"The break is not a break": Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Poesis as abiding love

Founded in the holy, poesis is itself, in turn, a founding. It lets mortals enter again the Open, and by fashioning an abode for the gods, it also permits the gods to re-approach the world. Abiding in the holy that itself abides, the poet says the words that will bring the holy to bear within all of reality. This is why Heidegger claims, "Poesis thinks of something which abides and endures."

The poets abide in the holy, but it is no less the case that the holy abides in the poets and grants them their very mandate. "The awesome power of the holy rests in the mildness of the soul 'of the poet,'" as Heidegger puts it. "The holy is quietly present as what is coming." Heidegger speaks of the coming of the holy in terms of its Unheimlich aspect, to which the poets alone are privy. "The holy confronts all experience," he claims, "with something to which it is unaccustomed, and so deprives it of its ground. Deranging in this way, the holy is the awesome itself. But its awesomeness remains concealed in the mildness of its light embrace. Because this light embrace educates the future poets, they, as the initiated ones, know the holy.... A brightness extends into the solitary souls of those poets who are embraced by the holy and belong to it.... These poets then stand open in the Open which opens itself 'from high aether down to the abyss.'" Hence the poets are charged with mediating the distance between the otherwise inaccessible holy and the mortals who have turned away. It is the "duty and obligation" of the poets, claims Heidegger, to guard and maintain this space: "The poets must leave to the immediate its immediacy, and yet also take upon themselves its mediation as their only task." This distance between is groundless--the abyss--and the poets are precisely those who must reach into it and so open a place for the holy to ground itself in the world. "Only now, through poetry, is there a founding," Heidegger proposes. "These poets first lay out and secure the building site upon which the house must be built in which the gods are to come as guests. The poets consecrate the soil." This is why Blanchot says the poet "connects the near to the far" (The Space of Literature).