Hopkins and Heidegger 9781474211437, 9781441169563

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Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only makes you eloquent. – ‘The Habit of Perfection’

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Acknowledgements

I would first and foremost like to thank Avital Ronell for bringing light to this project. Thanks are also due to Wolfgang Schirmacher, Virginia Cutrufelli and others at the European Graduate School who have been instrumental in the text’s formation, to Laurence A. Rickels for his warm support and to Mirjana Bonačić for caring enough to read closely. This book is dedicated to Melanija Marušić and to the memory of my father, Edward Charles Willems.

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Introduction

The aim of this book is to examine a number of cross-sections between the poetry and thought of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. While neither writer ever directly addressed the other’s work – Hopkins died the year Heidegger was born, 1889, and Heidegger never turns his thoughts on poetry to the Victorians – a number of similarities between the two have been noted, but never fleshed out. I intend to explore these meeting points. The germ of this book, however, was not laid in the reading of a passim reference. Rather, I found that as I read each author, at different times and for different purposes, I had the same very physical reaction to both. This reaction was what I can describe as a fluttering and then a heaviness in the chest that was both frightening and energizing at the same time. This similarity of reactions to the two authors confounded me, and I set out to explore it. Upon researching both poet (and Jesuit priest) and philosopher, I believe I have found a number of points at which they ‘meet’, and that these states that cross-sect, that intersect for a moment and then move on in their separate ways, were the reasons for my physical reaction. I believe this cross-section can be read through Hopkins’ inscape and instress and around Heidegger’s reading of both appropriation (Ereignis)1 and the fourfold (das Geviert). These expressions (along with a number of others key to both authors) are defined below, but what I initially found in my reading, and what resurfaces again and again, is the importance of anxiety. Anxiety is what I believe was the chest-fluttering I felt (and still feel) while reading these two authors. By anxiety what I mean is a removal from the everyday, a sense of unsettledness, questioning, and division. These are states that both Hopkins and Heidegger address directly in conjunction with inscape and Ereignis, instress and Geviert, and they are states that function as points of departure and return throughout the book.

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Hopkins and Heidegger

What is not intended here is an explication of Hopkins via Heidegger. While this kind of linear exegesis has its uses, my focus lies elsewhere. What I propose is an approach based more on a twoway street. By this I mean that there is a strong mutual relationship developed between the texts. While there was no actual feedback between Hopkins and Heidegger, here they appear in tandem; I will not only use Heidegger to illuminate passages of Hopkins, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the reverse. The main thrust of each of the chapters that follows is a reading of Ereignis where it functions, through both its incorporation and negation, as an access point into the fourfold. This reading is fleshed out through reading poems ranging throughout Hopkins’ career, along with Heidegger and those that have engaged Heidegger, such as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jacques Derrida, Avital Ronell, Jean-Luc Nancy, and many others. My readings develop from the strength of an ambiguity in Hopkins that is sheltered, allowed to be, and even held forth. This ambiguity is what in part causes the anxiety described above, and this text hopefully has the ability to step towards this ambiguity, however fitfully.

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Chapter1 Inscape and Ereignis

For most of his life Hopkins wrote without any real hope of publication. ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and ‘The Loss of the Eurydice’, two of his major poems, were rejected by the official Jesuit organ Month, and Hopkins felt he had no right, as a Jesuit priest, to seek publication elsewhere (White, 1992, pp. 258–9; 298). A lack of literary venue meant that Hopkins felt no real need to leave a detailed exegesis of his new poetical concepts, such as inscape and instress, for a non-existent extensive readership. This has left scholars to piece together literary definitions from fairly personal sources: his poetry (sent to a few of his friends), letters (which are actually quite extensive), notebooks, journals and sermons. Perhaps the most comprehensive attempt at a collation of references Hopkins makes to the concept of inscape is W. A. M. Peters’ 1948 Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Essay towards the Understanding of His Poetry. Peters believes Hopkins to have coined the word inscape to represent the individuality of objects of perception, the essence of what makes one thing this thing and no other. Peters foregrounds both the individuating and typifying aspects of inscape on the first page of his study, thereby stressing the importance of how inscape is both the particular in a thing (that which separates) and the unifying (that which enjoins). The first definition of inscape that Peters offers is the unified complex of those sensible qualities of the object of perception that strike us as inseparably belonging to and most typical of it, so that through the knowledge of this unified complex of sensedata we may gain an insight into the individual essence of the object. (1948, p. 1)

The combination of particular and unifying (or singular and plural) in inscape can be seen in a journal entry of Hopkins’ from 24 August 1870: ‘This skeleton of inscape of a spray of ash [a sketch accompanies 3

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the entry] I broke at Wimbledon that summer is worth noticing for the suggested globe: it is leaf on the left and keys on the right’ (1937, p. 134). In this example of inscape a branch of individuated twigs, in their unity, suggests a globe in a way similar to how a skeleton inhabits and supports the single organ of flesh: it is the coexistence of the singular and the plural that seems to be the site of inscape for Hopkins. Regarding this dual nature of inscape, literary critic Marjorie Coogan argues that ‘inscape is ontological, the never-to-berepeated “bead of being,” the meeting of the One and the Many, of unity and variety in the unique object of the poet’s “seeing”’ (1950, p. 68). The question of the phenomenology of seeing that Coogan raises leads to another aspect of inscape, which is instress. If inscape rests within an object in the play of unity and disunity, then instress is that which allows the poet to see, or access the inscape of a thing. As Hopkins states in a journal entry from 1875, ‘We went up to the castle but not in: standing before the gateway I had an instress which only the true old work gives from the strong and noble inscape of the pointed arch’ (1937, pp. 216–17, emphasis added). In the words of Coogan, ‘instress is the bridge between inscape and the poet’ (1950, p. 72). As a bridge, inscape brings the traveler to the gates of the castle, as Jesuit scholar Walter Ong, in Hopkins, the Self, and God, argues ‘Instress’ is the action that takes place when the inscape of a given being fuses itself in a given human consciousness in contact at a given moment with the being . . . ‘Instress,’ it will be noted, brings the human self, this particularized human being, into the dynamics of the otherwise ‘objective’ inscape. (1986, p. 17)

Instress is the particularization which takes place when both the unity and variety of a thing are seen; it is the work a human undergoes throughout its interaction with its world. This undergoing is related to Peters’ definition of inscape, where he connects inscape to the ‘sensible qualities of the object of perception’ (emphasis added), meaning that the individuality of a thing is not separated from its perception: inscape is not separated from instress. The ‘seeing’ of instress is intimately connected with the ‘being’ of inscape, as Brian Day argues: ‘experiencing the selving process in the world is a matter of perception, and that perception begins with seeing – with the close contextualized observation of the world’s multitudinous particulars. For Hopkins, to see a thing is a matter of seeing its selfhood’ (2004, p. 184).

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For Hopkins, the question of how we are ready to receive inscape via instress was not merely aesthetic, but vital. Hopkins says that ‘all things are upheld by instress and are meaningless without it’ (1937, p. 98). Inscape for Hopkins was not only the this-ness of nature, but it was God himself.1 Peters says that ‘It was his spiritual outlook on this world that made inscape so precious to Hopkins; the inscape of an object was, so to speak, more “word of God”, reminded him more of the Creator, than a superficial impression could have done’ (1948, p. 6). Hopkins simply states: ‘I know the beauty of our Lord by it’ (1937, p. 134). In looking at the concept of instress, the person who is capable of instress has also been brought into play. That ‘seeing’ person has been referred to twice (by Coogan and myself ) as a ‘poet’, rather than reader, observer, or subject. This was done in order to begin to call forth the manner of how a human lives, sees or dwells. To allow instress to be a bridge between the poet and inscape is essential because it is, literally, being. In the language of Heidegger via Hölderlin, the poetic seeing of inscape is what it means to say that ‘poetically, man dwells’. To be a poet, that is, for Hopkins, to undergo an experience of instress that allows access to the inscape of beings and things, is a process that can be linked to Heidegger’s concepts of dwelling and Ereignis. Both of these concepts are developed in Heidegger’s essay ‘. . . Poetically man dwells . . .’ which is on the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Before tackling Ereignis proper, an exploration of the differences between Hölderlin and Heidegger in regard to ‘dwelling’ will help form the discussion of Ereignis along with lines of inscape developed above. For the title of this essay, Heidegger appropriates and reformulates (by eliding the comma) the phrase ‘. . . poetically, man dwells . . .’ from part of a late poem of Hölderlin’s, ‘In lovely blueness . . .’: Is God unknown? Is He manifest as the sky? This rather I believe. It is the measure of man. Full of acquirements, but poetically, man dwells on this earth. But the darkness of night with all the stars is not purer, if I could put it like that, than man, who is called the image of God. (2004, p. 789)

The relationship enacted in this passage is that between both God and ‘man’ and sky and earth. What does the poetic ‘I’ of the poem believe here in ‘This rather I believe’? That God becomes manifest, and hence seen, up there in the sky. While humanity, full of everyday

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business, of its accumulated merits, is down on this earth [auf dieser Erde]. But which earth is this one? Why does the earth have to be specified by the thrust of the place-deictic this? A need for such specificity implies that there is more than one earth to choose from, that one is being isolated from another or others. Perhaps there are actually two earths present: (1) a physical or natural earth, and (2) an earth which is seen poetically, mediated by the existence of humanity and seen through its eyes – an earth that is humanized and believed in, an earth that is inscaped. One aspect of this argument is situated in the ambiguity of the pronoun ‘It’ at the beginning of the third sentence: ‘It is the measure of man.’ ‘It’ can refer to both the manifestation of God and a belief in Him. God is made visible, projected, and thrown onto the sky through the belief of humanity. God is an image. He is made manifest as [wie] the sky, much as one can work as a teacher or have failed as a father. Seeing God in the sky is what makes humanity humanity: it is the measure of ‘man’. Humanity simply is not without the image of God. This argument can be seen in light of Hopkins’ journal entry quoted above: ‘all things are upheld by instress and are meaningless without it.’ Instress is the belief that allows for the manifestation of God as image in the sky (which is yet another image), while inscape is what becomes manifest through what could be called ‘the belief of instress.’ Instress continuously holds this heavily loaded sky up above our heads. As Giorgio Agamben argues, ‘Since the image is not a substance, it does not possess any continuous reality and cannot be described by means of any local movement. Rather, it is generated at every moment according to the presence of the one who contemplates it’ (2007b, p. 56). Without the continuous generation and manifestation of the image, the world remains meaningless because it is without the image we project upon it. The term project comes into English through Latin and then French. The French verb jeter, to throw, can be seen in the English words project, jet and also subject and object (in French sujet and objet). There is a relationship between humanity as a constructed subject and projection. This relationship can be seen through the initial phoneme in French, which can also be spelled gé, and forms the beginnings of what become in English genesis, generate, gene, and genre – all of which contain projection, a throwing forward, a moving beyond: there is creation at their root (Derrida, 2006a, p. 28). Being a subject, then, is etymologically connected to being creative, to making (poiesis), to the generation of a world (this world). Such thinking is perhaps in line with what, from a neurological perspective,

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Daniel Dennett calls Centers of Narrative Gravity, meaning how a subject is actually a virtually cohesive story told to oneself (1991, p. 431). Subjects are poetic because they create a sky that contains a god through belief. For Heidegger, projection [Entwurf] is one of the key terms for what makes humans human in relation to the existence of other forms of life. According to Heidegger, ‘the essence of man, the Dasein in him, is determined by this projective character’ (1995, p. 362). Projection is that which makes up the supposedly unique way in which humans relate to world, meaning that they are in a relationship of image-formation (and hence world-formation), unlike the non-human animal, which only reacts. Heidegger argues that projection does not partake in any sort of hierarchical order of understanding, but is rather that which is always already there in the activity of understanding as a whole, in its totality; if there is understanding, or questioning, there is already projection.2 What is most proper to such activity and occurrence is what is expressed in the prefix ‘pro-’ [Ent-], namely that in projecting [Entwerfen], this occurrence of projection carries whoever is projection out and away from themselves in a certain way. It indeed removes them into whatever has been projected, but it does not as it were deposit and abandon them there – on the contrary: in this being removed by the projection, what occurs is precisely a peculiar turning toward themselves on the part of whoever is projecting . . . this removal that pertains to projecting has the character of raising away into the possible . . . (ibid., p. 363)

The belief resulting in the projection of the image of God in the sky is at once a turning away from one earth and a turning towards another: towards this earth. This indicates that the world is close – it is not that world. The world being turned towards is implicitly ours. However, there is another earth out there, but it is not ours. For Heidegger, projection is a raising away, into the sky perhaps, but it is also a coming into ourselves. This raising and coming is aligned with the human’s ability to form its world, to be lifted out of an instinct-only relationship to its surroundings. Another way to say this is that humans do not only relate to their world in the form of reaction, but can also respond to it, in the form of scientific analysis and description. Heidegger’s position here is traditional and anthropocentric, maintaining the difference between responding and reacting. Derrida argues

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against this in his essay ‘And say the animal responded’ and so does Leonard Lawlor in a further discussion (2007, pp. 48–53). The reason that such a separation is being drawn forth is that is needs to be made more prevalent in the thought of and surrounding Heidegger. This can be done by examining the role of the comma Heidegger elides from Hölderlin’s poem ‘In lovely blueness . . .’ The axed comma is important because its function in Hölderlin is not only to hold together, however tensely, both inauthentic and authentic being, but also to shelter this difference. This tension is maintained because, in one sense, with the comma poetically functions as a sentence adverb, affecting the modality of both the acquirements and the poetic: ‘Full of acquirements, but poetically, man dwells on this earth’ [Voll Verdienst, doch dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde]. In another sense the comma calls attention to the discord resident between inauthentic and authentic being. Heidegger’s denial of this comma is also, in part, a denial of this tension. Paying attention to the function of the sentence adverb brings out a complicated movement in Hölderlin that seems to have a developed correlative in Hopkins. This movement is essential to Hopkins’s ideas of the unity and separation of inscape. In Hölderlin, the existence of poetry is also the existence of ‘a man’, specifically a human who dwells on this earth. Heidegger correctly claims that ‘but poetically’ modifies what comes both before and after it (Heidegger, 2001a, p. 214). What comes before ‘but’ and what comes after it are both modified by the word ‘poetically’. However, being ‘Full of acquirements’, or merits, does not happen poetically in the same manner as what comes next does. What comes next is problematized, since what comes next is a comma. The comma indicates a separation from the rest of the line that follows, which is in conflict with the adverbial form of poetically which is actually thrown forward, waiting for the rest of the sentence it modifies; the comma holds ‘poetically’ back before launching it forward again, where it eventually also modifies the following words, and thus the whole sentence, including the word ‘but’. In short, the whole line is modified by the adverbial phrase, but with complications: ‘but’ and the comma introduce pauses, interruptions, dissonance into the line which Heidegger glosses over in his reading, although elsewhere he does say that ‘Staying appropriates’ (2001b, p. 171). Such interruptions are essential to the reading of Hopkins here, as his concept of inscape does not gloss over but rather enthusiastically embraces such dissonance: such dissonance will then be seen as a way to restructure some of Heidegger’s thought.

