Heidegger
 

Things
“Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”
― Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

A thing, a thing, a thing, a thing, a thing:
wind maddens my hair, whiskers of ice,
panther heat of summer. What’s a being
who’s made of things to make of these things? Nice
to have a mind, to parse the alibi
of love, the grace of doves ascending, rods
of insect light in the dark wheat, the why
of all things born of nothing, as if gods
were golden trumpet songs of butterflies,
the void resolving into bells, and not
beings we dreamed to dream us up. Here lies
a phone, here books, sweatpants, a blue ink blot.
Is being behind these things? What else exists
but things, and lists of things, and lists of lists?

1) changed lies to lie for grammar
2) Changed "of insect light in the dark wheat, the why" to clarify they are fireflies; then changed it back again because of a comment (was it Matt?) that the insects had better connotations here. But changed "light" to "glowlight"…then back again
3) Changed "of it all, meaning of things," to "of nothing born as things" to address how applying meaning to things relates to question of being and nothingness.
4) Then changed it to I seek in nothingness, to make it clear I'm not truly getting behind the idea of there being a meaning beyond existence
5)...and per Matt, going back to slightly changed of nothing born as all things, as if gods, or as of all things versus nothing, as if gods -- not sure which is better, or of all things out of nothing, as if gods, or of all things versus nothing, as if gods. Or what I just changed it to, of all things born of nothing, as if gods
6) line 11 changed "invented" to "dreams" for meter
7) changed "brain" to "mind"
8) Tried to fix the lie/lies problem by changing "a phone, a book, sweatpants, a blue ink blot" to "a phone, here books, sweatpants, a blue ink blot."

Hi, Tony—
Wow. This sonnet really challenges me. Starting with the sound effects, you have syncopated IP just up to the breaking point, yet still managed to hit all the bases of meter, rhyme, and structure. Lines 2 and 11 were hard to scan, but I finally figured them out.
Moving on to thematic concerns, you are working with the ex nihilo problem that you have been exploring in “The Singularity.” Sonnets seem at first glance to be an odd choice for metaphysical and epistemological meditations, but all of yours—this new one, especially—bring the focus back to the speaker’s feelings in a very effective way.
I like “panther heat of summer,” because it links to “panting” but also as a sleek, sinuous image. I’m understanding “to parse the alibi/of love” as a reference to I John 4:8, “God is love.” Is the “alibi” the idea that God loved us into existence, creating us from His own being?
I’m at a complete loss with “rods/of insect light in the dark wheat.” At first I thought “insect light” might have something to do with fireflies as an obscure reference to the randomness of the cosmos, then I thought “[Aaron’s] rod” and “insects” might be an even more obscure reference to the plague of locusts in Exodus. Sorry, I got nuthin’.
Lines 8-10 play off an idea from C.S. Lewis that God sang the universe into being.
Line 11 alludes to Voltaire’s remark that “If God did not exist, we should have to make him up.”
The last two lines are powerfully effective. You return to the repetition (“but things, and lists of things, and lists of lists”) that you began with in line 1 (“A thing, a thing, a thing, a thing, a thing:”) to suggest that your whole meditation is a bubble of consciousness appearing in a meaningless white noise of absurd being.
I’m reminded of a quip by philosopher and rabbi Sidney Morgenbesser on the question of why there is something instead of nothing: “Even if there were nothing, you’d still be complaining!”
Very good work—
Glenn

The echoes of Blake in the angst of being, the panther and brain triggering Tyger is delightfully done. This is just a flyby Tony as I will have to mull, enjoyably I add, and there is much to mull.

Given Heidegger’s sympathetic view of Nazism and his philosophy it always begs the question what did it mean to him for Nazism to be?

Jan

Tony, this is philosophical verse that even I can love. I love the audacity of L1, matched with the provocative last line. A few thoughts:

I’m innocent of Heidegger, but I find the epigraph misleading, because it seems to ask why there’s anything at all. Your poem, as I take it, is about why or how, given the existence of things, we add on a layer of meaning and metaphor. I love how you’ve illustrated that layer with the exquisitely random “whiskers of ice,” “panther heat,” “grace of doves,” etc.

