only poetry"'-'- Four words

myth, poetry metaphor, and belief — are wrapped together in this

understanding of truth. In Ricoeur's universe, meaning as myth or story

or poetry has a metaphoric structure. In Brown's world, "Reality is nothing

other than a metaphor which is taken literally and believed in..."'^

The nnetaphors we live by are ordinarily hidden fronn us, which is

why their un-ravelling beconnes ennotive.This hidden quality which

psychology has long spoken of in ternns of our consciousness, has also

been discussed in philosophy Heidegger often wrote that the hidden

quality in truth is a basic structure of the human world. "The un-truth

is most proper to the essence of truth," he writes.''' In this way all

discourse, all meaning involves a process of concealment. This hidden-

ness seems to be necessary for us. For example, the re-naming that I

discussed in the Introduction meant that names were erased but

incompletely, returning from time to time. A name was dis-placed when

it was re-placed because names belong to a certain place and are for

that place. Names that do not belong seem out of place, wrong. When

they linger on in a new place their presence is problematic. That is why

immigrants often hide their original names. If they don't, they face diffi-

cult identities based on the unfamiliar Because naming is metaphoric, a

hiddenness pervades all naming, even the original naming, which is a

naming after another

The simplifying myth structure of consciousness creates an attachment

to the hidden part of truth that is not present. As soon as a myth is

exposed (it need only be an image or concept of someone that we

have), we feel a certain emptiness that requires filling. We seek a new
understanding to replace it. One is no longer "this," one is now "that"
rather than nothing. When some form of meaning is surrendered, lost

or disappears, it cannot leave a void. Even when we say "I don't know" or
"I have no idea," we are responding to a question that makes sense and

so we already grasp it. That meaning frames the possibility of answer

Without the mythic or metaphoric hiding of naming, which pushes away

or represses total understanding, we would be immobilized, trapped in

a bottomless reflection.

In an essay titled "Plato's Doctrine ofTruth," Heidegger described

truth as a struggle that wrestles something out of hiddenness.'^ His

emphasis on struggle, on energy and battle and effort, removes truth

from the rationality of theory to an existential meaning.This movement
away from the distinct opposites implied in truth and untruth into a

blended reality is an experiential one. One is not imposing an easily

graspable structure on reality One is engaged with it in a life and death

struggle. Heidegger stated this profoundly but simply as being "only on

the way."'^ One is in motion, one is passing, one is going, one is alive

with the untruth of truth as long as one lives.

Coming to a realization that we are environed in the untruth of our

interactions with the world through inescapable webs of meaning can

be disturbing and discomforting. In the end, we never fully accept this

view because it makes too much of myth as untruth, as unreal, and

ignores its truthfulness. Since all truth is a truthful untruth we live with

its concealment. The Truth aboutTruth is the title of a book about post-

modernism and how the web of thinking about truth has become itself

a grand narrative like other grand metanarratives about the direction

of history''' Postmodernism is just the latest attempt at finding out the

truth about truth because truth is always hidden from us and requires

an endless process of revelation about the failings of past truths and

past revelations. In exposing the falseness of past truths, we lay the

groundwork for articulating a new truth that awaits a future exposure

for its deceit.The postmodernist desire to show how reality is always a

constructed reality (an ideology), and how its deconstruction leads only

to a new construction has been applied in many arenas. Postmodernism,

like any ideology, sometimes has an activist purpose but it is usually

concerned with social or literary deconstruction of culturally determined

truths. Heidegger's existential presentation of truth as a struggle

approximates the historical process in which truth is constantly being

turned into untruth, then truth and untruth again.

This text contains a struggle. Its struggle with truth is an existential

one that deconstructs language and reconstructs it in such a way as

to open the reader to the possibility not of another theory of truth,

but of an experience of truth that lays bare the constructed metaphor

of all our realities. This text shows that there is escape from the walls of

language, but it is a fleeting escape.

Reality speaks to us through language. Language is poetic and

the poetic is metaphohc. These two declarative sentences, ending in the

 —

equation of metaphor and reality, are not an exercise in logic. It is a

revelation of equation itself of metaphor as it exists in everything we

say Saying "reality speaks" is a metaphor Saying "language is poetic" is

a metaphor Saying "saying is a metaphor" is a metaphor This ends up

sounding like a circular game, which it is and one that is disillusioning

and tiresome. Experiencing language as circular is tiresome because we

want language to take us somewhere and not have us go round in

circles. We want it to take us to something that is beyond language

the meaning hidden in the objective world.

A different point of departure (beginning) for experiencing the real as

metaphor lies in my experience of what is traditionally conceived of

as poetry. When I was writing poetry I was experiencing reality intensely

The writing of poetry gave reality a new face. In creating poetry I found

metaphors that helped me surpass my ordinary experience of that

reality and make it special. The poetic moment was an uncommon or

unusual interaction between my consciousness and reality Its expression

in the form of poetry hinted that everything could have its poetic aspect,

however infrequent. In fact, the very lack of its frequency made poetry
a stance of the poetic moment.
The poetic moment hints at new realities that metaphors seek to
express. It suggests a breakthrough that is unsettling when compared
to the comfort zone of daily human limits.The poetic moment reveals

that reality is most "at home" for us when it has boundaries that we
accept. That which is without boundaries, beyond or outside borders

or limits dissolves the order in the ordinary To live outside of order

without any sense of boundary is to live in the limitless, which ordinary

experience does not inhabit.The poetic moment offers a glimpse of

a world beyond boundary It is a window that points to a world that

may not be framed by the linguistic limits of language as we ordinarily

experience them. The unordinariness of the poetic moment points

to the extraordinariness of the poesis experience, in which language

disappears completely

Poesis involves a rapture that takes us to another place or sphere of

existence.The Latin root of rapture is raptus, to be seized and transported.

It may be more than coincidental that the translation of metaphor (the
Greek root is simply metaphora) is transposition or translation. In both

rapture and nnetaphor there is the sense of nnovement from one sphere

to the other When we are transported outside of metaphor, we sense

its power in our lives because we become external to it. It becomes

a visible environment rather than the invisible one that it normally is.

Rapture is an abnormality that results in a new appreciation of the

non-rapturing norm.

When we think of the ordinary as limit, boundary and border

we are thinking of a line that moves with us in a circle. We are circum-
scribed by this horizon of limit.The horizon or line or border of language

is a circle that surrounds our consciousness of the real. Within it we

exist in the ordinariness of our everyday lives, comforted by the
universe of meaning that it gives us. Language makes all that surrounds

us real, allowing us to operate in the world with a degree of success.

The circle of language could be termed circumlocution or speaking

circularly We are going round and round within the meanings created

by language and that circumference of meanings makes us feel that

we inhabit commonality When I was student, I was taught the value

of the "balanced" or "moderate (medium)" life. Such a life requires

staying in the middle of the circle and not coming too close to the

edge. That circle was presented as a line with the middle position that

was good and extreme ends which were bad. Of course, it was difficult

to find moderation in all things, to be unemotional or not to stand too

close to the edge of things. As a young person, was tempted to I slip off

the edge.

This flat-earth view of limits and boundaries fits well with the age-

old social morality that always seeks the elusive paradise of the happy

medium. Those who come too close to the edge, or stray near the

boundary of reality (the furthest reaches), will surely perish physically

or mentally Humankind's place was in the middle around which the

world revolved. It was not until Soren Kierkegaard in the nineteenth

century called for "a leap of faith" into the abyss, that "abyss" took on a

positive overtone. It was no longer a kind of hell but rather the place

in which the ordinary could be saved from its ordinariness by the

extraordinary The invisibility that exists beyond the visibility created by

language is not a happy nnedium, just as Kierkegaard's abyss was not the

realm of happiness because happiness is equated with the meaning

(mean or middleness) that language creates for us. Going into the abyss

beyond the meaning of language, beyond that metaphoric structure of

reality in whose matrix we live means going into a non-land where we
were not meant to go.

Experiencing something beyond language (a languageless reality)

cannot be imagined as a pleasant experience. The world beyond the

language that creates our worldview is a world beyond viewing. A

world beyond language, beyond the metaphors of meaning, beyond

the horizon line we always have before us, shrinks the distance between

consciousness and reality, between the self and the world that seems to be

outside the self. What is curious about the language of non-language

is that it is first and foremost language. As soon as we enter language we

withdraw from going over the edge and return to the normative, to the

mean of the middle. It is in the comfort of language that meaning resides.

To express non-language through is means that the non becomes an

is — anti-language is still language. The mean in meaning is still with us.

We are back to the medium idea of the "happy medium" or the fulfilling

middle or centre. We are back in the realm of language, which is our

medium, mediating between the self and the world.This text speaks for

both sides —the non and the — but the speaking or the
is in writing it

turns first the non an —and then the

into is is into a non. In mediating,

language turns the opposites of language and non-language into each

other Metaphor as the realm of the middle is the realm of what is

and what is not, of truth and untruth, of mediation between itself,

us, and whatever is beyond.

Poesis is an enraptured embracing of the world that reveals language

as poetic form. Poesis is a word that in its Greek foreignness points

to an activity, a state of being rather than a state of language, which

suggests that there is a languageless way of being and that this way of
being, the way of poesis, is possible. Poesis takes us out of the picture

(b/7d) of the worldview, de-frames us with its ecstatic (standing-out-

side) power and re-places the visionary framing of the eye with a 360

degree circumference of sight. In poesis one can experience the power

of boundary more fully than in ordinary visioning.The languagelessness

that poesis carries is an encompassing that is more total than the com-

partmentalized universe we usually inhabit with linguistic vision, but it is

not totality as such.

Heidegger has been instrumental in revealing the possibility of

poesis because of his view of language. In a famous line he says,

"language is the house of being in which the human being ek-sists by

dwelling."'^ Our in-dwelling or being housed by language presents a

covering or enclosure. We are surrounded and protected by language.

It is our home. Language as our home is "the clearing-concealing

advent of being itself."'"' According to Heideggen language is the house

that we rent from being (reality). Language is the space that allows the

light of a clearing as well as the concealment of a shelterThe window

of a shelter lets light into the sheltering darkness and so reveals the

darkness for what it is

— ^the absence of light, Language holds this contrast

and we ek-sist in that contrast. But what if we were to step outside the

house created by language? What then?

Heidegger, in his visionary "Letter on Humanism," overthrows

the homely image or metaphor by claiming that human beings are

"homeless" because they think only about beings and not being.^°We

have turned language into the house of beings and not being. One
might think that becoming homeless was a way of touching being since

the "home" that language provides keeps us in touch only with beings.

By standing outside the enclosure of language, we might experience

being. But Heidegger's homelessness is a forgetting of being that is the

human condition and not some sort of aberration.The postmodernists

see truth as a creation of language and therefore a construct in which

we are housed. Heidegger, however sees truth as a duality an enclosing

and therefore an enclosure and also a disclosing or a disclosure.

Enclosing creates disclosure and disclosure creates enclosure. This

"in" and "out" or "from" explanation produces an enigmatic sense of

truth and language. When this text thinks poesis, it thinks it as both

the home and homelessness of language as metaphor

Heidegger used the contrast between being and beings to put

foPA'ard the idea of being as the no-thing of beings because beings are
things. Beings have their opposite nothing within thenn."' It is this

internal oppositeness that allows a being's opposite to be thought.The

result is that in Heidegger's world, hunnan being is also a non-being as

well. By dwelling in non-beingsness, which is being, one dwells in the

forgetfulness of truth. It is only through the forgetfulness of truth that

being is revealed as enclosing us. By becoming cognizant of our forget-

fulness, which is the forgetting of being by language, we are open to the

being beyond beings.

There is a suggestion of chaos here, a chaos produced by the

dialectical struggle between idea and reality word and deed, language
and consciousness.That chaos is not a totality but a nnoment in which

the interplay of home and homelessness is experienced. One cannot

look at languagelessness except as a text (the perspective of the world-

view); one must enter it alone, bring one's self into the space it occupies

rather than viewing it from the safety and security of sheltering language.

Chaos as a struggle with order begets a sense of fear But Heidegger

believed that one does not choose chaos oneself One enters it only

when invited, when one is called or beckoned by it. The call is from
outside the orderly world. It is the contrasting perspective of the world

as viewed by an astronaut compared to the perspective of a farmer

overlooking a field.

We are thrown into the real through birth and upbringing.The real

is where meaning resides and it is our human community that creates

the home that is the world of meaning for us. Against our being-thrown-
in-the-world comes a persona, which adopts and synthesizes out of
itself a personal truth against the truth of the collective inheritance and

the specifics of familial, generational and other socially determined truths.

We learn to "read" ourselves, and to create a text out of our lives and

its events. We fill our lives with eventfulness (meaning) as we build an

interpretive story or myth of who and what we are, just as others,

those around us, build interpretations of or stories about us, be they

one word identities such as "doctor" or "mother" or complex, even

book-length statements. Our re-organization of the organization that

we were given and all the implications that chance events and inherited
erasures hand down to us, creates its own structure, a mix of the public

and the private that is our own meaning —the story of our life.

What does this creation of personal myth have to do with truth,

language, and existence? It contrasts and compares one's own truth with

inherited truths in the same way that Heidegger contrasted being and

beings. It plays language against itself so that a self may emerge that

is more full of its own truth. It reveals the careful construction of the

structure of our personal mythologies and it allows us to explore

the myths we live by and find out why we inhabit them. Even so, a

personal myth or story makes a universal statement about language

and being.The meaning that language constructs for us allows us to live

within the dominant truths of a society and a culture. But these truths

begin to unravel when faced with the truth of our personal experiences.

The result is our creation of personal myths that let us take hold of

reality in a personal way beyond the scripted stories that we inherit.

But that taking hold is not an escape from all scripting and all stories

and all mythology. It is simply a reworking of the given that takes into

account what we have experienced in our lives. Similarly, the most

we can expect from an experience as profound as languagelessness

(poesis) is the glimmerings of a new language, a breaking up of our old

vocabulary and its restatement in a new way This new language

becomes filled with personal truthfulness as we struggle to incorporate

a traumatic experience into the language we have been given.

Through the creation of personal myth, language becomes a healer

whereas the earlier inherited language displays the wounds of our
social existence. The healing is not a cure but a salve, which tends to

protect us from whatever ravages we incur by dwelling in the house

of a given language. The salve of language gives us confidence in our

understanding, however idiosyncratic or syncretic. It places us in the

world in a way that is of our own making. We move from being made
to creating ourselves. This creativity involves linking personal meanings

and blending the given into a new creative whole of myth, poetry and
metaphorThe new language that comes from within involves a stance

of attentiveness to the hiding/revealing/hiding play of language as found

in truth. It involves the emptiness of listening that comes to us only

when language dissipates. When an experience of the limitless breal<s

into limit, its breaking in or breaking out of limit is momentary. What is

broken is the boundary of the ordinary, the banal where we constantly

live. The experience calls to us to prepare a new container for the

ordinary It is a gift that needs to be placed in a package of our own

creation, and in that package, shown to the world.

The knowing that the experience of limitlessness gives is no-ing.

Language as knowing and as no-;ng turns everything, even limitlessness,

into an objective thing, a limited being. In creating the new language,

we create text where our experience is placed and framed. What

was profoundly direct in poesis becomes profoundly indirect in text.

Having stepped outside the mediative structure of language in the

experience of poesis, we step back into language enlightened about

the power of metaphor

Many years ago I wrote the aphorism "metaphor arises from

inbetween." Inbetweeness is expressed in "inter.'The /nter-mediariness

of language is its ;nter-pretativeness. Metaphor is inbetweeness. If we

were to remove metaphor from our consciousness and all the indirect-

ness and translation that it implies, then we would be languageless and

when we are languageless we are beingsless. When consciousness is

stripped of language, it experiences itself as the silence that is awe. My

diary records that after poesis I wrote "when you become one with
the universe you become meaningless." But unity with no-thingness is,

and as an "is" it can be named. What is outside of language can be

brought over to language through language, but it is a failed unity

Recreating languagelessness through language is a process of forgetting

and untruth that is the essence of language. If it is being that is outside

of beings, then being cannot be turned into a being, which is what all

language does. If a person can become conscious of being without

beings, he is taken out of the house of language and beings into

unlimited space. When Heidegger wrote about the window created by

the worldview, he indicated that a house with a window was always

present for us, that we were always aware of the shelter we were in
and how it framed our viewing. Poesis suggests that we can stand in the

doorway of that framing and feel the space outside.

A consciousness stripped of language feels the metaphoric covering

that language provides. With beings we are placed but in being we

are placeless.When we are placeless we are languageless.This text re-

places the placeless by giving it meaning through language. Being outside

the house of beings is what poesis offers. The meaninglessness, the
placelessness, and the languagelessness of poesis is not something we
inhabit. We inhabit the opposite.

Paul Ricoeur, in the first volume of Time and Narrative, writes that

"the world unfolded by every narrative is always a temporal world."^^

The temporality that is part of every text, including this one, refers

to the temporal horizon of all discourse, and when discourse seeks to

describe that which is a-temporal, and therefore not some thing,

language begins to break down as an assured means of description.

Heidegger's language, which sought to express ideas beyond the

meaning of words encrusted with conventionality has been described

as a "torturous labyrinth."" Some may find this text also torturous. But

the same critic of Heidegger's language admitted that it had "a poetic

undertone." ^''
The torturing of language that is called for by the poesis

experience is actually the struggle to remake language and give its words
new faces.

Ricoeur in referring to his earlier book, Rule of Metaphor, suggests

cautiously "that 'seeing-as' which sums up the power of metaphor could

be the revealer of a 'being-as' on the deepest ontological level."" The
"as-ness"or"about-ness"that metaphor has at its core makes reality an

"about-ness" for us. Language makes the real something, a being. Here

Ricoeur remains comfortably in the domain of epistemology,the knowl-

edge of knowing, or in the domain of a philosophy of linguistics, but

later on he points in another direction. He says that we create "full

ontological meaning..." when we"...metaphorize the verb 'to be' itself

and recognise in 'being-as' the correlate of 'seeing-as' in which is summed

up the work of metaphor."'^*' He points out that being and seeing are

strikingly similar that Heidegger's window on the world is very much

 the range of vision provided by any specific language. A direct conscious-

ness of beingsless being, which poesis offers, reveals the concealnnent

of being that results from linguistic nnediation.That concealment can

only be expressed in the concealing ways of the window of language.

Heidegger suggested a way out of this impasse by calling on
human beings to listen to being rather than to fall victim to the seeing

power of language. He espoused silence and attentiveness and waiting

for He wanted us to turn our backs on the worldview. But, to step

outside our window on the world (the linguistic house given by being)
is not an everyday occurrence. That is why poesis is called a mystical

experience in this text. To ground a philosophy of language and meaning

in a mystical experience is something a legitimate philosopher like

Heidegger would never do. As far as philosophy is concerned, this

text is illegitimate. As a bastard text of philosophy it struggles with

denunciatory convention and with the creative potential involved in

liberation from disciplinary norms. Although it cannot escape being a

window and a worldview, its re-expression and deconstruction of these

words takes it beyond the norm of ordinary language. This taking

beyond imitates the taking beyond of poesis. While poesis gives us an

experience on the threshold of being, we can only give it meaning

through the window that is seeing, which is language. Even though

we may in a mystical moment, feel we inhabit being as direct conscious-

E ness, we cannot express it or hold onto it unless we return to inhabiting

some "
2 being as a metaphor "For years now, Ricoeur writes bluntly, "I

° have maintained that which is interpreted in a text is the proposing of

z a world that might inhabit and

I into which might project
I my ownmost
power."" This projection of one's "ownmost power" occurs in this text

as the author's combining of the languagelessnes of poesis that he

"^
experienced, the language of the culture he was given, and the linguistic

rebellion that poesis fomented in him, calling him to a creative and

unorthodox use of that language. Ricoeur said that the power of a

poetic text comes "through its mythos" that "redescribes the world."^'^

Wording is always a de-scribing and re-scribing. The redescribing that

Heidegger has done in his texts and that Ricoeur holds to be the
essential task of poetic language is grounded in an experience beyond
thought. Poesis offers a way for us to step out of language as a house
of beings and return to language as Heidegger's house of being. This

"stepping out" is no more than that. Just as the nnystic is unable to be

united with his or her soul's objective (the touch of absence), so too

the experience of poesis cannot "unite" one with languagelessness.^^

One can feel the house of being but not live in it.

15
lor the unum of the present in /too poesis out/of poesis

One is unum. One is one is what the previous sentence means. One is

the English word for the Latin word, unum. Simple translation. A way
out of this simplicity/oneness and into the complexity of translation is

through a chant:

One is Unum.
Unum one is,

may it be.

Is one unum?
Is unum one?
Who needs the is

when one is unum,

one unum,
unum one.

As we repeat the words, they gather a life that is complex rather

than simple. As we chant these simple words in their variations they carry
^^
us along in what Hans-Georg Gadamer called "buoyancy."^° They
become musical; they become questioning; they become rhythmic;

they make us become rather than just be. This emotive exercise with

words frees us from the simplicity of oneness and the false equalizing

of translation. A statement of three words, when turned into a chant, is

no longer a statement, a simple equation where we imagine all is grasped

and meaning is held in our hands like a stick. Instead meaning flows out
 of our hands, beyond us, lifts us into something else.The chant makes
us feel its power rather than the statement feeling ours.

One equals one is not the same as one is unum or one equals

unum. Unum is the word for one in Latin but are we one with Latin?

How unum are we with this dead language? Unum now sounds to us

like English "um" words or even the American poet Allen Ginsberg's

famous "om."When we say unum, we begin to resonate, to vibrate

with a wider universe of meanings, connotations, and sounds, including

words like "numb." Similarity begins to take over simplicity and similarity

suggests something beyond oneness.Translation becomes complicated

beyond the literal and the formulaic. We become enveloped, surrounded

as we sing with all the meaning that sound carries. Even reading the

chant silently evokes a non-prose feeling. We are moving; we are

skipping along; we are singing and singing is not reading or writing. It is

oral and driven by voice and energetic projection. Singing is a cultural

expression that links us to a world beyond solitude, beyond oneness.

Oneness is unity but the very idea of oneness, unlike singularity

implies more than one, something beyond just one itself Oneness is

the unum of unity where unity implies a bringing together of more than

one, which means that oneness always has a twoness or duality about it.