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However, in Hölderlin’s poem the pause precedes different words in the German and English versions of the poem, which is important because the difference in German seems to tempt Heidegger to elide the comma coming after ‘poetically’ in the title of his essay, ‘. . . Poetically man dwells. . .’ (the German of Heidegger’s 1951 essay is ‘. . . dichterisch wohnet der Mensch . . .’ while in Hölderlin one reads ‘dichterisch, wohnet der Mensch’). What comes after the pause of the comma in English is ‘man’, while in German it is ‘dwells’ [wohnet]. This near commingling of ‘poetically’ and ‘dwells’ seems to be too much for Heidegger to resist, and the comma is elided. In English, however, ‘man’ is placed between ‘poetically’ and ‘dwells’, which stresses the focus of the reading here: humanity is that which only exists poetically, creating its own earth separate from others. This ‘man’, however, is not just that which joins the poetic with dwelling, but it is also that which separates and complicates them: ‘man’ is thrust into the middle. ‘Man’ is that which is in between the poetic and dwelling, it is their mediator. Humanity, as humanization, is what is between biology and the poem. There is no ‘poetically’ without humanity. Humanity is the generation of the image of God in the sky (projected by belief ) on this earth. Such a reading is implied in the German, because of the break of the comma, and is brought forth in a stronger manner in the translation into English with the insertion of ‘man’ between ‘poetically’ and ‘dwells’. This dwelling is not an option for humanity, for the loss of such dwelling is the loss of ‘man himself ’. Christopher Fynsk reads Hölderlin’s poem in a similar manner, arguing that ‘The very excessiveness of each manifestation (like a strange beauty) constitutes a trace of the holy even as it marks in some way its self-refusal’ (1993, p. 227). In other words, seeing ‘the sky’ as a concept, rather than just blue and white and wet and hot, is poetic, but then humanity goes in excess of this, and puts a god on top of the image of the sky as if to call attention to its artificiality. It takes belief for this excess to happen. There is a trace of the holy, the spiritual in this belief, although at the same time it is problematic – it contains its own selfrefusal since when you look up you pretty much see blue and white and wet and hot. Fynsk sees Hölderlin offering a less promising vision than Heidegger reads into the poem because Hölderlin foregrounds the space of this self-refusal. Such a downplaying of the image-creating human can in turn offer a different reading of Peters’ definition of inscape quoted above: ‘the inscape of an object was, so to speak, more “word of God,” reminded him more of the Creator, than a superficial impression could have done.’ Life without God is

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superficial, biological, animal. In fact it is real. In his book on Heidegger, George Steiner draws a connection between Hopkins and Heidegger at precisely this point: ‘Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was also steeped in Scholastic attempts to delineate the exact mystery of substance and who was also overwhelmed by the radiant autonomy of organic and inorganic objects, Heidegger felt the world with a rare concreteness’ (1991, p. 34). As stated above, in ‘. . . Poetically man dwells . . .’ Heidegger both reads and does not read Hölderlin’s poem in a similar manner. For Heidegger the comma indicates that ‘poetically’ functions as a sentence adverb, denoting the inability for ‘man’ to be ‘man’ without dwelling in this poetic world which also contains ‘man’s’ acquirements. Heidegger states that dwelling is not something someone does at home in the suburbs compared to working in the city during the day: it is rather ‘the basic character of human existence’ (2001a, p. 213). Heidegger argues that it is poetry (or, say, creativity) that allows dwelling to exist at all. For Heidegger humanity can use language in a non-poetic manner, through ‘unbridled yet clever talking, writing, and broadcasting of spoken words’ (ibid.). However, in this inauthentic being, separated from ‘Dasein’ (meaning from its ‘being-there’ on this earth), humanity is humanity, just not ‘authentic’. The inclusion of both positions here is indicated by Heidegger’s elision of the comma from Hölderlin’s line. Heidegger allows this apparent contradiction between authentic and inauthentic being to reside in his essay. However, what Heidegger does not draw forth sufficiently, and what Hopkins makes central, is the absolute necessity for inauthentic being within the authentic. Perhaps one way to read this apparent paradox is through a closer look at the relationship between image and word, since it is one way to draw out the tension between this earth of human images and on that earth of inauthentic being. In ‘In lovely blueness . . .’ God is image; He is manifest in the sky, and humanity is ‘the image of God.’ Humanity can only see with images: it is how it sees God, and itself, which is through belief. But in Hölderlin’s poem humanity does not dwell in this image, but poetically with language; it is not stated that humanity simply is the image of God, but there is rather ‘man, who is called the image of God’ (emphasis added). Called by whom? What lies between this change from God as image in the sky, which is believed, to a humanity which is spoken? Heidegger addresses the theme of image briefly in his essay, stating that ‘image’ is defined as something that can be seen. Poetry, because it makes God manifest in the sky, therefore speaks in images (ibid., p. 223). It is the visible shelter of the invisible. But maybe this

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is moving too quickly, for there is another step between the image and the word not taken into account here. Such a step has been taken by philosopher Vilém Flusser. Flusser argues that ‘Images are mediations between the world and human beings’ (2006, p. 9). Humans are on an earth but images get in the way of a clear experience of where they are. The image, then, in ‘In lovely blueness . . .’ can be seen as the comma in ‘poetically, man dwells’. The image is represented in the poem not by language but by a grapheme, by an image itself: punctuation. The poem is indicating the difference between image and word in the poem’s presence on the page: it is the poem ‘itself ’ that is creating tension. According to Flusser, images are supposed to help in the understanding of the world, but instead they obfuscate it: ‘They are supposed to be maps but they turn into screens’ (ibid., p. 10). What happens when images become too difficult to understand is that ‘Human beings cease to decode the images and instead project them, still encoded, into the world “out there”’ (ibid., emphasis added). Here Flusser immediately understands the tension or anxiety of the multiple worlds Hölderlin captures in the ambiguity of ‘this earth’. God is projected onto the sky, and already we have two layers of images: the misunderstood image of the sky used to makes sense out of what can loosely be called (because these are still humanizing terms) blue and white and wet and warm, and then, when that image is too difficult to live with, when it starts to become a screen, God is excessively projected on top of it. But then this projection too becomes difficult, and there is a need to decode these images, to make sense of this obfuscation once again. Our ancestors attempted to tear down the screens showing the image in order to clear a path into the world behind it. Their method was to tear the elements of the image (pixels) from the surface and arrange them into lines: They invented linear writing. (Ibid.)

One way to read this passage is that there is a thread running through the separation between image and writing. There is a magic in writing in its relation to the image, and an understandability in the image in its relation to writing. This is a relation of difference and not equivalence. The ‘thrust’ of the comma’s interruption is not denied here, and it can perhaps be expressed by saying that humanity is but a linear simplification of a pictorial misrepresentation. A foregrounding of the confused and confusing image can be seen in Hopkins’ poem ‘Binsey Poplars’ (1879), written upon the felling of a number of aspen trees outside Oxford during the poet’s college

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days (the poem is given in full in the appendix). The reason the poem is being looked at as part of the prelude to Ereignis is that while many interpretations of the poem see it as an eco-friendly statement, a reading will be developed that sees the destruction of humanity as an essential part of humanity’s relationship to nature, to the image. The presence of this destruction in the poem, along with its negation, will be developed as an entry point into the thoughts on Ereignis. Just prior to composing the poem, Hopkins had sent his friend Robert Bridges (who was later, 29 years after Hopkins’ death, to be the editor of Hopkins’ first volume of poetry) a copy of a poem Hopkins’ father had written about a potential felling of trees in Well Walk (where Keats, Samuel Coleridge and Dr Johnson had memories) (White, 1992, p. 309).3 As to Hopkins’ own motivations for writing his own poem about trees to be felled, little is directly known, except that it is perhaps connected to the loss of vehicles of inscape: Since childhood the felling of trees had been intolerable to him, causing an anguish that was probably neurotic and finally inexplicable, but which clearly had something to do with his sense of the impossibility of ever making amends for destruction or of replacing any object or created thing, since the inscape of each made it literally irrecoverable. (Martin, 1991, pp. 305–6)

However, the role of the poplars is rather complex in the poem. The trees are not merely objective vehicles for inscape, but are rather personal devices for the upholding of humanized being. This is seen in the passive structure of the ‘subtitle, really an obituary’ (Nixon, 2006, p. 192) of the poem, which is ‘felled 1879’. The subtitle calls the title of the poem (‘Binsey Poplars’) into the role of the subject of its clause, as an answer to what were felled.4 This calling of the title into the poem makes the poem personal, perhaps seeming less ‘poetic’ and more related to ‘real life’. Indeed, the personal tone of the poem is solidified in the first word of the first stanza: ‘My’. What have been felled are ‘My aspens dear’. The aspens are ‘mine’ and not ‘yours’. They are, at most, ours, as a part of our earth. This poem is not only about the unfortunate destruction of inscape-bearing nature, but it is also about the loss of self that happens when our earth is taken apart or when its mechanisms of construction begin to be revealed. There is a correlation between a loss of self and a loss of this earth, because both are based on a similar construction: the image. One cannot be damaged without gnawing at the other. ‘Binsey Poplars’ creates a Flusserian order in which the trees are that which cover up, nullify,

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or make understandable that earth on the other side of us. When these trees are felled, through the agency of humanity, the world behind them burns a bit too bright for the self to remain intact. There is contact with what is not of this earth, and hence with inscape. What, then, do the poem’s aspens do? ‘My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,/ Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun’. ‘Airy cages’ seem to be the branches of the trees, since there is often spaces between bars. What is important here is to pay close attention to the verbs of the lines, to what is being done. These cages quell, not once, but twice, and then they quench. While both words commonly mean to extinguish, or satisfy, they have similar roots in death. ‘Quell’ is derived from the Old English cwencan, meaning to kill, and is related to qwalu, meaning death. These meanings can then be traced back to the Indo-European *gwel-, meaning pain, death or to stab. ‘Quench’ is similar, related to the Middle High German verquinen, to pass away. Both words have a kinship in death, but in the death of what? ‘Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun’. The leaping of the sun seems to be part of the grand expressiveness of a nature that is hardly able to hold back the glory of a God for which it is a medium. As Hopkins scholar W. H. Gardner argues just before quoting this line, Hopkins’s faith in the ultimate identification of Christ with perfect beauty and ideal activity seems to have occasioned in the poet, and also in nature, an inspired restlessness or impetuosity – a gust to hurl or be hurled, as if God were participating with his creatures in some jubilant cosmic sports or circus. (1944, p. 195)

However, it is actually this jubilation that the leaves, the cages, quell. And not just once, but thrice, as if it were a spell. The sun leaps, but the trees cause the death of the sun. Arguably, the sun could be seen as being quelled in the leaves of the tree in the process of photosynthesis, a procedure that Hopkins may have been aware of, as Day argues (2004, p. 188). Be that as it may, this is merely another version of the medium of the trees making what is not of this earth (the sun, a part of the non-humanized cosmos) understandable to the humanized mind through a scientific process. Even if this reading were taken a step further, and the transformation of sunlight into energy through the death of the sun were read as a Christian metaphor of the life of a soul after death, it is still a human understanding of this transformation that allows this metaphor to take

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place: it is a human understanding that put this metaphor in place, and the destruction of human understanding can take it away. It is humanity that causes the end of the trees of ‘nature’, since the trees are mediated through the image, and then through the linearity of language. The trees murder the sun, and humanity murders the trees, again in a three-time incantation, as can be read in the third line of the poem: ‘All felled, felled, all are felled’. In the next stanza the destruction continues: O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew – Hack and rack the growing green!

