Issue 12: Robert Mueller
Nothingness Expressed to be Real to be Writing Andrew Levy
to be Martin Heidegger Speaking Not Speaking
and Certainly Not of Background
to be Martin Heidegger Speaking Not Speaking
and Certainly Not of Background
by Robert Mueller
To branch, to take tippling step, from nest, onto slippery twig, to peel off from one’s own childhood, as if reeling as if at first — this, in our actions, is the essence of Geworfenheit, if it is anything at all, in Andrew Levy’s Nothing Is in Here (Eoagh, 2011). As we know, essence is ripe. And Mr. Levy’s preparedness is well-sewn. And the concepts of time and space are well-known (to some of us): Simply put, they are the registers of perceptible cash transactions. Of sensible passing into time. Of time passing. Into itself. And Being it becomes, or it was coming, this Being that generates experience, in itself, in its own Being. And then stepping out into time, one way to put it. Into time. And where, is not here; where is in, anything. No, not anything at all; nothing, and not anything at all. And where is all? Where is it all in?
It being always difficult, however, to salute an arrangement without some kind of improvidential assessment, let’s try it again. Let’s prove it again.
In expressing yourself properly, as if even then, you are delivered; you are found to be out of yourself; you are thrown (an odd word for us) or geworfen (not so odd) into the relations of interestedness, (as always) in your actions. So much more so that when Storyland gets evaded by, or perhaps along with, the big questions — and then maybe you can fit in your three-cornered hat. Or as Derek says — or the narrator says, for this book is of a writing by Andrew Levy that is narratological, or maybe it is dramatic — dramatic monological or dramatic dialogical — — “By the complete thirst, I mean one’s contemplation of books―that the completion of one’s contemplative quest would open (through ending) into a new experience of time.”
That is, by a new sense of time meaning also a real sense of time, as in what Martin Heidegger means by Zeitlichkeit, or better when the philosopher, to apprise us of our lack of real knowledge of our Being, makes the distinction, over the course of many many ramifications, between the existentielle, or the existing, or that of mere existence thusly considered (“Die Frage der Existenz ist immer nur durch das Existieren selbst ins Reine [purely or merely] zu bringen.” (see Section 4; references and quotations in this essay are to and from Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006, originally published in 1927); the locations are identified by section number, inasmuch as the text is laid out in consecutively numbered short sections)); so between, again, the existentielle and the existentiale, which is to say for the latter existing as rightly constituted and bound up with Dasein, and as awash in Möglichkeit (possibility) (Section 4), and indeed, as we may try to understand it, existing right smack there in nothingness (Nichtigkeit; this term brought in later on, e.g., in Section 62). This nothingness is indeed right there where we are there, and it has to do with our awareness of our being to the end, unto death, as greatly and indeed multifariously elaborated by Heidegger. However, let’s say it again anyway.
Nothingness has to do with a certain logic of negation enriched by a complexity of selves dissolved into the world and yet standing apart as a self-in-the-world. How that self has and is and can be constituted, and by what rights the arrangement with its end (in itself even) partakes of aspects more than noticeable among the others, is the difference of one’s self from others as a form of nothingness. I am I, but there, not here. Hence I am not I, and I am certainly not any of them. Especially when it belongs there where I am not but perhaps I was, I am not any of them. Not any of them, though not not anything at all. I am (mostly) nothing, or something, or something to that effect, all things being considered, which are a lot to be sure.
Even this nothingness empowers, and especially even in this form. To realize nothingness in all possibility is, or better what possibility as the constituted sense of possibility most effectively and presciently in terms of Dasein is, means to be in time in its fullest sense. Time as Zeitlichkeit reveals itself as this awareness or being there, which is one way of finding the Sinn or “sense” (let’s say) of it, the sense of it as this, in this and for this of our very own utmost brand of caring: “Zeitlichkeit enthüllt sich als der Sinn der eigentliche Sorge” (from Section 65, titled “Zeitlichkeit als der ontologische Sinn der Sorge”).
As mine own, it would seem, my time is my nothingness, or one variation thereof. An important one in this sense, Heidegger realizes; and so by extending the moment of existential bearing forward to nothingness, he uncovers (in the record, as it were) a sharp determination of our constitutional being that, when it stands, takes its measure from all of the possibilities, or rather the sense of these possibilities perhaps, brought forward as well to their furthest extent. As the fruits of an examination bearing on the history of Being’s coming into being among us, this sense of being is noted, and even lived, as an outgrowth of this being. This sense of being in our way to recovering time-fulfilling existence accompanies descriptions of self and of Dasein as a growing, or perhaps a showing (although the potency of display is debatable), where the changes take place not so much through time as time runs through them in our very actions.