So to begin a text with oneness, we acknowledge that one comes from

two. In the mystery of language and meaning, duality comes before

unity In dialectical understanding, for example, the thesis, which is the

given, results from uniting a previous thesis or given with its opposite

force, the antithesis.The posited (is) and its negation (nothing) give us

the synthesis, or new thesis. Every single thesis is a unification, a bringing

together, meaning that duality is the root of singularity and that one

comes from the two that precede it. Only with preceding can there be
i8
a proceeding.

Translation turns everything upside down rather than keeping it

the right way up. In translating (equating) one and unum, we have ended
up equating one with duum. (two) .Translation, as a process of equation,

unravels the false unity of equation and equivalence when we listen to

it, watch what it is doing, and refuse to take its is or being for granted.

Accepting equivalence in language is an act of faith, a suspension of

disbelief, and betrays a desire to create equality and unity between
words, sounds, languages, and cultures, where no equivalence or

equality exists or can exist Think of what meaning unum had for the

Romans. What was the metaphysics of unum? What status did it have

in Latin? What religious connotations did it carry? How dear was unum
to the Roman heart? Answers to such questions are all part of the

process of unravelling language, freeing us from the false equality and

taken-for-granted equation to which we have surrendered ourselves in

linguistic acts of faith.

"If we were to say today," writes Erhard Ebeling, "the same thing

that was said 2,000 years ago, we would only be imagining that we
were saying the same thing, while actually we would be saying some-
thing quite different."^' The unum of the Romans was not the unum
of the medieval monk, nor is our unum in a non-Latin world anything

like the unum of that medieval monk and his Latinized Christian

theological universe.Their onenesses are beyond our sense of oneness,

while still resonating somehow in our oneness. Our English word "one"
carries inside it a vast cultural history that gives it its current meaning.

Only by splitting open its shell can we begin to see it anew and so

renew ourselves.

Deconstructing unum to duum is rooted in the mystical moment -

of being without language, which leads to three separate paths that ^

Q-

converge in meaning. First, there is the historical experience of humanity a-

expressed in its large number of languages. In language, the meaning of -^

human experience is gathered up, offered, revised, modified, expressed, ^

and carried on, changing over time. Second, there is each individual's I

personal experience of human existence, and third, there is the imaginative

play of consciousness (imagination) as it creates meaningful connections

^'^
between personal experience and a culture. Hans-Georg Gadamer views
imagination as being at the heart of genuine understanding.^^

The trinity of history individual existence, and imagination are not

in the mystical moment of poesis, but they become present to us as

soon as we exit that moment. When we return to the familiar world of

everyday meaning, we enter this trinity of dimensions and begin to

create meaning for ourselves.The mystical moment recreates a return

to first experiences, both the first experiences of humanity —the
primordial experiences that are expressed in cultural and linguistic

meaning —and to the existential experiences of the person, which tell

us of coming and going, of events, of things, of all the happenings. When

an experience is powerful enough to upset the primacy of language

and its inherited meanings, creative consciousness sees the hidden

intersection between experience and language.

Philosophy has avoided an association with concepts such as

creativity art, and imagination, except in discussing aesthetics. These

terms are too burdened with the implications of literature and art to

be linked to the basic tasks of understanding that philosophy claims.

Philosophers have viewed their domain as more rational, more logical,

more "scientific" in its expression than the worlds of art and literature.

They have strained to make philosophy a knowing that is closer to "all-

knowing" than a knowing that is constructed or contrived by the artist.

The return to instinctual roots is anathema to the philosophical tradition,

which seeks always to build upon itself and its creations expressions of

greatness. Turning philosophy toward poetry is a turning away from

philosophical norms.

Where the modernist moment held firmly to the belief that

language could give us the noun of reality the equivalence of truth,

the postmodern moment sees only an adjectival modifying presence in

language and philosophy unable to escape its historicity^^ Philosophical

insight, which seeks the ancient meanings of words in other languages,

is an insight that is postmodern in its desire. Such philosophy seeks a

historicity of meaning within that historicityThis project of constructing

a new text based on an unpublished earlier text whose linguistic power

has been lost through historical change, is itself an acknowledgement of

historicity When historicity comes up against the existential moment

of poesis, it can only react imaginatively

Jacques Dernda,the poststructuralist, created terms such as "trace"

(archi-ecriture) and "under erasure" to capture the residual nature

of all language and its continual historical accretion of meaning. He put

ghosts back into language and so gave it a poetic structure. In the

extensive introduction to his English translation of Derrida's great work.

Of Grammatology, G. C. Spivak states that "writing is the name of the
structure already inhabited by the trace."^'* The trace is the sign that

inhabits other signs; it is something hidden and unseen. Traces of

meanings are hidden in the tradition that has passed away Excavating

that tradition is what leads us to new insight into meanings and under-

standings. Gadamer's "hermeneutical situation," in which interpretation

and translation are constantly with us, is present in every text that is

created by a human, because it contains "a play of presence and

absence, a place of the effaced trace."^^

One example of a trace comes in the reading of a text with foot-

notes or endnotes. If one were to read the notes first and then the
text, one would be viewing the evolution of the text through these
noted traces, the voices and echoes of other words, ideas and thinkers,

which are placed at the end of the text when they are actually in

existence before it. They have been removed to the back, when in fact

they existed prior to the text. In giving the text the illusion of difference,

when it is more a composite of its intellectual surroundings than a

statement ex nihilo, the author presents himself in the guise of originality

From time to time, original thinkers, such as Derrida, appear who give

such force to words with the power of insightful new meaning, that

their words serve as a new beginning for their readers. The thinkers

who came after Derrida were propelled by his core ideas to see the

world differently They have been changed by the traces he has seen.

His text becomes part of their texts and not just as some acknowl-
edgement or footnote; his text is embedded in their thought.

In the preface, I acknowledged the hidden traces of another text

within this text which has been erased in this writing, but which was
this text's first form. This second, or secondary form which is this text

is more distant from the primary experience of poesis than the first

text in terms of historic or chronological time, but it may also be closer

because ensuing history of postmodernism has created new under-

standings which illuminate the mystical moment.The moment of poesis

requires temporality to articulate it, thereby bringing the mystical moment
and the historical moment together in a text. In Derrida's "trace

structure of writing," texts become a coral reef built on the traces that
are the calcification of earlier originality, hardened shells left by the

once living. And what is most important is that they are not singular

shells but a multiplicity of creatures and creations. Many traces are found
in one coral reef Behind the single word is a vast ecology of language

filled with complex life, both existential and historic. It is a complexity

that only imagination can conceive and articulate.

Gadamer also added play to imagination as a key characteristic of a

text.The goal of play is "constant renewal."^'' When a text is a game, as

this text must be viewed, its playfulness is found in a "hermeneutical

circle," in which readers go round and round coming back to where

they started. The verbal journey that is involved in the going round

and round in meaning can result in readers becoming more insightful and

humbled in their understanding. The hermeneutical circle leads to

wonderful frustration, to an acknowledgement of ignorance, to the

insight that when our understanding approaches truth, it begins to lose

meaning altogether This text acknowledges the liberating experience

that interpretation and translation can create for the human spirit.

Michel Foucault, who better than anyone understood the archae-

ological nature of philosophical enquiry wrote in his introduction to

The Birth of the Clinic that, "we are doomed historically to history to the

patient construction of discourses about dis-courses, and to the task of

hearing what has already been said."^^ This text rejects the implications

of the word "doom." It is such a joyless expression. Heidegger doomed

us to the question of Being; Freud to the labyrinths of the psyche;

Nietzsche to a universe of denial and untruth; and Carl Jung to the

unfathomable oceans of the collective subconscious. When knowing is

doomed it becomes a prison. This text tries to express a moment of

liberation from the linguistic prison of knowing, an exit, however brief,

through a window that opens on languagelessness. Expressing that

moment depends on the creativity of those who have opened language

to the possibility of new insights. This text does not say anything

profoundly new because the trace structure of language precludes that

happening, but the way in which the text speaks gives it a characteristic

of originality (origins giving rise to the new or renewal).

Dependence allows independence, just as the prison cell allows

liberation to be possible. When the traces in words are combined with
the existential experience of poesis, poetic language with its lost mean-
ings springs forth. These two fundamentals (traces and lost meanings),

when combined, result in a third fundamental, which is an originality in

language that has within rt both origins and non-origins. When originality

appears through a reworking of language it remains idiosyncratic and lost

or is "discovered" by others and becomes a valued concept, an idea to be

addressed and translated through interpretation. Acknowledgement by

others makes a text translatable. Without acknowledgement, originality

cannot become the humus of new thought.Thought is original when it

is acknowledged as such, but as soon as it is acknowledged it loses its

originality because it becomes translated into other narratives. At the

very moment its newness is recognised, originality begins to dissolve

before the force of interpretation.

This text says that all language bears (and bares) the structure of

metaphor so metaphor itself must have a new meaning for this bearing/

baring to be felt.The power of new interpretation has to enter the old

meaning so as to transform it. OthenA/ise there is no originality And

without originality the traces in words remain hidden and concealed. We
remain "under erasure," comfortable and unthinking. Only when language

is broken up before us and we are shaken out of our complacency can -

there be a new revelation. When we see Derrida's ghosts come out of t

a.
language, it is possible to be transformed by their spirits. Whenever o

thinking and writing have come close to the edge of truth, meaning has •%

been pushed to a precipice. Core ideas bring us to the edge of the i

c
abyss, the very ledge of language, and we feel that we are toppling over I

into an area beyond language and meaning, a kind of freefall where

we have no support. On the ledge, understanding is difficult or very
^^
difficult because of the emotionality involved (fear of falling and its

concomitant exhilaration), and we need to be brought back into the

realm of the ordinary through comforting interpretation and under-

standable explanation (language). We must be brought back from the

edge lest we fall or court madness.

Writing about an experience that seems to be beyond ordinary

meaning and language and human expression is surely such a ledge, a

 thin sliver of linguistic stability next to a precipice where there is no
support against the power of gravity. The experience of the wordless
is extraordinary. It comes rarely if at all. When that experience is re-

created in writing, that writing seeks to re-experience language itself

so that our understanding of language is transfornned.This writing seeks

an effect no different from the presentation of an actor or a poet.

The re-creation is both direct and oblique. In a direct way the text

speaks about the poesis experience, but in so doing becomes an

indirect expression, an ersatz replication. In language, the experience

becomes its own opposite.The signifier makes itself into a sign through

which the experience becomes signified and so de-experienced and

re-experienced as language. The experience of the text as a reading is

utterly different from the experience of poesis, and yet it presumes to

offer a reflection of the real thing that gives rise to understanding.

Understanding is an indirectness, an obliqueness that comes with all

re-creation.When we are with text in words and absorbed in the written

we are oblique in our relationship to the experience that is described.

The experience and the words that describe it are first separated

through the experience of the text and then reunited through words

that seek to substitute themselves for the experience.The text seeks

to create the same understanding or conclusion, which the experience

did and, of course, it does so only within the limits of language.

5 When my initial text sought to do this, it did so without any referencing

c authorities, drawing on the remembered insights of philosophers that

° were meaningful to it then. It was text but it was almost oral in its

X. form, the way a performed poem overpowers writing.The experience

O
was mysterious or mystical and when the text sought to express

that mystery in language it had to retain some sense of mystery of

^ the unfathomable.

When Jacques Lacan wrote "no language can speak the truth about

truth" he was placing truth within the limits of language, and using truth

as something easily deconstructed.**^ Truth as absolute reality or the

ability of language to give us absolute reality through understanding and

insight, is impossible. Truth belongs to language, which is a construction

and nothing nnore. Truth is always language and as language it is always

"about sonnething" except about itself. Language refers us away from

its own structuring to present us with an illusion. In this text, the illusion

of offering the real experience through words bears witness to the

limits of language.

Thinking of words as present carries connotations of gifthood,care,

and sacrifice (mystery) that for us combined with time as historical

flow mediates between the poesis experience and the poesis text.

This is the unity (unum) or oneness of the present, which is the title

of this chapter To interpret language as present in all its connotations,

one begins with the existential experience that gives rise to the inter-

pretation of language as metaphor While the existential experience of

poesis takes us outside of language, it also returns us to language.

Inside language once again we see language as having new qualities and
characteristics. Poesis reveals language as a linguistic home that is not a

prison of the everyday but a shelter where we can develop reverence

for the awe-filling experience of poesis.The hermeneutical circle that

we enter through this text, which is an entrance into a verbal labyrinth,

is meant to change not only our view of language, but also our relation-

ship to reality It is meant to transform us by echoing the transformative

power of the existential experience of a mystical moment. -

Of course, words fail to achieve the real. Yet in their attempt to ^

Q-

re-create in language what is wordless, they reveal the limits of conscious- a-

ness and the limiting and shaping power of language. In poesis, the ^
experience of Being and Nothing becomes similar When poesis brings ^

us to a death of language, the result must be new word associations I

trying to express that death. Curiously death can remove the absolute
dimension from language because in death we are languageless. At
^^
the same time, death leaves a language about itself with the living. Death
can serve as metaphor for the poesis experience, an approximation we
cannot experience without dying and can never express after the fact

(the closest is the near-death experience described by some).This text

tries to be a near-poesis experience.To speak of death is to speak from

the side of living, from the side of language. But we know death as being
 beyond life, beyond speaking; so too poesis is beyond language and that

which is beyond language can be spoken of philosophically only in the

form of poetry
The absolute presentness of the poesis experience, when it is

experienced, is a stepping outside of history a removal of the con-

sciousness of self fronn time. Putting absolute presentness back into

language means taking the out-of-time and the out-of-history and

making it temporal and historical. Translating the wordless into words,

the timeless into time, the mythical into the historical is a fundamental

crossing over Our linguistic presentness, so heralded in our postmodern

moment, is always a passage from what is past. Its presentness is an

evolving moment rather than a mystical moment in which time stops.

Translation is a bringing together of opposites and then stating there

is identity in difference. All the thoughts of others that are gathered

here were originally thought and then written or written down while

being thought in languages other than English, the language of this

text. They were primarily German and French with some Latin and

GreekThese languages are rooted in earlier languages and evolved as

amalgamations and mergers of ideas, sounds, grammatical structures,

social values, and human inventiveness in naming.

The root of this work is an experience that is translated and texts

that have been translated into the English language. Translation is a

middle ground that is also my extreme edge. My poesis experience is

translated into language and that language uses other languages that

have been translated into English as a vehicle of meaning. This mediative

role of language, which fills us with the meaning of the moment,

histoncal and existential, presents a present to us that is always hiding

its past and its futureness. It is always hiding its temporality when it is

26
temporality that is its foremost being. Language as constant translation,

a perpetual middleness of illusionary power linking us to the real,

can be overthrown by a poesis that unconceals the basic concealing

structure of language. The question is whether those who have never

had the experience of poesis can, through the mere agency of words,
see the metaphoric structure of language, a structure language is

constantly concealing.
in/too poesis out/of poesis in/too metaphor go/in

Carl Jung wrote that "the thyroid was regarded as a meaningless organ

merely because it was not understood."'' Something is considered

meaningless when it cannot be understood because language and its

categories have not encompassed it. It stands outside the reality given to

us by language. The attempt to speak or write about the unspeakable

has a status, albeit a problematic one. If the unspeakable exists it can

only have meaning through language. Of course, there is a certain

reversal of meaning hidden in Jung's statement. Today we know what the

name "thyroid" refers to because it has become a common designation.

Although not specifically identified as it is now, it may have been part

of some designation. It existed through that designation but was so

hidden by it as to be "meaningless."
Is "meaningless" just another word for "wrong" or is it something

else? Former meanings are not meaningless if they can be discovered

and interpreted into our current meanings.They can become real again.

It is our regarding, our looking at, which is at issue and not the thyroid

or its naming or lack thereof When we pay regard to words and ideas
27
that have lost meaning, we pay respect to past attempts at knowing and

understanding. These past attempts are the historicity of meaning that

tempers the presentness of meaning.

The historicity of meaning always carries the duality that is suggested

in Jung's straightfonward but suggestive statement, whereby meaning-

lessness becomes a feature of historical time and our regarding of

language. In the English language, the word "present" is both a condition

 of time and an object. It has two different meanings within the same

symbolic expression and, more importantly, the same philological root.

Present as time comes from the Latin praesens which literally meant a

being before one. One was present when one stood before something

or someone. Present as gift comes from the same Latin root, the verb

praesentare. which means presenting, which is what a presenter does.

Present is the condition in which a gift becomes present to us. This is

the duum of the unum;the duality in the one. The duality in naming
is both the historicity of meaning (meanings now past, lost and echoed)

and the present of meaning (our current understanding). When we

are in a word we are in its duality, its two-ness and also its too-ness,

because both the past and the present are there together in the one

word. They are with each other and their otherness is a certain

sameness.The duum in the unum is both a separation and a unification.

It is a with-ness and also a distinctness and a differentiation which comes

about through the creation of a single identity. This with-ness is an

acknowledgement of the presence of another

The dual meaning of present is about a with-ness or too-ness

that suggests a duality in meaning itself Its duality being both present to

us as gift and as time, can be transferred to meaning itself Meaning is

present for us as gift and as time. Meaning can be a presentation that

makes something both present and a present to us. The transference

that comes in translation, which is dual presenting, tells us that meaning

is a mean and a middle ground that creates and gives us the non-

middle ends and extremes that need to be united and held together so

that they may be too (with) each other When something that was

once full of meaning is deprived or emptied of meaning by becoming

meaningless, or with-out or out-side meaning, we realize that what was

28
once given can be taken away in time. Meaning does not belong to the

thing itself but to the language that names it. The ultimate gift of

language, and therefore meaning, is its power to make a thing present

to us as a standing before us. Meaning that now only echoes in a word

is simply a presenting that has become past.This past presenting still has

the character of presenting when it is searched out: it comes back to

life, as it were, in its re-present-at/on. This coming back to life indicates
that the past presenting comes back into our presence, returns fronn

the realm of meaninglessness and gathers itself up in meaning once more,

but, of course, in a way that is different from its former presenting. For
an/thing to be present to us it must be meaningful because meaning
and presence are one.
One may schematize this in two ways. In the first, the duality of

time as a gift and gifting as an event in time can be drawn as a series

of arrows with each arrowhead pointing to the end of the arrow

previous to it.This is the image of a continuum. The second schema

has the arrows face each other point to point as in a mirror Sameness
and the opposition of the same touch in both schemas, their two-ness

becoming too or with each other even though they seem to touch at

different ends. In the continuum, what is crucial is the touching of the

pointed end of one arrow to the back of the shaft of the next arrow.

This touching is also present in the touching of the two points of the

arrows at their heads, so that the continuum that is created here gives

the appearance of stoppage, blockage, of squaring off, and yet forms a

line like the continuum at the place of touching. For there to be touch-

ing, there must be two. One cannot be a oneness until two touch.

When two touch they are both too and two.

The touching we are discussing is evident in the historical images

we can create in thinking or imagining the presentation of the present.

Not only is there a giver a receiver and a gift, but there is also a fourth

element —the call to the event of giving, the occasion itself The call
^
o
°-
is the social obligation, the cultural value that is present for the presen-

tation to occur The present arises out of a call for a presentation in <
which a continuum or bond or touching is made among all the elements

of a presenting. These elements of time, gifting, and gift come together

^^
in the word "presence" {praesentia). Presence connotes being with

another to attend, to experience the presence of what is present.There

is a suggestion here of being in a place or being placed and of reality or

being. And so the concept of the present tense, of the now, blends

with the idea of being here and of being presented in the here and

now.This is the link between space and time as reality

Surely placing, presenting, and the presence in nowness tell us that

 being present in the sense of presence is a special moment. When a

presenting occurs, when the moment of nowness is rich with significance

and we are filled with its complex meaning, we are lifted, as it were,
out of the mundane and experience an event as sacred, as unordinary.

This is the motif of the gift that is the present in present time. The
matrix of giver, gift, giving, and receiving, expresses radical duality either

as an opposing continuum or a following one.

The present as gift involves a certain carrying and bringing forth.

(Here we must listen to present as both gift and time and not try to
divide them into two but speak them as a meaningful oneness.) A gift is

taken and given; it is offered and accepted; it is wrapped and opened;

it is expected and it is unexpected. It is a surprise or it is known.There
is a handing over of a gift that means it is thought of, selected, and
meant to express friendship, obligation, love, or other human relation.

In all cases, there is a caring about something or someone. One thinks

about this giving and then carries it out as an act. It exists. One may
think of the present in the older meaning of an offering. The religious

connotations involved in the gifthood of the present include symbolic

meaning (re-presenting), caring (affection), and sacrifice.The offering in

gifthood was associated with sacrificing, which today may be considered

the cost of a gift. Sacrificing occurred as part of a sacred moment. It

was a ritualized event with certain formulaic requirements that were

5 repeated. It involved a higher power than one's own — ^that which was
c to receive the sacri-fice (socrum/holy; facere/to make or do).

° The meaning that language gives us as a gift when it presents reality

z to us, involves the total continuum of temporality with all its opposites

(past, present, and future). Time, as the presence of total presentness,

fills with the non-present (the past and the future) and brings together,
^°
or with-nesses, historical and existential experience. When Jung wrote
about something being meaningless, he was writing about the totality of

meaning in us that allows us to put everything outside the moment

of meaning into the realm of meaninglessness. In the realm of meaning,

the re-presenting and re-presentational power of language makes things

present to us. It gives them a presence, just as meaninglessness makes
them absent. Language is a form of presentation or present-ing. But in
its re-vealing of reality it also re-veils by putting other existing things

beyond nneaning. It covers them up so that they are not present to

us. Revelation includes re-veilation.This re-veilation also rebounds on

revelation by indicating that it is incomplete, that the understanding that

is given or revealed is but a glimpse with which we create a meaningful

but false story

The gift of present time is a re-presenting that dominates the

foreground where meaning resides. Language re-present-s over and

over again. We are in its presence as it first makes us aware of itself

and then hides to maintain the illusion of what it is re-presenting.The

finitude of revelation as unveiling and revelling leads to infinitude, an

endless continuum of finitude that can never be a complete unfolding.

Whether the schema of the two arrows touching tip to end or tip to

tip is taken as representing the continuum of meaning, the result is the

same — meaning remains in continuity with past meanings that need to

be erased from meaning in order for new meaning to come forward.

