MUDLARK No. 4 (1996) ISSN 1081-3500 Copyright (c) MUDLARK 1996 Editor: William Slaughter E-Mail: mudlark@unf.edu URL: http://www.unf.edu/mudlark __________________________________________________ A CONVERSATION WITH MARTIN HEIDEGGER An Original Poem in English by Van K. Brock for Kathy Rugoff __________________________________________________ INTRODUCTION [The] ground that enabled modern technology to set free new energy in nature [is] a revolution in leading concepts . . . by which man is placed in a different world. This radical revolution in outlook has come about in modern philosophy. From this arises a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it. The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist. --GELASSENHEIT (1959), translated by John M. Anderson & E. Hans Freund Even before his first book, in 1927, the young lecturer Heidegger was highly acclaimed. In 1933, when Goebbels called for burning books by Jews, socialists, and others, in bonfires often fed by professors and students, Heidegger swore loyalty to Hitler and, by vote of the faculty, replaced the dissenting rector at Freiburg. Always a German nationalist, Heidegger headed the movement to unite workers and students into the Party and signed orders firing Jewish professors, one of whom, Werner Brock, later an editor-interpreter of Heidegger, claimed Heidegger could do nothing else. When Hitler wanted him in Munich in 1933 and Berlin in 1935, Heidegger remained at Freiburg, and after 1934 Heidegger resigned as rector, pleading too much political influence. His fervent support of Nazis during the year he was rector was given when their power was weakest, but investigations by the French after the war cleared him of war crimes. Among Heidegger's loyal followers, Sartre (who read Heidegger and Husserl in Berlin) was in the Resistance and a Nazi prison, and Hannah Arendt (once Heidegger's student and lover), in exile in New York, became an influential philosopher of community and justice. If some deem Heidegger the thinker of his time, others find him original but untenable. He based his thought in a concept of rooted relation he called being-there, and stood on it by staying in Freiburg, even when it meant severing thought from action. _________________________ A CONVERSATION WITH MARTIN HEIDEGGER 1 Brother Martin! Here? And you on my mind. But you were drawn to poets. Rest by my hearth-- an oddity now in this red-gothic maze. Looking into my blue flames we are soon gone, our true selves staying in our work, you say, as we easily fly back to Freiburg, where by your pale fire, ten short years after the uncovering, you sit still "thinking back" on the glorious past of Swabia--your corner of poverty-- and I burn to ask about whoozit--the rector whose place you took--and those you deposed. This all-things-bound-together-in-conflict, you call true intimacy, and it holds us closer to our own ground, as in undoing we do and in doing we negate. I've no taste for your petite scandale; we're discreet. Can I or my colleagues judge you? Ambition, you say, means going around and around chasing your own tale. That's true, but we need to know, also, as you root us all in being-there, how you could breathe the infectious air, wherein you grasped necessity and manfully cast yourself into a broken iron cross, your most decisive posture, making history possible with your gloss. When is subtlety sophistry; exposing pornography the obscenity: the accuser the accused? Where thought is calculative, you say, not meditative. Excellent, Martin. I will remember. 2 These shapes fill and hold long-violent days: your home, Freiburg, the university, your hut here in the Black Forest Mountains, Europe--half-patched after the war-to-end-wars--that feudal bloodletting. New tributaries to their old bloodstreams, England and France backed thugs against the yearnings of the long denied remnants of the Triple Kingdom (careful not to displace tarty, perfumed auntie), new paperdolls from ministries in Paris and London, our Bureau still jostling anti-fascists in '42, while our boys died, as still, for Latin puppets-- cartoon figures with bald heads, mustaches all shaping your thought, as it still scars ours, garishly changed when your Dr. Goebbels said, "Burn their books!" Blunt's my way, Martin. Later-- charnel smoke shrouding Europe--you chat about Holderlin's torn homecoming, over alps, to folk, forest, field, both of you trapped in misty nineteenth-century metaphors, dreaming a reunion, Anschluss. What part of that great green field is our forty acres; what arc of that blue-eyed sky, a friend asked, is home? Where the tongue splits into poetry and politics, poetry, you say, is silence, a comfort to many. Is this calculative, Martin, this meditation, this silence? 