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LANGUAGE IN THE POEM

blind wildness it carries each kind into an irreconcilable split, and so casts it into unbridled isolation. The "fragmented kind," so cleft in two, can on its own no longer find its proper cast. Its proper cast is only with that kind whose duality leaves discord behind and leads the way, as "something strange," into the gentleness of simple twofoldness following in the stranger's footsteps.

With respect to that stranger, all the progeny of the decomposing kind remain the others. Even so, love and reverence are attached to them. But the dark journey in the stranger's train brings them into the blue of his night. The wandering soul becomes the "blue soul."

But at the same time the soul is also set apart. Where to? To where the stranger walks, who at times is poetically called only "he yonder." "He yonder," the stranger, is the other one to the others, to the decomposing kind. He is the one who has been called away from others. The stranger is he who is apart.

Whither is such a being directed which itself assumes the nature of the strange. that it must wander ahead? In what direction is a strange thing called? It is called to go under—to lose itself in the ghostly twilight of the blue, to incline with the decline toward the ghostly year. While this decline must pass through the destructiveness of approaching winter, through November, to lose itself yet does not mean that it crumbles into a shambles and is annihilated. On the contrary, to lose oneself means literally to loosen one's bonds and slowly slip away. He who loses himself does of course disappear in the November destruction, but he does not slip into it. He slips through it, away into the blue's ghostly twilight "at vespers," toward evening.


At vespers the stranger loses himself in
  black. November destruction,
Under rotting branches, along the leprous walls,
Where the holy brother had gone before.
Lost in the soft lyre musk of his madness.

(Helian, 81)


Martin Heidegger (GA 12) On the Way to Language