I might prefer “mind” (or even “soul”) to “brain,” since a brain is a necessary but insufficient condition of meaning-making.

I’m a bit of a stickler, but I honestly didn’t notice the problem with “lies” until you corrected it. I’d let it agree with “phone” and think of the rest of the list as add-ons (encouraged by the absence of “and”). A shame to spoil your near perfect rhymes.

I like the poem. It’s full of great imagery and sounds. What I can’t get out of my head though, and maybe I should, I don’t know, is that what Heidegger meant by this question and a good part of the book is that nothingness does not exist. He wasn’t skeptical about being, he was convinced of the impossibility of nothing.

I guess I’m being a drudge to be hung up that a poem organized around answering Heidegger’s question isn’t answering the question he’s asking. It’s a rhetorical question that leads to his premise nothingness is impossible, not being.

It’ll be easy to say that isn’t what you’re doing but it’s easy to interpret this way. But again, maybe most won’t be bothered by it.

Hi John,

All true. Here is what I was thinking: starting from the premise of being versus nothingness, he then proceeds to redefine the metaphysical as immanent, "Being" with a capital "B" you might say, setting the grounds for existentialism and the phenomenology he cribbed from Husserl. So, once you dispense with nothing, you are left with Being, both as a whole, as experienced in the world of objects, and as processed through the human beings thinking their way through time. Of course such a grand conception of "authentic" Being that can only be truly accessed by poets and philosophers might simply be a resuscitation of the dead God manifested as either non-metaphysical humanism (Comte, Mill, Sartre) or through the will to power of the elite "man of prey" (Nietzsche). Yet Heidegger ultimately comes down on the world-building aspect of the thinking animal (the human) as what saves us from Nihilism on the one hand and an essentialist humanism on the other. So, "Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell," and through language we can move towards "authentic" being. Yet, in such a move I feel Heidegger is being a Romantic, the Emersonian poet as representative man, the Shelleyan poet as unacknowledged legislator, the poet as priest in Blake, etc. So, his debate with Carnap was a debate really about what to make of living in a world of objects that we can describe but to which we cannot ascribe an ultimate cause. For Carnap and his ilk, Heidegger's ideas were pseudo-thoughts, not verifiable, and thus nonsense. So, I was hoping to explore the question of whether Heidegger's search for authentic Being was just another Romantic answer to the question of why is there being instead of nothing--i.e., whether it's a false question. There is being instead of nothing. "Why" is besides the point once God is dead. I guess the question is whether the essence of this is in the poem, or still too much in my head?

Hey Jan,

Yes, the Nazism in Heidegger, I would argue, is a feature, not a bug.

The questions of being and nothingness as I see it go to his existentialist use of death to define a "why" in life, and yet when confronted with the Holocaust & the Atom Bomb he was more concerned with how it manifests a mode of thought which he disapproves of than with the slaughter of millions of people. In fact, he had argued for the slaughter of the Jews earlier: So, in a 1934 lecture when the Nazis were already persecuting the Jews, as Faye writers, “Heidegger suddenly calls upon his students to ‘find the enemy’ who ‘may have grafted himself onto the innermost root of the existence of a people,’ to ‘bring him to light, to face him, and to ‘initiate the attack on a long-term basis, with the goal of total extermination.’” And he had argued for National Socialism as a form of government that promoted a salvatory form of technology. So, basically, he is an important thinker whose small, perverted, egoistic, and prejudicial self utterly undermines his philosophy. But that is a subject for another poem :)

Yes, Tony, it’s complicated. I personally think less than ten people have ever read all of Being and Time. One of the reasons Heidegger moved on from phenomenology was his need to address earlier assumptions about nothingness. To reject Spinoza and the rationalists. My point is considerably simpler and as I said may be of no concern to most readers. Your poem seems to celebrate Being in a manner counter to his statement. A sort of here’s your Beings right here sucker! when the statement is actually in agreement with your poem’s sympathies. If I’m misinterpreting it won’t be the last time.

