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ON THE WAY TO LANGUAGE

And in holy blueness shining footfalls ring forth.


Elsewhere it is aid of blueness (104):


... the holiness of blue flowers ... moves the beholder.


Another poem says (79):


... Animal face
Freezes with blueness, with its holiness.


Blue is not an image to indicate the sense of the holy. Blueness itself is the holy, in virtue of its gathering depth which shines forth only as it veils itself. Face to face with blueness, brought up short by sheer blueness, the animal face freezes and transforms itself into the countenance of the wild game.

The frozen rigor of the animal face is not the rigor of the dead. As it freezes, the startled animal face contracts. Its gaze gathers so that, checking its course, it may look toward the holy, into the "mirror of truth" (79). To look means here to enter into silence.


Mighty the power of silence in the rock


runs the next line. The rock is the mountain sheltering pain. The stones gather within their stony shelter the soothing power, pain stilling us toward essential being. Pain is still "with blueness." Face to face with blueness, the wild game's face retracts into gentleness. Gentleness transmutes discord by absorbing the wounding and searing wildness into appeased pain.

Who is this blue wild game to whom the poet calls out that it recall the stranger? Is it an animal? No doubt. Is it just an animal? No. For it is called on to recall, to think. Its face is to look our for ..., and to look on the stranger. The blue game is an animal whose animality presumably does not consist in its animal nature, but in that thoughtfully recalling look for which the poet calls. This animality is still far away, and barely to be seen. The animality of the animal here intended thus vacillates in the indefinite. It has not yet been gathered up into its essential being. This animal—the thinking


Martin Heidegger (GA 12) On the Way to Language