3 After a decade when your thought drew Europe's best--Sartre, Arendt (your own Jewess) among them--you gave your voice to the dregs of your crucible in their crucial year, then nurtured an endless silence having led sheep for wolves sheep need, you thought, to create new folds for sheep lest sheep bleat and are eaten-- bleats rising already in your alpine air. Yet you must have been comfortable when you said poets name gods and all things as what they are, not merely tagging those already known-- a conversation in the chambers and corridors of the word. In speaking the necessary word, we name things, and the named becomes known--or hidden: you censored your earlier mentions of Husserl. We give birth to being through the word, our silences stretching catholic wastes around it. We are comfortable, with many fine poets, too. But in some situations, I want to say, Beautiful bullshit, Martin. Truth can lie. God's sakes, Spit it out! Poor Holderlin, mad, foreseeing his sublime made wormy, Kierkegaard gasping at our stripped age, Nietzsche trying to shake us awake our poets in asylums and jails. Lobotomies, lost connections. 4 Did Kierkegaard, before your fire at night alone, shudder at the coals of outcasts you had once told of the dread he said filled our teeth and twisting veins, when we let others seize from us, for us, the awful reins of a world we are left to die in, daily bearing the freedom and necessity to choose: the aesthetic, for things raised into Being, or the ethical, for beings: that Janus coin. Only a step, not a leap, to sluttish strutting. Your wife, in and out to get New Germany tracts from your study shelves, listens. The two of you gave your children to the Holy Father and Fuehrer, the year of the bonfires, raging inside you, surrendering your students to the fires (lest they consign you there?) Did you tell her Hannah was your muse before or after you stripped Jews, from the faculty at Freiburg, for the SS? Do small lies make the new truths sing? She's back for more tracts. Hannah saw them there after the war, certain you had no patience to read the murky Destiny of him you called Mein Fuehrer. If Hannah read your speeches for the new Reich (Is such patience possible?), she must have glossed those, too. But your books were often bogs, Martin, Hannah's more like mountain streams you loved being near, and from clearer sources-- Augustine, Jaspers, Buber, and thou but not you. 5 Home again in the speech of her heart's habitat, surely, Hannah's voice glinted, for all around you-- your wife in and out--had been subtly filmed. Hannah wove excuses for you one knits a child, though they can no more untrouble us than her. You sat with quiet assassins, long, long after it was clear--clear from the start--they spewed Holderlin's high streams from lips soiling your dreams, rode stolen horses, trampling earth, nurturing abscessed roots under new-paved roads. Versailles only a scab on the sore Nietzsche saw long before Versailles. Narcissus only saw the sweet surface of the rancid water, as Wagner, before Versailles, moaned passionately for the old, pimply, embalmed, smelly darling-- we loved no operas more than his in the Thirties-- blurring Europe's ideas, preparing it for mergers. What skews your words is the angle they turn away. You traced roots into us leading nowhere. Meditation calculating. Shush! Don't tell us we are circled by the beast within; don't say colleagues will sell us when barbarians come to awake what lies in the bone hut. Maybe, the beast will sleep, if we are quiet. Maybe, we are luckier, not better than you. Yesterday and today are tomorrow. You are the world. 6 If Sam Johnson could not kick a stone out of air, troubling, unseen stones still fly around us, litter of spirit strewn in the rubble of war. A death parade led your retreat from earth. Camps already near you in '33-- Sachenshausen, Dachau, Oranienburg-- your metaphysics an erect arm. Whappened Toozit? Did Goebbels leave it to a committee to diffuse guilt among us like bad air? What would you not have done to raise children in the mistmurk you called home? When his first crude moves still needed Germany and Europe to look away, you and Pius gave Hitler a cachet. Extraordinary among your colleagues. If Pius did not sway you as former novice, you both subordinated intellect, passion, and humanity to the same mosaic--church, state, family. Later, retired to the mountains in peasant garb, in the hut Holderlin said defines man, the maker of huts, could you find no