In this form, too, time pulls us into nothingness. Rather time is what, as thus fully apprising, puts the timely elements in our actions. It is there in all our bearing of them; and it is then that our seizing of care and of care doubled and tripled manifests itself. Our caring is as fundamental in our time, and maintains our being there, as understood as existentially weighted and thusly arrived, always to the end, always potentially coming to the end. This end is all, is its purpose. So is our caring for our being, giving us the way to existence having an end.
Then you have to return in your discerning further to find what it is, this being in this thrown existence, and, as it appears, this being as worldly and as empowered in Zeitlichkeit and as placed confidentially in Dasein, what it really is as further understood in practical terms and finally as still to be revealed in constitutional terms.
However, let’s continue it again. Our timing and our placing of our existence understood as our expressing ourselves in the formations of Sorge and Zeitlichkeit, serving to make it all so real where and when, is all part of our understanding of existence, and is all-moving part always in some direction to be now known and living. Undertaking the existentiale means participating in the recovery of our being there as well as here. We find ourselves actively, as a being thrown over there, in a situation that was once laid out for us; and now we find it where it is still laid out in order to join it, or to come back to it perhaps. This finding that is our Zeitlichkeit and has us rapt for our end rests solely on possibility, considered for all intents and purposes as everything that is now possible, we having suddenly as it were drawn fully into ourselves, as well as our own death in everything (and through everything), which of all things belongs the most exclusively to our very own being, and which is at any moment possible. And not only so to speak.
To revert, then, in terms of possibility and nothingness, then, existence now found in being is everywhere laid out for us, if and when we care, and prepared for us, so that it is no secret in Andrew Levy’s writing, it becomes there. Right off what is nothing and what is nevertheless possible present themselves at their extremes. Right away in the narrator’s opening these extremes come out, and in that sense the sense of being is indeed already prepared, for him as it is for us. Being, as the presence of the writing, is there right there for us.
In seeking a new sense of time, moreover, Levy seeks the measure of his own being, known (timely) as his own determination to write. Thus it is in his ludicrously badgering redeeming, or rather in his leaning forward towards being writing, an existential task that he pursues. So to speak he does, at least. He clearly perambulates in what is already there what existence is undertaken to mean for Heidegger, and what also appears with force and relish to him when he is writing the book, and now when he is writing, and then some of the times over and above, and now, and then, to us, who are writing, and reading, and even singing through the banns of, the book.
It is reading it in this light that we extend our project. And we especially, even in this light, realize it. To light up to it, further and hence furthest, to the point of recognizing the existentiale as the sense of being now or newly able (as always) is for it to be realized as meaningful existence and as what it means to live the possibility of being. Hence to move up to it, for now but also for then, to bear up under the kerneled not internal existence as Dasein and as fullness in its own right, in and of itself, or in our actions (meaning actions in light of the feeling you could get from the notion of existence being “vorausgesetzt” (see Section 63), surely), means a well-told bearing and remains or complains of itself the fully interesting or completely care-borne existence. Then to mean this. Then to be in, where. Then to be newly, roundly, oh, to the end. Unto death.
Or let’s try that again. Let’s get back to negation. Let’s not turn our backs on a nothing that is anything if not uprooted into the fast-dash action. Thus if being be extended, by an experience of being in-the-world, to any sort of compost-reduction for redirection, towards being there where you are not and where you really are unto death in the real care-borne time; if all this in its sense, then nothing means as much as having to have that happen again and again elsewhere and elsewhere so it seems after and after to move in the inflected dusky risky rising middle.
Necessity plays a role as well, for both Levy and Heidegger, however much it may be contained within a history of the idea of being (also in our actions), and however much Heidegger may seem to show too much respect for necessity. Meanwhile, Mr. Levy’s partnering in a mid-Manhattan stories of sensitizing blurring remains telling. A wave is parted in this the blur of lost beautiful greatness and distinction. A drama unfolds, opening the trap-door to empty the golden cup, with draught upon disappearing draught of its own rewards. A standing confrontation is there that we can envision, affecting the do-ers, now here in this time re-centered read-again vectored. Thusly accorded, we can smudge ourselves in distinctions distinguished truly, and as always there, as if of the do-ers as they make do, as they are making do and are thriving perhaps, and perhaps against many odds in that anti-gravity of their always absurd heroics, affirming under a crumbling word-slime statics the running into before out of time.