As history moves along and culture evolves with new knowing and
understanding, we think that the meanings that become meaningless

have been buried for good. But they are only veiled from us, awaiting

their revelation. This is the problem of all symbols and the symbolization

that is language.The symbol is itself only when it re-presents another that

is non-symbolic. Its symbolic nature is rooted in its suggestion of the

non-symbolic opposite. When it presents itself to us it speaks for that

other but its speaking includes a constant incompleteness of presen-

tation. Re-presentation hides its past and its future, which is the veiling

role of the present.The presence of the thing as something present to

us is made possible by all the past of the symbol. The thyroid becomes

present for us when it is named, when that name becomes widely

known and discussed among a community of speakers who share the
same language. But it is discussed as a symbol that speaks on behalf of

reality Jung's thyroid may be an organic object in the body, an organ

that gives rise to certain maladies, an adjective for other organs in its

vicinity in the body or simply Adam's apple in ordinary parlance. Of

course, the name"Adam'sapple"is vastly rich with Biblical allusion com-
pared to the medical term "thyroid." The meaning in thyroid when it
 faces the meaning in "Adann's apple" creates a head-to-head continuum in

which symbol and object create a historical flow of meaning in which

the two names participate. In understanding them, we stand closer to

symbol because we are dealing more with meaning than the reality of

the human body

Symbols hint at the metaphoric structure of reality because symbols

are the signs of metaphor of the duum in the unum. Symbols tell us

there is another, that there is twoness that is a tooness.The repre-

sentational power of symbols is such that language is not a second-class

substitute for reality. Re-presentation is inter-changeable with all presence,

meaning that the gift and the giver are one in giving: the duality in unity

Heidegger used the idea of the "fourfold" in expressing the unity that is

created in symbol when he wrote:

In the gift of the outpouring that is drink, mortals stay in

their own way.

In the gift of the outpouring that is a libation, the

divinities stay in their own way they who receive back

the gift of giving as the gift of the donation.

In the gift of the outpouring, mortals and divinities dwell

in their different ways.

Earth and sky dwell in the gift of the outpouring.

5 In the gift of the outpouring earth and sky, divinities and

c mortals dwell together all at once.'^^

o

z There is a unity to re-presentation and presence in the root image

of the present as self-presentation and offering. In this root there is a

reality that indicates caring and willing. Reality is that self and other that
2^
we symbolize and so feel it being given to us. To associate gift (the

present as time) with symbol (the present as re-presentation), means

to take their ordinary meanings and unite them.The symbolization that is

language is a giving of a gift, a presentation of presents whose presence

results in a temporal gift of placing. Through language we are placed

and made at home in time and space. It is language that is the mean
in meaning, the nniddle ground that we occupy, mediating for us the

existence of all otherness in our universe.

The relationship of caring and willing to the gifthood that is the

mean brings psychological associations to our being-in-the-world.

Calling gifthood a mean places the gift in the middle between the giver

and the receiverThe gift is the link in the handing overThrough the

gift, the giver and the receiver touch like arrowheads. Because gifts

represent caring and concern, the relationship of caring to presenting

requires exploration. It is best to enter the idea of care through the

foreign word, sorge, made famous by the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.

To English readers, "sorge" is a foreign (outside our language) word,

carrying connotations that differ from those it carries for Danish

readers.The first connotation of sorge for outsiders is the experience

of translating it, in which we take care in equating care with sorge. In

this connotation, English caring takes precedence over Danish sorge.

The second connotation is the meaning that care has for us in English.

In English, care can be both a dearness and a concern. In either case it

creates a certain tension. "Caring about" requires an attentiveness that

makes us involved. But there is also a third connotation carried by sorge,

which is the element of the unknown. We are aware that the word
sorge has other meanings and connotations in its own language and

culture and that these connotations are hidden from us. When we
think of this, the unknown (Danish) takes precedence over the known
(English) until the translation of caring appears. This is its outside-
^
o
meaningness. If we were not to have first translated sorge, it would °-

-
have had required an explanation, an elaboration that would hint at

or suggest its meaning, even if the word care was never used. This

unfolding of sorge would have been complex and elaborate, while the
equation of sorge with caring is perfunctory and simplistic. What ^^

excites us in this simplicity is the equation sign itself This means that.

That means this. Such simplicity allows us first to resurrect all the

meanings of care in our language and at the same time carry only

the shell of sorge — the form that has connotations in Danish but whose

content we do not know.The equation of Scandinavian connotations of

 sorge with the English connotations of care is obviously a way of
avoiding the complexity of cultural difference.

Rather than use the word care, let us continue to use the unknown
sorge and so let its nnystery reside in our use of it much in the same

way we use poesis rather than poetry The word sorge allows emotional

openness, which, when added to various states of concern or caring,

means we can engage their being more fully than we ordinarily would.

There is more openness for us in sorge than in the word "caring," which
we understand. The unknown carries exceptionality better than the

known. Sorge can be more meaningful in its initial meaninglessnessthan

caring, which is understood, because we are primed by our unknowing

to seek understanding.

There are two separate states of caring in which sorge as emotional

openness plays a key role. The first is angst, a word that was once
foreign but is now meaningful in English, which occurs when sorge
(caring) and time come together existentially.The second is poesis,

when sorge and being come together outside of time. In the case of

angst, our openness to (concern for) time results in angst. It is a negative

experience involving emptiness, loss, negation, and even nothingness.

When we are open to and concerned about achievement and temporality,

of bending elements of the universe to our desires, we experience

angst. But when we care about being and our being, sorge provides a

5 sense of fullness, peace, and completeness. In the caring of poesis there

c is affection, a positive reaching out to and being touched by otherness.

° In the caring of angst there is fear and trembling and concern for
Z control over the other
o
What does sorge have to do with presence and the present of

time and gifthood? Sorge as concern for (openness to) allows a

^4 separation of itself into the modes of angst and poesis. Its dual mode
reflects a separation of being and time. In angst, we are determined by

temporality In poesis we are determined by limitless being. Our willing

drives a wedge between the experience of being and the experience
of time. In poesis there is no willing, only openness. One does not seek

to control but is influenced by that which is beyond control. In poesis

we become total presence and the gifthood that is without time

becomes a gift where there is no willingness. In poesis presence as time

is separated from present as gift. Immersed in presence we are only

conscious of the present-ness of time and not its continuum of past and

future, of what happened and results we wish to control in the future.

In losing the continuum we are actually losing the mean (language) where
we normally reside. We have been moved to an extreme end (the

ledge mentioned earlier), away from the centre with its comforting

meaning and understanding. Once time becomes totally present,

language is pushed aside.

Historically Western philosophy has pursued absolute knowledge

and in so doing has developed a technological culture whose main
dimension has been time-concern (openness to time). It is through

time that thinking has gauged human being in the world. Time became
the house of angst where we dwelled, and our concern with time and

its coming and its going became our fundamental way of being-in-the-

world, which, as Heidegger pointed out, resulted in a forgetfulness of

being.Time became a measure of doing rather than of being. Our being

was tied to the constant flow of doing — of achievement, creation,

action, results, and so on. Doing and time became synonymous. Our
concern for time made making, and the willing involved with making

and doing, paramount in human existence. In this worldview, time

became a quantity to be gained or lost, to be measured and evaluated

in its use. Time became useful, an object to grasp and control. In

Western philosophy action took prominence, leading to technological 'S.

o
°-
advancement, which, in turn, increased our sense of time as being crucial.
o
When being promoted a sense of timeless place and in sorge emphasized <
how we were in the world, how being was for us, became a minor it

presence. Its gifthood was relegated to certain areas of human experience

that were far from the everyday concerns of human history —to ^^

poetry or meditation.

Our anxiousness overtime made time into a precious commodity

It became a thing, an object. We live with time every day while our

experience of being is exceptional. Human experience of being that is

found in the mystical moment, in the moment of poetry and in the

moment when we withdraw from time-concern has become rare in

 our culture. In the intense meaningfulness of sorge.we allow "the world
to open up for us... because we are engaged....'"" When angst over

time is absent we are engaged by poesis. This engagement is the

sorge or caring linked to being. By disengaging ourselves from time

consciousness we find ourselves caring in a different way

Engagement that opens up the world to us in a different way results
in a third mode for sorge which brings angst and poesis togetherThis
is the mode of mythos, which translates the experience of time and of

being into a narrative. Experiences become languaged and in languaging

them we show our care. Mythos stands half-way between angst and
poesis, drawing on their basic elements, to create history as a knowing

of the past that is interpretive. While angst and poesis occur, their

meaning comes out only in the narrative of mythos. Mythos is our story
telling of the events of time-concern and of non-concern. Of course,
the narrative of our with-ness to time (ourtoo-ness) is more common
than our narrative of with-ness to being. Such story telling reinforces

language by using it and confirming its role as the maker of meaning

that can be shared with others. Mythos is the story of our participation

in the world. In mythos, time becomes a special moment that requires

remembering. Mythos as the openness to narrative is as fully our condition

as angst's openness to time and poesis's openness to being. In the three

cases of angst (being with time), poesis (being with being), and mythos

f (being with narration), sorge or caring is always present.

2 When being as presence is replaced by the ovenA/helming presence

° of beings, time as a present (gift) loses its meaning. Instead, time as

z present time (angst) becomes important because interaction with beings

(and how they impact our future) takes priority We put the gifthood
of time aside. The present as this moment requires action for the
^ future rather than being. The presence that we seek in the present

once gifthood is lost is simply a place of human activity (I must make

supper so that I will not be hungry or must make supper to make others
I

happy and so forth.) But when we become conscious of the gifthood of

time and its presenting, the objects of being and their purposes fall away
and become unimportant. Action recedes and one seeks only to be
present and fully open to presence. The present is present to us as a

presence in which we are present.

Mythos IS present in a way that tinne beconnes past (rather than

future as it does in angst), and so it must be brought back into presence

through narrative. Mythos allows us to bring past presenting into the

present. Narrative allows former meanings to become meaningful once

more. The story of the past, our past, other pasts, and so on, becomes
meaningful once more in mythos, not as an event in which we act in

angst, but as an event in which our action is only a telling, a linguistic

structunng of meaning. In mythos there is a listening for the past even

while we are in the present We view the story as a gift of time and con-

sciousness and experience that which is being offered to us and others

as an understanding of how we were and might be. In mythos the

primacy of time in angst and the primacy of being in poesis are both

made secondary to the telling, to the structuring of language. In contrast

to both angst and mythos, poesis holds time as a presentness in which

there is no past and no future. In this timeless-ness we find being. When

we are with being we are languageless.

Howeven when we are in a state of mythos we care for language.

Language is our being in and our creating of a world. In it time and

being are subsumed into a symbolic universe, where we create mean-

ing and share understanding. Language and its power to create meaning

is the metaphoric reality that we inhabit when listening, speaking, and

writing story.Time and being are metaphors we embrace. When being 'S.

o
°-
as presence is separated from time as happens in angst, time becomes
-
a commodity to be consumed. Now becomes void of being as pres-

ence when it is filled with beings and our manipulation of them. When

time becomes objective and real and powerful, there is no space for a
mediative presence, for a being-in-the-world rather than a doing-to- ^^

the-world. Perpetual making and doing creates a finite universe, while

presence makes time infinite, without end (the arrow head to arrow

end). To enter being-in-the-world we must stop doing-to-the-world.

Our anxiety to achieve a presence through doing rather than

receiving the gifthood of the present is driven by willing. In angst we

 answer the call to will. This will be and that will be. The present will be
used to will a future into existence. A technologized universe of making,

creating, controlling, and dominating replaces the experience of poesis.

Time-concern calls us to willing action. Poesis does not have that power
It seeks to bring us closer to the moment not concerned with time. It is

only after poesis that we are drawn to creating a mythos that gives

being a narrative. And once poesis has a narrative (a text) it is available

to angst, to act and be acted upon in the world.

Sorge unites us with time and with being, and when it tries to bring

the two together it creates a mythos for us, which seeks to understand
their roles in our lives. In angst we will something, while in poesis we
will nothing and receive the coming of nothingness to us as a gift beyond
the angst of time. Our willing is a forgetfulness of the gifthood of the

present. Only when the willing stops can the present become present

to us as a gift of itself

In gifthood we are open to nourishment, nurture, and care. In a

state of gifthood time is no longer an oppressive angst-ridden presence

whose resistance must be overcome. While the willing in angst gives us

the illusion of mastery over time, the illusion of being in poesis suggests

a stewardship in which we are subordinated to something beyond our-

selves. Yet both states are illusionary because they find their meaning

for us only in mythos, our realm of arranged symbols that recognise

.5 both being and time. Language is the myth-maker that brings us into the

S world. It is self-eluding. In its eluding we become stewards or guardians

° of reality rather than its conquerors.We act and think continually through

Z language's mediation. When that mediation presents time or being as a

gift, we are freed from our time-concern and are able to find our

presence in the world as a caring consciousness. In receiving, we give

2 up the world of our giving and instead embrace it as a gift to us. We

become will-less. We are simply there or, as Heidegger termed us, the

being that is there for being (da-sein).

Once the language of time is put aside, our angst recedes and the

present stops being the passage between the past of defeated wills and
the future of victorious willing. When time becomes a gift for us then it

becomes a call to being. We enter our thereness-for-being/being-ther"e-

for-us as a stillness. When we enter that stillness and occupy time in the

same way we occupy space, we ourselves turn into receptacles filled

with being that at some point will be poured out. In our thereness-for-
being we no longer will or act to control.Theangst of our will-to-power

dissipates when we are.This there-ness gives rise to a new sorge (open-

ness to) that is born from the experience of having been filled with

being. In the mystical tradition, the expression of being filled rather than

filling is fundamental. One is first given to, which results in one giving

oneself over to that which is given. In receiving the gift of the othen one

becomes a gift oneself, which is then offered to the other This is the

paradigm of the mystical moment expressed in various human cultures.

So time experienced as a gift produces a gift-filled stance.This state

of being leaves behind the angst of time-without-being and replaces

it with being-without-time. In being-without-time, being stops being a

gift of time. When we return to time-without-being, poesis becomes

history (the mythos of narrative). When our sorge touches being we
are sublimated poetically (metaphorically) in such a way that we enter

our own thereness-for-being. In this state of poesis, presence, as that

which has no time, becomes paramount; this is why one can speak of

overcoming time in poesis.

Presence, in which time as passage becomes time as total present,

is an en-trancing and an en-rapturing. Being-there is total attentiveness.

In presence, we are given thereness so fully that all else ceases to exist.

There is no world outside the poesis experience for one who is in it ^

o
because the totality of what is present to us is presence itself When we °-

"
become being-without-time we are experiencing a being-without-self

The self that falls away is one that exists in the passing of time, not in

its total presence. The willing that is found in our caring for time as

angst is no longer present in poesis, where the boundaries of the self ^^

and the world dissolve (we become unbound).The self does not become

boundless in an absolute sense because then the self would become an

empty nothing, but what it experiences is the loss of meaning (the

boundaries) in language. One does not experience specific identities in

poesis, only presence and need for identity as such. Not beings but

being, Heidegger would say

 The sorge of poesis means the end of time's passage and the

complete presentness of our presence.This is a great gift, which, when we

are filled with it (our being-there), transforms us into a gift. When
we are totally there we are outside of time as we normally experience

We are outside our normal willing to do things and change things and
it.

accomplish things. We are outside of the things that language gives us

and guides us through our daily lives.There is an interesting connotation

to poesis, the thereness-for-being, which suggests the sacredness of

poesis. The sacredness comes in the word sacrifice. Sacrifice (making

sacred) is a dimension of gifthood and since poesis is a gift, poesis

involves a making sacred. Making sacred means a giving up as well as a

giving to and a receiving from. In poesis something is surrendered or

given up. In poesis we sacrifice our ordinary experience of time and the
angst associated with it. We offer it up in the moment of poesis, giving

up our ordinary will-to-power and control over the events of life, like

getting to a place on time, for the moment of total presence. In giving

up our usual will-to-power, we are allowed to enter (entrance and

en-trance) the entrancing and the enrapturing of poesis.

All gifthood involves sacrifice in giving and receiving. In the gifthood

of poesis, when time becomes a being-without-time, we exchange our

normal historical being for non-historical being which then becomes
our history through narrative. The stance and meaning of poesis can

5 only be told when it is history when it is past. When it is totally present,

c it is speechless and wordless. In poesis language stops being for us and it

° is only in language that history can exist. If we imagine angst as the

z thesis of our normal being-in-the-world, and then consider poesis as its

complete anti-thesis, it is clear that mythos is the resulting synthesis.

Why was this chapter titled "In/too Poesis?" In and too are united in

'^°
"into." Into is not in/too. Into is part of the sorge of angst because it

is directive. In/too means a being in by standing with. It is a partnership

in which duality is united. Into tells us of passage out of and into, but

tooness speaks of a being with. There is a besideness here, a compan-

ionship, that says where there is one there is anothenThis is the with-ness

(witness) that is involved in entering language as a gift rather than using

it as a tool. In language we are with-nessing, and as witnesses we speak

about what we observe.Through our with-ness, we create a narrative

for others.This chapter has brought us in/too the door the passageway

where we are in and too entrance-nnent. In this in/too poesis, we are

in/too involves an out/of, where the narrative of

in/two as well. But all

with-ness is created.

41
sis out/of poesis in/too metaphor go/in circles out of d

Being-with/out-time raises the possibility of a non-historical being in

the present. We separate being from time when we lose our sense
of time and become with/out time, meaning we are in time and out of

time simultaneously. We continue to exist within time and history,

but our awareness has changed. Because poesis eventually becomes

history in narrative mythos we acknowledge our being with and in

time. A non-historical being in history means that we have stepped

outside language (and its time) while remaining with/in language and

time. Our with-ness is both an in and an out. Again the duum of the

unum.To be within time, language, and the mythos of history and yet
to be separated from all three — ^to be out of them no matter how
momentarily — is captured in the contemporary slang expression "to

be out of it." When one is "out of it," one has lost touch with reality

one is unconscious to the world, one is in another space and time than

others are in. "Out of it" suggests insanity The one who is "out of it"

does not feel "out of it" because he or she is in something else.

Those outside definethe"it"of reality differently than the one who

^^
is somewhere else, in another reality But that person, whose conscious-

ness is judged not to be part of the dominant reality remains physically

in that reality and is recognised as such. That person remains in our

world. So one is both out of the world and in it. This dialectical self-

contradiction, Hegel would say allows a transition to a higher truth, the

mediating synthesis.''' As we experience languagelessness, and with it

the loss of time, we remain within the continuum of language, though

 we have momentarily lost our consciousness of it. Similarly, when one
dies and is no longer conscious, one remains in the world as a decaying

organic substance, as memories in others, in the texts of one's words in

letters or books, and in visual images.

Poesis was defined in the last chapter as a state of openness to our

being with being as in/tooness. But poesis has an out/of aspect as well.

Poesis as a state of non-historical being within history means that poesis

can later become a mythos, our story of being with/out time and language.

We can remember poesis, and so we can narrate it. Naming creates

meaning and in naming a state with/out time we return to the medium

created by language where we ordinarily live. In that mean that is meaning
we speak what we have experienced and our speaking or naming allows

us to fit an experience into the meanings created by our discourse.

These definitions of poesis may seem, at first glance, awkward and

peculiar; but an examination of the word poesis in its ordinary meaning

indicates that these definitions are not unusual or strange.The Greek

word poiesis denotes making, and poiema refers to something made or

created. The making that has come into the word poetry which is

derived from the Greek, is the making of language. The play of words

that is a poem is a creation of meaning using language in an unprosaic

way A dictionary of literary terms defines a poem as being different

from other linguistic compositions by ". . .the way the words lean upon
."
each other are linked and interlocked in sense and rhythm, and thus
E
2 elicit from each other's syllables a kind of tune whose beat and melody
° varies subtly and which is different from prose.""*-^ This definition

Z suggests a complex relationship between the meanings a poem evokes

for the writer and the reader or listener In all language there is a

speaking, silent or not. To use the word poesis with its suggestion of

^ poetry its interlocking sense and rhythm of syllables with their subtle

melody is appropriate when playing with the duality of in and out, of

with and of and how they become one.

In poesis, we regain the gifthood of the world through the sorge

that is our openness to the full presence of our being-here.Time, which

has come to dominate our experience of beings, not only recedes in

poesis but turns into symbol and metaphor essences of poetry Time's
previous defining of reality that separated object fronn subject, reality,

and rationality from unreality and irrationality becomes in poesis an act

that limits reality and rationality Poesis makes time more and more a
definition and less and less something beyond symbols. In poesis an

otherness beyond time becomes present to us. After the experience of

poesis, the metaphoric structuns of reality becomes our definer of reality.

When time becomes a signpost, a letter a symbol the way language

is, we experience time as a pre-position of being.The otherness that is

our being beyond language becomes timeless. Poesis leads us to the

metaphoric reality of the world, which is why this chapter is titled "Out/

of Poesis," suggesting something beyond it. Our being in/too poesis as

described in the last chapter describes an entering into that suggests a

coming out of poesis. Coming out of poesis changes our view of reality
into one determined by metaphor
Non-historical being in history an experience of non-temporality,

involves both a possession of being and a being possessed by being

while remaining in time. One is held and one holds on to. The active

and passive senses of possession remind one of the duality in oneness,

which is the unity of opposites such as non-histoncal and historical.

In possession we are inhabiting and inhabiting is an in-having. In-having

is a being-with/in-having and having a being-with/out-time. When we

are in poesis, the state of being-with/out-time, we are enraptured

and entranced and so are in hobeo (having). We have been taken

possession of and are possessed by our own being, whose possession ^

o
we ordinarily forget. ^
Living in or inhabiting (habeo) poesis suggests a place or space that ^
is inhabited or held on to (in-having). What place or space is this being-

with/out-time? How does it occur? This dwelling in with/outness has

an entrance through which we enter its en-trancing. It is a habitation '^^

that covers us and surrounds us when we are in it. As a dwelling, it has

a way in and that way in is also the way out —the doonA'ay of our
experience. The doorway to the disappearance of time and its beings

and the reappearance of our being without beings opens for us when
we lose language. Our own possession ofourbeing-in-the-world, which

poesis gifts us is our hereness, in which we lose our daily will-to-power.