The word ‘rack’ can be traced to the Middle English wrak, meaning damage or shipwreck, which is spelled wreck in common usage, and provides a key word in the title of Hopkins’ great poem ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, written four years earlier in 1875. What is interesting to compare between these two usages of wreck is that in ‘Binsey Poplars’ what is wrecked is a growing tree, while in ‘The Wreck’ it is a constructed object, a ship, which is in part hewn from timber. However, there may be a sense then that the trees of Binsey are also not purely ‘nature’, as perhaps the leaping sun is meant to be, but rather an intermediary stage, something between humanity and that earth (as a ship can stand between its crew and the elements). This reading of ‘nature’ as that which causes the death of the sun and acts as an intermediary for humanity can be seen as the poem continues: Since country is so slender, To touch, her being só slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her,

Country, nature, is as fragile as that which takes it in and constructs it from all of the available input: the human eye. What does the poem suggest as a possible end to the reign of the human eye, of vision itself ? A prick. But a prick from what? It will be remembered that the word ‘quelled’, from the first line of the poem, can be traced back to the Indo-European *gwel-, meaning to stab. If this connection is allowed, then since it is the trees that are stabbing out the sun

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in the first line, it is potentially the trees that are pricking out the eye here. What is destroyed is seeing, which, as Day argues, is perhaps connected to the repetitive loss of the scene of the final lines of the poem: ‘The sweet especial scene,/ Rural scene, a rural scene,/ Sweet especial rural scene.’ Day argues The scene must be seen in order to be a scene – and must have been seen to have ever been considered a scene; the existence of an instress is necessary to appreciate the beauty of an inscape; without the inscape there is no instress and without the instress no beauty. Subject and object as relational entities become most fully themselves through the instressing act of perception: the subject in being able to perceive, the object in simply being, and thereby possessing that which allows it to be perceived. (2004, p. 186)

Day describes the subject and object tied in perception. This reading is developed in the lines of the poem following the prick, where if we mend nature, we end nature; any contact with nature destroys it, like a porcupine touching a balloon, except that it is the trees, with their sharp branches and needles, that can pop the surface of our reification. This destruction can happen because the trees, the scene created by humanity’s vision, are tied poetically to humanity itself: a destruction of one is a destruction of the other. The eye as the seat of vision, often argued as the dominating human sense, is pricked just as the trees are felled. However, slightly diverging from Day’s powerful reading, the object of Hopkins’ poem is more active than ‘simply being’. The trees as objects are destroyers, murders, quellers of the sun (even if through the transformative process of photosynthesis). The trees are active, for their destruction brings about an unselving: ‘Strokes of havoc únselve/ The sweet especial scene’. While this does indicate a less instrumentalist view of nature than was perhaps common among Jesuits of the time (ibid., pp. 183–4), here the trees function as a mediator between humanity and another earth (the sun). The scene or image of the trees is undone through the flattening linearity of the construction of language, linear description. Such a flattening is a part of technological progress and in fact, as Robert Martin argues, the trees were actually being destroyed in order to be turned into railroad ‘shoes’, or brake blocks for locomotives – to be a part of the long smooth lines of the Great Western Railway (1991, p. 307). With its unselving the image has ceased to be helpful in its simplification of nature and the cosmos. While the image of the

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trees is projected outside of us, their destruction is connected in Hopkins’ poem to a dismantling of our inner-selves. This is because it is through the image that we make sense of the complexities of the phenomenological input our senses provide. So there is an incorporation of the outside in the inside, we are more our environment than we are ourselves (we are this earth), and the unraveling of one is the unraveling of the other. So in a very real sense the unselving of others is an unselving of self. Not because they are the same, but because each parasites on the other, to make their lives easier. Hopkins’ poem is about the relation between subject and object as Day argues, however the object is not ‘simply being’, because the object is our humanized selves. This provides an interesting reading of Jude Nixon’s conclusion to her report on the historical background to Hopkins’ poem. Nixon argues that Victorian in its agenda, the Well Walk [the destruction of which Hopkins’ father protested in the poem sent to his son] controversy staged a whole set of issues, among them questions of history and historical memory, progress, gender, health, nature, ecology, the environment, aesthetics, economics, and the poor . . . Manley Hopkins’ ‘The Old Trees’ and Hopkins’s ‘Binsey Poplars’ brought these issues together in poems protesting the destruction of wild nature. For these environmentally ardent poets, the delicate ecological balance is compromised when, as Manley Hopkins puts it, ‘scenes that nursed our love have changed.’ Nightingales no longer sing, and the sun becomes a ferocious lion loosed upon the earth. But these changes also lead to personal disorientation, for they alter the self and one’s sense of place. There is, too, a kind of personal loss when we remove natural landmarks that are also markers of the mind, heart, and soul. (2006, p. 208)

The destruction of the image of nature into a flat railway system is a personal loss since the person is invested in its construction of this world. This is not the destruction of ‘wild nature’, as Nixon assumes, but rather humanity’s image of it. In the flash moment of the change from one world to the next, from image to language, the sun is for an instant loosed upon the earth, because the cages of constructed nature are no longer there to quell it and the wood has not yet been converted into linear language (linear technology). It is in this moment that the self is unselved and that Hopkins’ inscape can be

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glimpsed: unselving is the instress that allows a glimpse of inscape. The power of Hopkins’ poetry, and how it engages Heidegger and can be read back into some of the problematic elements of Heidegger, is that in the moments of destruction enacted in his poems through syntax and semantics there is an incorporation and a denial of what is destroyed in the poems, and it is this coexistence that is instress, allowing the presencing of inscape. In ‘Binsey Poplars’ the absence of the arborous intermediaries is a sense of personal loss, the shaking up of the constructed self. There is nothing wild about the trees and their being cut down: what is let loose in their destruction is ourselves. Philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe also concentrates on the image in relation to Heidegger’s ‘. . . Poetically man dwells . . .’ Central to Heidegger’s thought are the lines ‘Is God unknown? Is He manifest as the sky? This rather I believe’ (Heidegger, 2001a, pp. 217–18). Lacoue-Labarthe reads God not as the abyssal sky made manifest as but rather as image and imitation, meaning as a poetic incorporation or exscription of the gods into the human where, again in the words of Hölderlin, ‘the darkness of night with all the stars is not purer, if I could put it like that, than man, who is called the image of God’ (Hlderlin, 2004, p. 789). Or as Hopkins states in a sermon from 1879, ‘while you praise him he will praise you’ (1959b, p. 38). First, Lacoue-Labarthe sees Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s poem ‘In lovely blueness. . .’ as where ‘God, the unknown, shows himself as the sky does; he is as manifest as the sky’ (1999, p. 116). Lacoue-Labarthe sees this as problematic for Heidegger’s reading since Heidegger wants to read the manifestation of the sky as its relation to earth, as a part of the measure that separates mortals from the divine, the earth from the sky. Lacoue-Labarthe asks For how is the sky manifest, if not here – ‘In Lovely Blueness’ – as the pure void of bottomless light, the pure spacing, above our heads, of air and light (Ether); the spacing that outlines, rather than being outlined by, the earth; the spacing, out of which the earth’s space spreads and all things become visible, articulate themselves? (Ibid.)

The sky as image is not that which is outlined by the earth in general but rather that which itself outlines this earth in particular. All things become visible in the sky simply because it is through the image that things are seen. Lacoue-Labarthe offers an alternative reading of Hölderlin, closer to the one developed here, seeing the poem as

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a relationship ‘between image and imitation’ (ibid., p. 118), meaning humanity’s creation is the image of God, it is a belief in the image. Humanity is both an imitation and an incorporation of this image (and is why the destruction of trees can be the destruction of self ) and also a self-refusal since a belief in the image, in one earth, is a removal from another earth. Thus for Lacoue-Labarthe ‘Imitating the divine means two things; wanting to be God (the Greek tragic experience), and “humbly” keeping God’s retreat as a model (the “Western” experience – just as tragic, but in another sense)’ (ibid., p. 119). Humanity is divided – it is both the image and a removal from the image, a movement that Hopkins’ poetry can offer to revitalize certain aspects of Heidegger’s thought. Lacoue-Labarthe is developing what Fynsk calls the ‘self-refusal’ contained the poem, and the recording and enacting of this self refusal, or unselving, is at the heart of the power of Hopkins’ poetry, and also an entry point into Ereignis. Imitation and retreat, a removal from the proper, is the birth of potentiality, or of what is not yet manifest. The location of the improper in imitation is the focus of perhaps Lacoue-Labarthe’s bestknown work in English, Typography, where he engages in a rigorous thinking of mimesis. For Lacoue-Labarthe, mimesis contains a selfreflexive element that disallows any sense of the proper: the only recourse, with mimesis, is to differentiate it and to appropriate it, to identify it. In short, to verify it. Which would without fail betray the essence or propriety of mimesis, if there were an essence of mimesis or if what is ‘proper’ to mimesis did not lie precisely in the fact that mimesis has no ‘proper’ to it, ever (so that mimesis does not consist in the improper, either, or in who knows what ‘negative’ essence, but ek-sists, or better yet, ‘de-sists’ in this appropriation of everything supposedly proper that necessarily jeopardizes property ‘itself ’). (1989, p. 116)

Lacoue-Labarthe says that the only recourse is to appropriate mimesis. Appropriation, one of the translations of Heidegger’s concept of Ereignis, is not ‘authentic’ for Lacoue-Labarthe as it is for Heidegger. For Heidegger, Ereignis is the mood of humanity when it is receptive to the poetic. Thus it is the mood of authentic being. For LacoueLabarthe the poetic is closer to Flusser’s reading of the image, as that which has become a screen blocking our access to other worlds, and therefore has nothing proper about it. The image is earth-defining,

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what Lacoue-Labarthe calls ‘the spacing that outlines, rather than being outlined by’. The space that outlines indicates strife in the forming of images, strife between the concealed and unconcealed, and is what calls us to being. Listening to this call is a form of experience. The experience of the poem is a part of the methodology of this book, meaning looking at the poetry of Hopkins as it is read, rather than as a finished textual object. Taking a cue from Stanley Fish’s classic essay ‘Literature in the Reader’, the meaning of a poem ‘is a temporal one,’ interpretations are ‘events in his [the reader’s] encounter with the line’ (1980, p. 26). As Fish argues, ‘The meaning of an utterance, I repeat, is its experience – all of it – and that experience is immediately compromised the moment you say something about it’ (ibid., p. 65). The reason Fish is being brought in here is that some of the quotes above from Lacoue-Labarthe have been taken from his book Poetry as Experience in which he develops Heidegger’s concept of the experience of thought. Lacoue-Labarthe quotes from Heidegger’s ‘On the way to language’: Experience means eundo assequi, to obtain something along the way, to attain something by going on a way. To undergo an experience with something – be it a thing, a person, or a god – means that this something befalls us, strikes us, comes over us, overwhelms us and transforms us. When we talk of ‘undergoing’ an experience, we mean specifically that the experience is not of our own making; to undergo here means that we endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it. (Qtd. in Lacoue-Labarthe, 1999, p. 98)

To be open to an experience of what ‘is not of our own making’ is to be able to experience the call of that which is not ourselves, to experience that which is not of our earth. This experience, in the poetry of Hopkins, is enacted through the simultaneous incorporation and unselving of the image. Such an experience of the poem is mapped by Hopkins scholar W. H. Gardner in the second volume of Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition. Gardner maps out this unselving experience of reading Hopkins in a concretesque diagram of a few lines from Hopkins’ ‘The Bugler’s First Communion’ (1879). What is impressive about Gardner’s reading is that it shows the opening of potentiality not through any sort of ‘naturalness’ of language but rather through the

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denial of naturalness via the thick mulitivalence (meaning more than just a dichotomy of two elements) of Hopkins’ ambivalent style. The selection from the poem originally reads: Those sweet hopes quell whose least me quickenings lift, In scarlet or somewhere of some day seeing That brow and bead of being An our day’s God’s own Galahad. . . .

e m so

ng

ei

se

da

of

y

those sweet hopes

w

ho

se

le

as

tq

ui

ck

en

in

gs

,e

tc .

Gardner’s graphic representation is as follows (adapted from 1949, p. 302):

that brow and bead of being, etc. in ew om

rs

to

le

ar

sc re he

As I have stated elsewhere (Willems, 2008), the diagram prophetically addresses a comment Marshall McLuhan makes in his classic Understanding Media, published 15 years after Gardner’s commentary: ‘How Gerard Manley Hopkins would have loved to have had a typewriter to compose on!’ (1966, p. 230). What Hopkins’ poem (through Gardner’s representation) is foregrounding here is a fundamental multiplicity of experience that indicates a celebration of Lacoue-Labarthe’s impropriety. Imagery, language and poetry are technical, not natural, and this is also true for what allows an experience of poetry to take place. Humanity can experience poetry because it is not a part of nature, because it is an artificial being, and it is the

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experience of the artificial that calls the human being to its earth. Or, as Wolfgang Schirmacher puts it, ‘We find the dynamic standard of the process within ourselves: in our artificiality. But with this step we mortals do not find ourselves outside the cosmic order: we are only fulfilling our destiny as appropriated, as openness toward Being (Ereignis)’ (1987, p. 218). What is made visible in Gardner’s diagram is Hopkins’ attempt to capture a pre-judgemental quality, where the synthesizing eye is pricked and damaged. The potentiality for not only ambiguity but multiple threads is sheltered through his technique. In the thought of Heidegger, the moment of Ereignis seems to hold a similar position. Ereignis is what brings something into its own before judgements of truth are made. To dwell as humanity is to shelter this coming forth. For Heidegger this is an experience not only of poetry, but also of thought. Thought in this sense is a medium, a place through which the unconcealed works to come forth into the concealed, and this medium is therefore a site of struggle and paradox. This struggle needs to be maintained, held, and sheltered from dismissal. For Heidegger the state of maintaining struggle is an openness to being. However, as argued above, Heidegger’s sheltering reads the role of unselving in a different manner than Hopkins. In the reading of ‘Binsey Poplars’, what was developed was the mutual unselving of object and subject. There was an experience of that world through a realization of the poverty of this one. Done through language, the invisible other earth was able to become visible in a strange givingover of the self to unselving; the burning of the sun happens through the momentary breakdown of sunscreen. The incorporation of the dismantling of the moment of Ereignis as a part of Ereignis itself is part of the way Hopkins’ poetry can be read beyond and back into Heidegger. The impropriety of the many-times-removed-from-reality of human experience helps in the understanding of further lines in Hölderlin’s ‘In lovely blueness . . .’: ‘the darkness of night with all the stars is not purer’. Why purer? As a comparative, it is the darkness of night that is not purer than something else. Again, close attention needs to be paid to the ambiguity in the referentiality of the poem. A reading can now be ventured along with Flusser’s thought on the image. ‘Man’ is just as removed from the real as darkness, night and stars are, because all of them are images. And this brings the argument back to ‘man, who is called the image of God’ (my emphasis). It is ‘man’ who calls ‘man’ the image of God – humanity calls itself the image because it has turned the image, which has become a screen, into an easier-to-understand linear representation. In other