Take, then, in the before this and out of this, time possible. Take its grounding unto death; take its anticipation against many odds. Take time as fundamental. Take it as Zeitlichkeit, as the form of awareness of all the pressures of past and future rolled up into the one present as constituted in-the-self-in-the-world, as the form of being in time refreshed, as the one present already-constituted. Take time as fundamental as Zeitlichkeit, and, forthrightly, as vivid time unto death, a configuration determinably (fooh!) o so so surely even irredeemably appropriate to this our world, yes in our actions, our world that compels us to this assertion of that being of “nothing being in here”; and yet not a whining really or winding away.
Well, some whining maybe. Exhilaration apart, some whining, some binding. Still, still, time as fundamental is as Zeitlichkeit for sure, is as writing the book, as Derek always wanted, it seems. Writing the book is what he wanted, in any event, to be sure about. Thus speaking of the writing the reading the book as contemplative and concertively doing quest, the narrator (let’s say) identifies a multitudinous targeting praxis. He understands it as the Gestalt of stepping out, into what it is, the world, and of minding a world already entered, in both clarity and befuddlement. Reading, or writing, it, the book, we could regard, therefore, ipso facto the writing, as how “everything coheres in the making, following many practice sessions …,” as how money falters in the bank.
But it is henceforwardly time to celebrate in formal lyrics (set off in the book by block indentation):
The Mind is Not Designed for Thinking
The men see as a danger the men think the men
will force them to do them. As others looser or belts
we take more and more feed no satisfied lose
you are miserable too until we change our appetites . . .
Space will no longer simply be a form of
exteriority, a sort of screen that denatures duration,
an impurity that comes to disturb the pure,
a relative that is opposed to the absolute . . .
It is an oracular and choral materiality
Nothing being in it materially clings to the immaterial as sense of meaningful time, the new experience of time, and involves emptied placements and new displacements in a coordinated time-and-space sensitizing. A displacing rolls out to an accomplishing and, for Andrew Levy, ever varying experience of Geworfenheit (the writing continues at this juncture as no longer formalized or set off, but still as placed in linear sequence):
I was. You were. Where would you be now?
I’m just a former usherette. We’re not even looking for the problems.
See my Dad, smiling down upon us?
He was a lovely human being with the most charitable heart.
This, with its pasts and presence both present, could be a being thrown into time, not dissolved in it, as it were. An experience likened to Geworfenheit could explain how, as in the lines in verse quoted previously above, the living of one’s encounter with all difficulty transforms practice. Thus to file “The Mind is Not Designed for Thinking” into dark hilarity leading to darker oracularity is to respect the different purity of impure in-the-world constitution, even originary if as exterior, and even, if as exterior, a re-constitution, a truth relative, a bursting re-surging sacred, a feeling about things re-constituted and yet genuine. The darkness appears not so very dark, but rather painfully dark. It can only serve for this constituting of the self by way of respect for the answer, as implied and as given: The Mind is Designed for Acting. What would that be, such that it would be made known to be, what would that become (unto death), but the nature that we partake of? If we had known it — and we have — it was part of our newly (and nearly?) being there:
Turn on the anti-gravity floor.
It has a life of its own, it breathes. I see the moon illuminating each cloud. What I had forgotten happened here. To walk away, to turn. To anticipate. Having arrived as leavening a form comprehended to be beauty has in the imagined a secularized orthodoxy moving toward the inevitability of its death. I’d listened to you more intently as you lay dying than I believe or remember heaving ever listened to you before. The cloud dispersed into a brush of fuzzy white pebbles above an orange flame horizon. New York City, the Hudson River, the anti-gravity. Every breath feels like it is here. What the nature of my writing suggested in the past was everything for me at that time. What was asked for I couldn’t deliver. The construction or the sentence or line was always what meant something. Everything of life in each one, the practical and the imaginative failure searched for in the indelible waste. So much life, a diminishment in everything I’d imagined formed into a new time. And I am surprised in how little time passed.
The amount of time it took to lower a blind. Everything I’ve come close to, to walk away, to run. “We’re the forgotten bunch,” she said. “We’re not even looking for the problems.” I keeping coming back for more of it distracted by the lives of everyone around me. You’re not listening. I am. You are.