 When we are totally here, we become absent to our normal reality

and it becomes absent to us. Its absence is determined by the loss of

language and time and the meaning that they provide — ^their defining

of reality First, the term "with/out" suggests a loss: we are without what
we once had. Second, "with/out" suggests an outsideness, of a standing

outside what we had once inhabited. Third, it suggests a being with

out-ness itself We embrace the not having. And finally, "with/out"

suggests proximity and connectedness. Separation and nearness are

implied togethenThrough these four meanings we can understand that

being-with /out-time, a state of languagelessness, is both an absence

and a presence.
Presence because of its association with time, and absence because

of its dual meaning of in and out are frames of the entrancing doooA^ay
If we examine both absence and presence in their Latin roots we see a

common structure. Presence comes from the Latin, praesentia (noun),

and praesentore (verb), and praesans (gerund), and means being before

one. It is a combination of prae (of before) and sensus (sensing or

understanding). Absence is a combination of ab and sentia, of being

absent or awayThe sentia in both words implies both being and under-

standing. So we can think of presence and absence as having the duality

of with/out and in/too. This duality is in both words and brings them

together since presence implies a previous absence, while absence implies

5 a previous presence. Whether absent or present, one is moving in the

2 same continuum of meaning, placed differently but always placed in

° relationship to the other placing. One cannot be absent without first

Z having been present and one cannot be present without first having

been absent. Our every standing in a doorway makes us both present

and absent. Poesis is a doorway rather than a window. It is an in-

^^ between where the worldview of looking in or looking out is compressed

into a without and in/too.

When we are with/out time we are both present to and absent

from time. We are near time and surrounded by time and we are

always in a position of returning to time because the en-trancing that

comes with being-with/out-time implies the existence of an entrance

which is also an exit.The entrance, where we are en-tranced, implies a

door^^ay that is a threshold where we move from one in-habiting to

another in-habiting and in the movement find ourselves in the en-trance

that serves as in and out. In our ordinary in-habiting (angst), we try to

have, and to hold and to possess in an active way, the reality we know.

In poesis, we in-habit by being possessed, by being held in and by in-

having our being, which is not a having at all but a gift (a present) of

presence itself

Entrance has two senses.There is the sentia of going in, of entering,

that implies an action or movement. There is also the sentia of simply

being there.There is an entrance and that entrance can be a trance, an

enrapture that folds over us and holds us in its grasp. But this holding-

in in an en-trance (in-trancing) is not a claustrophobic one where we

are shut in. An entrance is an opening, a door^/ay that stands between

two worlds, and so when we enter the en-trancing of entrance we

can move as easily back as for^/ard. In fact, the greatest sense and

experience of en-trancing is being in the entrance itself of being both a

part and apart This tension is what gives poesis the sense of being

possessed and of possessing.

In the entrance that is poesis, we are in historical time and outside

temporality Atemporal experience seeks a narrative mythos because it

has affected us within time itself and so is surrounded by language. The

near-death-experience is an example of en-trancing, in which one has

entered a new realm but also remained in the old realm, in which one

leaves and then returns from the new realm to the old realm of time -

and language, seeking to express the new in the language of the old. ^
Another way of thinking of an entrance, is to think of it as a bridge. ^
One is on a bridge that holds one above the abyss and the bridge is

open at either end so that one can both enter and exit. In the near-

death-experience, narrators speak of having left their bodies and ^7

returned to them. They are standing on a bridge that reveals two

realities at either end. One is the reality of all the somethings of our life.

The other is Sartre's nothingness. Poesis gives us access to both.

When we in-habit the active and passive senses of having, we

co-exist. Inhabitation is both being placed and having that place. The

en-trancing of in-habiting allows us to experience the present as

complete presence, in which there is no consciousness of past or future.

When we in-habit, presence loses its dinnension of time and, when it

does, a sense of gifthood replaces our normal willfulness. We are

receptive rather than pro-active. In-habiting offers us a presence in which

we cannot will-to-have. Instead we are being-given. Heidegger often

used the term "dwelling" in regard to being. The term combined both

the noun for a shelter or habitation with the act of dwelling in or in-

dwelling so that little distinction was made between the two. Heidegger
added a sense of home to the meaning of dwelling. He considered our

coming-into-being as a coming home. For him, "language is the house

of being.""*'' And he used an older term, "abode," as in the biblical

expression "abide in Him."''^The abiding that poesis gives us is one that

is a givenness and not something that is taken or made.

Entrance, inhabit, dwelling, home, and abode are all words that

connote residence and residing, and it is the combination of active and

passive tenses of these words, of an object and an acting subject, which

the bridging door^/ay of poesis brings together Poesis is a passageway

as well as a space. In poesis there is sorge (a caring) but without angst.

Caring for time stands at one end of the bridge of poesis, while at the

other end is oblivion, the end of time and space, the end of sorge itself

The passage of poesis is a going to and a going from in which both

sides of the passage remain there for us. What is interesting about
passage is that there is both motion and no motion. Time is about us
but not in us, and the passing that comes with time-consciousness is

momentarily lost.Time does not end, nor does space, though we lose

awareness of both in poesis.

Sorge as an openness to is a form of concentration where we can

become enraptured and entranced. This enrapturing and entrancing

that comes with caring gives us another dimension of meaning. Ernst

Cassirer wrote that "whatever appears important. .that and only that .

receives the stamp of 'meaning'.""'^ So the mean as mediation and the

middle now has also the dimension of importance. It is meaning that
holds us in thrall. It is the middleness of meaning that matters. When
we are in sorge, when we are full of caring, we are filled with a meaning

that is total rather than specific. In the sorge of poesis we experience

the serenity of our being rather than its normal state of angst. The
dividing line between our being-with/out-time and our being-in-time is

monnentary: awe and fear are concentrated as we concentrate.Yet fear

evokes angst and awe evokes a state of wondernnent Wonder is a

trance in which sorge is not fearful but simply full. Wonder is our be-
holding (held by being) as a being-held the way we are held by a doorway
or a bridge that is open both ways.This is the openness of poesis.

Awe is another word for poesis.The state of poesis is an awe-filled

state because openness to being with time and space consciousness

is awe-filled. When we experience our being in poesis, and enter

existence without time and language, we are filled with our being to

the exclusion of beings.This puts us in awe because we are outside

our normal selves. Beings exist outside of poesis, while being exists

in it. Words such as wonder, awe, concentration, care, and so forth,

are simply different ways of expressing the mystery of poesis and its

mystical moment. Of these words, the term concentration leads us

further in our understanding of poesis.

Concentration is made up of con (with) and centrum (centre). In

concentration we centre ourselves and our centring suggests a circle at

whose core we stand. In centring and being centred, we are in the area

between the centre and the circumference. In the area between the

centre of and the surrounding horizon of language, our understanding

of passing from being-with-time in/too being-without-time resides.This

area is the en-trance given by in-habiting and holding (teneo). The area |
o
itself is simply distance or difference. Once distance or difference comes ^o
into existence, circumference becomes circumference and the centre 'i

is centred.

How does one move from the edge or horizon of language on

the circumference into the languageless centre? We cannot cross the 49

distance of difference gradually slowly gently Difference has a certain

absoluteness that requires a leap, a being taken from one to an utterly

different one. Being-with/out-time exists only when we are separated

from being-with-time. Being-with-time is our state of angst, the sorge

of caring for time, while being-with/out-time is our state of poesis, the

sorge of caring for being and being cared for by being. The "with/out"
 warns us of the duality of the "with" state and its co-existence with

time. If we imagine being as our centre and our daily linguistic con-

sciousness as the circumference, then being in poesis is a being-with/

out the centre. In poesis, we inhabit the separation or the difference

looking toward the centre. We are not totally in the centre. We are not
totally being, because in poesis we continue to retain the consciousness,

which makes us a being rather than being. The self recedes but does

not disappear.

In poesis, then, we move to the centre, which is our being, with a

leap which is accomplished by the moment of poesis, but we never

totally unite with being. We remain a duum as long as we can return to

understanding, as long as mythos remains with us as a possibility So the

passing from time to non-time within time and then back to time,

enunciates a story that we pass on.The story of a leap from one to the
other and back again tells us that there is an abyss and un-grounding

between the two states that we must cross by going-over In our leap,

we are suspended between the two. Poesis, as the timeless being with-

in history is that leaped space.

In our leap, we leave the ground of the circumference behind,

but then rejoin it on the other side as we pass near the centre on

our way back to the circumference of language. We cannot exist long

in our leap because the leap occurs in the context of the world of

E space and time and physical reality However, the leap is so fundamental

2 an experience that it can reveal space and time and reality to be utterly
° different from the way we normally experience them. So poesis entails

z a leap, but a leap that cannot be willed or desired or wanted but

instead occurs when we are presented with it as a gift and we receive

it as it receives us.The bridge metaphor instead of the circle metaphor

5° the doonway to Language the ground at
suggests the bridge is poesis. is

either end, while the abyss under the bridge is being itself Our sense of

falling is the leap of poesis, a leap that we feel but do not do.

When we are on the bridge (in the en-trance to and from and so

en-tranced) over the abyss of being, we remain aware of our grounding

and of poesis as a bridge that unites what is separated. We may be

ungrounded by our leap, but we are hopeful of a return to our ground.
This is both re-assuring in a flight from the unusual, and also cause for

concern because it is a return to the normal. We are also aware of

danger in the leap, of falling into the abyss of being which would plunge

us into death. Poesis is not the leap into death since we return from it.

It is the sense of utter stillness coming from the abyss that poesis brings
to We do not go to We do not will We do not throw ourselves
us. it. it.

into We await
it. a that does not involve death.
its call, call

We are as not moving, and we are

still, in as being there, still, in still

so that space and time can come together Leap as a stillness involves

being taken from where we can will to leap. To move into non-
movement is both a stillness and a still moving. In our leap we are

possessed by the experience of poesis that offers us a proximity to

being as a kind of death, where there is no motion, where there is no

passage of time, where there is no space. When we are taken from

the circumference of the circle toward the centre and then back to the
circumference, we are simply being possessed by our own existence

in so fundamental a way that we feel our existence most closely It is an

existential being from which we spend most of our time being alienated.

The experience of awe or wonder at the heart of poesis makes us

both happy and sad to return to our normal un-awe-filled state.

When we are in poesis, our concentration and our concern (sorge)

lets us possess our-being-possessed-by-our-being in a way we normally
are not. In poesis we feel that we are on the way to being without
place. But we are always placed because we do not lose our conscious-

ness completely We remain aware, and being aware we are able to

name and to understand. We are preserved in our living by being-there

rather than just being.The modifier the placer or spacer is what keeps
us human during the crossing of the bridge where we can feel both

non-meaning (being) and return to meaning.

When Heidegger adapted from earlier German philosophers the

term "dasein" as the definition of our humanness, which is translated as

being-there, he balanced thereness with being, indicating that being was

not a thereness at all but a non-thereness. We, who live in thereness

continually, are not attuned to non-thereness. But when language recedes

and the present time becomes presence rather than the flow of our
 willing actions, we come to the edge of our being-there, its extreme
condition in which non-thereness is palpable. When non-thereness

comes before us, the time in which we pass and the language of

meaning are revealed as the circumference of our existence rather

than its centre. Language is always there, but when its thereness meets

non-thereness there is a break in communication and representation.

When we are in the area between circumference and centre we
are as fully there and being as we can be. In the area between there-

ness and non-thereness we are being-there in its fullness because we

sense both the circumference and the centre.Through us they are both

the unum and duum (oneness and its tooness). But we experience this

space as a bridge over an abyss of being, even though we are the bridge

itself. We are the habitation that we inhabit. None of this is external

to us. We are both in-habiting and having. We are not the abyss of

being and its total non-thereness because we are still being-there.

We have not eliminated our thereness in poesis; we hold both non-

thereness and thereness together When both are present to us, we see

time and language and our willful life with them as hiders of being and

its non-thereness.

Using the circle image is a metaphor but metaphor is the only way
in which the experience of poesis and its revealing can be described.

If the reality that language gives us is presented metaphorically then

f the truth of poesis is only a truth. Truth is essentially a process of

2 simultaneous hiding and revealing and re-hiding.The untruth of truth is

° the limitation of truth because it must cover up with every uncovering.

z When we think of the truth of language we must always think of its

untruth as well. The word "true" comes from the Old English troewe,

which comes from the German treu, which implies an accordance with
5^ on the Old English troewth. later
the state of things. Truth is a variation

treuthe in Middle English that described fidelity or constancy and is

related to the Norse tryggdh. meaning faith. There is an element of

loyalty to or faith in the constancy of how language accords us the state

of things. We are required to truly believe in the real because language

tells us it is.

The postmodernist view holds that the truths that language gives
are only a re-presentation of reality, with an emphasis on re-present-

ing. The re-present-ing that language allows constructs new realities

because its re-present-ing is constantly changing.The different descriptions

of reality that local and specific languages give us nneans that our faith

in words and the access to reality they give make meaning the limit of

truth.'*'' When Heidegger combined hiding and revealing, truth and

untruth as the basic moments of language, he was accepting the duum

of language's unum.

If we move away from the metaphors of the circle and the bridge,

we can try another metaphor for this state of non-thereness and there-

ness. When we leap from our usual life in and with language toward

languagelessness or meaningless being, we enter a fog where there is

no seeing. In the metaphors of the dooiAvay and the bridge there was

an emphasis on seeing as be-holding both the abyss and the ground, of

looking two ways as it were, as we pass from time and in/too time,

from one point on the circumference to another When one enters a

fog, however, all sight is lost and one is totally surrounded by fog, which

reveals itself as fog but also hides all that is in the fog. All that is in the

fog or outside the fog is still there, but it no longer exists for us because
it can't be comprehended except through memory We can see only

the fog. In the fog we are veiled, enveloped and hidden. Our strongest

sense is of the hiddenness of things, of the world being veiled from us.

Reality is there, but where?

If the truth of language and time exists at the circumference of the ^
o
circle, we can only know that truth when we stand outside it and see it
^o
for what it is. But in the fog seeing comes to an end. The sensation of -

the fog leaves us disoriented, knowing we are somewhere, because we

must always be somewhere, but not knowing where this there is. We
are without a circumference, where we once were, and we are not at ^
the centre, the abyss of being. We simply stand in the space between

them (the bridge) and are en-tranced by either our fearfulness at where
we are, or en-tranced by our openness to being.

Poesis as bridge and fog, and its revelation of the circumference of

time and language as the limit of truth, leaves us totally embraced by

metaphor, because in writing about poesis we are not in the state of

 poesis but in the state of mythos, where time, passing, history, and

language live together.The images of bridge, fog, and circle, which seek

to embody in a meaningful way what is trying to be said about the

truth of language, are indicators, not only of the difficulty of speaking

about poesis, but also of the metaphoric structure of reality If we can

speak of a certain reality the reality of poesis, only in metaphoric images,

then we can rightly ask if this metaphoric structure applies in reality

beyond poesis.Transferring the insight of the poesis experience to our

languaged world is possible because the questioning of language that it

creates happens in the post-poesis moment. Our return to the angst of

time grounds us and allows us to care about what happened.

Sorge is an important concept because it has been related to open-

ness and caring. This openness and caring has led us to con-centration

(being with the centre) and, with it, the circle of meaning. When we are

concerned and concentrate, we are encircled. In being encircled we

are filled with care and wonder When we speak of awe and wonder
we are speaking of a mystical experience. Poesis as a mystical experience

involves a surrendering to surrounding. The surrounding that we

experience in poesis is language as the circumference of being, outside

of which we stand. The realization of language's totality weighs on us at

the very moment after we have stepped back from it.

There is a sacrifice in all of this. Sacra (sacred or holy) and faceo

5 (to make), that make up sacrifice, indicate how the poesis experience

2 is a holy one. It suggests a certain other-worldliness, of that which is

° beyond the normally human, of participation in a special moment,

t Experiencing poesis lets us enter the realm of the sacred, the mystical

moment. This sacredness should be thought of as opposition to the

secular (saecu/urum.that which is of the temporal), whose main dimen-

^"^
sions are time and space. Poesis, because it removes us partially from
the circle of time and language that we ordinarily fully inhabit, is some-
thing that belongs to the sacred and the holy The making sacred of
poesis (its sacra-ficing/making) takes us out of the secular and so reveals

the secular in its timeness.

When poesis occurs we receive the revelation of the mystical

experience, that all our truth is a metaphor. Poesis shows us that we

deal constantly in metaphors when we try to express being through

language, and in poesis we come as close to being as we can without

dying. In the previous sentence, I am not using the explanation of a

bridge, or a fog, or a door^vay or a circle, and such non-metaphoric

directness seems harshly abrupt, rather unreal and definitive without

presenting any linguistic or logical proof It is presented as a claim

that is a foil accompli.The metaphors in this chapter allow a certain

enshrouding mystery to surround poesis that makes it easy to under-

stand because metaphors have this imagistic space, which is individually

defined by personal meanings, where we can play and agree, disagree

or partially agree and disagree. We can make metaphors work for us

with certain private resonances. In reading the claim that poesis teaches

us the truth of reality bounded by linguistic horizon, we enter another

level of metaphoric speech, in which metaphor is not obvious, like a

doorway or a bridge,- but hidden in the affirmation itself

It is through hiding that we ordinarily describe reality but we hide

that hiding in our assertive descriptions. In them there is no mystery no

fog or bridge or doorway just a confidence about reality that allows us

to operate successfully in the world. Poesis challenges that operation,

takes us away from it and so makes us sacred rather than secular In its

bringing us close to time-less-ness (out of the secular), poesis brings us

even closer to time, which then becomes limited and circum-scribed

(written around). In poesis reality as metaphor becomes our new

horizon of understanding the world.

55
in/too metaphor _;o/in circles out/of death pastbe

Being-there and being-here creates a spatiality seemingly bereft of time.

I am here and you are there and there is space between us but when
combined into a "here and there," the result is an indeterminate space

lacking clear dimensionality.The placing within "here" and within "there"

already eludes to being somewhere but its specificity requires all

sorts of relational information beyond here and there for it to be

understood. Here and there need definition when we are not present

to the place implied in them.The where of here and there becomes a

somewhere that is problematic to our understanding unless there is

more information. Place is always a relationship between various places

and spaces. It also has a relationship with time. To remove time from
any space is an artificiality in the physical universe, but a suggestive act

in thought.

There and here already imply being since we experience being as

always being somewhere.To attempt to remove the somewhere leaves

us uncomprehending, and barely acknowledging that beyond space

and time there may be being. To come into contact with such being, or to
57
say that we have or can experience being outside our normal experience

of beings, means that we have been placed outside our usual phenomenal

state. In coming into contact with being in a seemingly unmediated

manner or form, we can say that we are possessed, en-tranced, or

encircled in such a way that we feel inhabited rather than inhabiting. In

being without place, or in placeless being, we no longer are shielded

from the centre and so we become open to a new re-veiling that

 appears as truth. We perceive something that around being, rather is

than being itself. We perceive another presence, a nnennbrane w^hich

surrounds being. There is clothing on the nakedness of being and that

clothing is the language or meaning that gives us time and space.

In the state of poesis, time is negated as a giver and dominator of

reality and space is negated as a giver and dominatonWe no longer feel

in a constant whirl of passage, of coming and going, of doing, responding,

and acting. The timeless/spaceless world is awe-filled and wonder-full.

Yet we remain conscious of being the being-of-being-in/between.

Consciousness requires separation and difference, which is both spatial

and temporal. So, in the en-trancing of poesis we apprehend the circum-

ference (the clothing of language) that surrounds being but we remain

apart from being itself through apprehension. We see being differently,

but we still see. We now occupy the place between being and language,
truth and naming. We are with being and not with We are with to it. it,

the extent that we are turned toward it as never before, but we also

continue to stand in our former relationship to it.

Our pre-poesis knowing, the condition of space and time, returns

to us post-poesis, but, when it returns, its encompassing totality (its

covering of language) has been shattered. We now are conscious of

reality in a different way because in poesis we momentarily withdrew

from it; we sense it from afar We cannot escape from knowing/

comprehending/apprehending, but the revelation of poesis allows

us to experience beyond our normal knowing. Our return from poesis
(the place between being and language) into the total realm of metaphor

(the circumference) means we return to hiding and uncovering and

to creating truth in the way language creates truth. We return to the

revealing and re-veiling that is meaning. Poesis, which is the experi-

S8 ence that takes us out of the act of creating truth, is made into a

truth in narrative.

Poesis is wordless. It does not seek a naming. We, who experience

poesis, need to name it, to define it, to clothe it in meaning and under-
standing after the fact. We need to place it in relationship to all our

understanding, our sensual universe and its rational construct. When

one is in poesis, one is receiving a gift of timelessness. When one is
outside poesis, one seeks to give it a name. One becomes the giver.

This is the truth-creating re-veiling of language. Poesis is an experience

of complete wholeness, in which being takes up almost our whole

being, while the world of creating meaning and using words and
language belongs to the ordinary world of will-to-power, control,

and domination.
Poesis becomes our past when we re-enter time and space. Its

caring challenges the caring of our daily lives. When our daily reality

withdraws in poesis, a new distance is created for us to comprehend

our being-in-the-world. We need that space to open up the world
for us under a new meaning and a new perception. In experiencing a

negation of our daily world we end up giving it a new name. By

removing ourselves from the circumference of meaning, by stepping

away from it, we see it for what it is — not the centre of our lives that it

once was but its periphery

What does it mean to say that language is outside poesis, when

metaphor is all we have to work with? All that I have said about poesis

is metaphor We are held by the metaphor as the only evidence to our

with-nessing poesis. We can only speak in metaphor when we do speak
of it. Our evidence is a symbolic representation. The experience of
poesis when made into language makes it seem distant. Once it was no
longer inhabited, poesis could only be grasped as language. For us, the

limit of understanding being, of presenting it to us as meaningful, lies in o

language itself Through poesis we perceived language as a hiding of S"

being, as a clothing of it so that language became indirectness. We saw ^

o
the circumference (our language for it) of being as the only permanent <
place for us. We could convey poesis only through the shape of a

language. In giving the experience the name of poesis we were in-scribing

it, creating a word for it and making the languageless into its opposite. -^^

Poesis, through this naming, became part of our regular world, where
it could be passed on to others. Poesis became ordinary But in doing so, it

stopped being an experience of languagelessness and timelessness;

it became a subject of historical language, where we feel at home and
reassured. In the mythos of poesis we lose our mis-givings about the
mystery of poesis and, through words, feel confident that we have
 brought poesis into the realm of meaning and understanding, where we
and language are in control. Rather than being possessed by being,

we now possess it.

Calling language the circumference of being is a metaphor and an

indication of the metaphoric relationship of all language to being. The

line of the circumference is what first defines a circle as a circle. It is

the circle's first horizon of identity, but that defining horizon becomes
something else when viewed from the poesis experience. The circum-

ference both hides and reveals the centre of the circle because it suggests

another (the centre) that is part of the circle. A circumference creates

a centre and a centre creates a circumference. The circumference

(language) can expand inward or outward continually but it must
always be separate from the centre in order for a circle to exist. The

separation between circumference and centre is the space and time

that allows defining or making definite.