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Hopkins and Heidegger

words, in order to understand the image that has become too difficult to comprehend, humanity has called itself into action by putting the image into words. God, the unknown or unseen, meaning it is a part of that earth, is filtered through the image which is filtered through language. In Hölderlin’s poem, darkness, night and the stars are no more pure than is this construction of God. This is different from Heidegger’s understanding in his essay, and yet it comes from it. For Heidegger, humanity can hear the call of poetry or it cannot. Poetry is not something that humanity creates as much as it is something that exists outside humanity and waits for humanity to be ready for it, so it can speak through humanity (Heidegger, 2001a, p. 226). What is valiant in Hopkins’ work is the inclusion of both the appropriation of poetry and its negation, of the inclusion of both this and that earth. Agamben, in Language and Death, traces the history of the word this through Aristotle’s first and second essences. As Agamben summarizes, the first essence [prote ousia] is indicated by common nouns such as man [anthropos] or horse [ippos] for example, while the second essence [deuterai ousiai] is indicated by the use of this: this man [o tis anthropos], this horse [o tis ippos], and so on (1991, p. 16). What is important for Agamben in the turn from first to second essence is that ‘The problem of being – the supreme metaphysical problem – emerges from the very beginning as inseparable from the problem of the significance of the demonstrative pronoun’ (ibid., pp. 16–17). The demonstrative pronoun indicates a movement from image to speech, ‘from showing to saying’ (ibid., p. 17), and hence is a location for the emergence of humanity and the creation of an earth for itself. This emergence is partially contained in a negative, in the negation of one earth from another. It is this ‘negation’, or perhaps it is better to say ‘hesitation’, that Hopkins’ poetry cherishes; is a trajectory developing away from the duality of animal/human, image/speech or showing/saying. In thinking through hesitation and negativity, Lacoue-Labarthe’s definition of de-sisting will be kept in mind. Lacoue-Labarthe, in defining mimesis (a reading of the self-same), states in the quote above that ‘mimesis does not consist in the improper, either, or in who knows what “negative” essence, but ek-sists, or better yet, “de-sists” in this appropriation of everything supposedly proper that necessarily jeopardizes property “itself ”’; desisting will be read as a gesture of hesitation in the chapter on Hopkins’ poem ‘Sibyl.’ Through the ambiguity of ‘this earth’ Hölderlin seems to foreground the question of other earths, seemingly inaccessible to humanity

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stuck in its mediating imagery and language, but existing nonetheless (and with this knowledge therefore accessible). For Heidegger, human beings are always already dwelling poetically, it is just that they often forget, for they have so many distractions: ‘Our dwelling is harassed by the housing shortage’ (Heidegger, 2001a, p. 211). In fact, this always already [immer schon], and its forgetting [die Seinvergessensheit] are intertwined. Just as humanity has first to be able to see in order to classify some of its members as blind, ‘dwelling can be unpoetic only because it is in essence poetic’ (ibid., p. 225). For both Hopkins and Heidegger, not just the possibility but the potentiality for poetic (human) being is foregrounded, with the difference between possibility and potentiality being that in possibility actuality does not need to already exists, while potentiality always already assumes both the futural being and the non-being of an event. To clarify this, one might think of the difference between ‘It is possible for me to kill someone’ (even though I would never dream of actually doing it) and ‘The potential exists for me to kill someone’ (it might or might not happen, but the seeds for the action are there, waiting . . . ). The importance of potentiality in Hopkins can be seen in his stress on the importance of movement and process in inscape: This is time to study inscape in the spraying of trees, for the swelling buds carry them to a pitch which the eye could not else gather – for out of much much more, out of little not much, out of nothing nothing: in these sprays at all events there is a new world of inscape. (1959a, p. 205)

Pushpa Naidu Parekh argues that Though we can still say that inscape is the pattern of the individual being, we need to comprehend that pattern here is not a static, given quality; rather, it is an evolving shape. It is the intrinsic interplay of the parts among themselves and the whole that is emerging into shape. (1998, p. 12)

While the final relationship to the whole that Parekh sees here is questioned through Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of de-sisting (from the whole), the movement between ‘the parts’ is a key to understanding the dynamic quality of the potentiality of inscape. Hopkins scholar Daniel Brown, in his Hopkins’ Idealism: Philosophy, Physics, Poetry, briefly examines the connections between potentiality and inscape. Brown looks towards an early essay by

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Hopkins on Aristotle. For Aristotle, the latent form of a thing is responsible for its identity, but the latent form is something that is subject to change. Therefore, the identity of a thing is an interchange between flux, or potentiality [dynamis], and crystallizations, or actuality [energia] (2001, p. 71). For Agamben, this potentiality was indicated by the demonstrative pronoun used to differentiate the first essence from the second. For Hopkins, the transformation from potentiality to actuality is not something that happens in the thing itself, but rather in the perceiver’s mind. To illustrate this flux of perception, Brown quotes Hopkins, who describes an image seen to change from that of a quatrefoil into a Maltese cross. Hopkins says The eye looking at the figure on a church wall might however be suddenly struck by the thought that not a quatrefoil but a Maltese cross was meant, a white cross thrown up on a dark ground. At once the sheaf of causes become the effect, the old effect, the quatrefoil is scattered into a number of causes. (qtd. in ibid.)

The eye of humanity is located at the base of the projection of an image, of ‘a white cross thrown up on a dark ground’ (my emphasis). The way in which such a projection is possible for Hopkins is that ‘“The eye . . . [is] struck by the thought”’ (qtd. in ibid., p. 72). The phenomenological manipulation of the quatrefoil into the cross from within the moment of thought striking the eye is an example of exploring the morphological moment of the this, meaning retaining not this earth nor that one but rather attempting to see the moment that one changes into the other. At this moment there is no reflection, it is as if we were a deer staring into headlights. Another way to say this is that the potentiality of a thing comes forth from within the moment of striking (which can belong to an experience of anxiety, or a rift in being. Heidegger refers to this moment as the Augenblick); a moment of creative transformation is struck. The preserving of the potentiality of poetic being is a description of the attunement of Ereignis, which was said above to be the ability to be open to poetic being. What is significant for the understanding of Ereignis for Heidegger is that the poetic is a capacity that does not always have to be realized. Hopkins also sees inscape as something that is always there, waiting for humanity to be in the right mood to receive it: ‘I thought how sadly beauty of inscape was unknown and buried away from simple people and yet how near at hand it was if they had eyes to see it and it could be called everywhere again’ (1937, p. 161). Again it is seen that humanity is called: inscape is waiting for

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passers-by to be ready to hear its voice. However, this voice is not that which is separate from the human and located in the thing itself. As was seen in the reading of ‘Binsey Poplars’ above, that which is outside is imbued with self, and its destruction can result in unselving. Therefore there is an indication of a divided self, one that allows for the incorporation of the other within. This divided self is an essential element in the understanding of Ereignis. The way that Hopkins’ poetry is read here is that it not only functions to enact Ereignis, but also at the same time to negate it. Such negation is not a part of Heidegger’s thinking of Ereignis, and it is this negation that will allow Hopkins’ poetry to propel us into a rethinking of a number of other readings of Heidegger and beyond. One way to think of this negation along with Lacoue-Labarthe’s reading of de-sisting is to take a look at Theodor Adorno’s reading of negation in Hegel. For Hegel, negation is creative because it is a way to access a wholeness that had to exist before negation in order for negation itself to exist. As Hegel states in The Philosophy of History, The reason of this difference from the single natural individual, is that the Spirit of a people exists as a genus, and consequently carries within it its own negation, in the very generality which characterizes it. A people can only die a violent death when it has become naturally dead in itself, as, e.g., the German Imperial Cities, the German Imperial Constitution. (1900, p. 75)

Hegel later illustrates the principle of negation through the allegory of the life of a seed, ‘for with this the plant begins, yet it is also the result of the plant’s entire life’ (ibid., p. 77). Jean Hyppolite forcefully summarizes the creative aspect of Hegel’s reading of the negative. According to Hyppolite, there is an a priori whole, and negation isolates that whole into parts. This isolation is creative because then the whole can be captured from each of its parts: Negation is creative because the posited term had been isolated and thus was itself a kind of negation. From this it follows that the negation of that term allows the whole to be recaptured in each of its parts. Were it not for the immanence of the whole in consciousness, we should be unable to understand how negation can truly engender a content. (1974, p. 15)

Adorno calls for a moment of hesitation in this thought. This hesitation is what is meant by Lacoue-Labarthe’s de-sisting. Adorno argues

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that what is needed is to hold the place of negation open, rather than forming a re-synthesis: That Introduction [to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind] bids us purely observe each concept until it starts moving, until it becomes unidentical with itself by virtue of its own meaning – in other words, of its identity. This is a commandment to analyze, not to synthesize. For the concepts to satisfy themselves, their static side is to release their dynamic side, in a process comparable to the commotion in a drop of water under the microscope. This is why the method is called phenomenological, in passive relation to phenomena. As Hegel applied it, it was already what Benjamin would later call ‘dialectics at a standstill,’ far advanced beyond whatever would appear as phenomenology a hundred years later. (1990, pp. 156–7)

‘Dialectics at a standstill’ will be developed in the chapter on ‘Sibyl’. However, here it is important that the movement of analysis (rather than synthesis) that Adorno highlights is developed from the event of Ereignis, which is translated into English in a number of ways. Appropriation is one of these, while others are enowning and event. Ereignis for Heidegger is the event of a being coming into its own, a being becoming uncovered, a being present to itself. Heidegger scholar Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei defines Ereignis thus: ‘Ereignis as the “event” of “appropriation” (Ereignis) is the name for the temporality of Being as a sending that is not grounded in Dasein and is not merely the ground of beings’ (2004, p. 84). Gosetti-Ferencei continues And yet the Ereignis is not a phenomenon, for it does not appear, but is rather the most inconspicuous (das Unscheinbarste des Unscheinbaren) . . . In the Ereignis finite things have their stay or sojourn (Aufenthalten), and Hölderlin’s language shows that the saying of Ereignis ‘brings to light all present beings in terms of their properties – it lauds, that is, allows them into their own essence.’ (Ibid., p. 86)

The earth that Ereignis allows to become present is that of earthformation, of finding essences and properties of things – of allowing things to be seen outside of there mere physical presence: Ereignis is what allows, in the language of Flusser, for the image. So Ereignis is indeed not a thing, but a mood, or attunement [Stimmung]. Ereignis forms the crux of the change in thinking for Heidegger after his

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magnum opus, Being and Time. In Being and Time, essential being was grounded in beings themselves, in what Heidegger calls Dasein (‘being as being its there’). After Being and Time, Heidegger’s thinking takes a turn where essential being becomes located outside Dasein, now being found in Ereignis. In his first major work concerned with Ereignis, On Time and Being, Heidegger says: ‘Being would be a species of Appropriation, and not the other way around’ (2002, p. 21). Ereignis is that which calls beings into humanity. In this sense Ereignis is that which allows humanity to come forth, to become unconcealed by stepping onto its earth. To understand Ereignis as unconcealing, Heidegger’s relationship to the pre-Socratic philosophers is essential. In order to decide whether something is true or not, or in order to ask a question about it, that something must first be present, visible, unconcealed. Heidegger, rather than thinking the truthfulness of this something, instead looks at what he calls the primordial, meaning the unconcealment of that something to thinking in order for it to be decided upon. For Heidegger it is imperative to think this unconcealment before a decision is made. Hence Heidegger can be found to be concerned with differences such as between waiting and awaiting in Discourse on Thinking (Gelassenheit) (1969, p. 68), a difference between the transitive and intransitive. Heidegger does not want to think of a being that has a relationship to becoming, but rather that being is becoming: ‘if Becoming is, then we must think Being so essentially that it does not simply include Becoming in some vacuous conceptual manner, but rather in such a way that Being sustains and characterizes Becoming (γε′νεσις-ψθορα′ ) in an essential, appropriate manner’ (Heidegger, 1984, p. 31). One of Heidegger’s aims throughout his work is to return thinking to a thinking of presence. That which becomes present as unconcealed is aletheia, a pre-Socratic term denoting truth lying prior to openness and unconcealment. But that which becomes unconcealed, and then falls back into the concealed, is also present, as a trace of what has come forth. In the words of Albert Holfstadter: What presences does so by coming out into the open and staying there; its staying is its presencing. As it leaves, it becomes absent, absences; but in its absencing it stays, as absent, and this is its presencing as having been. Both the beings that presence and the beings that absence are, and persist, in their way of staying in the open that has been deconcealed. Being, as presencing, is being and staying unconcealed.

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Time, as presencing, is coming into the open, staying, departing, yet remaining in the unconcealment in just that way. Being and time are both thinkable only by way of aletheia. (1979, p. 21)5

Aletheia, in Heidegger’s reading, is both that which is apprehended in the thinking of unconcealment and that thinking itself, for ‘Aletheia is prior to the distinction between truth and falsehood. The unconcealed being is directly apprehended’ (McGrath, 2003, p. 341). Ewa Borkowska, writing on Hopkins and phenomenology, also connects Hopkins and Heidegger through pre-Socratic thought: It is Heidegger who – in the 20th century – contends that certain truths are planted in the language itself, truths that were known by early Greeks but whose profound links with the language were later forgotten. Interestingly, Hopkins makes similar discovery [sic] before Heidegger, having recourse to the pre-Socratic resources much like a great German philosopher and adhering to the view that words never free themselves from their etymological ancestry and hence the aim of his approach is revisionary rather than descriptive. (1992, p. 46)

Thought, which is sometimes fuddled by the busyness of the everyday that hides the concealed through idle-talk, is also the machine that allows access to unconcealing ‘certain truths’. Through thought, by at times letting go of the pettiness of language, being can touch the screen, and the image, and the reality behind the manifestation in the sky. Poetry, through its removal from reference and its location in representation, can function as a locus for such thought. Poetry, through removal, or de-sisting, or what is called here a certain notion of negation, can apprehend something beyond language itself: inscape. For Heidegger, humanity becomes humanity when it can open itself to this poetry, the poetry it itself creates in its becoming (and hence being, as Heidegger stated above, is fundamental to becoming): This is Heidegger’s version of Parmenides as one of the first Western thinkers to articulate the concept of Being as aletheia: Being is always ‘already-there,’ the ‘a priori’ unveiling presupposed by all subsequent thinking and comportment. Thus the line ‘to gar auto noein estin te ka einai’ should be translated: ‘Being is the same as the apprehending of the entity in its being.’ (Sandywell, 1996, p. 299)

It is Being’s becoming that shelters this reflexivity. By sheltering what is meant is that being is a place that keeps or protects the becoming of