Yes he talked Nazi BS until he felt it closing it despite having a Jewish student mistress for years. To me it’s a frightening example of the romanticism of fascism. How it works on the emotions and bypasses even the smartest people’s intelligence. He was from an ugly area of Germany when it came to barbarism too. You are watching the emotional lure of fascism everywhere now to the point I’m almost convinced democracy will always be doomed in the face to it.

My question is with the epigraph. Although now I think I’ve beat the horse to death.

*If you choose to go deeper into the roots of his philosophy you need a different poem IMO. Good luck with that. As regards nothingness he was right. Any nothing we see is full of matter and who knows what else.

Carl! Thanks! Does my discussion above help at all re: how nothingness relates to the layer of meaning we impose upon things? I see the whole discussion as related, and thus I actually changed "mind" to "brain" to suggest that human being is determined physically (mind is a function of neural chains), whereas I worry that "mind" suggests too much of "soul," animism, the idea of a thinking psyche outside of gray matter that I guess is Kantean or Cartesian, though I have not dug into them enough to say clearly--I am just an interested amateur.

Glad you liked the random, semi-surreal images. I was trying to suggest the difficulty of meaning making in part by making them hard to instantly translate into concepts/abstractions.

I'll think about lie/lies. Hmnn. I could also change the butterflies half of the rhyme.

Thanks, Tony

Ah, John, I think I see it, your concern.

My intention (tho perhaps not my execution) was not to celebrate Being but to question how we ascribe meaning to it, thus AS IF "the gods/were golden trumpet songs of butterflies" when in fact they are "beings we invented to dream us up." Thus the pun on "Here lie" -- things lie to us about their significance, as we lie to ourselves about human essentialism.

I was hoping to imply to the question of "What else exists" that nothing else exists.

Maybe I need to amplify the image of the void to bring this to the surface?

Am I understanding your concern, now, I hope!?

Best, Tony

Glenn, thanks for the insightful reading of the poem! I wonder if others have issues with the rods of insect light (yes, I was thinking fireflies, and no, I was not trying to make them take on lots and lots of meaning--just fireflies in the dark--tho' at the back of the mind I must have been thinking of Japanese Zen poets who present the firefly as an image of enlightenment in the darkness of existence). But is that semi-surreal image just too far out to do its work with interest?

...and after all that I made a few changes. Maybe they help?

Hi Tony,

Lots to like here, including how the poem riffs of the Heidegger quote. It's a very long time since I read Heidegger, but I recognise some of the themes, the loss of gods motif, things, being, nothingness. I particularly like the line, "What’s a being / who’s made of things to make of these things?"

I do wonder if maybe the last line could be stronger. The closing "lists of lists" seems to depart somewhat from what precedes.

I preferred "insect" to "fireflies". Insect has interesting associations, like "alien/other" and "insignificant", that "firefly" loses.

I also much preferred, "the why / of nothing born as things" to the (to me) less complex and less interesting "the why / I seek in nothingness". The latter can also be read as something like, "the why I seek in oblivion", suggesting, drink maybe, or sleep. Do you want that meaning?

L11 strikes me as hexameter:

be|ings we | invent | ed to dream | us up. | Here lies

If so, I guess one possibility might be: "beings we dreamed to dream us up" or the less regular, "beings we dreamt up to dream us up".

best,

Matt

Matt! Very useful, thanks. See revisions. I'm eliding "Beings" into one syllable to make troche/iamb to start line eleven.

beings we | invent | ed to dream | us up. | Here lies

It has an anapest, which I almost never allow, but what the hell. Once in a thousand lines is okay, I guess.

Similar minds, my friend, in fact I originally wrote per your suggestion "beings we dreamed to dream us up" but changed it feeling that "invented" was clearer -- yet, I think it is also more didactic, less lyrical, so I'm gonna take your suggestion here, thank you!

