Heidegger

Thus, gelassenheit must be grasped first (if you like): Heidegger’s seminal
‘Conversation on a country path’ {part of ‘Gelassenheit’) should be
consulted for this — anyone interested in a close reading?

Thus spoke I a little whiling ago; I got a response off-list from a list
member, Ron Jelaco, who (for better or worser) encouraged me to attempt to
carry this reading through, so here goes…

“I can go anyway, way I choose
I can live anyhow, win or lose
I can go anywhere, for something new
Anyway, anyhow, anywhere I choose
….
Nothing gets in my way
Not even locked doors
Don’t follow the lines
That been laid before
I get along anyway I dare
Anyway, anyhow, anywhere”

[from ‘Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere’, The Who, 1960s]

“…But I’m livin’ in a foreign country,
But I’m bound to cross the line.
Beauty walks on a razor’s edge,
Some day I’ll make it mine.
If I could only turn back the clock,
To when God and her were born.
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give ya,
Shelter from the storm…”

[from ‘Shelter from the storm’, Bob Dylan]

I want to begin by walking at some distance (apparently) from Heidegger’s
path by ambling with the artist Richard Long a while as he walks his (not
laid before) line along a razor’s edge, his representational difference. In
1982 Long produced a close-up photograph of his over-walked boots calling it
‘Shelter from the storm’: a reference to Dylan’s song, Van Gogh’s ‘A pair of
shoes’, and thus to Derrida’s playful pairing (and paring?) and un-pairing
of both Heidegger’s peasant boots (in his ‘Origins of the work of art’) and
Shapiro’s artist’s shoes. And thus we are in the same (though not identical)
region; resonances echo and ring in the stillness of the dusky evening for
both artist and thinker.

I am choosing, initially, to walk this parallel path with the artist rather
than simply (!) alongside Heidegger’s thinking path because of the
extraordinary difficulty in making the first steps with Heidegger and his
walky-talky illustration of gelassenheit. Both Long and Heidegger step out
on a landscape far from human habitation: and that means far from human
habituation too; for both the very stepping out and forward, step by step,
is the ‘point’ of the path-making; for both the work (whether thinkerly
discourse/drama or artwork/event) is non-representational; for both
souvenirs (text and photograph/caption resp) accompany the work. For Long
the artworks are the walks and the more or less ephemeral traces and tracks
accumulated in the very walking and tracking (like an animal’s foil for the
hunter/tracker) some ever-so-slightly-not-quite accidental/vicissitudinal,
some rather more deliberate/willed/placed. For the sake of the exhibitions
he produces the photographic souvenirs that display the traces and tracks
and placements as images. But the artworks are not the images rendered for
the art markets, are not the representational mementos, are not the traces
of the traces of the walks: they are the walks as such, the walkings, and
*as such*, they can not be represented, they can only be walked
(exquisitely, of course, these are the walkings of a sensitive artist).

The exquisite difficulty faced in Heidegger’s thinkerly walk is that he
seeks a thinking path that is not representational, that is not an act of
will; and the initial ‘problem’ is how to not even will the not-willing (how
to not represent the non-representational). Long’s walking helps us because
he accompanies his non-representational artworks with representational
souvenirs (comings with/before, underlying/accomanying). For the thinker
this might mean that the post-metaphysical thinking that Heidegger seeks in
the Conversation can be accomapanied by metaphysical (representational,
calculative) souvenirs; that the restitution of thinking when thinking is
brought into the region of the non-representational can be realised without
the total abandonment of the calculative (will). Although the Conversation
begins far from human habitation, it is nontheless walked/talked by human
walkers/talkers. For both Long and Heidegger the ‘aim’ with each footfall of
their paths is to listen sensitively to that which calls for each footfall,
the eros of walking and stalking and talking. The Conversation is enacted as
a conversation in the soul (Plato’s path in the Socratic dialogues) and thus
is just as solitary as Long’s long walks and traipses into the deserted (by
productive/calculative/mobilised civilisation).

That’s all for now; next time, in part 2, I’ll begin looking at the
Conversation itself in order to get a handle on the wayward path and so
begin walking with Heidegger without getting dizzy or lost in the
crepuscular pathways sited along the way of the thinker. Long’s path might
even intersect at times…

regards (and special thanks to Ron who posed the question of the near
impossibility (non-pass-ability?) of representing/analysing such a thinking
of the non-representationality of gelassenheit (as illustrated in the
Conversation); this labyrinthine task can only be unthreaded by walking the
path with Heidegger.

michaelP

Posted on Sunday, June 7th, 2009 at 6:00 am
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