A nineteenth-century etymological dictionary of the English language

defines the Greek word meta as a prefix that suggests change."*^

"Among,""with," and "after" are some of the English language equivalents.

.'^^
Metaphora (Greek) is a combination of meta (with) and ferein (carrying)

In metaphor something is changed or transferred indicating a certain

duality in its operation, of a one from two or in two. In change things

are not what they seem. They transfer and transform. Something
becomes or is viewed as something else. When we say that language

has a metaphoric structure we elude to its duality as symbolic repre-

sentation for being. It is a re-placement or, more commonly a

representative. Language as metaphor allows us to re-present the world.

Plato used the circle concept to link understanding and being. As the
Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben explains:
6o

Each being has three things which are the necessary

means by which knowledge of that being is acquired;

the knowledge itself is a fourth thing; and as a fifth one

must posit the thing itself, which is knowable and truly is.

First of these comes the name; second, the definition;

third, the image; fourth, the knowledge. In Plato's exam-

 pie of the circle, the name is thus the word 'circle'; the

definition, "that which is everywhere equidistant from

the extremities to the center"; the image, the drawn

circle; and the knowledge, the intellection or opinion of

^'^
the circle...

In his exposition of knowledge Plato refers to the complexity and

weakness of language in grasping truth or the truth of a being, and he

miakes a critical comment about the pretense of knowing through

writing when he states further on that "no man of intelligence will ever

venture to entrust his thoughts to language, especially if the language is

unalterable, like language written with letters."^' What is crucial is the

suggestion that the circle metaphor; and Plato is discussing a real circle,

has this linguistic multidimensionality framed at one end by the sensible

and at the other by Plato's idea of the perfect circle." Agamben states

that language presupposes beings and he refers to the "presuppositional

structure of language."" This is the otherness of the centre as presup-

posed by the circumference of language that surrounds being.

Derrida's concept of the urn of language suggests the ashes of words

and consumed meanings. Transferring the urn concept to metaphon

allows us to move from the meta (with) part to the ferein (bearing/

carrying) part of the word. An urn is a container and when we-think of

language as a container or an urn, we are dealing with the second part

of the word "metaphor," the part that denotes carrying, holding up,

or containing. The phora in metaphor is the carrying part but also

the containing part, a resonance of the circumference that limits or

contains the circle. Plato's defining and imaging and knowing deal with
containment.The word phora had connotations of a seat that held up

or supported, ergo, it carried.This same connotation occurs in the word

"form," derived from the Latin forma, meaning shape.^'' Phora as shape,

as form, as an urn that carries, relates to the shape or circumference

concept that underlies metaphor

Linking phora to form gives us a definition of metaphor as having

shape. In metaphor there is shaping through the vessel of language. If

language is a metaphor then it is a shaper a container that forms things

 into its own shape. The Greek word amphora, referring to a two-

handled vessel, suggests the structure of language as metaphor The

duality of the two handles, plus the reference to a vessel or container

that holds something within itself, is well suited to understanding the

operation of language. Amphora as an object lets us play with metaphor

as an amphiphoreus. If a metaphor is an amphora, then language is a

container that carries within it an empty space that is filled with some
beings, such as oil or wine in the case of the Greeks and Romans.

Language must form the emptiness of being into the shape of a being

in order for its being to be fulfilled. Agamben would say that this to-be-

filled emptiness is its pre-suppositional stance toward things. Language

then shapes that being into its own likeness.The space language holds is

surrounded by the wall of the vessel, which is what we see as the

defining shape and that wall is the limit of the container Yet the vessel

could not be a container if it did not have the dimensionality that

allowed it to be filled. What we cannot behold is what is within the

walls of the vessel. It is hidden from us even though we are aware of

it (Agamben's pre-suppositing). A container cannot be flat. It must, like

the circle, have space between its walls (circumference). Language as a

metaphor is an amphora, a vessel that contains both emptiness and

fullness and presupposes a being other than itself within itself Of course,
it is we humans that pour meaningful things into the amphora and then
carry it and the contents.
The circumference of language is a cipher that requires deciphering.

For language to work as a communicator of reality it needs to have the

nonlinguistic being as well as the linguistic. Its representational power

comes from the two handles by which it is carried. When philosophy

deals with metaphor it ascribes to it a secondary or rhetorical nature,

62
believing that philosophical thought can somehow surpass metaphor
and express language unmetaphorically'"'' The common use of metaphor as

a figure of speech, in which one thing is described in terms of another

makes language de-scriptive. Language is de-scription (of writing) and

de-finition (of the finite). Description and definition are metaphoric.They

are the vessel of containment, an amphora which both holds another

and hides it from view.
 Meta and phora can be interpreted as applied finitude, the concrete

definite that is nothing but shape. So language as a nnetaphor limits and

defines. It is the shape through which reality is fornned. Instead of the

centre inside, we have only the circumference of language. Language

is the limit and boundary of being in the same way that circumference is

the limit and boundary that shapes a circle around a centre.The poesis

experience allows a term like metaphor to be moved or carried from

a very specific meaning in literary practice to a general description

of how language works. Poesis offers metaphor as the new definition of

language. But when language gives a boundary of meaning to meaning-

less being, language is stretched to its limit. Texts such as this one are a

source of great frustration because of what they do to language and

ordinary meaning. They strip language of its confidence while agreeing

to its necessity

Language as metaphor gives form to being and so creates reality

and truth. It shapes and moulds, giving reality a plenitude of limitations

or shapes.The poesis experience of being is an experience of limitless-

ness beyond metaphor because the ordinary shape of beings is lost

to us.The normal metaphoric structure of language that allows us to

understand and explain does not operate in poesis. We, the carriers of

the amphora of language (Derrida's urn) stand outside the contents

that are carried in the form.

Carl Jung in explaining his master concept of archetype refers to o

the Platonic "Idea" as a prototype.^*^ For Jung, as for Plato, the archetype/ 2
^
idea is a primordial form." Out of the infinitude of unlimited being

come shapes and in their formal discreteness we are able to relate c;

them into webs of meaning.This prototypicality concerns what Gadamer

calls "the fundamentally linguistic character of our experience of the

world."^^ "The mediation of finite and infinite" he goes on to say "that ^

is appropriate to us as finite beings lies in ianguage."^^ The circumfer-

ence of meaning is the mediation that language provides us in our

dealings with reality Language becomes fundamental to the founding

of our experience and our understanding.The unmediated-by-language

experience of being that comes with poesis exposes the mediating

role of language in our accessing reality Gadamer hints at this when he

 writes "metaphor maintains the appearance of carrying something
over from one realm to another. ..Only when the word... has lost its

character of having been taken up and carried over does its meaning in

the new context begin to become its 'proper' meaning."''" Gadamer's

emphasis is on appearance and illusion, on pretense that works when
its appearance is forgotten. The context of meaning is important, so

that in the trans-position or translation involved in metaphor there

remains a context now subsumed into new meanings.^' This is the

duum in the unum. In the transpositing involved in metaphor as a

literary device, we get an inkling of the interpretive act in language that

brings being into our consciousness as beings.

The Spanish philosopher Julia Marias stated rather dramatically: when

we believe we walk on earth, we really walk on metaphors." When we

understand, we think we are at the centre of being when in fact we are

, at its periphery We are listening to language, the interpreter unless we

experience poesis, When we walk on earth we walk on earth, but

when we think about walking on earth, we are walking on the meaning

of earth. No doubt there are occasions when something that we walk

on is so novel, so strange, so unnamed that we do not walk on meaning

other than the meaning of "I don't know what it is," or "I don't know
what to call it." As soon as this not knowing or absence of symbolic
meaning occurs, we are nervous and uncertain. Walking outside of

5 language's comforting naming and explaining can be frightening. So,

1 like explorers, we quickly create a name that is We use our

familiar

° language to feel at home and secure in our knowing. We live in and

z by symbol.

The symbolic never stands alone. It is always about being and being

a symbol. It is always pointing both to itself and another.Time also does

^4 not stand alone; needs another to be real. It needs space. Time is
it

symbolic, a being for another being, just as space is a symbol of time.

Space appears to be the opposite of time because it is measured by

time. When we pass through physical space, our sense of distance is

related to time. When we sense a passage of time, we measure it as

space movement such as the sun across the sky So space and time are

symbols because they interpret each other and so create different ways
in which we understand them. As synnbols they are as fundamentally

different as being and language are different, but how different is that?

Language is the fundamental metaphor that we inhabit. It repre-

sents being to us. What language gives being is meaning and meaning is

ultimately more important to us than being itself Language is what we

cling to as we make our way through the world (space) and through

life (time). As the message of or the messenger from being, we pay

attention to language and not to its source. When being is given a

meaning, it loses its being. In language we live in the shapes and shaping

created by symbolic representation even as we interact with the physical

world. This living in language puts us on the circumference of being.

Perhaps this is why Plato held the ideal to be superior and above the real.

The real has no meaning beyond language. It may exist but it is not

real for us if it stands outside of language and meaning. Language tells us

that we are in touch with reality and as long as language successfully

interprets reality we accept it as truthful, as giving us the truth of reality

In the scientific age (the age that glorifies technological knowing),

begun with Greek thinking, truth keeps changing, unfolding, modifying.

Meaning resides in circumscription or in the metaphoric structure of

language, and we cannot live without meaning.The genius of language is

the limit it puts on being, creating for being myriad interrelated forms.

Where there is no limit, no boundaries, no shapes that differentiate and

give wholeness to things, there is no language, only limitlessness. o

By naming the relationship of language and limitless being metaphor 2

we take up the afterness of meta. Metaphor is that which brings shape ^

to what matters. Its carrying is after the fact of being. Language comes ^
c
after being. But this after being is also before being. It stands before

being and hides it from us. We experience language first, yet language

comes after being and substitutes itself for it.To reach being, and so ^
go beyond language, we must leave language and the metaphoric

structure of reality That beyond language is the abyss of non-meaning,

of meaninglessness, which is highly problematic for the human mind.

Through the experience of poesis, we get a glimpse of a meaningless

world. The poesis experience reveals to us the metaphoric structure

we inhabit and so shows the limits of language and its partiality (every
 truth IS an untruth, every metaphor is partial and inadequate to describing

being). In doing so, it indicates the opposite of truth, which is being

or non-truth.

Being is not true or truth. Being is the connplete opposite of truth,

which is a creation of language. If we ask if it is true that being is non-

truth, we are making being into a question of truth and questioning is a

linguistic exercise. Since language is the only thing that gives us truth

(meaningful understanding), all that is outside of language is non-truth,

non-meaning, and therefore being. We live in truth and in being but we

experience and hold onto being as truth, as language tells us it is. When
poesis ends our contentment with language as the provider of under-

standing, we move closer to being and further from the claims of

language. We come closer to being because we glimpse language from

outside itself and we approach the centre of the circle which is the

infinity of being beyond language.

But our removal from language through the experience of poesis

also brings us closer to language itself The difference between being

and language that poesis offers also shows their symbiosis, which is

like the symbiosis of space and time — aspects of reality that are both

similar and different After poesis we feel intensely the symbolic power
of language and the majesty of metaphor We recognize and acknowl-

edge that being comes to us through language and that language is a

privileged intermediary Being becomes being for us through language,

while language comes to us through human being. The limit and partiality

that is truth in language is actually comforting because it fits our own

mortality and finiteness. Language as the circumference of being is where
we belong and where we feel most alive. We are not at home in poesis,
which is an overwhelming experience that puts us at the furthest limits

66
of our human psyche.

Poesis gives language a new authenticity by stripping it of its equa-

tion of truth with being and its ability to deliver just such an equation.

Poesis gives the centre to being, and so rejects the claims of language to

that centre. Poesis also indicates that human being does not reside at

the infinite centre but at the finite circumference created by language.

We are to inhabit partiality and limit as it exists in language. Language is

ours but being is not, even though we share in it.

The philosopher of hermeneutics, Paul Ricoeun discusses the meaning

of metaphor by dissecting its etymology in The Rule of Metaphor.

"Phora" is a spatial term involving a figure.^^ So the concept of "figure

of speech" has a spatial aspect.The shaping, forming, contouring that

is part of the circle metaphor about metaphor fits with Ricoeur's

concept of figure. Later on in the same text, Ricoeur analyzes "meta-

phoric truth," which is the truth inherent in a figure of speech, and

attributes a "tensional" quality to it.^'' Referring to a metaphor in the

phrase "joyous undulation of the waves" from a Holderlin poem, he

describes the presence in this metaphor of "the reciprocity of the inner

and the outer. . .a bipolar tension."*"^ This tension is similar to that which

is found in the relationship of centre to circumference in the circle

metaphor revealed by poesis. While Ricoeur is analyzing the workings

of metaphor as a figure of speech and a literary device, extending his

analysis to all of language and meaning results in the tension between

language and being. Ricoeur concludes:

Metaphor is that strategy of discourse by which lan-

guage divests itself of its function of direct

description in order to reach the mythic level where its

^^
function of discovery is set free. o
a.
fO

<u

Describing all language as metaphor may not be Ricoeur's goal, but ^

such a statement does operate on a mythic level of discovery The <

c
authenticity of language lies in its hiding of being from us while keeping
it present through meaning. Description is the perpetually evolving

boundary of our shaping of reality If, as Ricoeur insists, metaphor can ^

set us free to discover, then the circle metaphor used here should set

us free from our normal non-metaphoric understanding of language. If

metaphor frees us from the direct description function of language and

allows us to reach the mythic, as Ricoeur claims, then the circle meta-

phor in this text does this as well. This text, then, becomes a metaphor
that attempts to be totally freeing, which, of course, being language,

it cannot.

Language cannot be other than a nnetaphor It cannot go beyond

itself What Ricoeur approaches with a philosopher's caution, this text

embraces enthusiastically Where he makes a distinction between

metaphor and language in general, this text does not. Yet his discussion

of metaphor as a literary device points to the literary and metaphoric

character central to this text. A text cannot deny that it is a text nor can

it become other than a text except as oral discourse that is read aloud

orspoken."ln philosophical discourse," Ricoeur writes, "the renovation of

extinguished metaphors. . .is the awakening of etymological motivations,

pushed even to false etymology."^^ So the false etymology in this text,

which links metaphora and amphora awakens the reader (hopefully) to

the essence of mythic metaphorizing. False etymologies poetize language

through their bi-polar tension. Embracing their falseness is a method of

reaching truth.

The falseness of the etymology used here removes the reader from
the ordinary descriptiveness of language and its inherent unconscious

falseness. Metaphors that are dead to us come alive again through false-

ness. This falseness points to the structure of untruth in all truth that

comes from metaphor When we take Plato's "Forms," or Hegel's "Spirit,"

or Heidegger's "Being," as direct descriptions rather than metaphors,

we deny the metaphoric structure of language and distance ourselves

from the being they re-present.The Aristotelian definition of metaphor

as epiphora, where epi is a "to" adverb, while phora remains that which

carries or holds, maintains the formative nature of language as a bearer

In a sweeping statement (sweeping about metaphor as a literary device),

Ricoeur speaks almost mystically about metaphor when he writes:

The metaphorical field in its entirety is open to the figures

that play on the relations between the similar and the

dissimilar in any region of the thinkable whatsoever.''®

Metaphor is the constant being-as of language and language is

constantly a being-as. At the beginning of this text, circumference and

centre were the two/too in the unum of the circle. Their similarity in

language and their dissimilarity in being are open to the endlessness of

metaphor reverberating with its own metaphorness. Ricoeur tells us

that "being-as signifies being and non-being."^'' If the centre is being

and the circumference is non-being (language), then the relationship

of language to being is metaphoric or being-as. This text is a being-as of

the experience of poesis and, in being-as, it is a shaping of poesis and a

holding of it in language and in meaning.The text holds the experience

of poesis in words. Language gives us being, but being as language,

as metaphonThis is the metaphoric truth Ricoeur refers to. To use

the term "poesis" re-makes this text's philosophical claims into poetry

and metaphor

Poetry heightens the tension between language and being which

ordinary language tends to eliminate in favourof practicality Because of

its lack of practicality poetry gives language a greater authenticity and

insight into language as metaphorThe use of literary devices in poetry

suggests a communion with being rather than alienation from it.

Communion with being through language rather than the more direct

experience of languageless poesis is a possibility It poses the idea of

language that is no less metaphoric but is more clearly self-conscious

of its metaphoric nature. After poesis such language could only be

realized in poetic text, one alive with metaphor

69
go/in circles out /of death past becoming ending/bt

The hermeneutic circle, or the endless path of interpretation where

language interposes itself, is another way of expressing the nnetaphoric

nature of language. Gadamer's maxim, "Being that can be understood is

language," is the hermeneutic circle formed by language, understanding,

and being. ''°
When language describes itself as metaphor it is self-

consciously hermeneutic. But when, one may ask, has language ever

claimed to be other than symbol and metaphor? It has been viewed as

such for millennia. Humanity has conceived language as a form of being

that allows us to communicate our grasp of reality and to be a symbolic

substitution for it. We all know and realize that the word "chair" is

not a real chain but a word communicating meaning. So why try to

make a distinction between our ordinary use of language and some

other, supposedly more authentic understanding of language as a self-

conscious going around-in-circles?

After the experience of poesis,the continuum between reality and

meaning that we take for granted is broken. The fluidity and effortless-

ness of the ordinary use of language results from our ignoring the power
metaphor We use language and do not
^^
of language as reflect on it.

It is an automatic tool of consciousness helping us make our way in

the world. But poesis brings us face to face with language in a more
immediate and introspective way in a way that is only hinted at in

poetry where each word becomes, as they say pregnant with meaning.

In poesis we come face to face with language by being taken from it. All

this is beyond our daily relationship with language, whose goal is to

 help us cope with and control what is. Poesis reveals such an imnnensity

of being that we are temporarily speechless.

In the previous chapter the defining of phora became a journey

along the pathways of the hermeneutic (interpretive) circle. The jour-

ney began with the temporality of space (its history) and the relationship

of language with space and time suggested in phora. Now we can build

on this static image of the container/carrier if we relate phora to forum,

the place or space where dialogue and discussion within a community

takes place. In the forum, humans practice the convincing power of

language to effect consciousness and human action.The forum was the

place of rhetoric, where the structuring and manipulation of words,

phrases, and ideas in an emotional manner allowed humans to make

historical decisions for their communities. The forum was a dynamic

place of interchange, a space where something happened over time.

There was a beginning and an end and an in-between.Time passed in a

community so history was made. The idea of forum gives the herme-

neutic circle an interactive element. Both Roman jakobson and Julia

Kristeva have presented language as this kind of double interplay of

rhythm and structure.'''

What the idea of forum shows us about metaphor; other than its

human community of meaning, is that the dual message/messenger

nature of metaphor is both static and dynamic. Language as a metaphor

5 creates through its "like" or "as" motion passage to and from. The

1 hermeneutic circle involves a journey along its edge. A metaphor is both

° stable and moving. It was, is and becomes. It is both spatial and histoncal.

z Metaphor involves a process in which we walk along, exchanging the

being of language for the being of things. This exchange is the trans-

lation of language into reality Language, the giver of reality creates

7^
meaning. Hermeneutics, as a discipline, deals with texts and their

interpretations. When we view language in its totality as interpretation,

as an interposing of meaning onto reality, then we can see all language as

hermeneutical, as turning all reality into meaning through naming.

Language as hermeneutic circle is the first/after form (meta-phora)
that we give to being as beings.The hermeneutic circle can only give us

metaphors about beings that it frames.

 Heidegger used the hermeneutic circle to slnow how interpretation

was a circularity that opened our eyes to the interpretation-donninated

nature of reality^^ He told us not to be afraid of circularity, which is a

way of saying not to be afraid of metaphor and its hiding of being. Only
when we are conscious of the universe of interpretation in which we
reside can we bring this interpretive nature to the foreground of our

understanding. While going around in circles seems fruitless and a waste

of time, it is not. The person who runs around an exercise track, who
runs in circles, is not wasting time. That person is exercising and finds

benefit in it.The person who runs in a straight line has to turn around

to reach his starting point. Beginning and end are one and the in-between
is the purpose of the exercise. The in-between is the distance and the

time we take to do the run. So it is with the hermeneutic circle. Our

passing along it in a language-conscious way prepares us for the leap

out of metaphor/language. Poesis then takes us out of interpretation, and

we go/in the circle of language itself

When we return to language we compartmentalize, objectivize,

partialize, define, and make useful what we have experienced. That

we glimpsed at being beyond language in a languageless way is now

no longer indefinite but very definite with spatial and temporal bound-

aries. Reality is the place of boundaries and limits and being becomes
myriad discrete realities — objects, ideas, emotions, all defined and

limited. Language allows us to separate being into endless forms of

beings that are. ^

The hermeneutic circle that we can go around or enter in/too, is z

both our starting point (interpretation) and our end point (translation). ~

Since being is beyond truth (truth is a function of language and so a

metaphor) we seek words to express the beyond truth, words like

"awe." But we do not live in awe. We cannot live in a state of poesis. ^3

We always need to return to the hermeneutic circle, the poetry of

metaphor It is our home. When we return to language, we inhabit the

metaphora.the perpetually moving boundary of that which gives shape

to being, that gives being its determinacy
Poesis allows us to see language better than language can, but it can

only do so in a languageless way The use of non-English terms, the

 abuse of etymology, the metaphoric linking of words in creative ways,

the dragooning into service of non-existent fornns of words used in this

text are all rhetorical techniques to open us up to thinking poesis, but

they are no more valid a substitute for it than language is for being.

They all partake of the secondary nature of language nnasquerading

as something primary They all play the game of language, which is to

hold being in its power by giving the meaningless meaning. A language

that seeks to break out of its nature becomes, as this text is, a broken

language, a shattered amphora whose contents have spilled onto the

sands beneath the ocean of understanding. It is a language that is wrecked
and unusable.
We stand before an anti-language language with puzzlement, just as
we may read this text with puzzlement and non-understanding. We
would have great trouble reading an anti-language language. We know
it contains something but what that something is would not be easily

knowable. It would be too close to meaninglessness while having the

form of meaning (language). It may suggest an awe-filled universe, but awe
is a dangerous thing since it suggests the indefinable, a realm we avoid.