I’m with Carl on keeping “lies.” One possible solution is to finesse it with punctuation:
. . .Here lies/ a phone—a book, sweatpants, a blue ink dot
Or
. . .Here lies/ a phone. (A book. Sweatpants. A blue ink dot.)
The bonus in this one is that the parentheses imitate the grouping of random items into lists that you mention in the last line of the poem. It’s as if the speaker is struggling to create meaning by comparing and contrasting. “How is a raven like a writing desk?”
Glenn

On the fireflies. . . Sometimes I think it’s okay to include a vivid image that resonates emotionally and feels necessary even though a neat, clear, logical justification of it isn’t possible. In other words, it’s okay to stump your reader once in a while. Your panther in line 3 is a spectacularly successful example of this principle. The speaker is, after all, inviting the reader to join him in his quest to extract meaning from absurdity.

To my mind, the poem is precisely about how minds (whatever they are) and meaning emerge from brains, rather than about how brains and other things emerge from nothing. Insects have brains, but they don’t think how nice that is. You’re telling me it’s more complicated than that, which I can readily believe. I’ll get back to you after I’ve read and absorbed Heidegger.

Think of it this way: “Here lies a phone, [and here lies] a book, [and here lie] sweatpants, [and here lies] a blue ink blot.”

I notice you’ve dropped a syllable from L7, roughing up the meter. Many here will like that, though I had to catch my balance.

Hi Carl,

Okay, you convinced me on these three points--tho still worried about lie, lies.

And yeah, I can't pretend to be a Heidegger expert, either! If the poem is working, it will bring across interesting questions whether one knows his work or not.

Thanks so much, Tony

Tony, another lovable rigorous philosophical poem. The first line is an inviting usher.

In the list of three that follow, I’m a bit bugged by the grammar of it. The first item is a statement, while the second two items are just items--unless the second item were intended to modify the first’s “hair” (I don’t think so)—but then that would leave the third item as an outlier, even though “panther” has a certain nice association with “whiskers.” “Wind maddening my hair” would tidy all that up, although it would change the meter (but that’s already varied, and there are also possible subs for the verb). Granted, the disorientation of the syntactical shift arguably enhances the sense of the chaos of things, so it does appeal to a certain part of my brain (or mind)—but it rankles the other.

Nice next sentence.

“The alibi of love”—hmm, I wonder what that could be, and if it could be tied to the “grace of doves descending.” Like some others, I do rather enjoy the disorientation of the randomness of this second list.

I wonder too a bit about the “golden trumpet songs of butterflies.” Of course, butterflies don’t sing, nor do they play trumpets, although they might feed on flowers shaped like golden trumpets. Are you fancying them as terrene angels of sorts? I guess this is simply a whimsical way of saying what you say more directly two lines later--that creation creates its creator. But there might be a way to do so that seems a little less odd. ?

How about a semicolon after “phone” to clarify the grammar?

I love “beings we dreamed to dream us up”—or even “beings we invented to dream us up.” A nice "snake biting its tail" effect.

And I like the way the last line resolves things in its tidy progression, starting out by biting the tail of the first line and then expanding outward from that.

I miss the fireflies, their seeming blink, to be and then to not.

I feel differently to you on his espousal of Nazism. I believe Habermas asked him twice to recant and he could not do so even in the face of all the whispers becoming shouts.

I admit I have no clear understanding of ‘Dasein’

However, the poem triggers thought in me I enjoy it on many levels and in the different levels of incarnation. One cannot ask for much more.

Jan

Jan,

I hear you. I am conflicted in that I find his ideas interesting, but as you say his silence spoke volumes in his refusal to recant. I've read a few books and articles on the Nazi legacy--by his defenders and accusers--and can't say he comes off very well.

Dasein--that's a hard one. Maybe something like the (authentic) phenomenological experience of humans and how they exist in the world of space and time as compared with the (inauthentic) world of human interaction.

But this is what opens him up to accusations that he is reverting to or simply secularizing Christian ideas of grace and damnation (authentic and inauthentic), even if they are this-world instead of metaphysical.

Thanks for the good words!

Best, Tony