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the differentiation to be found in the this, similar to the way inscape is the location for both the unity and disunity of a thing. Hopkins describes the self-reflexivity at the heart of being in his ‘Comments on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola’: ‘I am selfexistent none the more for any part the selfexistent plays in me’ (1959a, p. 126). In Hopkins, the this that, through its negation, is an access to the that, is attractive, it is sweet, if dangerously so, as described in ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ (1882): Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and swiftly away with, done away with, undone, Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and dangerously sweet Of us…

That which is undone is that which is flying (projecting) from us. That which is sweet of us is done away with . . . us. Agamben develops a reflexive relationship between separation and unity that is similar to the one found in Hopkins’ inscape. Agamben traces this within the etymology of the Indo-European *se, which he then connects to the term Ereignis. Agamben observes In Indo-European languages, the group of the reflexive *se . . . indicates what is proper . . . and exists autonomously. *Se has the semantic value in the sense of what is proper to a group, as in the Latin suesco, ‘to accustom oneself ’ . . . the Greek hethos (and ēthos), ‘custom, habit, dwelling place’ . . . as well as in the sense of what stands by itself, separated, as in solus, ‘alone,’ and secedo, ‘to separate’ . . . as well as to the English ‘self,’ the German sich and selbst and the Italian sé and si. Insofar as it contains both a relation that unites and a relation that separates, the proper – that which characterizes everything as a *se – is therefore not something simple. (1999, pp. 116–17)

Agamben’s definition of *se sounds much like Peter’s initial definition of inscape. In addition, for Hopkins it is when one is alone that one can be with inscape and hence with that which is beyond our world: ‘I saw the inscape though freshly, as if my eye were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come’ (1959a, p. 228). Heidegger links the concept of Ereignis semantically but not etymologically to the theme of *se by suggesting a relationship between

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Ereignis and the German verb eignen (meaning ‘to appropriate’) and its adjective form eigen (meaning ‘proper’ or ‘own’ and which is etymologically related to *se) (Agamben, 1999, p. 117). Ereignis is actually (as Heidegger himself points out) etymologically related to the ancient Germanic ouga, meaning ‘eye’, coming to mean ‘to place before one’s eyes’ (ibid.), which enacts the instress of seeing contained in Hopkins’ ‘The eye . . . [is] struck by the thought.’ What this means for the investigation into a relationship between inscape and Ereignis is that at the center of both terms is a quivering, meaning an unstable movement back and forth between the concepts of singularity and plurality (the ‘proper’ and the ‘alike’ contained in the *se): for Hopkins inscape is located in the ‘effects which are always changing’ (1937, p. 216). This poetic quivering of potentiality forms the catalyst for the connection between inscape and Ereignis. However, the question still remains: What does it mean to ‘dwell’ in this quivering? Agamben relates this non-simple meaning of *se to the concept of dwelling in a fragment from Heraclitus. The reason this fragment is being looked at here is that in the next section of the book I use Hopkins’ poem ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’ as part of thinking through ‘The Wreck’, and looking at Heraclitus now will help set the stage for that work, in addition to gathering together a number of different thoughts from this chapter. Agamben states that this fragment ēthos anthropōi daimōn

is usually translated as, ‘for man, character is the demon’. He then challenges this translation by looking at the etymology of the two key words ēthos and daimōn (Agamben, 1999, p. 117). For ēthos (‘character’) Agamben indicates that the original sense is that of ‘dwelling place, habit’. As for daimōn, Agamben traces it to ‘the lacerator, he who divides and fractures’ (ibid., pp. 117–18). Using these two more historical definitions of the terms, Agamben offers a new translation of the fragment as: ‘For man, ēthos, the dwelling in the “self ” that is what is most proper and habitual for him, is what lacerates and divides, the principle and place of a fracture’ (ibid., p. 118). This new translation allows Agamben to offer a definition of ‘man’ as: ‘Man is such that, to be himself, he must necessarily divide himself ’ (ibid.). It is this dwelling in the divide that is inherent in Heidegger’s reading of Ereignis and aletheia as a priori potentiality. What Hopkins foregrounds is both the movement of

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this dwelling and what he adds is a sense of negation at the heart of the divide that is humanity. This ‘negative heart’ is a description of the movement contained in Hopkins’ poetic masterpiece, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’.

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Chapter 2 ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ and the Potentiality of Ereignis

If a tension created from movement within two nodes is taken as the entry point to a reading of Hopkins’ ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, a number of images immediately become apparent. First of all, the poem tells the fate of five Franciscan nuns who were banished from Germany and drowned just before landing in England. The whole poem is situated in a ‘non place’ of neither Germany nor England: ‘Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them’. (The complete text of the poem is offered in the appendix to this book.) This neither Rhine nor Thames is indicative of the between described in the previous chapter as potentiality. Looking at the first stanza of ‘The Wreck’, this movement of potentiality becomes apparent in a number of lines. Thou mastering me God! giver of breath and bread; World’s strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

Framing the stanza is a movement between the passive and the active. The passive ‘me’ and ‘I’ overwhelmed by ‘Thou’, ‘thy finger’, and ‘thee’ in the first line: ‘Thou mastering me’ and the last: ‘Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.’ In the intermediate lines of the stanza, between being mastered by Hopkins’ God and then actually, at the end, actively locating him with ‘find thee’, we find a ‘Lord of living and dead’ who both binds and unmakes: ‘Thou hast bound bones

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and veins in me, fastened me flesh,/ And after it almost unmade, what with dread,/ Thy doing;’ (emphasis added). Two strands are continually being brought together in this stanza: the active and passive, the living and dead, the made and unmade. It is from within this simultaneity that the poem faces God, and not from one side only. This is an experience of loss of place, an abyss where, in the third stanza of the poem, ‘Before me, the hurtle of hell/ Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?’ Literary scholar Paul Beidler has identified this movement of betweeness as the chiasmus of ‘The Wreck’. In his essay ‘Chiastic strands in stanza 1 of The “Wreck of the Deutschland”’, Beidler follows up on a number of comments made on the poem by linguist Roman Jakobson. Jakobson utilizes Hopkins to expand on the wellknown idea of equivalence. Jakobson’s equivalence is based on combination, of which rhyme (in which repetition separates sound from sense) is perhaps the clearest example in poetry. What Jakobson does with Hopkins is to expand the idea of equivalence into that of the more general concept of parallelism, quoting a line from Hopkins’ journal as support: ‘The structure of poetry is that of continuous parallelism’ (qtd. in Beidler, 2000, p. 580). Jonathan Culler quotes Hopkins at the beginning of a chapter on Jakobson’s poetics. Additionally, Culler quotes from Hopkins’ essay ‘On the Origin of Beauty: A Platonic Dialogue’, in which a professor of aesthetics comments on the parallelling of harmony and dissonance: ‘I wished beauty to be considered as regularity or likeness tempered by irregularity or difference’ (qtd. in Culler, 1975, p. 55). The commingling of harmony and dissonance in the chiasmus that Beidler develops (it is a conventional poetic device, much used by Alexander Pope) is actually inverted parallelism, where two elements (phonemes, graphemes, words) in one line (or stanza), designated a b for example, are reversed in another line (or stanza) as b a (ibid.). For Beidler, inverted parallelism marks a chasm – it marks the extremity of failed reference, since reversal is the opposite of identity . . . It marks both the integrity and the incoherence of the text. There are always two ways of reading the chiasmus, each collapsing the other in the inevitable process of deconstruction. (2000, p. 593)

An example from the first stanza of ‘The Wreck’ could be ‘bound’ and ‘unmade’, parallel because they occupy adjacent lines, chiasmic

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(or inverted) because they are the opposites of each other. This chasm is what I called the ‘non place’ opened in the poem between the Rhine and the Thames. However, what I believe Beidler fails to take into account here is the reflexivity inherent in the concept of inscape. Agamben expressed the reflexive nature of the *se as ‘Man is such that, to be himself, he must necessarily divide himself ’ (Agamben, 1999, p. 118). A few examples from Hopkins will follow in order to try and help clarify the role of reflexivity. I will first look at the final lines from Hopkins’ poem ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’, before looking more closely at ‘The Wreck’. ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’ ends I am all at once what Christ is, 'since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, 'patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond

The ‘I’ that is Christ because he is me is a definition of self in which the pronoun ‘I’, which in linguistic terms is categorized as a ‘shifter’ (a grammatical element that only takes on meaning by reference to its surrounding discourse), is defined as a relation to itself, as reflexivity. This reflexivity is apparent not only in the alliteration of Christ as Jack, joke, poor potsherd and patch but also in the last repetition of ‘immortal diamond’. It can also be seen in Exodus 3:14, when Moses asks God his name and is answered ‘Ehyeh-AsherEhyeh’, which can be either translated as ‘I am what I am’ or ‘I am what I shall be’ (see Mensch, 2005, pp. 77–8 for discussion). Reflexivity as repetition is a means of stressing the temporal and locational shifts words undergo, where one never quite lands at the same place from which one took off, as if instead of jumping up and landing down on the flat edges of a circle, one were slowly working down the edge of a spiral (Agamben, 1999, p. 96). Repetition can never be the same, and in the repetition of ‘immortal diamond’, for example, there is a stuttering minimal difference from within the two repetitions that is allowed to come forth when the overrunning commentary of language is halted by the slowed-down stuttering of the repeated word: this is a holding, or sheltering of the word that allows the minimal difference to come forth. This is what Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy call the ‘auto-manifestation’ of literature (1998, p. 123). The reason that this repetition is a foregrounding of the temporal can be seen in Kant’s argument that the

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temporal is an extension of the combinations of sensations. As James Mensch summarizes, in order for something to be repetition it must be recognized as not being the same (Mensch, 2005, p. 21). The existence of such a difference implies the creation of temporality: ‘Reproduction must add not-newness or pastness to the content it reproduces. This modification is reproduction’s generation of time, for it allows time to be distinguished “in the succession of impressions following one another”’ (ibid., 2005, p. 22). This minimal difference is, I believe, an indication of inscape as being open to something new, meaning to something that is not of this earth; the process of repetition is one manner of enacting the openness of instress and can be found throughout Hopkins’ works. A few examples are, from ‘The Windhover’: I caught this morning morning’s minion . . . from ‘Inversnaid’: Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is from ‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves’: self ín self steepèd and páshed from ‘(Carrion Comfort)’: . . . cry I can no more. I can;/ Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.1

There is actually a surviving fragment of Hopkins’ on repetition entitled ‘Repeat that, repeat . . .’ which is quoted here in full: Repeat that, repeat Cuckoo, bird, and open ear wells, heart-springs, delightfully sweet, With a ballad, with a ballad, a rebound Off trundled timber and scoops of the hillside ground, hollow hollow hollow ground: The whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound.

Repetition and openness can be seen in how the ‘open ear wells’ at the song of the cuckoo bird. This song is not only repetitive itself but also bounces off tree and hillside, ‘a rebound’, multiplying itself and making the landscape flush. What is important in the term ‘rebound’ is how it is an attempt at the as close as possible which also includes an acceptance, or at least admittance, of difference (as in ‘rebound relationship’). To bound again is a way of marking the minimal difference, it is the creation of something new out of the ‘not-this’ needed in order for there to be repetition and not just a blanket of sameness. Hence it is a movement that is different from Levinas’ critique of the stasis of the literary, as formulated in Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, where such movement,

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would thus constitute that identity, and recuperate the irreversible, coagulate the flow of time into a ‘something,’ thematize, ascribe a meaning. It would take up a position with regard to this ‘something,’ fixed in a present, re-present it to itself, and thus extract it from the labile character of time. (1998, p. 37)

This minimal difference of temporality is the split which is ‘proper’ to a being, as Agamben indicated in his translation of Heraclitus’ fragment as ‘For man, ēthos, the dwelling in the “self ” that is what is most proper and habitual for him, is what lacerates and divides, the principle and place of a fracture’ (Agamben, 1999, p. 118). Slavoj Žižek describes the minimal difference which is at the heart of the divine, when, instead of a hidden terrifying secret, we encounter the same thing behind the veil as in front of it, this very lack of difference between the two elements confronts us with the ‘pure’ difference that separates an element from itself. And is this also not the ultimate definition of the divinity – God, too, has to wear a mask of himself? (2006, p. 109)

Žižek puts a twist at the end of his Kantian reading of divinity. The ‘pure’ difference he indicates is that of the temporality needed in order for difference to occur. Such difference is then read into divinity, or in the language being developed here, as an indication of something which is not of the humanized earth. Otherwise, as Paul Weiss argues, ‘we would at best be world-makers, or more precisely, world-imaginers’ (1995, p. 135). However, added onto this, Žižek addresses the need of God who has to wear a mask of Himself. This mask of God, in the poetry of Hopkins, is humanity: ‘I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am.’ ‘Man’ is created in the image of God in the sense that both are the same, are repetitions of each other. The only difference between God as image and humanity as image is temporality, meaning, that by confronting God as image, humanity has the possibility of going beyond its humanization. This is the message of the destruction of the poplars which themselves quell the heat of the sun. First, the image of nature that holds back that which is beyond our earth needs us in order to exist (this is Žižek’s reading of how God has to wear a mask of himself, a mask given by humanity). Second, it is us that have therefore invested the image with the power of our own unselving, the difference between the two images (in the previous example, the tree and ourselves) being nothing but temporality, or the ability to go beyond: in other words, potentiality.