Without a doubt, the self of a being in-the-world is what governs entirely this attempt at writing, on the part of Levy’s narrator, and for the reader. Heidegger, adopting the concept of Sorge, or care or interestedness, may also bear up to the constitutive burden of existence by testing what it means to be for the self, by exhaustively thereby unburdening its being thrown or geworfen, its existing in the world. This Sorge, this caring, even here with its little left to care about, has that certain constitutional strength of Nichtigkeit, or nothingness. Thus nothing being in here in these deforested attempts at writing simply sets forth all the reflected possibilities, as always. The deepest, the most bindingly felt, the most committed and the most responsive of all is an “unleavened” and “leavening” situation of possibility that our actions, these very actions proceeding out of a finding oneself fearless in the times, originate.
But let’s get back to it. That Zeitlichkeit then tells you the time differently from a forwarding linearly succeeding of past into future, and thus differently from an existence perched on mechanical props, is what the narrator pictures perfectly to tell how his story would go. Thus Levy imagines not only the difficulty of Dasein to the end, but recognizes how much that grappling with difficulty means positing a splitting off of the person, along with displacements and their displaced scenarios, and with a displacing and intricately empowered re-conceptualizing, in our actions, of our apparently new and yet always already pressuring experience of time. What seems like playfulness is engrossing oneself in time-sense. What is play is also over there. Being where you are not, it — what it or ourselves are in fully-weighted time — appears. As “existential,” involved in its caring, measured in its waiting, it appears. As vanilla puzzle on one hand, concurring urgency on the other, it appears, it goes out, it falters, it returns, reappears. And so he the narrator here (or there) is:
SOMEONE ELSE
I had been looking for ways to tell this story for a long time. I had been looking for the time to tell this story for many years. Today, I begin to understand how difficult it is to imagine an end to the story, coupled with the feeling, a certainty almost, that I have lost any definite sense of how and where it begins.
I would dance as a child holding my mother’s hands, my father would watch from his chair. In bed at night I made copious notes, in my imagination, rewriting Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo. We turn now to the beginning of the story.
The story that I am about to tell you.
The anticipation in the phrase “about to tell you” speaks every bit, in this particular context, of what it means to be there to the end. And unto death, in all unique contexts. Or, in terms leaning (and leavening) towards the pregnant reconfiguring of our sense of time, as Derek or someone says about it a little further on, what it means is that in these “stories that follow we will arrive . . . No, we will hold, if only momentarily, an uncompromising yet thoroughly compromised, and belated, beauty” (ellipsis in the original).
The concepts Dasein, Sorge and Zeitlichkeit, then, with not a little Geworfenheit thrown in, can all illumine this text by Andrew Levy, this so-called “Bildungsroman” as likened by him to a building zone in the opening paragraph. Here (or there) is where the confessions and the “existential” growth of the character who is the book’s narrator are always seeming to be placed, in the writing, at odds. As a geworfene to be sure, whoever is doing and talking in this writing is always somewhere where he is not. He thrives, let’s say, but at some expense, given especially that the focus of the character-building is in an obscured and hazy darkland and entirely disruptive middle, and is in fact a building, now enveloped and displaced, or disappeared, in the middle of a serrated midtown Manhattan obstruction that in one emboldening both disturbs the center and cuts off the city’s parts. The speaking character, as geworfene, is thusly geworfen and, in a sense (and to be understood and interpreted (with force) as nearly the whole of that writing), now characterless.
So the actions of which are the burden and writing of Andrew Levy’s existence may be thought to appear — (Let’s interrupt this to say that the phenomenological experience, even as if Levy’s narrator has that at his fingertips, develops out of the historical character of our sense of being in time. Where, is not anything at all. In following the path out of this where containing nothing we show our character. We come into our being in time where there the possibility of being at the end is real, and we come to it, there where we are not, to be in time and on time with ourselves where before we were put, like it or not. We are back there where we were, maybe for the last time, or, who knows because always vividly conducted into the present of last possibilities, there where we were not and now really are, therefore seeming newly to be, in a way, although the state of anxiety about death is, in another way, suspended, as is natural (but not for these purposes as they have historically developed), contrary to our existential being for all that) — before us (without conceding too much glorying in appearance and in process) as being in and of the writing that is nothing if not constitutive in existence, in one’s being — (Let’s interrupt this again to say that the completion of our being in the Dasein of the All-Caring (because you can’t help it) permits the structure of Geworfenheit to be fully realized, and this actually for ourselves and on our own realized.
