Paul Scott Derrick Grisanti - Lines of Thought

The aim of the first group of six essays that follows is to reflect on the central line of thought that I’ve referred to above, a line that passes from Emerson to Dickinson and leads on to Heidegger. I begin with an essay on Dickinson and Heidegger instead of Emerson simply because that early essay was my first, tentative step along this journey. Then come three essays on Emerson and two more recent ones on Dickinson. I hope that, taken together, they will make the ideational lineage I am trying to uncover more visible to the reader.

The next three essays follow some of the branches of that line in Sarah Orne Jewett, William S. Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, and Timothy Steele. Whether they are conscious or not, echoes and reflections of Emerson’s and/or Heidegger’s thinking can be found in them all.

And the third section deals with a contemporary English poet—and friend—Richard Berengarten, whose work I deeply admire and believe to be a direct continuation of the inner core of thought in western culture that this book hopes to illuminate.

Do I need a further justification—beyond the Emerson-Dickinson-Heidegger-Cavell lineage that this collection traces—for grouping these particular writers and thinkers together? In the end, a faithful Emersonian, I can only appeal to my own self. These are the works that have sought out my sensibility, that have found a response in a mind, such as it is, that their calling out has helped to form.

What do we look for when we look for value in a work of art? Like Robert Frost, I think of questions that have no reply. Or so many very different replies that the questions are rendered moot. But Harold Bloom’s test seems good enough to me to work with: the poet and the poem should touch upon permanence. And how judge permanence? In Frostian terms, as inner and outer weather.

The majority of these writers and works are permanently installed in my own experience. I never tire of returning to them, and always find there something new and exciting. And if my responses to them are accurate, they will continue to be installed in the collective memory of the culture that we all construct together.

I

EMERSON, DICKINSON, HEIDEGGER

Emily Dickinson, Martin Heidegger and the Poetry of Dread *

We do not need to question the power and immediacy of Emily Dickinson’s voice. Time, and the overwhelming weight of critical adulation, have proved that the personal language which her poetry composed, with all of its solecisms and violations of grammar, holds a deeply moving strength, a mysterious quality akin, perhaps, to the very enigma of truth itself, which all serious language labors to reveal.

And while untold pages have been written to describe the effectiveness of Emily Dickinson’s words, to elucidate the “how” of her palpable phrase, few have been expended to tell us why. Still, once having accepted the familiar supremacy of her work, we are faced with this second, more fundamental question: why is the poetry of Emily Dickinson so consummately and so irreproachably right? This question is not intended to repeat, in an opaque form, the well-worn query into the mechanics of her verse. It means, instead, to strike to the very roots of her language, as the words emerge from her perception and desire, and to grasp them in that process of emergence. Why does this poetry, this highly personal expression, beam so effortlessly into the darkness of our own perception and desire?

Our deeper subject, then, is the character of language itself. To perceive why, within the totality of linguistic experience—the confusion of verbal interchange and misunderstanding—one person’s words ring out sharply above the babble of history, we should judge those words against some coherent theory of how language functions in the world. In his essays on language and poetry, 1 Martin Heidegger constructs a complex and fascinating “explanation” of the role of language within the circumference of human activities.

To criticize Dickinson’s poetry against Heidegger’s ideas is not as far-fetched as it may at first appear. Heidegger himself calls for such a testing of his thought against diverse examples of world literature in “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (Heidegger: 270-71). lndeed, such a consideration should broaden our understanding and appreciation of them both, and serve, at the same time, to substantiate each in the reflected validity of the other.

In those four essays brought together in English under the title Existence and Being , Heidegger unveils a concept of language which construes it as a kind of non-spatial region, a region in which the constituents of the world enter into the arena of existence through the interaction of human thought and the material environment. The result of this mingling of intellectual reflection and physical fact is the word. Human thought plays upon a thing, as it were, catching it up from the indiscriminate stream of natural process, to recognize it as that which it is. The act of language distinguishes parts from the whole. The word allows a thing to come out of the mist of unknowing and to take its place as what it is. Language tames the mystery and delivers it to knowledge in the form of the particular concept, whose realization is the word.

Here we can begin to grasp the Heideggerian concept of “letting-be.” This fundamental creative act of language allows that which is outside of us to be what is for us. It brings the things of the world into “the openness” of language; it “discovers” them from the unknown for human appropriation and appreciation. “To let what-is be what it is means participating in something overt and its overtness, in which everything that ‘is’ takes up its position and which entails such overtness. Western thought at its outset conceived this overtness as τα άληθέα, the Unconcealed” (Heidegger: 306). This open region, this overtness, where what is takes its place in the “Unconcealed” is what I have called the non-spatial region of language.

Within this framework, the “world” is only that which human awareness has encountered and, through the creation of language, brought out of the dark. This way of thinking seems to agree with the famous opening proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” That which has not come into the light of language is unimaginable. It cannot be an issue. It remains, very simply, in the dark. So, were it not for words, which separate particular concepts out of the seamless web of process, everything that is would rest beneath a pall of undifferentiated silence, as if buried in some vast Jungian Unconsciousness. And indeed, without the “unconcealedness” of language, not even time would exist.

For Heidegger, history begins at that moment when the spark of selfreflection flickers in intelligence, and man can separate his own thinking from the flow of natural change: “[...] the existence of historical man begins at that moment when the first thinker to ask himself about the revealed nature of what-is, poses the question: What is what-is? With this question unconcealment and revealment are experienced for the first time” (Heidegger: 308). Thinking extends into the unknown of material circumstance, and in the act of shedding light upon it, creates phenomena which remain in the world as language. By picking concepts out of physical evanescence, language fixes them into its more or less perpetual overtness. Thus language establishes a contrast between the idea of permanence, implicit in the word, and the transience of natural process; and time emerges, or “opens out,” as the discrepancy between “that which goes” in the flux of being, and “that which stays” in the unconcealedness of the word. “After man has placed himself in the perpetual, then only can he expose himself to the changeable, to that which comes and goes; for only the persistent is changeable” (Heidegger: 279).