Language that seeks to unmask itself as a hermeneutic circle can

only circle around itself Its unmasking can only be a thought, a momen-
tary unmasking of its masking. That is why the unmasking that occurs

when speaking about poesis is simply another masking. It is only when

5 we stop languaging that the being of poesis becomes possible. But we
2 cannot will poesis. It must be given by being-to-us.
° The circle of metaphor has come to us through our cultural

z inheritance, where the mystery of being has turned into the denial of

that mystery This denial allows language to be dominant in our dealing

with physical and other reality When poesis exposes this denial and
74 puts forth the mystery of being once more, language is not transformed

into something less than it is. Rather, it is given an even more powerful
place than it had before. The mystery of being is replaced with the

mystery of meaning, the mystery of knowing as an endless will-to-

power in relationship to reality Without language there is no knowledge

that can be communicated; without symbolic forms the world is un-

knowable. But, in a denial of its metaphoric structure, language becomes

just another manipulative definable object that can be used and discarded.

Poesis challenges that and gives language a sacred presence and mean-
ing instead of stripping it of meaning or value.

Both Ricoeur and Gadamer point to the mystery of explanation, of

the endlessness or infinitude of interpretation, as something worthy

of amazement and not just something to be treated in a utilitarian

manner In this text, language is shaping poesis. Those who read and

interpret this text will further shape poesis (its meaning), just as any

language evolves in its shaping of reality in history Just like any experience,

poesis gives rise to naming. When an experience is novel, the resultant

naming becomes novel for a time, until it is accepted as normative. If

the naming is never accepted as "truth" it remains as "untruth" as long

as it is remembered.
Once we are clothed in language and meaning, the tension between

circumference (language) and centre (being) cannot be ignored. We can

no longer assign the meanings in language to a useless past, but we give

them a currency for the present.The origins of words are no longer just
origins that are now irrelevant. Instead they seem to glisten with their

original freshness and powenThe old naming is not useless but essential

to it. Language that is post-poesis and poesis-reflective holds language to

the forgotten light of former meanings. This text allows poesis to be

semi-understood. Mystery is a certain form of un-knowing in which we

comprehend parts but not the whole. We ac-know-ledge but we do
not know. ^
Already this text is an interpretation (indirectness) because it uses z
c
language. It seeks to translate the experience of poesis into a language \
that tries (hopelessly) to respect the infinitude of being, but turns it into

the finitude of one word — poesis.The common denial of the metaphonc

reality of language in its daily use has resulted in an overemphasis on 75

the finite over the infinite. This is what this text seeks to rectify It seeks

to bring back into language the mystery of being and the infinity of

language as metaphor In being an interpretation, this text walks along

the circumference of meaning created by language, but it walks slowly

So it seeks to dismantle, dissect, reconstruct, and imagine words that

break through accepted meanings and suggest new ones. Heidegger is

 a master of this. So are Derrida and Foucault. These philosophers use

imagination and the poetry of origins to give refreshed meanings to

words and expressions.

Poesis re-veils (reveals) through its door-like process of opening

and closing. Its re-veiling (creation of meaning) of being is what occurs

when language describes. If the new/created/imagined meanings of

philosophers become widely accepted, then they will take on the

assuredness of knowing and so become inauthentic.They become truth.

The difficulty of understanding often associated with such texts means

they momentarily escape truth. As these texts become part of the

body of "knowing," truth removes all hint of their metaphoric structure.

They are no longer the duum in the unum but the only one. As truthful

accounts of being, they hide their metaphoric structure.The more truth

or validity we find in a thought, the more untruthful or inauthentic it

becomes and its interpretation of being ever more suspect.

Because poesis is an ex-stasis, a standing outside the norm, its ecstasy

cannot be languaged other than through a poetry that recognises its

metaphoric nature. Metaphor as the door to what is, must be viewed

as a door and not as the inside or the outside of the door Metaphor
opens (reveals) and closes (re-veils) reality for us. Without metaphor we
cannot enter or leave reality The door is not a substitute for reality

but an entranceway Once poesis has shown us the door of language,

5 language becomes even more important than before. If one were to
2 dwell too long on the metaphoric quality of language, language would
° lose its power to communicate being to us. It needs its separation or

Z
o
alienation from being as much as it needs its communion with it. We
do not want to be "en-tranced" with the power of language in a self-

conscious way because we would stop operating in the world. We

7^
need the illusion of non-metaphor to survive; we need to be one
with the reality meaning gives us rather than being one with meaning-

less being.

Poesis creates an apprehension in us because it brings us closer

to being than we have ever been. We prefer the representation of

language to being itself In its representation of being, language creates

all the devices of rationality needed to construct a useful universe for us.
We are able to digest reality through the meanings language offers

us. If language could no longer objectivize or rationalize, it would be

dead in the same way a foreign language seems to those who do not
know it. It would be a meaningless and frustrating presence. The

ossification of pieces of language occurs when language is no longer

malleable but considered obsolete and useless. When we are filled,

through poesis, with the openness of being, we grasp ever more tightly

the meaning of our world as a tower of unchangeable truth. Even

when we know that the truths we grasp are not meaningful beyond

language, we remain loyal to them for fear of what disloyalty brings,

which is meaninglessness.

Only when hermeneutics frees us from rigid meanings, and creates

new inter-pretations that we can inhabit, do we feel at home. Interpre-

tation is a replacement of inherited meanings with renewed meanings.

When Heidegger excavates antique terms and gives them a creative

etymology, it is not so much, according to his own view, creating anew

but respecting the old. When Jung goes back into alchemist terminology

to find understanding, he likewise respects the old. This is the counter-

current to the progressive view of scientific terminology which must

continually bring into disrepute old ideas and make them defunct or
false. Jung and Heidegger embrace the hermeneutic circle and the power

of metaphor to give meaning. These thinkers may make claims that

sound as absolute truth claims, but their only absolute is metaphor and
the meaning it creates. Their engagement with past human cultures ^
challenges the future-orientation of the physical sciences and their will- z

to-powerThrough poetry and self-conscious metaphor we can escape x

from the regimes of reality that have been constructed for us. Poetry is

a sign of human weakness and inability to control. Poetry sings being

'^
and nothing more.

Language that knows itself as an interpretation knows that it knows

being only as interpretation. In being conscious of its origin (language

and being) it knows the importance of originality to thinking and

speaking. The metaphors of poetry are most powerful when they are
most original in their linkages and resonances.That is why originality in

thinking and writing requires imagination and creativity Poesis as

 entrancing and awe and presence, activates an engagennent with

language that generates new meaning like a flowing sphng.These new

meanings may be boundaries like all other boundaries because they

are based on the old boundaries, but they break up the established

ones to provide a momentary glimpse of'something else" in the world.

When poesis has shown us language as the after-form of being,

we see its historical conditioning both as a god and as a tool. As the

former language presents itself as being infinite, while as the latter, it

presents itself as totally finite and expendable. In the pursuit of being as

description, language recreates itself into new knowing. This knowing

seems to be an insight into symbol as a tool that opens up the mystery

of what is. But then we reject this insight in favour of another that

seems more truthful and so on. This is the infinity/finity dichotomy of

language and cultural construction. In every affirmation by language

there is a denial. Language, to use Derrida's urn metaphor is constantly

burning itself into ashes that either rekindle or burn no more. The urn

of meaning both carries and hides the ashes of previous meanings that

are no longer relevant. Whenever we bury ourselves in the language of

the times we are burying ourselves in its ashes. Heidegger would ask,

"how is it" with language, because "how is" is more important than
"what is."The power to name and re-name, to create and un-create
meaning, to be alive for us and to be dead for us, is the beating pulse of

E metaphor: that which is distant from and near to being.

S Going around the hermeneutic circle of interpretation is a call to

° go into the circle, to step outside of meaning and language, which is

Z what happens in poesis. But going in, compared to going round, implies

a coming-out-of If one does not come-out-of the circle, one dies.That

the will-to-death is so common among mystics is a clear indicator of the
7^
attraction of the fullness of nothingness. In the ending of life, one feels

intensely alive to something beyond ordinary existence.This is a direct

experience of beatific vision that no text can convey What to some

would seem to be nihilistic angst (despair) is to others heavenly beauty

(ecstasy). Poesis is neither as overwhelmingly positive nor so negative.

Its neutrality lies in its absolute valuelessness. It is only our understand-

ing that awards it character after the fact.

 In its exstasis, poesis removes us from any absolute clainns because

it removes us from the meaning that language gives. Being beyond

language shows us the boundary of language as the creator of finitudes,

of shapes, and the endless amphorae of reality The language that seeks

to express poesis does so knowing that its expression is metaphor

piled on metaphor a heap of meaning that covers being for us. Language

makes the infinite finite and so puts being in our grasp and in our
control. When we enter the repetition of words, such as the chant at

the beginning of this text or the repetition in this text itself, we are

moving to something beyond the rationality of language.

Fear of and attraction to the meaninglessness of being can happen

simultaneously when being is presented in a non-representational way

In the ecstasy of poesis there is also utter despair When Heidegger
was in his seventies, he participated in a seminar that discussed the

fragments of thought left by the Greek pre-Socratic philosophen

Heraclitus.The seminar was conducted at the University of Freibourg

by Eugen Fink. Near the beginning of the seminar the transcript indicates

FHeidegger saying almost casually: "Although I do not like to use the

word [being] anymore, we now take it up nevertheless."''^ One can

understand his reaction because he had used the term so forcefully

and so endlessly in his initial writings.The word had become meaning-

less to him because he had found other words to express what he

thought He wanted to circle it and not be so direct in his naming, as

if he understood being. ^
I use word "being" constantly in this text without any implied meaning z

or clear definition. This lack of defining suggests being's indefiniteness. \

o
Being cannot be rigorously articulated, and Heidegger's retreat from

the word later in life warns me that being cannot be the plaything of

language. Circling it hermeneutically as this text does, is the correct 79

stance. Calling out to it from the boundary of language and hearing

one's own echo is all that is required. What our words bounce off

(being) does not matter so much as the effect of their bouncing. We

know that the echo has not the strength of the originating call but it

may have a greater beauty and impact. We should think of words as

echoes from being.

 While poesis has been explored linguistically in page after page of
this text, being has been a kind of ghostly spirit without physical or

linguistic substance. It is present but undeternnined. If being were to be

defined it would be only a word and a web of meaning such as that

which a dictionary creates. Letting being be is what poesis teaches. Let

the word "being" be the metaphor that it is; let it be the ultimate for.

The relationship between what is and what is named is the relationship

between the unknowable and the understood. The unknowable is

not a non-existence for us but an undefined presence (the pre-sent

described in earlier chapters of this text).

Language will not allow us to discover being. Poesis is a gift from

being that breaks through language. When we are outside the "as is" or

"like that" of language, we are outside the metaphoric structure and its

endless separation, unifying and shaping. After poesis one continues to

speak but in a way that is conscious of how language is for us rather

than what it is.

Being can be both threat and peace. It can be the nothingness of

chaos or the plenitude of total meaninglessness. Experiencing being as

non-differentiation, allows limitlessness to enter our lives for an instant.

Its wholeness only highlights the partiality that allows us to be in the

world. Language, the home of partiality, must hold on to the circum-

ference, to Its hermeneutical form. In that way language guards and

protects the unreachable centre. Its hermeneutic circle of constant

differentiation makes possible the harmonious fluidity beyond itself

The fluidity or indeterminacy of the centre (here) is what is suggested

in mystical understanding.

Legend and myth are also self-consciously metaphoric and allegorical.

The allegorical speaks of resemblance and the similar At one time, myth
8o
was presented as an accurate description of the way human beings are

in the world, but as a metaphor its truth was open to interpretation.

The myth may be immutable in its oral presentation but terribly mutable

in its interpretation. Mythos (narrative) is rooted at one end in the

logos of chaos. So any text that seeks to approach being must do so as

self-conscious myth. Mythos does not presume to take reality and truth
as anything more than its own story telling. It calls itself a substitution,
a representer and not the real thing.That is the sense of chaos that we
feel beyond meaning, the frightening/welconning abyss.The hermeneutic
circle contains an abyss that is both inviting and repelling. At the centre
is being with/out beings like us.

Language that presents itself as appearance rather than as the

presenter of being, would be a language struggling with authenticity In

striving for authenticity it breaks up and de-constructs itself as this text

has attempted, so that we might hear and acknowledge its echoing

nature. The source of the echo is both the wall of being that reflects

our words and we ourselves, who generate the words. Our words are

reverberations of ourselves. The more we break up words the closer

we get to their nature. The moment of poesis cracks open language

revealing the death-like absence at its centre.The monological pretense

of language becomes progressively dialogical (dual) in these word-games,

then polylogical (the play of the many), and finally unlogical (empty of
logos). The word-games that pervade this text are simply part of the

carnival of language, espoused by Mikhail Bakhtin. Poesis can only be

expressed through word-play and acknowledging this limitation liberates

us from the strictures of language, and allows us to dance.

81
 —

es out/of death past becoming ending/beginning posts

One of the central distinctions in metaphysics has been the opposition

of being and nothing.The concept of nothing is both a tool of logic and

an emotional description of meaninglessness, where the lack of meaning

is considered a personal mental problem associated with depression.

Being is positive and nothing is negative. The "is not" is what is not true,

what does not exist, etc., while the "is" is and so is true, real etc. In

opposition to this dichotomy, the poesis experience makes the lack of

meaning in poesis meaningful. An experience that removes us from the

truth of language has a certain nothingness and meaninglessness about

it, but this nothingness and meaninglessness is positive and worthwhile.

Poesis, in giving us being as a no-thing, makes being's limitlessness a

presence. Poesis, when it is spoken or written about, is always a was and

a past, which is what language demands. By having the characteristic

of was rather than is, poesis can be languaged.The poesis experience of

no-thing-ness (being) becomes the ultimate horizon of human being-

in-the-world, where the world is momentarily withdrawn from us in

the withdrawal of language. In poesis nothing and being are the same,

while in the languaging of the poesis experience poesis is made to

inhabit space and time.

As well as the poesis experience, there is another"ultimate horizon"

of our being-in-the world and that is the end of our being-in-the-world

our death. Are poesis and death similar? They are similar but not the

same. From poesis there is return to being-in-the-world because we

do not leave the world the way we do in death. We do not leave life in
poesis. But even in death we do not become a no-thing. We are

transfornned organically into other physical elements. We are, but not

the way we were. In death, the circumference of language and meaning

is taken from us so that we are no longer a being-in-the-world.

In poesis we are separated from language and time but then we

re-enter both and remember In death there is no remembering.
Remembering belongs to the living and the language of the living. When
Derrida used the urn of language metaphor he unconsciously put death

and poesis in proximity by eluding to an urn filled with human ashes.

In death there is a fundamental transformation of our being. In the

poesis experience exaltation in the fullness and nothingness of being

transforms consciousness but not our being-in-the-world. In the awe

of poesis the ultimate horizon of our experience of being is similar to

death. Poesis suggests that losing our being-in-the-world is not a disaster

When we are aware of the gift of worlding that language gives us, we
are listening to the standing-for-another of language. We become aware
of the other that is beyond message and messenger The otherness,
that we see from afar in poesis, is the impossibility of crossing the

distance between circumference and circle while living. Only in death

do circumference (language) and centre (being) become one.

The otherness of being in all its infinity is a universal surrounding

that we do not know. Listening closely to language, after poesis, allows

us to see, not the centre, which we can only sense, but our surroundings,

the circumference. When we are in-between the centre and the circum-

ference, when we are in poesis, we no longer are in language and meaning.

We can never see beyond our world because seeing is understanding

given by language. In poesis, we fall off the circumference of meaning

but we do not fall into being itself This falling-off fills us with a dread as

much as a fulfillment. The dread comes from our fear of losing our

finitude, our limit, as we approach being without limit.

The fundamental experience of poesis gives rise to new language,

which death does not.There is no speaking after death. But after poesis

there is a need to speak, to articulate, to generate words and descriptions.

to struggle to transform this trans-formative experience into an inter-

pretation to be understood, The poesis experience is so ovenwhelming

that It creates new words that augment and rejuvenate the metaphoric

structure of reality. Through poesis, being brings language to life again,

takes it from its practical death, which is its commonplace objective

existence into a new life, a kind of after-life. So though we do not

die, something in our relationship to language dies. When language is

re-created, we re-create our world and ourselves.

Our experience with being does not bring us back to being over

and over again, since poesis is a gift of being and not in our power to
vv'ili. It is a gift that brings us into an ontological unity with language that

we never have before. We now respect its being-for-us more than ever
before. We pass through word, beyond it and into it again, and our
return makes us more caring of it. What we took for granted now takes
on a special power and mysteryThe gift of poesis is a new sensitivity to

the metaphoric structure of language.

Up to now, the metaphoric structure of reality has approached

language from an "adjectival" stance, with language as a kind of screen

between being and us. Another approach to this structure is prepositional.

The preposition is metaphoric (the first shaping of being after). In order

to be complete a preposition needs another The fundamental aspect

of the preposition is its pointing beyond. In the previous sentences

the preposition has been changed to a noun and so its pre-positional

character has been lost. But prepositions like "to, in, or for" pre-suppose

otherness. Preposition and metaphor work the same way Like an

adjective, the preposition is not a foundation or a centre. As such,

adjectival and prepositional interpretations of language are metaphoric

because it is an "in-between" that expresses intentionality some acting

or present subject, and an object.

The subordination of language to reality that nouns and verbs imply

is removed when we make adjectival and prepositional nature (how)
fundamental to language rather than its noun or verb structure (what).

While nouns and verbs express a confident equation with being and
beings, adjectives and prepositions in their very modifying, take on a

lesser role. Giving language over to this "lesser" role toward reality would
bring an inordinate amount of doubt and hesitation into our existence.
It would not be useful in manipulating reality But it is important for us
to know that meaning is just a descriptive adjective or an expressed

preposition that links both us and being.

Viewing language as a preposition of being and not as a noun that

carries equal weight with being, undermines the daily usage of language.

When we think of sorge, or sacrifice, or gifthood in association with the

work of language, and when we imagine language as boundary, horizon,

and circumference, as this text has, then we cannot operate confidently

in the world. We become too aware of the un-truth of our truths and

this is debilitating to everyday action. We cannot live in this state of

disorientation. We have to have confidence and belief in our knowing

in order to survive. We must have a world of meaning that hides being

for us and mediates or else we become obsessed with language and

being to our detriment.This is the death-like trap of poesis. Its life-like

dimension is a re-freshment of language.

Poesis is a new environment. Entering it is like entering a hot spring,

where we become immersed in an unfamiliar element. We rise from

that spring refreshed and revitalized and hopefully feeling better. Poesis

has the same effect because it returns us to the close collaboration

between being and language that is the boundary we inhabit. A

boundary unites two sides with its limiting. As a boundary language

belongs to both being and human being. It is grounded in the nothing-

ness of being and in the limit of human being. Death also is a boundary

that unites our finitude with infinitude. It belongs to both. So we consider

death a threshold to the nothingness of being-beyond-life. Whether

nothing or everything is beyond life is not crucial. In the end, from the

perspective of our being-in-the-world, they are the same. After death

we are no longer in the world the way we were.

In poesis we do not die. We are still connected to perspective or

distance. We remain in life, separated from being-beyond-life. The only

separation we experience in poesis is a separation from language and

time. Like the near-death experience recounted by many poesis leaves

us watching language and time from a distance, from the space between

language and being, In poesis we watch meaning not from the vantage

point of meaninglessness itself, but from the perspective of a closeness

to meaninglessness. We are near it as we remain in-between being and

language. Our awareness of meaninglessness creates an attachment to

meaning. If meaning were to end for us then being would also end and
we would have crossed the boundary to death. When we cross to

death and its realm of meaninglessness, being is no longer there for us.

As language slips away, so does our being-in-the-world and when our

worlding is gone, so are we.

The glimpse that poesis offers — of the of the end of possibility

our world, of the end of meaning— overpowering and

is death-like

because it suggests an end to differentiation. Distance, space, time, and

language, which give perspective to our existence, can disappear for us

momentarily and when they do we are close to our being. Our need
for differentiation to create meaning and world is fundamental. The
differentiation between being and its symbolic representation is crucial

for re-presentation to occur Remove the space/time between centre

and circumference, and the circle is broken and stops being. Differ-

entiation comes from the opposition and negation involved in positing

the opposites of centre and circumference as the definers of our circle

of understanding. If they were not different we would not have meaning.

The circumscribing, the outlining that is reality is so persuasive and

so real for us that it becomes the total presence of reality unless poesis

intervenes and makes the outlining circumference a representation, a

simple drawing of being. When we come to believe that language is

constantly and everywhere re-presenting being, we come closer to being.

In becoming more fully aware of the metaphoric structure of language

as the presenter of reality we also affirm its opposite being.

Bringing the concept of death and the concept of poesis near each

other closes the distance between the two. In poesis we feel like we
are dying-to-the-world because in poesis we momentarily leave our

daily world and see it from afar from the in-between that is the distance

between centre and circumference. Since we do not ordinarily inhabit

poesis, we can experience it as a kind of dying. We come very close to

the boundary of limit itself and the other side of that boundary is both

frightening and attractive. Perhaps the fullness of meaninglessness and

the emptiness of meaninglessness are just two sides of the poesis

experience that parallel the dual way in which we may view death.
Poesis seems to bring us toward being, which in turn hints at our

not-being.

When we speak of being and not-being we are standing in language.

Heidegger expressed this as "language speaks," suggesting that language is

the speaker more than humans are speakers.'"^ Speaking is the shaping

of the universe of meaning that we inhabit through language. So when

we speak of being and nothing, it is in fact language that is speaking

and what it bespeaks is itself Language's concealment of being in its

very act of revealing beings makes us un-knowing in our knowing, when

we hold knowing to be a true representation of the way things are.

The characteristics of language cloud being with themselves and put

themselves forward as the structure of reality

The differentiations that mark language for us are there because

we cannot grasp that which is not differentiated. Non-differentiated

being is outside our world of differentiated being in such a profound

way that we cannot express it except through differentiating language.

Death is also a realm of undifferentiation because it lacks all the thing-

ness of our world. It is so beyond our current being-in-the-world that

our not-being-in-the-world seems inexpressible and unspeakable, except

through metaphor To describe or to represent death means to put it

into words and into meaning and give it a form. When the meaningless

is made meaningful, its meaninglessness is wiped out or covered oven

Poesis is the boundary situation, the border or horizon where word

and wordlessness come together and do not obliterate one another

These opposites remain opposite, except that in poesis the near-death

of language makes us open to a universe beyond language as a presence

and so a gift of being. Our death-to-words allows a new consciousness

to come forth that is renewing. Renewal implies a resurrection after

death because there is a returning to life after poesis, to being as beings

rather than to being as nothing.There is a kind of rebirth after poesis.