So sometimes it always seems in this attempt at writing to be having a ball, and then (or now or newly) to be thrown back to where you have already been thrown (before all of this perhaps and to be sure), to take back your pregnant being of then and there, and so again to be truly where you were. As always to the end. Unto death) — in the full sense of “existentiale” with an “a”.
Following a wide-out writerly openness enables, somewhat paradoxically, Levy’s writers and readers to stick the representation, where there is always available (and real) a “structural assembling of parts” (gegliederte Strukturganze) (see sentence quoted immediately below). Levy asks about how the unity of the self, lived in and through the writing of the book, can be brought into form from the displacements of that self’s, or the writer’s, opportunities for caring in the world. What the excellent philosopher Heidegger asks, as a corollary to this the writer’s task, concerns existence in the face of all ultimate possibility and hence negation, as suggested above, existence as Sorge as existential basis for our being-in-the-world-possible: “Mit der Frage nach dem Sinn der Sorge ist gefragt: was ermöglicht die Ganzheit des gegliederten Strukturganzen der Sorge in der Einheit ihrer ausgefalteten Gliederung?” (Section 62)
In other words, and in Levy’s best imaginative terms, the everything of all the member parts put together over there, as if with the fully committed interest and care of being in-the-world, has to define our existence over there. And so much more is it the case in blighted aporia in this world of today. Hearing the complaints of not even looking for the problems, being confronted with the disinformational systems of meaning that point to those killing innocent civilians at the backing of their people, and so on and so forth, and propagandistic billboarding, and talking and distorting in promotional biz-whiz, hearing all these fragmentary assignations, even he puts together a world of experience out there, and out there in that more or less new time, even he does this even while there is nothing, nothing, in here.
It is within this pattern of constraints that Levy constructs a negative writing and a drama of the self not self out there in a time of not time (unto death of the not-yet of experiencing death) of “I was. You were.” and now here I am. And “nothing is in here.”
Heidegger says, “Zeitlichkeit enthüllt sich als der Sinn der eigentlichen Sorge.” Any talk of experiencing a new sense of time pertains to what Andrew Levy, or his narrator, or his perplexed and empowered anti-hero in action, experiences actually for himself in the time, actually a little time, surprisingly so, it takes to write it (and do it or make do with it, and not have done with it, or more that of always (already?) having to make do with it). It would appear that the existential sense of our being brings our experience up to date as of being unto death, or of being of that which is a fact but not yet.
And yet, yet, whatever this might mean, the Geworfenheit of our already being thrust out into time makes this a being dying, certainly much of what Levy’s weakened heroics abjectly present themselves to be and the splendid fractalizing of their broken sentencing. That is why the dodge of “not yet,” of living freely in the consciousness of a yet-to-be-determined status of care and of a basic and in fact healthy anxiety for the future so empower the writing by its failure, this “not yet” of being in time, to gloss over the actions taken over in the writing. Meanwhile, being thrown into time may make it and makes it constitutively a full being in the constitutive time-presence of which it is and already is and is out there to be. All the while nothing is in here, as we may, actually following Levy religiously, newly note.
So what about this half-side of the page and all this fantasizing about death and the new writing that speaks itself, its own language, and illustrates with its wonderful beautiful notions like (((this happens, then that happens, then unfortunately) but truly, it really ain’t the same, and mine […] the most methodical or disciplined to begin with) the poems are for ghosts […] no point in living life elsewhere) that illustrate with their pleasing perspicacity that illustrates if nothing else could the “Nothing is in here”? Domingo Sanchez, 21, says it, “‘[…] cracks opening the earth’ […] ‘soil kept coming down on us’,” only a little better.
As if you were afraid to ask this time, what makes negation tick the monstrous affinities so of the existentiale? So it lapses, and that’s when (again the half-sided page layout)
Then there’s a few seconds of a red blanket; breathing sounds pulse on the soundtrack. A young woman with a sort of beatific homecoming queen smile on her face is rammed by one of a pair of drag-racing cars and ends up sleeping in an apartment whose owner is away on vacation. The older couple effusively wishes her luck. The young guy collapses. Hot dog buns. The ultimate movie heroine. He grew as weak as to be unable to think.
