and “word sounds.” Both of these arise concurrently and arise every time the word-sound is intoned. But all sounding is the echo of the fact that beings, previously beingless, enter into the eventuation toward beyng and persist therein. The echo of the inceptual voice of being originates in the breaking apart of being in beings, which are themselves first lit up through the appropriation to being. In the inceptual voice of the event-related disposition, there is neither speaking out nor silence.
We can still hardly experience these relations appertaining to the history of beyng, relations of the beginning as voice to the essence of the adopted human being, because we take “disposition” as well as “word” metaphysically. We do not recognize in the mood-marked “disposition” its essential provenance out of that disposition which, by way of the event and as beyng itself, claims the human being for the preservation of the truth of being. We are still unable to apprehend that this claim of the beginning is an addressing and a claiming that eventuates in what is speechless.
Indeed it happens to us occasionally that we are “speechless” in amazement, joy, horror, bliss. But we have no inking of speechlessness itself in its event-related essence. What appears to be the absence of speech, i.e., the absence of vocables and words, is, thought inceptually and essentially, only the pure event of the word as the disposing voice of beyng. This voice adopts us into the clearing of being so that for certain moments we experience beings themselves, i.e., the fact that beings are. Yet in this way we are also still scarcely on the path to the experience which can be expressed briefly thus: beyng is.
Speechlessness is to us an unexpected and fleeting transitional state, an exceptional case, which we understand in reference to the usual mastery and use of language.
In truth, however, speechlessness is a “sign” in which the event-related essence of disposition and of the word, in their inceptual belonging- together, can become visible, assuming that we are able to think in terms of the truth of beyng. Of course we are accustomed to represent language as the possession of vocables and as the “capacity” to use them. We think of the word on the basis of languages and linguistic capacities, rather than—although not as a mere reversal—experiencing language on the basis of “speechlessness,” the latter on the basis of the inceptual disposedness, the latter on the basis of the event-related disposition, the latter as voice, the latter as the inceptual “claim,” and the latter as the grace of the greeting of beyng itself, i.e., in the essential occurrence of its truth (the twisting free into the turning departure).
Because beyng itself is inceptually the word (the event-related disposition which knows neither utterance nor silence and stillness),