words in the woods for the dirt in the blood of your days? Too late for you or them, too soon for us. No gun to my head or my family's, only perqs. Am I uncompromising? Everyday, here, too, is a compromise and a death, Martin. I am mute, only a hollow tree in a raucous wind. When a poet gasps, who hears the pierced god? 7 You were a god almost, who could have howled the breath you modulated as silent gas. Some here, too, labor to please any glinting tooth, but less original than you, leap through paltry hoops of innocence and wit-- never blushing. I blush down to my scars, those old concealments, under an old hat, out of fashion and as frayed as a hairnet. We all flee private fires. You in your dark peasant bloodroots. Stocky, dark hair and eyes, long rooted here. Whoever hides with you under your peasant garb, it's not the risen dead. Here, firelight and night licking, you are less real than your later glosses of your early work, where endlessly washing your hands you theorize unspeakables the young man you strain to know could not have guessed, without seeing what you saw and don't even try to find words for. It howls, Martin. Who plays your priest? you-- once a novice--washing yourself with Holderlin's lie to Mother, that his is the most harmless of pursuits, most innocent, while homesick paths lead to alpine ledges where dreams of the valley misted far below mesh with fratricidal nightmares. Nothing washes, Martin. Every atom holds a galaxy, all galaxies echoing them, and we region in all individuals. Hunger to purify a redemptive plot of earth severs and scatters its remnants. 8 Surely, night on night, Pascal harped on our need to hedge our bets, while Nietzsche threw us back on the shit we create, words we shuttle in the dark, playing poker with the quiet assassins, beings your stakes, Solitaire with Being, showing us tomes on motives for obscurity beyond laziness or narcissism. Gates of creation shut, forbidden muse exiled--to fire or America--what difference to the formlessness you hailed? Fantasies of new forms rise from the humus. What wasteful excuses. Voice stripped for the SS, you weren't a bad German or a good German. You were a representative man--no worse or a little better than most--too much like us. You put your country above the earth, only an acre of privilege and prestige above those who stood in the path of your siege. That's not grounded, Martin, that's not being-there. Did they bring your son's ashes in a shoebox saying the younger could be packaged thus? No, that was a professor in Vienna, the price of Anschluss, Waldheim the messenger boy, in between writing his coprophagic thesis on the dawn of the Thousand Year Reich. He's still their messenger boy, still Secretary General of the Crematoria. Those ashes still my brother's, I his father. 9 Kurt, my philosopher friend from Hamburg, said, "There's no end; when Karin was 17, she asked 'Will I always feel dirty for being German?"' You had a quarter of a century after D-Day, Martin, and what for her? What could you say? Kurt told her what Hans' parents had said: "There are no perfect people, my daughter, my son, and perhaps none who came close." Yes, say that Kurt, if it helps--what is and was should not be the child's burden it is--but add, the hard thing is not being an abstraction, but being human, aware of and fighting crimes done in our name. The hard thing's knowing how little changes-- after Nuremberg, Vietnam, Lebanon, Haiti (the endless streams of those drowning in our litanies of innocence). It's hard knowing our overseers of spirit or letter, if not as bad, aren't better, knowing dirt from soap amidst a rat's-ass ethics we live by, nests of convenience wherein we heap lives with the daily grounds of our lies: graduates not sure what century Hitler reaped, how, or what side we were on then or are now, for whom newspapers pitch sixth-grade speech in fifth-grade thought, to compete with networks advertisers manage for Congress and us, along with our lives. Truth/vermouth distributors say and scholars echo, is what clients buy, and through them publishers show us postmodernity's more perfect union--claws and fangs of wolves with the hearts and brains of sheep. The hardest thing is knowing slave from free, chameleons and turtles from poets and humanists. 10 In your Nazi nights, when Hannah visited you, by your troubled fire, bringing Augustine, to discuss her dissertation, there on your shelf, his thoughts on love by the trash, did you say how it escaped the flames that gutted you?