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

The poet, as Heidegger conceives him, epitomizes that when men have forgotten their humanity and the gods have left mortals alone, "the logic of the heart corresponds to the saying of the inner recall." In answer to his own question, "What are poets for?" Heidegger offers, "To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods." During the world's darkness, if infidelity is to be reversed, "There must be a first one who poetically rejoices before the greeting messengers, in order that he, alone and in advance, may first shelter the greeting in the word" (Elucidations). By stepping forward, in a solitude occasioned by his fellow mortals' amnesia and the gods' deliberate default, the poet entrusts himself to the holy that entrusts itself to him. In so abiding, he provides the chance for mortals and the gods alike to remember their Being--while paradoxically rethinking the past as what is yet to unfold--and to convert the break into a possibility of loving reunion. What orients the poet toward the holy, and what serves as site for the holy's abiding in him, is the heart. Heidegger's version of poesis as an abiding love, if only tentatively and reluctantly articulated within his writing, is identified and pronounced by Blanchot when he reads Heidegger reading Holderlin and speaks of "the interiority of the Sacred inside the interiority of the poet, in his heart, his mediating force insofar as it is love" ("What Are Poets For?"). Even more affirmatively, Blanchot asserts, "[T]he poet is love; it is his love that gradually makes the gods come down toward men, that gives everything to all" (The Work of Fire). And if Heidegger seems to appropriate Kierkegaard's notion of "alas, a faithlessness--toward a faithless one!" he thinks it not in terms of human lovers but, rather, vis-a-vis the gods and mortals who have abandoned one another in a double infidelity. Kierkegaard, a far more systematic and unabashed apologist for love and its works, has, of course, no similar faith in the poet's vocation as the lover. Yet his statement likening a ruptured relationship to a severed word is prescient: "for the one who breaks the relationship still cannot take the hyphen with him," Kierkegaard promises, figuring love as a punctuation mark that binds together; "the lover naturally keeps the hyphen on his side."

Andrew Zawacki is the author of a book of poetry, By Reason of Breakings (Georgia), and a chapbook, Masquerade (Vagabond), which received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. His next book, Anabranch, is due from Wesleyan in 2004. He is coeditor of Verse, and his criticism has appeared in Boston Review, TLS. New German Critique, and elsewhere. He studies in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

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