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Such an unselving is a lack, a lack of self, and as such provides part of an answer to Mensch’s question which was: if we accept that a divine being created our world, then ‘how does the being that is before the world appear within the world?’ The answer Mensch gives is that in order to not be a part of this world, what is not of this world must lack this world: If God’s being is other than worldly being, it can only appear as such by appearing as a lack of worldly being. God can appear as he is, as other than the world, only as such alterity. This alterity implies that God is present in the world as poverty, as need or lack. (2005, p. 171)

Repetition, in a sense, has an ethical aspect located specifically in the nature of its non-divinity. Avital Ronell traces the ethical call of repetition through Nietzsche’s concept of ‘America’. It is important to look at Ronell here because she brings out some of the reasons for why Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, located a questioning of God at the heart of his poetry. While nearly all of his poems end with a ‘return to God’, at least one, ‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves’, can be argued to inhabit different coordinates. These coordinates are located within the non-divine and ethical call of repetition. According to Ronell, Nietzsche’s concept of America is a codeword for a locus of experimentation. Nietzsche’s thinking stresses the process of experimentation rather than the confirmation of a hypothesis: it is a place of ‘experimentation, trial, hypothetical positing, retrial, and more testing’ (2008, p. 295). This testing is needed to take the place of a vanished God who used to provide a ground for being to stand upon: ‘Now we godless ones test; we rigorously experiment’ (ibid, p. 298). ‘America’ is Nietzsche’s name for such a place where process is held as more important than result. It is a place of potentiality. As Ronell argues: Taking off for America, he [Nietzsche] redefines the place of the experimenter, letting go of familiar mappings and manageable idioms. The experimenter must give up any secure anchoring in a homeland, allow herself to be directed by an accidental current rather than aiming for a preestablished goal. The accidental current becomes the groove for a voyage taken without any helmsman, without any commander, Nietzsche insists. As exemplary contingency plan, America allows for outstanding reinscriptions of fortuity. (Ibid., p. 300)

As Hopkins states in a notebook entry from 1873, ‘All the world is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as

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well as a purpose’ (1937, p. 173). Hopkins’ ‘chance left free to act’, although eventually falling into a purpose for him, is sheltered in the open-experiment of repetition. Coming back to the beginning of ‘The Wreck’, the openness of the ‘lateral fall’ (meaning a fall back on the same word but on a different place on the spiral) of repetition can be seen in the last line of the third stanza, which reads: To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.

The first two lines of this stanza were used near the beginning of this chapter in relation to the between: ‘Before me, the hurtle of hell/ Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?’ The question I want to ask here is: What does it mean to have a stanza that begins with the between and ends with the same? I read this confluence of the between and same as a location of anxiety relating to a refusal to rest in one node or the other, the cause of the physical feeling I have when reading both poet and philosopher (which I described in the Introduction to this book). The refusal being coordinated here is one of movement rather than stasis, of potentiality rather than decision. ‘The Wreck’ expresses a state of anxiety in the face of a feared God. The mobility of this situation is expressed in the chiasmic structure of the poem. In order for a proximity to God to occur, there first needs to be distance. Fear is a sign of this distance. Such fear is actually a sign of greeting, as thought by Ronell. Writing on Heidegger and Hölderlin, Ronell argues that ‘The Greeting first establishes a distance so that proximity can occur’ (2008, p. 208). This initial distance is a recognition of the difference of the other from myself; it is a recognition of nothing at first but the temporality of a ‘pure’ difference, that there is someone other than myself to greet. This distance implies an abyss, which is a part of the generation of fear, and this commingling of fear and compassion are at the centre of the image of God in ‘The Wreck’, where in stanza 33 there can be found ‘The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides’. The necessity of anxiety in the face of compassion has also been stressed by Simone Weil: As for those who have been struck by one of those blows that leave a being struggling on the ground like a half-crushed worm, they have no words to express what is happening to them . . . Affliction makes

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God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. A kind of horror submerges the whole soul . . . What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love. (1951, p. 120–1)

Blows intermingled with love will take a more physical manifestation in the reading of Hopkins’ poem ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ in Chapter 4. Heidegger also discusses the movement between proximity and distance in his discussion of fear and anxiety [Angst] in §30 of Being and Time, which is titled: ‘Fear as a Mode of State-of-Mind’. Heidegger divides the phenomenon of fear into three points: ‘1) that in the face of which we fear, 2) fearing, and 3) that about which we fear’ (2004, p. 179). I will focus on the first point, ‘that in the face of which we fear’, in relation to ‘The Wreck’. That in the face of which we fear is the ‘fearsome’ [das Furchtbare] (ibid.). That which we encounter is fearsome because it has the power of detrimentality, and if we are fearful of detrimentality then that means that we are within the range of that which is causing our fear. For Heidegger, the region from which this fear emanates is a known region. That which can cause detrimentality comes from within this known region and has something ‘queer’ [geheuer] about it (ibid.). It is from within this region that something that is other becomes present, and the key aspect of the relationship developed here to the fearsome for ‘The Wreck’ is therefore that of mobility. For that which can be detrimental is not yet within striking distance, but is coming closer, and it is this motion of drawing closer from which the aspect of fear emanates. This drawing closer is something that is close by, not yet here, a potentiality: ‘it can reach us, and yet it may not’ (ibid., p. 180). And, as Heidegger states in his later essay ‘The thing’, ‘The terrifying is unsettling; it places everything outside its own nature’ (2001b, p. 164). It is within the duality of ‘it can, but it may not’ that the insecurity of anxiety arises. ‘The Wreck’ is placed between the Thames and the Rhine, between being bound and unmade, between the passivity of being mastered and the activity of finding. It is the potentiality of being held within one or the other that is the cause of anxiety, the ‘it can, and yet in the end it may not’ which for Heidegger implies that: ‘what is detrimental as coming-close by carries with it the patent possibility that it may stay away and pass us by; but instead of lessening or extinguishing our fearing, this enhances it’ (2004, p. 180).

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Hopkins and Heidegger

While this feeling of fear may be brought about by stressful situations such as that of a shipwreck, for Heidegger this fearfulness is not meant to be understood as a feeling only coming about in moments of peril, but rather ‘as an existential possibility of the essential stateof-mind of Dasein in general, though of course it is not the only one’ (ibid., p. 182). Hopkins also stresses that inscape can be found in what is normally considered fearful, for example it can be seen in a skeleton, although there is a danger of being overwhelmed: ‘It is not that inscape does not govern the behaviour of things in slack and decay as one can see even in the pining of the skin in the old and even in a skeleton…’ (1959a, p. 212). Fearfulness as a manner of authentic being is what I believe is happening when Hopkins combines the feared and the loved when the image of God the father is coming closer in stanza nine: ‘Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung:/ Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.’ Literary critic Northrop Frye connects anxiety and inscape as being what is essential for Hopkins: ‘For Gerard Manley Hopkins, the religious position he took [as a Jesuit priest] was certainly an anxiety to him, but the only way he could attach himself to the vertical bar of deep originality’ (2000, p. 77). Considering the concomitance of anxiety and inscape, I believe that the use of terror and mercy in ‘The Wreck’ takes on another dimension than does Heidegger’s delineations of fear. I use the word ‘dimension’ here quite consciously because I see in the ‘The Wreck’ not so much the dichotomy of fear from below, about to crush one from above, but instead as a polarity of a loss of ground from both in front and behind you, a more three-dimensional confrontation with the fearsome. In other words I see Hopkins’ enacting a movement that happens at the same time, in not a linear but rather a spatial fashion organized into the lines of poetry rather than prose. Not only do I see this evident in such lines as those quoted from the beginning of stanza three: ‘Before me, the hurtle of hell/ Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?’ but I believe I am now in a position to take a closer look at the repetition in the last line from the same stanza: ‘To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.’ I see this three-dimensionality made manifest in the chiasmic co-presence of flame and grace and also in the repetition of the same two terms. This movement is supported by the powerful ambiguity of multiple meanings that can be interpreted in the terms flame and grace. Flame can be desire, fear, terror or pain and punishment, but it can also be light or a passionate love. Grace can be read as love, faith,

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reconciliation, beauty or even pleasure. Such a multitude escapes the reduction of dichotomy, a reading which is also supported by the verbs flash and tower. Flash is the potentially blinding Augenblick of Heidegger that is a quick movement given an upward thrust by the movement of tower. Within the repetition of terms a temporality is created in which one is essentially open. The co-presence of two instances of the same term enacts a state of openness that this book argues is inherent to the potentiality of anxiety. This openness as potentiality is that which is never enough. Ronell defines Ereignis in a similar manner: What occurs is an a-temporal interruption or ‘fold’ in time, something that Heidegger draws from the archaic German word Eräugnis, which establishes a link between Being and light. Christopher Fynsk calls this accession to language a blinding of sorts, referring to the opening, in relation to the sudden fulguration of what Hölderlin (and some traditions of Zen Buddhism) designated as a ‘third eye.’ It points to an awakening, to a watch that will never be watchful enough. (2005, p. 120)

This openness is found in excess, in that which is beyond the repeated terms. Such an excess can be found in the ambiguity of such terms as flame and grace. Another way to approach this openness might be through the concept of the sublime. Here I will look at one of the best known thinkers of the sublime, Jean-François Lyotard, and his The Postmodern Condition. For Lyotard, the sublime is also an enactment of an overscribed potentiality. The sublime is that which evokes a contradictory feeling, ‘a strong and equivocal emotion: it carries both pleasure and pain . . . in it pleasure derives from pain’ (2004, p. 77). Lyotard describes this Kantian sublime as ‘when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept’ (ibid, p. 78). Here Lyotard is pointing towards a beyond that is similar to Heidegger’s idea of the ‘queer’ of the fearsome. For the fearsome is something already known (Lyotard’s ‘concept’, or a repeated term) and yet there is something unusual at the same time (the imagination fails to present an object to match the concept previously held). You are expectant, you have a concept in your imagination, but your experience exceeds that concept and you are left shivering out in the cold. This revaluation of the concept is the pain out of which pleasure is derived. The pleasure is the pleasure of being open to something new, something outside of the concept held

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in the imagination. Historian of the postmodern Johannes Bertens argues that, for Lyotard, the sublime ‘does not lead towards a resolution; the confrontation with the unpresentable leads to radical openness’ (1996, p. 113). The ‘unpresentable’ of Lyotard is not seen as something negative, but is rather the core of the sublime, and he calls it the ‘differend ’. For Lyotard, the differend is closely related to Ereignis: ‘The There is takes place, it is an occurrence (Ereignis), but it does not present anything to anyone, it does not present itself, and it is not the present, nor is it presence. Insofar as it is a phrasable (thinkable), a presentation falls short as an occurrence’ (2002, p. 75). Literary scholar Jerome Bump has examined the relationship between the Kantian sublime and ‘The Wreck’.2 Bump notes, as was done above, how ‘The Wreck’ shelters the anxiety between two nodes, rather than giving one up for the other: Hopkins refuses to explain disaster [of the shipwreck] as either the absence of God or the presence of some negative power which resists God. Nor does he allow an act of the victims of the disaster to be labeled as its cause. He makes an extraordinary effort to represent the storm as the sole cause of the wreck and then he identifies that storm with God. (1974, pp. 117–18)

Bump is describing ‘The Wreck’ as being face to face with the unrepresentable, with an act of nature for which there is no intentionality, but only potentiality. This storm, as out of the humanized world’s control, is that which is beyond the earth of humanity. Therefore it is divine, in the realm of God, and arguably imbibed with inscape. What is accomplished here is the enactment of process. There is a failure to attach a single cause to the disaster, so instead ‘The Wreck’ points towards a process, a process of unrepresentability (Lyotard’s differend). Bump indicates this process when, quoting from stanza 28 of ‘The Wreck’, he argues that Hopkins ‘cannot even select one name for God’s sublimity, because no single title is sufficient: “the Master,/ Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head”’ (ibid., p. 120). This ‘failure’ of selecting one name was also illustrated in the lines quoted from ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’ in which Christ is Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood and twice immortal diamond: this is what Hopkins calls in stanza 34 of ‘The Wreck’ a ‘Doubled-naturèd Name’. Although I agree with Bump so far, what I believe he misses in his analysis is the creative power of failure in

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‘The Wreck’, and in the poetry of Hopkins in general. The creative element of inscape can be seen in the generation of difference, or temporality, out of repetition. For Hopkins, anxiety is necessary to this generation, and its generation through negation is the focus of the following chapter. The movement inherent in the creative element of the failure to name, I believe, can be seen in the fourth stanza in ‘The Wreck’. Here it is in full: I am soft sift In an hourglass – at the wall Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift, And it crowds and it combs to the fall; I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane, But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.

At first the movement of falling down the hourglass seems to be obviated by being held ‘Fast’ by being ‘roped’ (which is another kind of repetition) which is the gift of Christ. However, a closer look at the verbs in the stanza offers an ambiguity to such stability. In the fourth line, what is ‘it’ that crowds and combs as if dragging one down rather than holding one up? In the sixth line being ‘roped’ happens ‘all the way down’, as if the rope were a part of what was dragging one down. This reading is supported by the last line, where the rope, the gospel, a moral principle, the rescuer, is also ‘a pressure’. What kind of pressure? The rope seems to be pulling down, but it also saves one from falling: it is both the problem and its solution. What is enacted here is a movement similar to the greeting described above, in which in order to be open one first has to fail, to be afraid, or in the words of the stanza above, ‘a drift’. An editorial decision made by Robert Bridges (and repeated in most standard editions of Hopkins’ poems), actually detracts from this sense of steep peril. In the second to last line, as R. J. C. Watt reports, the word ‘flanks’ is, in the surviving manuscripts (the original is lost), actually ‘planks’. For Watt the significance of this change is not only that ‘planks’ is a term more ‘vigorous, exotic and highly particular’ (1999, p. 364) but, following Ruskin (one of Hopkins’ main influences), Watt shows how in referring to the side of a mountain, ‘flanks’ are the lower parts of the mountain while

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‘planks’ are perpendicular or steeply inclined faces of rock. ‘Planks’ therefore ‘gives the necessary sense of perilous declivity’ (ibid., p. 365) that such a dangerous fall requires. The movement in this stanza actually captures the movement of inscape. This movement is framed by the endwords of the first and last lines; it is not the steady fasting of the rope that is important here: the ‘gift’ is actually implicit in the movement, or potentiality, of ‘sift’. Hopkins describes this fasted movement in relation to seeing the inscape of the sun: ‘It was all active and tossing out light and started as strongly forward from the field as a long stone or a boss in the knop of the chalice-stem: it is indeed by stalling it so that it falls into scape with sky’ (Hopkins, 1937, p. 129, emphasis added). Scholar J. Hillis Miller, in his seminal essay ‘The creation of the self in Gerard Manley Hopkins’, also reads this same stanza in regard to potentiality (although he does not develop the connection): The transformation of the self when it becomes Christ is the abandonment of one cleave of being and the actualizing of another potential one. For every man, and even Satan himself, has at least one potential cross-section which coincides with Christ. (1955, p. 317)

