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

he can prevent the break, he can perform this miracle; for if he perseveres, the break can never really come to be. By abiding (and in this abiding the lover is in compact with the eternal), he maintains superiority over the past; thereby he transforms what is a break in the past and through which a break exists, into a possible relationship in the future. Seen from the angle of the past the break becomes clearer and clearer day by day and year by year; but the lover, who abides, by abiding belongs to the future, the eternal, and from the angle of the future the break is not a break, but rather a possibility.

This capacity to "transform the past into the future" is the lover's prerogative, though it is a privilege granted by love itself, since "the powers of the eternal are needed at the decisive moment." Moreover, the lover's definitive prowess for transforming time, such that the future and its possibilities are hewn from the very hollows of an empty, apparently accomplished past, is characterized by Kierkegaard as a peculiar type of vision:

That the relationship has reached the breaking-point cannot be seen directly; it can be known only from the angle of the past. But the lover wills not to know the past, for he abides; and to abide is in the direction of the future. Consequently the lover expresses that the relationship which another considers broken is a relationship which has not yet been completed. Although it lacks something, it nevertheless is not for that reason a break. Therefore the whole thing depends upon how the relationship is regarded, and the lover--he abides.

The lover, then, reconceives the past as a possibility by seeing differently: the lover revises.

This essentially creative faculty, the transmogrification of time by means of a specifically Christian vision, is, in Works of Love, given the visible figure of a waiting. To illustrate that the lover "continually emancipates himself from his knowledge of the past," Kierkegaard employs an image at once visually arresting and moving: "Does the dance cease because one dancer has gone away? In a certain sense. But if the other still remains standing in the posture which expresses a turning towards the one who is not seen, and if you know nothing about the past, then you will say, 'Now the dance will begin just as soon as the other comes, the one who is expected.'" Again, the disappearance of one dancer does, "in a certain sense," conclude the dance. Thought within the horizon of love, however, whereby the past is not "seen," the absence of a dancer signals not the conclusion of the dance but rather its condition of possibility: so long as the remaining dancer maintains the posture of facing where his now missing companion once was, his partner's withdrawal is retemporalized as an advent. The invisible dancer, rather then being lamented for having "gone away," is instead awaited in expectation, the fulfilment of which will be precisely the start of the dance, not its finish. Kierkegaard's dancer who holds his pose is faithful despite having been fled from. Hence he exemplifies the Christian lover's imperative to "[p]ut the past out of the way; drown it in forgetfulness of the eternal by abiding in love: then the end is the beginning and there is no break!"