-- echoing, Love, nothing counts unless we say so. Martin, did she say, You mention love twice in all of your works; what counts for Nazis? Did you say, Fatherland, Home, Children; did she ask, What more than dogs? They weren't Nazified. I'm not interested in your sentiment. That's what she thought and was too kind to tell you. We learn to converse by questioning ourselves, Augustine said, then speaking of his community, did he echo Goebbels or explain how love draws our will, by invisible skeins on pulleys of light, toward That of which man's a faint echo, free to sing or be hollow. Rags of truth give odorous sanctity to solipsisms your New Student hangs by, as wits of brass alchemize iron to tin and dream pop alloys from plastic and aluminum. Martin, your dying fire needs a new limb: perhaps one from that brilliant Jewess, over whom your logic hails assassins. Did you not tell us words have consequences; the limb of thinking is the way of waiting? 11 The names my tongue can't say aren't those who, in your way, still chart our universities false. I want to know what warps we tunnel through, from knowing these unnameables, to pursue our daily pretensions, our standards for living? Martin, we endow ironed white shirts still; decade on decade: wherever peace bonds kill today. Feds harassing journalists and scholars for trying to sing with the authors of liberty the only thing that can save us or others, here, in Managua, Soweto, or Port-au-Prince, where bodies strangely grow from dirt or asphalt, our fingerprints in the lead roots of red flowers. Protesting students threatened in quiet nights deans and their tails wag out deja vu Edgar's boys called integrationists Red in the fifties)-- we too make non-persons of those who protest-- as our president, all-cap smile and tinted hair, shrugs and talks of freedom, our own barmy Wagnerian stagehand--where the Emancipator sat-- killing another's revolution, as Chrysler remodels Liberty by The Book of 0, making her a fancy lady for United Fruit, cavities stretched until tanks drive through: the foreplay of war. The President of the Screen Actors, playing SS for the Bureau, prescribed capsules to metabolize terror in our bloodstream, where his U-boat rises, sliding up the Potomac toward the lake of ice at the core, his leading lady gliding at his side, nothing real but costumes, roles, of make-out, made-up evangelists who give directions while writing a mad play where the electors are extras 12 Martin, I've meditated, and calculating risks to me, I would rather be silenced than silent. Those are the choices we have where we are free to see or not, as we please. Quizzes you pose on creation and destruction, the relation of those who reap power's prizes to dark abattoirs--let me: Why does God hide? Is poetry mush? Will it feed the disenfranchised poor, the confused prisoners? What mirrors permit trafffic between torn Europe and those who tore? Are our smoother obsessives more educable than yours? Your silence and ours were accessories. No one's innocent, but innocents gasp and die in your sentences, and in ours. We swallow blood of old scripts, wasting brown-babies as terrorists to keep Hollywood safe, caring more for fetuses than for the slaughtered, ignorant, and (on so many levels) starving. Christ bleeds in museums; we embalm children with shrivelling ideas, petrified by the old terror in the bloodstream. Martin, we don't know yet which of us is better. Loyalty of those whose work you would have burned for Goebbels the year of your loud ascent, makes you as hard to disregard as to pardon. You owe too much to those who bore blows you didn't oppose. Sartre made you our hair-of-the-dog after the orgy. But God's not dead, you responded, only hidden. Yes, Martin. He was silenced, alone, in prison, with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Brother Dietrich died there. But he was only one of the numbered and unnumbered. 13 Your offer to help reeducate Germany refused, we embraced scientists who had helped demolish Warsaw, Minsk. . . and fattened on slave factories, savage camps. No silence can atone for such calculations. No one can give these forms their one name. We have neither the depth nor breadth. I can only try to know myself--all I can bear-- nightyears trying to elude an enveloping pettiness Will they be us? Am I uncompromising? Martin, I dream of your escape to a mountain hut, where streams speak the one language that's true and no one sells another. At last you spoke of unwilling, of opening toward being, that which becoming opens to--letting go of sidesteps, calculations. You have shown us scales and stakes. We, the uncertain ones, live among smoldering unknowns, contracted to their one name: hundreds of millions in mass murder--in