Literary critic Terry Eagleton has developed a similar (although more two-dimensional) reading of the ‘fall’ in Hopkins. In his essay ‘Nature and the Fall in Hopkins’, Eagleton, looking at the early poem of Hopkins’ ‘Spring’, writes the lines dexterously avoid equating Nature as it is with unfallenness, while at the same time contrasting it favourably with man’s tendency to sin. Moreover, the sense of this strained, fragile survival within nature then leads on to a suggestion of how likely the Eden of man’s own past – his childhood – is to sour . . . (1998, p. 31)

Holding to the potentiality between the unfallenness of nature and the tendency to sin in humankind, the spatiality of ‘transformation’ as Miller calls it relates to Ereignis in the sense that Ereignis is the event of appropriation. As Alan Schrift argues, it is ‘the gift-event of Being’, meaning it is the event of overcoming the everyday forgetfulness of one’s authentic self (1997, p. 6). The potential of overcoming forgetfulness is realized in ‘The Wreck’ in the movement through the hourglass, a symbol of temporality. Hopkins’ stanza shows how sheltering the potentiality of difference, here between falling and

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being held fast, happens quite literally from within the generation of temporality. The gift then is an opening to what is beyond our everyday selves, but often this gift seems to take the form of a disaster (the fear in the gesture of greeting). Fynsk offers a similar reading of constructive disaster in his thinking of Heidegger: Herein lies the essence of what Heidegger, in An Introduction to Metaphysics, identifies as the constant possibility of disaster. The encounter with the overpowering power as it opens in Nichtung [the essence of the nothing] drives Dasein into the freedom of undertaking technē; but as we noted earlier, this effort at mastery must come up against its own limits – it traces its own limits. The basic trait of the human essence is to be ‘the strangest of all,’ to denotation, inasmuch as man stands always in the possibility of disaster. All other traits must find their place within this trait, which, as we now see, marks the limit of man as that being that undertakes technē. (1993, p. 124)

There is an element of the strange within the human because there the human, as Agamben’s thought has shown, is divided by what Heidegger calls a rift [Riss]. The rift in being is a minimal difference from which something other than being can come forth. Such a rift is the site of the possibility of disaster because to exist as such is to be within the constant pull of the fastening of the everyday and the pressure of unselving. This happens in an encounter with that which is not ourselves, with what Fynsk calls the ‘encounter with the overpowering power’ that Hopkins sees as inscape. Disaster becomes a place for the disclosure of being (ibid., p. 122) and this is what I call its creative aspect. Fynsk writes: ‘Being is affirmed in the very shattering [Zerbrechen] of the wrought work’ (ibid.). Shattering is destructive in that one thing terminates its sense of wholeness, but it is generative in that many more pieces are created. Motion, as seen in the action of shattering, plays the key role in what I have found to be one of the few texts investigating a relation between Hopkins and Heidegger in any sort of depth (although the latter is not really dealt with in much detail): ‘“Meaning motion”: Gerard Manley Hopkins with Heraclitus via Heidegger’, by scholar Joanny Moulin, presented at the Gerard Manley Hopkins Summer School, 2000. Moulin also looks at this fourth stanza from ‘The Wreck’ (‘I am soft sift’) and in it sees evidence of how Hopkins ‘did not conceive of time and history in linear, one-dimensional terms’

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(Moulin, 2000). Moulin bases his reading on the word ‘coomb’, which comes from the Welsh cwm and refers to the curves and movements of a hilly landscape, and therefore a flux, like waves, of time (ibid.). But waves are not only a flux but a repetition, which I think is part of their mesmerizing quality; out of such monotony there is the generation of seas and tides, of temporality.3 Such generation from within repetition is a quality of waves Moulin does not address. This point is important because it is through such repetition that something new can be created. In a notebook entry for May 14, 1870 Hopkins writes, The chestnuts down by St. Joseph’s were a beautiful sight: each spike has its own pitch, yet each followed in its place in the sweep with a deeper and deeper stoop. When the wind tossed them they plunged and crossed one another without losing their inscape. (Observe that motion multiplies inscape only when inscape is discovered, otherwise it disfigures.) (1937, p. 133)

Hopkins stresses the importance not just of motion (discovered, or ‘seen’) but of span, of the movement from one state to another in a notebook entry from a year later: A beautiful instance of inscape sided on the slide, that is/ successive sidings of one inscape, is seen in the behaviour of the flag flower from the shut bud to the full blowing: each term you can distinguish is beautiful in itself and of course if the whole ‘behaviour’ were gathered up and so stalled it would have a beauty of all the higher degree. (Ibid., p. 148)

Motion multiplies the newness that is born within repetition. This can be seen in the single quote Moulin brings in from Heidegger, regarding a definition of logos not as language as such but rather of gathering. This motion of gathering is developed in the next chapter as the gathering mirror-play [Spiegel-Spiel] of the fourfold [Geviert] of Heidegger. However, what is important about such a gathering here is that for Heidegger generation is a part of the minimal difference of es gibt [it gives]. Derrida has thought the giving (or what has been called here the generative) aspect of this phrase. For Derrida, to attempt to read the ‘pure’ giving removed from the economy of debt and credit, it is essential to remove both the giver and that which is being given. As a brief example of this well-known aporia, there is a question of whether I can give a gift without waiting for a response

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of gratitude. Even if I do not tell anyone of my gift (an anonymous donation, for example), I still pat myself on the back for doing good. A way out of this aporia for Derrida is through the notion of the counterfeit gift, as raised by Baudelaire’s short prose piece ‘Counterfeit Money’ which forms the crux of one of Derrida’s most sustained thinking on the gift in Given Time. It is from Baudelaire’s story that a question is posed: Can a gift that is counterfeit (in the story a man gives a beggar a false coin, and then seems to lie about it to his friend, so there is a lack of clarity as to what was given, or even if something was given at all) be both given and removed from the given? Derrida sees the same question posed in Heidegger’s reading of es gibt (Derrida, 1994, p. 20). The es of es gibt, according to Derrida, attempts to be ‘the “ça” of “ça donne”, which is not a thing, and in this giving that gives but without giving anything and without anyone giving anything – nothing but Being and time (which are nothing)’ (ibid.). But, Derrida asks: What is the relation of giving and time? What is in the es that relates it to time as an element of the movement of play? Derrida states: ‘the es gibt plays (spielt), says Heidegger, in the movement of the Entbergen, in that which frees from the withdrawal [retrait], the withdrawal of the withdrawal, when what is hidden shows itself or what is sheltered appears’ (ibid., p. 22). In the language of above, it is through a repetition of the same that something new is given, and this given is a temporality because one thing is different from another, and therefore it is an instance of ‘time as a beat in place’ (Lyotard and Thébaud, 1985, p. 34). This is then related to the notion of play because in play there is the potentiality for a lack of intentionality, there is a hint of ‘pure’ movement. This kind of movement is more complex than the movement back and forth within a dichotomy, and Heidegger calls such an increase in complexity the fourfold. Derrida seems to agree, since he states that play adds another dimension to time, making it ‘quadridimensional’: The ‘giving’ of the es gibt Zeit belongs to the play of this ‘quadrimensionality,’ to this properness of time that would thus be quadridimensional . . . This fourth dimension, as Heidegger makes clear, is not a figure, it is not a manner of speaking or of counting; it is said of the thing itself, on the basis of the thing itself (aus der Sache) and not only ‘so to speak.’ This thing itself of time implies the play of the four and the play of the gift. (Derrida, 1994, p. 22)

While the fourfold is taken up in detail in the next chapter, what is important here is that the fourfold is pointing towards something

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unfamiliar, something beyond. The generation of this unfamiliar is through a movement outside of the economy of debt and credit, which can be seen as still being lodged within the minimal difference of repetition. While Hopkins shelters repetition in the poetry looked at in this chapter, in the next chapter it is seen that he not only includes this repetition but he also negates it. This inclusion plus negation is seen as a novel entry point into a thinking of the fourfold.

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Chapter 3 ‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves’ and the Gesture of the Fourfold

In Hopkins’ ‘Spelt from Sibyl’ s Leaves’ there is a warning against the polarity made manifest in ‘The Wreck’. Posited as an alternative to polarity is what Heidegger calls the ‘fourfold’ [das Geviert], a gathering [Versammlung] of four elements together: earth, sky, divinities and mortals. As Vincent Vycinas summarizes: ‘Each of these four refers to the others. To name one of them is eo ipso to think the other three. Heidegger calls them Geviert. Vier is “four”, and Geviert “is that-which-is-foured” or “foursome”’ (1961, p. 15). This gathering is still seen as generative, and in no way defeating. This view seems to go against the ‘common sense’ interpretation of ‘Sibyl’ as that of a dark poem of loss. To answer this apparent paradox I argue that this night is not an abandonment of inscape but is rather a representation of the bridge between poet and the essence of being, or what Hopkins calls instress. The concept of ‘the bridge’ is central to Heidegger’s thought in his 1951 essay ‘Building dwelling thinking’ and it will take the concept of Ereignis out of the (even if three-dimensional) polarity of what I called a quivering within two nodes, and into the fourfold evening of Hopkins’ ‘Sibyl’. This reading of the generative aspect of gathering can be seen in Derrida’s reading of spirit [Geist] in Heidegger as ‘that which gathers or in which what gathers is gathered’ (1991, p. 80). For Derrida, spirit is the place [Ort] of the access to thought (ibid., p. 113) in the mirror-play of the fourfold: The lecture on ‘The Thing’ (1950) deciphers in this play of the world – recalled in this way by an erasing of ‘Being’ – the becoming-world of the world, das Welten von Welt, the world which is in that it worlds (itself ) or makes itself worldly (Die Welt ist, indem sie weltet). We know the type and the necessity of this formulation. It means in this

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case that one cannot derive or think the world starting from anything else but it. (Ibid., p. 52)

This immanent reading of the world as not starting from anything but itself asks a question that stems from the previous chapters: if humanity is located on this earth, how is it that it can have access to that which is beyond? Perhaps such access can be found in the incorporation of the polarity of Ereignis, through its negation, within the gathering of the fourfold. A letting go of the polarity from within the fourfold is still a way of hanging onto it, and can be what enacts what Ronell describes as a ‘double movement of approach and withdrawal’ (2008, p. 206), as seen in the sift and gift of the hourglass from ‘The Wreck’. In this sense, ‘Letting go is still a way of holding’ (ibid., p. 218). The holding on to the negation of polarity in ‘Sibyl’ is a reading of the spirit of gathering in the sense that what is new, outside or alien is gathered into what is inside. As Ronell argues in a discussion of Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s ‘Andenken’: ‘the outsider is quickly promoted to insider; the alien exclusion, mastered and contained, now holds the fort of Ursprung and origin, resuming the offices of the subject’ (ibid., p. 222). For Derrida, his thoughts on Heidegger in On Spirit finds a sort of culmination in repetition since repetition is not anything new, but rather an access to thought, to the possibility of the origin (1991, p. 113); this is the incorporation of repetition not as content but as access, as a movement or gesture which opens a clearing for being. Derrida describes such an experience in the work of Hélène Cixous, which for Derrida is ‘a double and coordinated gesture, capable of doing things with words, of carrying with a gesture that is also a gestation and a birth: gestio means to be carried away with desire, to burn with desire, and gesto means to carry, and gestari to be carried, to travel’ (Derrida, 2006b, p. 119). The reason Derrida is being looked at here as an introduction to ‘Sibyl’ is because his thought of an access to being is one of a negation contained in the emptiness of night which can also be generative, generative in the sense that the night can be seen as a holding back of day in order for the origin of the movement of the heavens to come forth: Crepusclue or night, as geistlich, does not signify the negativity of a decline but what shields the year or shelters this course of the sun . . . Spiritual is the gait of the year, the revolutionary cominggoing of the very thing which goes (geht). (Derrida, 1991, p. 89)

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The gait of being that is allowed to come forth in the ‘nothing’ of repetition (ibid., p. 112) is an access point within the hermeneutic circle of what is this earth. The reading of ‘Sibyl’ takes a somewhat unusual form as the poem will not only be looked at as a whole, but the first line of the poem (describing a sunset) will be commented on word-by-word. In the words of Matthew Arnold, ‘Short passages, even single lines, will serve our turn quite sufficiently’ (2003, p. 469). This procedure will be done for two reasons: (1) the first line figures as a run, or syntagm, of single terms (the singularity of which is underpinned by sprung rhythm), a number of which are also key terms in Heidegger’s thought (earthless, attuneable . . . ), and, (2) what I consider the poem’s major reading, that by Norman White in his Hopkins in Ireland, proceeds in the same way (although for the length of the whole poem, and not just the first line), and his comments on the terms will serve as catalysts for my own. With this in mind I would like to present the poem in full: ‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves’ Earnest, earthless, equal, attuneable, 'vaulty, voluminous, . . stupendous Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, 'womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearseof-all night. Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, 'her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, 'stárs principal, overbend us, Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth 'her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, astray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; 'self ín self steepèd and páshed – qúite Disremembering, dísmémbering 'áll now. Heart, you round me right With: Óur évening is over us; óur night 'whélms, whélms, ánd will end us. Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish 'damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black, Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! 'Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind Off hér once skéined stained véined varíety 'upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, pack Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds – black, white; 'right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind

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But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these 'twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, 'thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

Before looking at the first line in detail, as a framework for my reading of the poem I will continue my brief introductory exegesis of the work as a whole. I see in the poem a warning through the imperative ‘wáre’ against the dichotomy of ‘black, white’; ‘right, wrong’ where ‘thóughts agaínst thoughts’ (a dichotomy of the same) ‘ín groans grínd.’ An alternative to this dichotomy is offered within the first half of the poem in the form of night, a place which at first seems terrible: 'For earth ‘her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as/ tray or aswarm,’ where what is found is the ‘self ín self steepèd and páshed – qúite/ Disremembering, dísmémbering 'áll now.’ The place of earthless dismembering, I argue, is not to be read as a lack of faith and the destruction of inscape, but rather as the location of generative instress itself, of the bridge between poet and inscape. I will argue this by attempting to show how many of the main features of inscape examined in the last chapter on ‘The Wreck’ are found here in ‘Sibyl’, although, instead of taking the form of a polarity (against which Hopkins directly warns here), the shape of Heidegger’s fourfold will emerge. This reading is framed against the common strain of readings of the poem which take ‘Sibyl’ to be seen as a bleak loss of faith, of an abandonment of inscape. This reading of abandonment can be seen, for example, in the work of literary critic Howard Fulweiler (who later brings in Jerome Bump, who was discussed earlier in relation to the dynamic sublime, for support) who states, In the sestet of ‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves’ a kind of computer-like automatism leads to a vision of eternal punishment . . . With nature often assigned to the ‘black,’ the ‘wrong’ half, the speaker must withdraw into his own divided self . . . Although this reduction is made in the fear of eternal judgment to hell, as is so often the case with Hopkins’s rich and multivalent imagery, such a world – in which polarity is transformed to dichotomy – is hell . . . (1993, p. 109)

Fulweiler here reads a turn back to dichotomy from polarity. My reading will be that the poem moves in the opposite direction – from

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polarity, towards that of the fourfold. What I believe Fulweiler misses in his reading is both the stupendous nature of night and the explicit warning attached to the dichotomies at the end of the poem: ‘But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these 'twó tell, each off the óther’ (my italics) and which can also be seen in the imperative of ‘Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind/ Off hér once skéined stained véined variety 'upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, pack’. Here again there is a pleading to let life off its two spools into a more vibrant, unstained variety. In the reading of ‘Sibyl’ that follows, an attempt will be made to keep vibrant the many difficulties and contradictions of this stunning poem.