[as if to say what we will will we own up to drifting in the nothingness to replace replacement into the noting out there to the foundation to stand on as if to say a new sentence of time as if what is I am you were stand on out there to come to new owning this based on this tossed down ourselves nothing is in here there to the reaching into about to subsisting now newly in time],
when
. . . Die Eigentlichkeit des Selbstseinkönnens verbürgt die Vor-sicht auf die ursprüngliche Existentialität, und diese sichert die Prägung der angemessenen existenzialen Begrifflichkeit. – Section 63
[as if nothing escapes the reality of our existence in the world as if the self in being always already thrown out there knows no boundaries and is all-knowing of itself in its own boundaries as its own constitution in nothingness as if the nothingness of all its possibility were its being there its fully negated and fully possible being even ever-presently unto death as if to say],
when
You’re in the wrong place. Tell me two more lies. I’m not going to tell you. You should be able to figure that out. It’s too much; you’re not listening to my unhappiness. Keep reading. Nothing is in here, readers say. The questions you raised about my writing are right here. Pursued, by yours truly (though the question of “truth” is doubtful at this point) to the space I have titled Storybook Land. Put your feet down, put your head back, and sit still. I didn’t feel sad, I didn’t feel afraid. I just felt at peace. If you would do what you’re supposed to do… Sit down. I don’t think I’m anywhere. There is nothing just like you.
[as if to say that to meet up with nothingness and to meet up with all kinds of frivolous and get-out-your-dinner-digging contradictions and be there where you are where you were where you are not and nothing is in here and that is the nothingness in time where you were where you are already not and nothing is in here and that is the nothingness in time where you were where you are already not where you are where you are experiencing nearly living new time],
when
Gesucht ist ein eigentliches Seinkönnen des Daseins, das von diesem selbst in seiner existenziellen Möglichkeit bezeugt wird. Zuvor muss diese Bezeugung selbst sich finden lassen. Sie wird, wenn sie dem Dasein es selbst in seiner möglichen eigentlichen Existenz “zu verstehen geben” soll, im Sein des Daseins ihre Wurzel haben. Der phänomenologische Aufweis einer solchen Bezeugung schliesst daher den Nachweis ihres Ursprungs aus der Seinsverfassung des Daseins in sich. – Section 54
[actual is eigen mine it belongs to me mine it is mine regardless because a place with presence to a being-wise in the formation already of existence where is all is all thrown into the spirit already to be grasped of completeness unassailable and in living now with the proof circumstance substance coming-into-being living now nearly fully distantly instantly instantiated thereof as if to say],
when
Just extract the delicious meat and eat as is, with a creamy ramekin of melted butter or a zippy mustard dipping sauce. In the very unlikely event you should have any extra meat, simply mix with mayo.
[as if to say as if in-the-world were anything at all and the nothingness that wears down and the slaughter and the blight were and we are there to configure that arrangement of nothing as power nothing as freedom nothing as possible],
when
Dass es faktisch ist, mag hinsichtlich des Warum verborgen sein, das “Dass” selbst jedoch ist dem Dasein erschlossen. Die Geworfenheit des Seienden gehört zur Erschlossenheit des “Da” and enthüllt sich ständig in der jeweiligen Befindlichkeit. Diese bringt das Dasein mehr oder minder ausdrücklich und eigentlich vor sein “dass es ist und als das Seiende, das es ist, seinkönnend zu sein hat”. Zumeist aber verschliesst die Stimmung die Geworfenheit. Das Dasein flieht vor dieser in die Erleichterung der vermeintlichen Freiheit des Man-selbst. Diese Flucht wurde gekennzeichnet als Flucht vor der Unheimlichkeit, die das vereinzelte In-der-Welt-sein im Grunde bestimmt. Die Unheimlichkeit enthüllt sich eigentlich in der Grundbefindlichkeit der Angst und stellt als die elementarste Erschlossenheit des geworfenen Daseins dessen In-der-Welt-sein vor das Nichts der Welt, vor dem es sich ängstet in der Angst um das eigenste Seinkönnen. . . . – Section 57
[as if to think about that keeping thinking going hits on the circumstances web of dangers that to being for what being constitutes as the existentiale constitutes being for what its being open to constitutes time of apprehensive keeping thinking in the acting geworfen into the apprehensions of time displaced and all really present there where you are geworfen there where you were to configure the time of this apprehension as a newly constructed time as if placed there in Zeitlichkeit in its readiness already to be there unto death in this vale of death in this only way for you the self coming out of the self stilly very stilly in your own your very own self being securely very securely not strangely not at all as if to say],
when
The Empire State Building a way that feels in its absence from sight tomorrow’s big day, don’t know what to say. We’re going to pull never more than middle it’s unbelievable. Its absence can look for some time it has taken his breath in a way that feels it had once belonged to me.
