118 § Poetry, Language, Thought


purposeful self-assertion by the ways and means of unconditional production. We are without such care only when we do not establish our nature exclusively within the precinct of production and procurement, of things that can be utilized and defended. We are secure only where we neither reckon with the unprotected nor count on a defense erected within willing. A safety exists only outside the objectifying turning away from the Open, "outside all caring," outside the parting against the pure draft. That draft is the unheard-of center of all attraction which draws all things into the boundless, and draws them for the center. This center is "there," where the gravity of the pure forces rules. To be secure is to repose safely within the drawing of the whole draft.

The daring that is more venturesome, willing more strongly than any self-assertion, because it is willing, "creates" a secureness for us in the Open. To create means to fetch from the source. And to fetch from the source means to take up what springs forth and to bring what has so been received. The more venturesome daring of the willing exercise of the will manufactures nothing. It receives, and gives what it has received. The more venturesome daring accomplishes, but it does not produce. Only a daring that becomes more daring by being willing can accomplish in receiving.

Lines 12 to 16 circumscribe what the more venturesome daring consists in, which ventures itself outside all protection, and there brings us to a secureness. This safety does not at all remove that unshieldedness which is put there by purposeful self-assertion. When human nature is absorbed in the objectification of beings, it remains unprotected in the midst of beings. Unprotected in this way, man remains related to protection, in the mode of lacking it, and thereby he remains within protection. Secureness, on the contrary, is outside all relation to protection, "outside all caring."

Accordingly, it seems that secureness, and our reaching secureness, call for a daring that surrenders all relation to being shielded and unshielded. But it only seems that way. The truth is that when our thinking proceeds from the enclosure of the whole draft, we then finally experience that which in the end—that is,


Martin Heidegger (GA 7) What Are Poets For?