So the coming-into-being of birth is similar to the coming-into-being of

death. The coming-into is the passage way Death-resurrection-birth-

death-resurrection-birth create a circle that emulates the circle of

meaning that we inhabit. In this circle of meaning, being, and nothing,

beings and no-things are conning-into-themselves in a way that is death-

like, resurrection-like, and birth-like. It is always "like."

The death-of-language in poesis frees us momentarily from the all-

encompassing power of language's speaking. The otherness of being

beyond beings and language stands there for us and we become "born
again" to language in its concealing-of-being dimension. One has to be

taken out of language by languagelessness. Our view of limitless being is

ultimately limited by meaning and our personal being-in-the-middle

between being and language. Poesis, unlike death, brings us close to

meaninglessness then pulls us away from it, allowing us to re-enter

our normal universe. When religions describe a world beyond death,

when they bring us resurrection, eternity or eternal return, they are

presenting metaphors for a being that is beyond our ever/day existence.

They give meaninglessness meaning.

When we realize that language is a basic expression of limiting, a

passing beyond limits implies an entrance that has no ending. Passing

beyond limits is the beginning of the end of beginning. The beginning

that is in the ending of life suggested by death-to-the-world is a kind of

passing out in which we become lost to ourselves. In the thought that

every entrance is an exit and that every exit is an entrance, we can

sense the boundary of death-into-being and the boundary of language

as that which stands between being and meaning. The impossibility of

expressing the sameness and the utter oppositeness (the duum in the

unum) of being and death puts us on that boundary We stand on the

brink of language and sense a fall into not knowing and not naming,

which seems to be utter emptiness.

Poesis is a pre-figuration of our death, in which language and

meaning disappear But poesis in its pre-figuring remains a border a

boundary that we stand on but do not cross. As a border it has other-

ness on either side. It is a divide that divides something and on that

border we can look both ways. Death is therefore a boundary word

and as a boundary word it refers to the presence of otherness and of

opposites that are the same. Death is the ultimate metaphor in its

concealment and its revealing of being.

 The shaping that language gives to being is absent in the poesis

experience as it is in death. In poesis, language withdraws from its

re-presenting of being as beings because we become fully conscious

of its placing of limit over the limitless. Every time language brings us

being, it also gives us the opposite of being. When language is brought

face to face, as it were, with its negation, with languagelessness, it sees

the limit of its power Being is the negation of language's negation of

being. It negates the opposition and differentiation that language creates.

It negates space and time.

When one returns from the experience of poesis, a new perspective

is added to our worlding that becomes part of our worldview.This

perspective seeks a language that is close to being. Poesis, as a metaphor
for death, has no practical value for ordering the world to our will. It is

poetry. As poetry language becomes aware of its interpretative power

of its ability to create meaning, to offer understanding, in short, to world.

But that worlding is self-conscious of its poetic worlding and so less

likely to seek to manipulate the world in a useful way

Poesis allows us to create in language a recurring translucence.The

first/after shaping of being that is metaphor is the boundary between

being and language, a boundary we seldom approach. If being is the

beginning and nothing is the end, then in the circle of language revealed

by poesis, beginning and ending are the same. As differentiation retreats

f from its dominance, beginning and ending are the same. In that retreat,

2 sameness and being come together and our differentiated world seems
° undifferentiated.

Z Poesis brings us to language after taking us from it, just as death can

be said to bring us to a new after-life.The experience of far-off being

calls us to create language about the non-linguistic. Our doing so is

9° doomed to metaphor which brings forth the metaphoric structure

of reality more than ever before. Language gives form to that which

has no form. The formless, in turn, gives back, or resurrects, the life of

language because of its not being formed by anything other than a

metaphor a likeness, a representational equality After poesis we sense

form and formlessness, and so feel closer to being (formlessness) than

ever before. We can, as it were, see beyond the confines of reality

 By trying to give nothing a fornn, language turns nothing into some-

thing for us to understand and comprehend. Nothing becomes like

other understanding and comprehension. It becomes language and

meaning. It becomes an existence within our space and ourtime and all

its culturally created parameters. Poesis may have been a breakthrough,

but we return to it wilfully only through creating a narrative structure

for it. Poesis as text rather than an experience is always structured.The

energy we bring to language is the gift of poesis, which helps us modify

and restructure language. It is the ground of our creativity

In death we say that life receives its boundaryThe end of life, which
is the beginning of death, is a threshold that we cross from and into.The
threshold that we cross in poesis brings us close to death, the death of

language, the death of space, the death of time, the death of our being

as a being-in-the-world that language has created for us. But in poesis,

there is a return, a resurrection that allows life to gather new meaning and
for language to be refreshed and renewed. Standing on the boundary
of languagelessness, we see language for what it is and does and we
return embracing it more fully than before. In poesis, words end, but
after poesis, they come back in ever newer forms.The first/after form
that we call metaphor comes to us clearly after poesis. The afterness

and the firstness of language is our prime revelation after poesis. The

secondary revelation of poesis is the being-beyond-the-world that is

being itself our being. When poesis takes us outside our world and the

worlding of language, it takes us further inside ourselves, toward being

and away from our daily preoccupation with beings. Poesis opens up

language to precariousness, the precarious-ness that accompanies the

necessity of re-presentation. In that precariousness language breaks up,

disengages, alters, and becomes superfluous, momentarily absent, and

so our being-in-the-world is made deepen richer more at home with

our being beyond language.

pa s t be c m i ng n rl i n d /h ao •; » nnp

Poesis is an experience of being that nnakes language both significant and

insignificant for being. Poesis brings us closer to language as language,

and being as language. The metaphoric structure of reality revealed by

poesis remains intact and yet that structure becomes more clearly a

structure, more obviously a creation and a construct. Of course, the

structures of languages have been studied and explained through a

variety of sciences, and, in our everydayness, we live with and constantly

express these structures with varying degrees of awareness depending

on the circumstances of the moment. What poesis does is remove the

usefulness/obsolescence of language that comes with its practicality

and moderates its will-to-power as the giver of meaning. It puts language

in its place, as it were, in regard to being. Being, which was structured

into a universe of beings, is brought back to centrality through poesis,

which, in turn, results in humility for language and ourselves.The naming

that allowed us to control so many aspects of our world retreats in

poesis. Poesis lessens understanding, which is valued highly in all human

cultures, and replaces it with mystery
93
Poesis touches on the endless, and so approximates the death-
experience. When it presents the infinitude of being, it highlights our
life within representation and the finitude of being through language. Its

pointing to undifferentiated being as the ground of language momentarily

undermines the primacy of language and consciousness. Out of this

experience comes an attempt, such as this one, to deconstruct the

given of meaning and refresh it with the unfamiliar Such attempts

 strengthen language making it more fully conscious of its metaphoric

being. It cloaks itself in a new authenticity. When poesis brings us to

the brink of meaninglessness, it releases us from our daily round of

meanings and brings us back to them with a deeper awareness. By

stepping outside /inside the circumference of metaphor that we inhabit,

we return to it with a new perspective. Since poesis cannot be willed

but is a gift of being that happens to us, it becomes a source of imaging

and naming that reflects the gift of being. New words, ideas, and language-

making result as we bring a new experience into an old language.

The language of this text has tried novel ways to create meaning

with the break-up of words, expressions, and phrases.Those who have

not experienced poesis have only this textual substitute. The "reality"

of poesis for such readers is a construct of language, and the reader

either believes that construct or the reader does not. Not believing in

the poesis experience does not invalidate the text as a work of poetry
that seeks to describe poesis, even for those who do not believe. The

text has a value of its own and achieves, like all texts do, a variety of

effects.The relationship between poesis and those who only read about
it is analogous to the relationship between being and language in which

being is hardly ever present and language is omnipresent. The existential

nature of poesis leads a text to re-produce that existentialism in words

and those words cannot, however hard they try recreate for the reader

5 what happened.The closest that we can come to it is through high art.

c Reading and meditating on this text will not give one an experience of
° poesis.This text is not a mantra to be repeated, a technique that can

z re-create what was in the first place uncreated and given. One waits

for the gift of poesis. Nothing more.

The words about poesis are just that —they are about.They are not

94 the being of poesis nor its revelation. They are about an experience
re-creating itself in a text, which is un-existential. Poesis takes one out
of the mirroring structure of words and presents words as a mirror

Mirroring is a way of masking in which what we see as otherness is

ourselves. Poesis offers itself to the writer as an exercise in writing. In

this text, poesis is a word or a series of words and as a word it requires

further words of explanation. These further words of explanation.

 —

pages of them, create the body of the text that tightens the linguistic

knot and chokes out the existential moment of pre-written poesis. Ideas

of difference, of similarity, of shaping, circumscribing, and describing

become the normative and operative reality of text that creates an

illusion of past life.

The illusion of explanation in which we name beings, and limit

being into a being, is simply the first-after shaping (metaphor), the first

post-being forming of being into beings that language must do. The
double meaning of present as being here now and as gift was/is a useful

metaphor for being. Its usefulness is the usefulness of all language. And
yet poesis as an experience seeks to bring language back to a kind of

sacred-making (sacra-faceo) wherein being becomes a presence that

can have a sacredness for us. When language tries to be sacred-making

rather than secular-making, it is attempting to undermine its own

nature and remove us from itself

"Language speaks. . . language speaks," wrote Heidegger''^ Language

is speaking and speaking is language and if this sounds circular; it is.

There is no speaking beyond language and language can do no other

than speakThis text is a speaking and as a speaking it is a metaphor
an about-being. As an about-being it cannot give us that being as it

is or was but only as it seems, within the parameters of naming.

Only in direct experience can being present itself to us beyond those

metaphoric parameters that make every word a translation of being
an
^^
into language. |
The symbols that language gives us in place of being allow some- ^

thing to appear to us as something that is known; this knowing is the :;;

knowing that hides being by bringing it into knowing. We can recognise

the word "poesis," for example, through association with another familiar

word, "poetry." The reader never having heard or thought about the ^^

former term, does not find it completely alien because of its resonance

with poetry as a literary form. For those who first read it, the word
"poesis" emulates poesis as an experience, which holds out the familiarity

of possible understanding.

A text intellectualizes being into a here and a there, and a where

and a what, and a why and so on. Being becomes understood. Poesis is
 understanding when it is named. Poesis was unnamed before it became
a text. It could have been named any name that seemed appropriate.

The appropriateness was not so much dependent on the unnamed

poesis experience that sought to express itself appropriately in language

as the framer of ideas but upon the understanding brought to the text
and the desire to choose a word that communicated what I wanted

to sa/. What I intended was an expression of something both familiar

and unfamiliar
The afterness of a text is a perpetual part of the afterness of

language that is always an after-being that naming/shaping does. Once a

metaphor is created it presents itself to us as the name of the beings

we experience, and once we have that meaning, the naming is more

important to us than the thing itself In the writing of this text the

choice of words and expressions became the dominant reality of poesis

as word, while poesis as experience slips away into unrecognizable

memory into wordlessness. I could have simply written that I was in a

state of awe and left it at that. "Awe" could just as well have expressed

the experience of poesis as these pages of text have, but "awe" is not

an argument or an essay or a text, and the intent of a text is textuality.

A text is intended. The word awe could not re-create poesis the

way this text can, because it lacks sufficient differentiation (meanings) and

it is the abundance of differentiation that matters. This differentiation

5 into a wealth of meanings and numerous metaphors describing and

E
2 alluding to the nature of the experience of poesis is what makes poesis
° understandable and intellectually available. "Awe," as a word, is too

z unlimited in its implications. But if "awe" were equal to the word poesis,
o
rather than its sub-definition as it is in this text, then awe, if it were used,

would have more of the indeterminacy of being rather than the deter-
9^ minacy of beings. And isn't that what should be communicated? Obviously
that is not what is or was intended to be communicated. What is

communicated is the constancy of metaphor, the primacy of language,

the importance of meaning based on identity and difference. The text

about the loss of text ends up celebrating its textuality and its being

in-love with the play of language. In writing, poesis, the actual experience,

pales and fades before poesis, the word. In a text, a reader only revels
in words and the revelling experience of words is not the experience

of poesis.

The afterness of words is a result of language. Ricoeur described

this as "the paradox of the copula, where being-as signifies being and
."'''
not being. , Words are and are not being. In this areness and notness

they are essentially nnetaphors and as metaphors they both give and

take away being. Gadamer associated the afterness of words as the

"translation of past meaning into the present situation."^^ The present

situation is the writing about poesis, not poesis itself Derrida explained

that "a text always has several epochs" within it.''' This layering or covering

that occurs in meaning relates to a common human experience that

has been named and passed on, which is then taken up by the person

who writes or reads it. The writing of poesis means an erasure of the
poesis experience through naming and its replacement by words that

turn our world into Ricoeur's "rule of metaphor" and its implication of

sovereign power authority and law.^°

If language is that shaping form that is given to being to create

its circum-ference (revealer of its presence and its hider like a courtyard

wall) then our questioning of language is a quest along that circumfer-

ence. Even an experience like poesis, which takes us from the

circumference returns us to it. When we are, we are in significance.

When Jacques Lacan wrote that "no language can speak the truth about

truth," he implied that there is a truth beyond truth that language

on

cannot articulate.^' Such a truth would be a non-truth, something

|
other than the truth offered by language. Speaking in tongues gives ^

truth and the only truth it can give is its own. Being is so other to :;;

language that it resides "at the centre of language," where it cannot be

touched or seen.^^

The "presence" that language provides is similar to the way a ^^

person is present across the room from you.The naming of that person,

and the implications inherent in that naming, take precedence over the

person's immediate presence. Their name or identity carries such a

massive burden of meaning that the "real" person is lost. So we live

more intensely in the naming than in the presence because we live in

understanding. It is only when a person is unnamed or unknown that

their presence as presence beconnes more imnnediate and significant.

We read or identify them or their characteristics as a certain presence.

As soon as they are there, or somehow present for us, they have a

name no matter how generic. When we understand anything or anyone

in even the most simple or basic way we are re-cognizing.^^ We bring

them into our knowing or cognizance. They come into our language

and are placed and timed there.

Poesis exists as presence; when language is our presence then poesis

is gone. In a certain way it is the loss of its being-for-us that this text

celebrates. All texts are about and a text about poesis is no different.

Its aboutness separates it from the experience and makes it into a

metaphor Even in its self-conscious aboutness a text remains about the

past becoming an illusionary presence.

ending/beginning postscript to poesis sources

I remember an afternoon during my journey in Aegina.

Suddenly I saw a single bolt of lightning, after which no

more followed. My thought was: Zeus.

Martin Heidegger, Heraclitus Seminar ( 1

966)^"*

Historically, the articulation of poesis began with Heideggerian language

and it ends with Heidegger When I was part-way through the writing

of this manuscript and only a short way into the earlier text which I

was using as my base text, I realized what wasI actually doing. Since

the earlier text had been deeply influenced, almost single-sourced, by

my experience of Heideggerian thought as a graduate student, I could

not come into my own expression without the presence of another

Just as Heidegger used the other of Greek language to break out of

his Germanic tradition, so I turned to the other of postmodernist
philosophers to break out of my Heideggerianism.That these thinkers

were primarily French (Derrida, Foucault, and Ricoeur), and that one
was a student of Heidegger's (Gadamer), helped broaden the cultural
99
space that my thought could occupyThe overwriting of "Metaphor and

Interpretation" by Poetics of Naming became an attempt at escape. In

the other-than-Heidegger texts I found a refuge and a liberation. Their

multiplicity gave me the gift of my own unity

The presence of other ideas allowed the original experience of

poesis to come forth in the text in a different way Poesis as text became
less Heideggerian in its expression, and inevitably more post-modern.
The thinkers I turned to had been influenced by Heideggerian thought

in one way or another so that there rennained a continuity an appeal

and a relevance that linked them to poesis. Yet it was the poesis
experience that sought to be said and its saying was its own. This text

was actually meant to play "pseudo-mystical word games" that would

hold some appeal to these thinkers.®^ was consciously seeking to
I make
philosophy into poetry and to make mysticism philosophical. I accepted

the Heideggerian view that texts that can rightly be termed pseudo-

mystical word games can "reveal our world and transform ourexistence."^^
This book is a work of art because it is intended to help us pay

attention to who we are. "Works of art are capable," one commentator

on Heidegger explains, "somehow, of bringing us home to ourselves;

they show us how we dwell together amid things, making us perceive

our own existence as something fresh and strange."^'' The forming power
of language, which gives us a sense of change, of freshness and strange-

ness in our reality is the across-ness of metaphor; that continuum of

meaning that links time, space, and our being, and creates the broad

band of reality whose unthinking middle we inhabit most of the time.

This text, conceived as a work of art, is meant to have a transformative

power when read, but whether it is a transformation toward poesis is

subject to the interpretative/translated constructions of others who

give it their meaning, when they read it.

Gadamen paraphrasing Heidegger says that a "work of art opens

up its own world."^^ He goes on to explain that "language is the most

primordial poetry of being."^^ Thinking of language as the poetry of

being is the fundamental translation of the human condition that

Heidegger introduced into thinking when he became engaged with

Greek thought. But his translation of Greek ideas and words came out

of and into non-Greek German language and culture. This text is a

personal and poetic translation of his insights that have been handed

down in numerous English translations. His insights claim to open up

our world through an engagement with language that is less explan-

atory and more intuitively interpretive. Heidegger was a modernist who

sought to base his philosophy of language and being on a now disputed

intellectual and linguistic rigor and rationality which he considered truthful

(and so laid the groundwork for overcoming modernist beliefs about

truth). This text, however has the irrational (the mystic moment of

poesis) for its foundation and, as such, limits its truth claims to the

veiling/revealing/reveiling of language. Its irrationality brings us only to

the edge of meaning. It can be spoken of but its expression is drawn

from within meaning.
When the irrational is rationalized, its beyond-language experience

can only be approximated and that approximation is not just a word or

series of words or expressions, but a tearing-apart of language itself

By breaking language apart we are imitating the exposure of ourselves

to poesis as a leaving-behind of language. The construct of language as

a dwelling where we live is a fundamental metaphon first articulated by

Heidegger against Plato's metaphor of the cave and its sense of light.

Heidegger's house of reality is different from Plato's cave of reality

Plato's cave is a given that we have entered, while Heidegger's house is a

human construct that we inhabit as an inherited tradition.The meaning

created by the house of language is different from the meaning created

by a cave.

Michel Foucault wrote: "We are doomed historically to history

to the patient construction of discourses about discourses, and to the.

task of hearing what has already been said."^° In this text, what has been
said has been said in different ways before by others and probably in a

clearer way Clarity is not the issue. It is the repeating that is important.

Repetition is the way something is said in various ways that indicates

a struggle to explain the various ways of saying the same thing. It is the

form, the how of our saying that matters and the how is changeable,

especially in metaphor I intended this text to break free of the

Heideggerianism of the earlier thesis by using the thought of others as

a lever. But the poesis experience was mine alone. It and only it gave

rise to whatever originality the two texts have. It was not inherited

from Heidegger or Derrida or any thinker though poesis, the word and
the text, was obviously influenced by reading them. No philosopher

worth his or her salt would stand on the quick sands of mysticism,
though he or she might allude to its ultimate presence at the end of a
train of thought.
 When Heidegger wrote about being "On the Way to Language,"

he was talking about how the world is presented.'^' Fronn time to time

the presentation is made in such a striking and resonant way that we

experience it as something new, even though its identity with other

thought, earlier language and expression, is always there.This rhetorical

aspect is what encompasses the originality of any text. In the metaphoric

structure of reality the battle of metaphors is the only battle.

The quote at the beginning of this concluding chapter is from the

Heraditus Seminar, an event late in Heidegger's life (he was in his mid-

seventies then). The quote has three basic propositions. The first is "I

remember"; the second is "I saw"; and the third is"My thought was." He
remembered what he saw and what thought that sight occasioned.

It was a thought that came to a twentieth-century philosopher in a

place where, two and a half millennia earlier a name, the name Zeus,

was revealed as a god and not as a myth. As a man of the post-Zeusian

world who tried to return to the world of Zeus, we are left wondering

how "real" Zeus was for Heidegger.The whole quoted phrase ends in a

name, a name that the philosopher links metaphorically to a bolt of

lightning. Here was an experience and naming linked powerfully to the

symbolic and its history Here was metaphoric reality in a pure form.

When Heidegger was "reminded" of how lightning was an act of

Zeus, he was presenting his statement as an act of memory, which is

the basis of all storytelling. His "I remember" is really a reminder to us.

He brings the past into the present as history, as a story. In the form

of story, which is the form of this text, it gifts the past to others.

Poesis as a text is also a remembering and its remembering is, like

the quote from Heidegger more about the cultural resonances and

associations implied than about what I "saw." Heidegger's interpretation

of a simple event carries a massive cultural heritage for the reader

In remembering, Heidegger is bringing forth the whole corpus of what

Greek philosophy meant to him and not just a summer cruise in the

Aegean. Likewise, Heidegger and the other philosophers are remembered

in this text as thinkers whose thought might recognize the words about
poesis because they come from them.
In creating Poetics of Naming as a text about the textless, I felt an
obligation to the earlier text, to the poesis experience, and to the thinkers

who inspired nny own expression with their words. As I was addressing
the anonymous reader I was also addressing the philosophers whose
thought I felt might recognise poesis. In addressing these others, I was
mimicking how others had addressed me in their texts. Relating their

texts to the creation of this text was something added on to this text as

quotes and footnotes, which were missing from the original text closest to

the poesis experience.The original text was not so much an expression

of story telling, as a remembering and an acknowledgement of which
this text is, as it was a declaration of insight spurred by the poesis

experience.The closeness of the moment created a different and more

urgent form.The aboutness of the original text was heavier with poesis

than the aboutness of this text. It is further in being post-Heideggerian;

it is further in being more manifold in its authorities; it is further through

its having to remember; it is further in its struggle with what was

forgotten. Working through another text, another layer of language,

the texts of others, and the act of translation heightens the sense of

distance from poesis that underlies this text. Part-way through the reading/

writing/understanding of what had written, sensed I I how distance creates

ambivalence because in the space between then and now, here and

there is filled with so much that has passed by

The event of poesis, the mystical moment which revealed the

metaphoric structure of reality gave rise to a text that is not this text. f

That text was lost to my consciousness but then it was remembered ^

and faced. In facing my old text I was facing its physical reality in the \

same way that Heidegger faced Greece — ^the place rather than the words -5

that came from that place.There, he faced a lightning bolt among all the

lightning bolts that he must have seen in his life and associated that bolt
''"^
in that place at that time to Zeus, a naming that led to the creation of

a story about that bolt of lightning.The naming became a narrative. His

naming Zeus, which he represents to us as spontaneous, was more

than just a link to the Greeks, a kind of mental homage because he was
"there" — it also linked Heidegger's thought to an age of gods. Here

was Heidegger standing in his own famous "fourfold" of earth, sky gods,
and mortals that he viewed as the context of all thought. He was on
 the earth (the sea), looking up at the sky seeing a bolt of lightning that

he took as a sign fronn Zeus, which then made him feel mortal. In this

simple statement is the fullness of human fourfoldhood as Heidegger

thinks it. In this simple statement is the caring for history that is story

telling, which is the structure of our relationship to all that is; the caring
for time that is the angst of the moment, and also the caring for being

that is his standing and simply watching the acts of the gods and so

being fully a mortal rather than a god. For Heidegger; the name Zeus
was a metaphor for so much. In Germany he could think of Zeus, but in

Greece he could experience the metaphor as a source of thought.