[as if the placement of one’s self the owning of oneself were the provident displacement of nothingness of nothing in here of the glued-up ungluing of this unhappy muddled middle of no time like the present come and gone come and gone come and gone],
when
. . . Oder bleibt es bei der in ihrer existenziellen Möglichkeit bezeugten Entschlossenheit, so zwar, dass sie durch das Sein zum Tode eine existenzielle Modalisierung erfaren kann? Was besagt aber, das Phänomen der Entschlossenheit existenzial “zu Ende denken”?
. . . Im eigenen Sinne der Entschlossenheit liegt es, sich auf dieses Schuldigsein zu entwerfen, als welches das Dasein ist, solange es ist. Die existenzielle Übernahme dieser “Schuld” in der Entschlossenheit wird demnach nur dann eigentlich vollzogen, wenn sich die Entschlossenheit in ihrem Erschliessen des Daseins so durchsichtig geworden ist, dass sie das Schuldigsein als ständiges versteht. Dieses Verstehen aber ermöglicht sich nur dergestalt, dass sich das Dasein das Seinkönnen “bis zu seinem Ende” erschliesst. Das Zu-Ende-sein des Daseins besagt jedoch existenzial: Sein zum Ende. Die Entschlossenheit wird eigentlich das, was sie sein kann, als verstehendes Sein zum Ende, d. h. als Vorlaufen in den Tod. Die Entschlossenheit “hat” nicht lediglich einen Zusammenhang mit dem Vorlaufen als einem anderen ihrer selbst. Sie birgt das eigentliche Sein zum Tode in sich als die mögliche existenzielle Modalität ihrer eigenen Eigentlichkeit. Diesen “Zusammenhang” gilt es phänomenal zu verdeutlichen. – Section 62
[as if to find one’s self entirely in a world of care as if to be truly in-the-world here and now for what it is worth as if what our being is that it is out of our existence as if stayed and figured from here forward always looking into our time as possibility and as possibility at its most distant and most real is what is meant to exist truly and being thrown out into it having the form of it as something entworfene as the quality of the geworfene is to take a stand and to embrace and as if to take itself into its possible self as Dasein as if only Dasein were being possible and to embrace the experience of the self as to be its very own already in time being the character of being there to the end bringing it to its end and as if that were the essence of nothingness to be in this configuration in time as my own and thus truly as my own as negation and caring and no one other caring but my own caring repeating the being to the end that is nested and all within me to the fact of ending all as my own and and so starting from there from here in time here and there as same somehow if unto death anything caring of anything and therefore in nothingness a beginning a structure of beginning too as if that were the way to existence already as being here constituted or rather being there constituted as my own determination my own perhaps perhaps not quite or being brought into closing and springing forwardly as Entschlossenheit but in time and subject to time as my own configuration and forwardly being at the greatest distance in the greatest freedom and presentation into being there as if to own up to it as if to own up only as if in Geworfenheit essentially as existentially as it could be there it is its own its very own being as if to say].
[as if he had it coming to a resting place, but it’s not so, it’s not so, and cosmic culture died and restored itself [circa 2003 etc.] and culture died and culture died and dying restored itself dying is becoming and dying is again this time and again as if to say].
[as if to say how does it come out (“Nothing standing.”) in the end (“Who determines who gets to go?”) in the coming into time (“Now blur”) and as if to say this is my choice].
Well. That’s all. Thanks for listening.
fin
Robert Mueller’s poetry can be found online in Moria, SugarMule and Spinozablue, and in print in American Letters & Commentary, First Intensity and elsewhere. He has authored poetry reviews and a number of scholarly and critical articles ranging from an original composition at the Barbara Guest home page in the Electronic Poetry Center to discussions (in ELH) of the intricate courtiership involvements during the reign of Elizabeth as they may be reflected in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and (in Centennial Review) of John Ashbery’s versions of poetry in the phenomenal flux of Hegelian dialectic. He has has contributed poems and an essay to past issues of Blackbox Manifold. Additionally, a discussion in Jacket2 of The California Poem by Eleni Sikelianos considers questions of time and history using Pindar as a time-piece.