this century--every continent, almost every country. Manipulated by endemic madness, numbed. Readier to lie and kill than to know and create. We prepare ourselves in a subtler Treblinka. But it's nice here in your hut, almost like home. 14 Burnished red trees around us sing in silence. Fires from this quiet deathstorm swirl the map. I've lived where hysteria rules and bids me speak and be silent or be accused of hysteria. Yet nothing disturbs those who can't see the dust on the goldenrod and bloodflowers, or see naked petals muted under a subtle film. I don't imagine the deaf or lame, miraculously, will sing or dance. And if what I diagram seems ordinary, more searing forms than ours scan those blueprints. Already, firestorms increment into organisms nothing impedes. We are still at peace with our old psychoses. How will the battered veer? Who will help them or us? Martin, I know you are there, silent as always. Hannah said you had no concept of community, no talent for politics, and went off into Eckhardt in old age-- Where else?--always absorbed with original revelation, no matter how removed, and your bloodroots. Alone in your peasant's hut and Black Forest Mountain skiboots, in summer your pale fire almost sufficed. Innocence makes our conversation harmless, impotent, until we learn to serve, open, wait on-- as you finally tried to, Martin--the multifoliate unknown echoing beyond our words. Fumes from many fires eerily flare our pale flames, consuming me, also, Martin. Conversing with whom? __________________________________________________ A-NOTE Van K. Brock has a BA from Emory University and graduate degrees from the University of Iowa and the Writers' Workshop. Since 1970, he has taught at Florida State University, where he is a Professor of English and a former director of the Writing Program. Brock's poetry includes UNSPEAKABLE STRANGERS (Anhinga Press), THE HARD ESSENTIAL LANDSCAPE (Contemporary Poetry Series, University Presses of Florida); several chapbooks; poems in journals--including THE AMERICAN VOICE, GEORGIA REVIEW, NEW ENGLAND REVIEW/BREADLOAF QUARTERLY, NEW YORKER, NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, PLOUGHSHARES, SOUTHERN REVIEW, and YALE REVIEW; and in anthologies--including STRONG MEASURES: CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN POETRY IN TRADITIONAL FORMS, THE MADE THING: CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN POETRY, BLOOD TO REMEMBER: POETS ON THE HOLOCAUST, and SWEET NOTHINGS: THE POETRY OF ROCK 'N' ROLL. Brock is the founder and former director of Anhinga Press, founder and former faculty sponsor of SUN DOG: A LITERARY ARTS JOURNAL, and founder and editor-in-chief of INTERNATIONAL QUARTERLY, a non-profit journal of art and writing in all genres and from all origins. Van K. Brock's most recent book, UNSPEAKABLE STRANGERS (1995), "is composed of several sequences of poems about or related to the Holocaust," and is available from: Anhinga Press P.O. Box 10595 Tallahassee, FL 32302 ISBN 0-938078-42-9 US $12.00 What others have said about UNSPEAKABLE STRANGERS: "They are alternately, and sometimes simultaneously, subjective and objective, and, I think, brilliant and yes, painful, but with the necessary pain, if we are to remain human. I've read other treatments of the same subject, but these, I think, are indispensable." --Judith Hemschemeyer "...very ambitious and I think quite successful. I like even what I would call their moral earnestness and the--at times--coolness with which it's delivered." --Donald Justice "These are very bold and powerful poems about [of course] practically the most difficult theme in the world. I read them with increasing admiration for both [the] mastery of imagery and control. Never once [do they] slip into the sentimental and that in itself is an achievement. But mainly I am impressed by the pervasive music, the requiem sound." --William Styron Individual subscriptions to INTERNATIONAL QUARTERLY are $30 for one year (four issues); $55 for two years (eight issues); and $75 for three years (12 issues). Library and institutional rates are $40 a year, $70 for two years, and $100 for three years. Add $5 per issue for air delivery. Payment is requested in U.S. currency. Sponsors and corporate memberships are $50 to $2500 and include a subscription. Send subscriptions, memberships, queries to: INTERNATIONAL QUARTERLY P.O. Box 10521 Tallahassee, FL 32302-0521 Tel (904) 224-5078 Fax (904) 224-5127 __________________________________________________ COPYRIGHT (C) MUDLARK 1996 All rights revert to the author upon publication. 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