There are several intriguing implications in Heidegger's three-

sentence narrative. First is its trinitarian structure. This statement of

remembering suggests a folktale of something that happened in time
but was really timeless (history as mythos).The narrative begins with
the authority of the self.The story comes forth from personal expe-

rience — rememberThen, there

I is the experiential seeing (the angst of

the moment) that provides the elements of the event, and finally there

is the hermeneutic (interpretative) moment in which he equates the

name Zeus with lightning. Zeus is both lightning and an explanation of
lightning in Greek mythology. Heidegger as a man of the twentieth

century does not believe in Zeus's thunderbolts as an explanation

of lightning (nor did the Greek philosophers). Heidegger is paying

OS
.S homage to what the Greeks revealed and what he found in their

2 language. Zeus is a metaphor for Greek thought.

° The trinitarian structure of an event that gave rise to the invocation

Z of a god's name made Heidegger feel at home in the universe, a universe

Q.
created by the Greeks and named by them. In that moment of seeing

lightning, he stepped out of his Germanic myth and acknowledged

''°4
the power of Greek myth over him. He was free of one language and
embraced by another This text also steps out of its Heideggerian
myth to acknowledge the power of the myths of others. The event this

text struggles with is not so much poesis, as the event of the original text

that is real and immediate for me because it has not gone away It is

the text about poesis that now speaks of my narrating and not of

poesis itself So it was for Heidegger He approached Being through

translated and untranslated Greek texts. He never spoke of a mystical

experience of Being, only of the hints of it he found in texts.

Beside the trinitarian structure is the potential relationship of the

philosopher's self to Zeus.The patriarchal cannot be ignored. Heidegger

as the father figure of postmodernism, links himself in his Greece to

Zeus, the father of the pantheon of gods. The progenitor of linguistic

and historical deconstruction may have been simply telling a story of

a momentary thing-that-happened, but I doubt it because no story

telling is simple. No single word is simple because of its inherent duality

and aboutness that creates a space for interpretation and explanation.

So Heidegger's self and Zeus resonate with connotation and meaning

beyond what the narrator may have conceived. By giving the phenom-
enon the singular name of Zeus, Heidegger showed us the power of
mythos over the power of science and ordinary meaning. He showed
the historical and psychological depths of language and how deeply

and firmly we reside in it as humans needing understanding. In

Heidegger's narrative, the name "Zeus" overpowers the word lightning,

makes lightning a messenger rather than a thing in itself and asks mortals

to wait humbly for another sign.The mythic quality of the Heideggerian

narrative also involves the words:"journey,""single bolt," and "no more."

Heidegger's writings created a journey through language and into being

in which remembering is paramount (the remembering of ancient words,

for example, and their lost meanings), but the journey motif also has f

implications for remembering.The Homeric epic and its basic journeying £

is here, in this simple statement, as a returning home. Heidegger has \
c
come home to the Greeks, in whose thought he has lived. He is -5

acknowledged by Zeus, who sends a thunderbolt to greet him. Joumeying,

whether physical or psychic, involves a quest, a search that has been

^°^
basic to Heidegger's view of philosophy Journeying in his philosophical

texts is a hermeneutic circle in which the thinker/hero of the epic returns

home to the same place he began, but in the process is transformed

through engagement with words.

There is also a Christian connotation in the journey motif which is

the cultural mythos in which Heidegger lived.The image of being struck

by lightning while on a journey is the story of Saul on the way to

 .

Damascus, who is struck by God's revelation. Saul became Paul.

Heidegger takes the power of revelation in the single bolt of lightning,

with its simultaneous image of fire and light as coming from outside
humanity, but speaking to us in our own constructed languages. That
there is "no more" except the thought of the name Zeus tells us that

the narrative takes oven The name Zeus and the name's associations

come to thought from stories and return in the person's own story

The Homeric epics and the Biblical stories are single bolts of lightning

beyond which there is "no more." They are the metaphors, the language

that gives us meaning. Beyond metaphor there is nothing.

While completing this text, I became aware of the change in tone

of this text over the earlier one.The vigour the declarative enthusiasm,

the assuredness of that beginning moment close to the event had

dissipated. Thirty years and innumerable non-poesis texts, separated

me from the experience of poesis becoming the history of the words

of this text, its literary con-text. Middle age and all its experiences stood

like a latticed wall between then and now. My earlier spirited condem-
nation of language is evident in this paragraph from page thirty-five of

the thesis:

Yet IS this a false project? Doesn't this bring us into the

will-to-power of word as the dominator of reality and

away from presence and care?To know is to lie.To know
is to create metaphors, to be symbolic.This revelation is

only a revelation. It is a hiding because it does not

bring us closer to Being at all. It only increases our

desire to vocalize, to do a new naming, to create word

and language, to express the inexpressible, to shape and
io6
to form . .

There is not one paragraph in the new text that can match this one
for intentionality and energy This tone is lost forever because poesis

has never returned to me. The rationalizing, mellowing, and wear and
tear of time is evident in the new text. The above paragraph, like the

thesis itself stands as a judgment over its future creation. In creating

anew have made
I the earlier text past and passe, when in the moment
of its creation it was full of itself Now it hovers over the new text like

a fading father over a growing son, aware of losing its grasp on the future.

The new textual spirit results from decades of being-in-the-world

and not from being close to being. In the earlier text, being was

capitalized in the same way that being was capitalized in the older English

translations of Heideggerian texts. When the new English translation of

Being andTime came out in late 1990s, the capitalization was removed
in favour of the lower case, which I have in turn adopted in this text to

fit contemporary usage that was somehow embarrassed by the earlier

capitalization.The modernist personalization/deification/metaphysization

that was expressed through capitalization is now a secularized post-

modernist version that is being.

The themes and expressions of this text are not novel in them-
selves.They resonate with thinking and feeling expressed by others. For

example, in a recent biography of Heidegger; the images and themes

highlighted in Poetics of Naming are given prominence. In his preface to

Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Rudiger Safranski writes that

the purpose of Heidegger's philosophizing was "nothing less than giving

back to life the mystery that threatened to disappear in the modern

world.'"^^ Safranski gives mystery in a postmodern world a historical

meaning by identifying Heidegger as "a 'master' from the school of the

mystic Master Eckhart.'"*^ Toward the end of Safranski's text he quotes f

an authority who stated "that Heidegger's work had to be great as £

'great poetry'.'"''' Mystery mysticism, and poetry are the trinity of meta- \
phors that are equally valid for poesis as they are for Heidegger's thought. ^
Safranski also uses the bridge metaphor to describe the human condi-
tion: "A glance into the abyss under the bridge might frighten us... it
^°^
shows the nothingness above which we are balanced... Heidegger's
analysis... is a continual attempt to show that we are creatures who
build bridges because we can experience open expanses, distances,

and, above all, abysses. .above ourselves, around ourselves, and within
.

ourselves.'"'^ In a sense, this new text is a letter to poesis from afar

attempting to speak to it as one who had remembered. Some might

say it is a love letter to a lost moment. doubt I that this text is able to
 —

retrieve the moment of poesis, either for its author or for its reader

Too much has been overgrown by language in the intervening years.

I feel that I am slashing at a thick undergrowth and failing to make

much headway Like the reader of this text, I too am now an observer

of poesis.

Language is a bridge that carries such a historical and social burden

of meaning, that words like mystery mysticism, and poetry rest in a

complex web of understanding and are consumed by it. Safranski

concludes that Heidegger's writing is "enigmatic."'"' Surely we can say in

concluding this text that the more it has sought to express and explain

poesis and its insight into language's relationship with being, the more
enigmatic it has become. If it is not enigmatic, then it has failed as the

poetry of philosophy The final refuge of a text's meaning is in enigma,

its openness to endless ambiguity its interpretative hermeneutic.

An example of endless interpretation happened in the creation of

this text. As I related in the preface, the title of the text — its name
was changed several times.The changes came about because the original

understanding of what was to be done, a projected imagining of the

future text based on its past association with its original, became
inadequate.The name changes reflected the change in the text from its

original conception and articulation to its present one. The changes

came about gradually in the evolution of the writing through the post-

Heideggerian influences that were unknown in the creation of the original

text. But it was more than that. The postmodernist title acknowledges
the original impulse given by poesis but adds the issue of naming: a

paradigm that did not exist for the original text because it had not
been thought.
The dual languages of existentialism and postmodernism are in

io8
the new text, but the postmodernist derivatives from existentialist

thought and language are actually the minor voice.The "about what" of

this text is actually more about the earlier philosophy than our current
one. The text is about poesis, an experience with/out naming. But the
word poesis is nothing more than a naming of an existential experience.

It is not the experience itself So the choice of a title and its "accuracy"

and "truthful" representation of the text is nothing but the hinting at

involved in all language, the descriptive moment of the hermeneutic

as it translates being into language. The title was changed toward the
end because it was beginning to become wrong. The text no longer
welcomed what it pointed toward.The older modernism of Heidegger

that would present poesis as real is surpassed in this text with the

afterness of the words of others, who have built on Heidegger and

departed from his words, as every original thinker must. There is a

struggle in this text between two times and two worlds — a struggle

between yesterday's black and white cinema and today's colourful world.

By using the word "being" liberally in this text, I acknowledge the power
and importance of that earlier cinematic representation of reality upon

which my world of colour is built.

Changing the original title of a text at the end of its writing may be
considered a minor matter of refinement, but it is more than that.

The language of the final title is the resolution of a battle; the battle

between its modernist textual roots and its postmodernism, between

its truth claims and its rejection of truth. Writing the new text became
an engagement with the past, with language, with expression, with

meaning. Heidegger's engagement with Zeus and his metaphor was

itself repeated in the naming of the text. I could not be a god and name
my own creation. I needed the voice and understanding of another
who stood outside the text to name it, as I was named by my father

The current title of the text, its naming of itself, stands at the beginning s

of the text, but it is really about the end and what happens when the ^
writer knows not what he does.The problematic of literariness in this \
C
text required an oral solution, a speaking rather than a writing, which is -5

why the instant oral naming of the text by my philosopher friend struck

me like an unexpected bolt of lightning. That it was a female voice that

'^°^
named the text liberated it even further from Heidegger Athena had

spoken to me. It may very well be that speaking the words of this text,

one by one, bit by bit, and reflecting on them provides more under-
standing than would silent reading.
wng postscript to poesis -ources

To name this text about poesis a prose poem places it outside the

mainstream of the philosophical tradition. Christopher Norris, a professor

of English, delineates the battleground this way:

A deconstructive reading will typically fasten upon those

moments in the philosophic text where some cardinal

concept turns out to rest on a latent or sublimated

metaphor or where the logic of an argument is subtly

undone by its reliance on covert rhetorical devices...

One result of such readings is undoubtedly to challenge

the commonplace assumption that philosophy has to

do with concepts, truth claims, logical arguments,'clear

and distinct ideas', etc., while literary criticism deals

with language only in its rhetorical, poetic or non-truth-

functional aspects. What Derrida has achieved... is a

striking reversal of the age-old prejudice that elevates

philosophy over rhetoric, or right reason over the

dissimulating arts of language.^'

The age-old prejudice is an aspect of modernism that Heidegger

was part of as he lay the groundwork for the postmodernist philos-

ophers of the latter half of the twentieth century In the late 1930s and

1940s, when Heidegger's thoughts turned to the philosophical implications

in poetic texts, he was bringing literature and philosopiiy closer together

Poetics of Naming carries on in this tradition.

William Spanos.aiso a professor of literature, claims that Heidegger's

thinking about being exposed the limits of truth/'*^ Acknowledging the

linguistic limits of truth becomes a meditation on the limits of reality as

presented by language. One might say that in Poetics of Naming the

modernism of the word "being," and the postmodernist emphasis on
reading are synthesized. The masking power of a culture and the inter-

play between the text, as created by the writer and the text, as re-created
by the reader, replaces the older emphasis on speaking and saying.

The saying of poesis is replaced by the importance of the reading of

the poesis experience by both the author and the reader using previous

texts to provide that reading with meaning. Since Poetics of Naming is a

re-writing of an earlier unpublished text, it is a first seeking of a reading

public for poesis.The distance between the private text of the past and

the public text of the present is dependent on the circumference of

interpretation that the reader inhabits.

What structures this text is what is not there (poesis) and what is

there but not seen (the thesis). These two absences underlie Poetics of

Naming, and so make its claim of being poetry valid. The end result is a

rhetorical orality Poetry is filled with the polymorphous perversity of

language and non-language as they dance together Poetics of Naming

is filled with the unspoken absence of poesis that, when spoken of is

simply a remembering and a narrating.

The very nature of this project for both author and reader is inter-

textuality: the reader's universe of texts and the writer's universe of

texts colliding. Numerous texts by philosophers and philosophic com-

mentators have also invaded the space between text and the writer

and the reader When the book was created from the thesis, it became
concerned with its readability its readers, and its future reading or

interpretation. Poetics of Naming is a manifestation of that which sought

to be read. As such a seeking, it could aim to cause a range of reaction

from epiphany to revulsion. A reading that was ordinary and untouched

would return it to the commonplace. A poetic reading would leave its
roots acknowledged for what they are —words that, in reaching out to

express the wordless, are metaphor the essence of poetry

sources

preface to poesis
1 For a discussion of Kant's attack on metaphor and poetry as unphilo-
sophical, and Derrida's view of this, see Dawn McCance, Posts: Re
Addressing the Ethical (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 26-27.

2 Ibid., 33.

3 Ibid., S5-

in my name: a personal introduction

4 McCance, Posts, 56.

on naming metaphor
5 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metophors We Live By (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1980), 159-160.

6 Ibid., 171.

7 Ibid., 195.

8 Stanley Romaine Hopper and David L. Miller lnterpretation:The Poetry of

Meaning (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), xiii.

9 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 196.

10 Martin Heidegger Pathmarks, William McNeil, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1998), 148. ^„

11 G. B. Madison, Hermeneut/cs of Postmodernity (Bloomington: Indiana

University Press), 77.

12 Norman O. Brown, Love's Body (New York: Random House, 1966) 266.

13 Ibid., 85.

14 Heidegger, "On the Essence of Truth," in Martin Heidegger Pathmarks,

William McNeill, ed., 148.

15 Heidegger, "Plato's Doctrine of Truth," in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks,

William McNeill, ed., 171.

 i6 Heidegger, "Preface to the German Edition," in Martin Heidegger,

Pothmarks, William McNeill, ed., xiii.

17 Walter Truett Anderson, ed., The Truth about Truth: De-confusing and

Reconstructing the Postmodern World (New York; G. R Putnam and

Sons, 1995).

18 Heidegger, Pathmarks, William McNeill, ed., 254.

19 Ibid., 249.

20 Ibid., 258.

21 Ibid., 318.

22 Paul Ricoeun Tinne and Norratlve Vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago

Press, 1984), IX.

23 Stephen A. Erickson, Language and Being: An Analytic Phenomenology

(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970), 44.

24 Ibid., 50.

25 Ricoeun Time and Narrative, xi.

26 Ibid., 80.

27 Ibid., 81.

28 Ibid.

29 McCance, Posts, 84.

the unum of the present

30 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, David E. Linge, trans,

and ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), xxii.

31 Gerhard Ebeling, The Problem of Historicity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,

1967), 26.

00 32 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, xxii.

i 33 Gadamer Philosophical Hermeneutics, xviii.

^ 34 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammato/ogy, G. C. Spivak, trans. (Baltimore: Johns

o
2 Hopkins University Press, 1976), xxxix.

«J Ibid., vii.
35
°"
36 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, xxiii.

37 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

114 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xvi.

38 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (1966), 867-68, quoted in Jacques Derrida,

Of Grammatology. xiii.

39 Joseph Campbell, ed.. The Portable Jung (New York: Penguin Books,

1971), 21.

40 Martin Heidegger, Poetry Language and Thought, A. Hofstadter, trans.

(New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 173.

41 Richard Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

1999). M7.
 out/of poesis
42 Hans-Georg Gadamen Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies,

R Christopher Smith, trans. (New Haven and London: Yale University

Press, 1976), 105.

43 J.
A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory,

4th edition (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 678.

44 Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language, P D. Hertz, trans. (New York:

Harper & Row, 1971), 63.

45 Ibid., 57.

46 Ernst Cassirer Language and Myth (New York: Dover Books, 1953), 37.

47 Steiner Kvale, "Themes of Postmodernity," in WalterTruett Anderson ed..

The Truth About The Truth: De-confusing and Re-constructing the

Postmodern World (New York: Putnam, 1995), 19.

in/too metaphor
48 WW. Skeat, A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language

(New York: Capricorn Books, 1963), 324.

49 Ibid., 325.

50 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, Daniel

Heller-Roazen, ed. and trans. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999),

6. For a full rendering of the quote from Plato see 29-30.

51 Ibid., 30.

52 Ibid., 35.

53 Ibid.

54 Skeat, /A Concise Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 195.

55 Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1993), 119.

56 C. G.Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious 2nd Ed.

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 75. q

57 Ibid., 33. ^
o
58 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 77-78.

59 Ibid., 80.

60 Ibid., 85.
115

61 Julia Marias, "Philosophic Truth and the Metaphoric System," in S. R.

Hopper and D. L Miller, eds. lnterpretation:The Poetry of Meaning

(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 46.

62 Ibid., 49.

63 Paul Ricoeun The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the

Creation of Meaning in Language, Robert Czerny trans. (Toronto:

University of Toronto Press, 1977), 143.

64 Ibid., 246.
 6s Ibid.

66 Ibid., 247.

67 Ibid., 292.

68 Ibid., 295.

69 Ibid., 313.

go/in circles
70 Quoted in Jean Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, Joel

Weinsheimer, trans. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,

1994), XIV.

71 McCance, Posts, 93.

72 Grondin, Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics, 97.

73 Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, C. H. Seibert,

trans. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 8.

out/of death
74 Martin Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought, Albert Hofstadter, trans.

(New York, Harper & Row, 1971), 198.

past becoming
75 Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language,Thought, Albert Hofstadter trans.

(New York; Harper & Row, 1971), 198.

76 Martin Heidegger Parmenides, A. Schuwer and Ri. Rojcewicz, trans.

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 12.

77 Ricouen The Rule of Metaphor, 313.

OS 78 Gadamen Philosophical Hermeneutics, xvi.

E 79 Derrida, Of Grammato/ogy, 101.

^ 80 "Rule of Metaphor" is the title of Paul Ricouer's The Rule of Metaphor

o
S (1977). See note 64.

* 81 Jacques Lacan, Ecnts (1966), 867-68, quoted in the translator's

**
introduction to Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, xiii.

82 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 238.

116 83 Gadamer Philosophical Hermeneutics, 25.

ending/beginning
84 Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraclitus Seminar, Charles H. Seibert,

trans. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 5.

85 Polt, Heidegger: An Introduction, 146.

86 Ibid., 177.

87 Ibid., 136.

88 Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics, 222.

89 Ibid., 228.

90 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical

Perception (New York: Vintage Books,i994), xvi.

91 Martin Heidegger, On The Way to Language, P. Hertz, trans. (New York:

Harper and Row, 1971).

92 Rudiger Safranski, A^ort/n Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Ewald

Osers, trans. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1
999), ix.

93 Ibid., X.

94 Ibid., 409.

95 Ibid., 430-31.

96 Ibid., 431.

postscript to poesis
97 Christopher Morris, "Deconstruction, Postmodernisnn and Philosophy:
Habermas on Derrida," in Maurizio Passerin d'Entreves and Seyla

Benhabib, eds., Habermas and the Unfnished Project of Modernity

(Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997), 102.

98 William Spanos, Heidegger and Criticisnn (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1993), 14.

117
(
ciif^TJentfi l a Canadian literature series

Apostrophes II The Hydra's Tale

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E.D. Blodgett Robert Rawdon Wilson

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Apostrophes IV The Literary History of Alberta:Volume One

speaking you is holiness From Writjng-on-Stone to World War Two
E.D. Blodgett George Melnyk
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George Melnyk
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Robert Kroetsch
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o 88864-349-7
 George Melnyk is a cultural historian

in the Faculty of Communication and

Culture, University of Calgary. His major

scholarly works include the two-volume

Literary History of Alberta (1998-99) and

A Hur)dred Years of Car)adian Cinema

(2004). As an essayist he has written a

trilogy on Western Canadian topics

beginning with Radical Regionalism (1981),

followed by Beyond Alienation (1993),

and most recently New Moon at Batoche

(2000). In the 1970s Melnyk founded

NeWest Review and NeWest Press to

further Western Canada's distinct

cultural identity.

A former president of the Writers

Guild of Alberta, Melnyk also served

on the National Council of The Writers*

Union of Canada. His approach to

language is conditioned by his long-term

engagement with nonfiction, his multi-

lingual upbringing as an immigrant son,

and contemporary challenges to narrative

and authorial voice.

ISBN 0-88864-409-4 The University of Alberta Press

A volume in (n/BBcn/sl a
Canadian literature series

Printed in Canada
Book design; Kevin Zak
$54.95 in Canada

780888"644091 www.uap.ualberta.ca
"Melnyk achieves a mystical

experience by stepping

out of language. He
returns with a changed

sense of reality, metaphor,

history, myth, time,

space, and language.

That moment
outside language

Melnyk names

as poesis."

—Robert Kroetsch