Earnest, In the first word of the poem Hopkins sets the tone in the key of truth. White connects the term ‘earnest’ with the Victorian distaste for Romantic frivolity, but perhaps more interestingly for the argument here, he quotes a number of lines from one of Hopkins’ surviving sermons: ‘“Truth – reality or earnest and the feeling of it, earnestness; spiritual insight. This guards chastity and temperance . . . it cuts off the flowing skirts of idleness and worldliness”’ (qtd. in White, 2002, p. 27). Reading ‘idleness and worldliness’ in the sense of Hölderlin’s ‘acquirements’, earnestness is then a way of stepping out of the worldly and into what Hopkins boldly calls truth, or to that which is beyond a humanized earth. Heidegger devotes §35 of Being and Time to everyday ‘idle talk’ [Gerede]. For Heidegger, idle talk is what allows beings to communicate with others on a day-to-day basis and be understood. It allows humans to be in the world. He calls it ‘a positive phenomenon which constitutes the kind of Being of everyday Dasein’s understanding and interpreting’ (2004, p. 211). The gift of Ereignis is that the possibility for stepping out of this everyday is always already present. Heidegger scholar David Hoy sees this stepping out as a non-linear shift: Truth, for Heidegger . . . follows from an understanding of prior conditions. These conditions are what philosophy aims to reveal, what it wishes to get back to, but this stepping back is not a going back in time – for instance, to before Plato and Aristotle. Rather, it is a getting away from the ordinary involvement with things and getting back to the very essence of what a thing is . . . (1976, p. 62)

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Hopkins connects earnestness and truth and sees this truth as a way of freeing oneself from worldliness. For Heidegger, idle talk, as worldliness, is what veils authentic being which is always flowing underneath: . . . the obviousness and self-assurance of the average ways in which things have been interpreted, are such that while the particular Dasein drifts along towards an ever-increasing groundlessness as it floats, the uncanniness of this floating remains hidden from it under their protecting shelter. (Heidegger, 2004, p. 214)

Floating above authentic being on the self-assurance of worldliness is an image that holds true to the polarity of poetic being, where the temporality of openness is already there, hidden, and all one has to do is forget that one has forgotten it. Access to truth is generated out of the inclusion and negation of plurality, since such a gesture opens the world to that which is already beyond it. It does not exist before it in a linear fashion, waiting for its rediscovery. Instead it is created out of the playful gathering of the fourfold. Ronell indicates this temporality when she analyses the necessary effects of the tranquilization of idle talk in Heidegger and its relation to anxiety: One might hazard that Dasein needs to face its intoxication – fascination and vertigo – , that is, with the tensed fist of anxiety. That is why Dasein is split over where to go: it is drawn toward the experience of fascination and passivity even as it is drawn (or draws itself ) toward the experience of death. (1992, p. 44)

Ronell indicates the double movement of the hourglass here, a movement which can be seen through a sober approach, a facing that allows for no looking away, but rather a strong reading of a looking towards, or a being-with. This earnest facing is a part of the inclusion of that which might not be necessarily wanted here (dichotomy). This inclusion is necessary in order to enact the gesture of going beyond it.

earthless, White describes how at the time of sunset the earth and heavens are mixed in the night:

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The earth, with its associations of unspiritual clay and variegated dapple, no longer has its usual nature or is distinguishable from heaven. As darkness increases so the sight of the earth decreases and the mind concentrates on spirituality, on the unearthly black and white. (2002, p. 27)

Then White points towards a connection between the unusual nature of night in ‘Sibyl’ and the ‘Four Last Things’ (Death, Judgement, Hell and Heaven), mentioned in the book of Jeremiah, relating to the Christian tradition of Judgment Day: ‘The necessary preliminary to the Four Last Things is the nullifying of all earthliness ( Jeremiah [4.23] foretells the day of God’s vengeance: “I behold the earth, and lo, it was without form and void”)’ (ibid.). In ‘Sibyl’, immediately after the injunction of earnestness (as a place of escaping the monotony of the everyday), there is the earthless, the loss of individuation or unselving which tells of the coming (this coming was a part of Heidegger’s definition of the fearful) of the terror of God on the last day. It is the black of night that is ‘Disremembering, dísmémbering’, it is a taking apart of both the mental and physical. In ‘Sibyl’, what is equated with the everyday is a lack of asperity. This lack of asperity is contained in the lines: ‘the toolsmooth bleak light; black,/ Ever so black on it’. The Day of Judgment is when all things become equal (the next word in the first line), it is our end: ‘Óur évening is over us; óur night ‘whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.’ However, whether night is a location of ultimate sameness in the poem is in question, for the poem also holds a space open for contemplation, inviting a sense of negation and questioning which can perhaps allow for the possibility to move beyond the sameness of this earth into something that is beyond. For Heidegger, the term ‘earth’ [Erde] is extremely important, and is connected to authentic being through the artwork when the artwork (for example a poem) is a place which can shelter the potentiality of poetic dwelling. The question that is examined here is the following: What is earth in relation to the artwork? This question is important here because it is the artwork that can shelter not only earth, or this earth of a humanized world, but also provide access to that earth, to what is new, open, and otherwise. Heidegger thinks this question in one of his most well-known texts composed after Being and Time (first published in 1927), and that is the 1935 lecture ‘The origin of the work of art’. Heidegger develops his thinking of earth in relation to an unidentified painting by Van Gogh of a pair of peasant shoes. In Heidegger’s

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description of the painting, these shoes are located nowhere; they are in an unidentifiable space, bereft even of any clods of soil stuck to their soles. Heidegger thinks of the shoes in terms of their usefulness as equipment. According to Heidegger, the more useful the shoes are, the less the woman who wears them at work will think about them. ‘She stands and walks in them. That is how shoes actually serve. It is in this process of the use of the equipment that we must actually encounter the character of equipment’ (1993b, p. 159). The character of the equipment here is the essence of the equipment, the thing-in-itself. The woman is being-in-the-world because she is using these shoes in a manner that others use them also. She is because she is in the world of commonality. As Mensch argues, it is because of my concerns (my need to protect my feet from the ground) that these shoes are there for me (2005, p. 155). But what of the relationship of the thing to the earth? Heidegger states: ‘This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself ’ (1993b, pp. 159–60). There is a relationship between the everyday world of the peasant woman and the flowing underneath of earth. This flowing underneath is that which is beyond the everyday of the world. However, the relationship the woman has to the earth is, in general, unnoticeable. It is reliable. ‘By virtue of this reliability the peasant woman is made privy to the silent call of the earth; by virtue of the reliability of the equipment she is sure of her world’ (ibid., p. 160). But the reliability of the shoes is not a constant: they wear out, are the wrong size or may protect only against certain types of surfaces and weather. So there is a strife between the world of reliability and the beyond-reliability of earth. The pushing and pulling of this relationship between earth and world is for Heidegger primordial strife [Urstreit]. ‘Truth essentially occurs only as the strife between clearing and concealing in the opposition of world and earth’ (ibid., p. 187). Strife is that in which ‘each opponent carries the other beyond itself ’ (ibid., p. 174). It is from within the strife that the beyond, or truth, is possible. The rift [Riss] is another Heideggerian term closely related to strife, as mentioned above. The artwork is actually a manifestation of the rift, it is a gathering site for the emergence of being. Fynsk argues that the Riss is named as the gathering trait of the conflict of world and earth that is set into (traced in) the work of art and brought to appear

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there as the event of the opening of the truth. If, as we see here, this trait must also mark the possibility of disaster in the confrontation of world and earth (of dikē and technē, in An Introduction to Metaphysics), then we must conclude that the work of art bears the trace of the limits of man’s creative endeavors. The work must bear the trace of man’s finitude as a kind of pointer that signals an unmastered, abyssal depth: the opening of the finitude that conditions his creative activity. The work marks man’s Untergang and is thus itself necessarily a fragment, the result of a ‘shattering.’ (1993, p. 124)

The artwork is a marking of the shattering of being, the creative disruptive rift that marks an access point to the openness of being through its unselving. This rift is seen in the strife between earth and world in Heidegger’s ‘The origin of the work of art’. Heidegger scholar John Bruin, writing on Heidegger’s essay, says, ‘What is exceptional about the artwork is its relation to the material or “earth” (Erde) of which it is made. This relation is such that the artwork is its materiality’ (1994, p. 449). The poetry of Hopkins does not hide the strife inherent in the difficulties of representation; instead it faces them in the kind of earnest attitude on which Ronell, for example, has focused much of her thought. Inscape is to be found within the difficulties. What I mean here is that being is preserved in the movement from error to error of representation, from revision to revision.1 As Žižek argues, ‘symbolization ultimately always fails . . . it never succeeds fully in “covering” the real . . . it always involves some unsettled, unredeemed symbolic debt’ (2005, p. 262). Being open to this debt is the ‘American’ experimental disposition. It is from within this strife, for Heidegger in ‘The origin of the work of art’, that earth is made manifest. Bruin agrees, and then makes an explicit connection between Heidegger and Hopkins: [The artwork’s] materiality – be it of stone, wood, metal, color, tone, or word – is constitutive of the very ‘quiddity’ of that particular artwork. The ‘what’ of the artwork is for that reason ill-suited to the requirements of conceptualization, and therefore generalization. This entity stands out, elusively and obstinately, as if it were alone a separate species unto itself. Its ‘this-ness,’ or ‘inscape’ as the poet Gerald [sic] Manley Hopkins might call it, ‘is just what is unusual’ about this entity . . . Crucial to the argument of [‘On the origin of the work of art’] is just this point about the particularity and ‘haecceity,’ if you will, of the artwork. (Bruin, 1994, pp. 449–50)

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The relationship between Hopkins and Heidegger Bruin alludes to connects inscape with quiddity, with that which stands out, utilizing the thought of Duns Scotus.2 This aspect of inscape was developed in the previous chapter in relation to Heidegger’s concept of the fearsome. In that context, what was feared came from a known region, but had something queer about it. The fearsome was born from a queerness (along with its proximity) from within the known. In Bruin’s words above, because of this queerness, the ‘what’ of a particular artwork is not easily generalized. A means of allowing the particular into the general, or the earth into the world, is the thrust of the focus on Hopkins’ incorporation of the negative here. However, Hopkins’ term here is not earth but earthless: the removal of this-ness, the dismantling of self. ‘Sibyl’ is a poem that does battle with the seeming loss of inscape, but it does so from within the darkness, and not by attempts at exclusion. This is perhaps why the reader finds earthless following up on earnest. It is the spatial placement of this loss that I believe marks a new turn in the path of the poetry of Hopkins. ‘Sibyl’ is no longer in the realm of the parallelism or even Beidler’s reading of the chiastic structure of ‘The Wreck’. There is no counterpoint waiting to sooth the reader in the next line. Instead, there is only more and more darkness, a darker and flatter night, and then, at the end of the poem, a warning against any sort of redemptive dichotomy (represented by the two spools and the black and white of the poem). As Hopkins writes in a journal entry , ‘for out of much much more, out of little not much, out of nothing nothing’(Hopkins, 1959a, p. 205). I read the movement away from the parallel not as an abandonment of the process of inscape but rather as a thinking of the gathering of the four elements of Heidegger’s Geviert.

equal, White divides this term into two domains. First, he examines the equalizing features of night as what make all things the same, where the earth becomes earthless as it blends into the sky (in the reading here this is the sky seen through belief in Hölderlin’s poem). Then White also ties ‘equal’ to the equality of a Judgment Day, ‘when all are equal and justice will be dealt impartially’ (2002, p. 27). In a related passage, White discusses the ‘becoming even’ of ‘evening,’ which is the first word of the second line of ‘Sibyl’: The original participial meaning of ‘becoming even’ describes the period when things are still as uncertain as the equivocal adjectives;

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evening is becoming a definite noun, thus connecting with ‘equal’. There is almost a birth process – ‘strains to be’; and evening becomes the night in which time finishes, the vast night of eternity, in which are wrapped like a body in a hearse all events of time. (Ibid., p. 29)

The moment at which all things become equal is at once the end of history, Judgement Day, but also a birthing process where evening strains to be womb, home and hearse: a straining to be. In what sense can this liquefying sameness also be the place from which something new is to arise? ‘Sibyl’ is a poem about an end where ‘Óur évening is over us; óur night ‘whélms, whélms, ánd will end us’, and I read the end of history (a concept Heidegger states to be inherent to Ereignis, and which is developed below) and the birthing process to be cobelonging to a theme of Hopkins’ poem indicated by the proper name included in its title, that of prophecy, and hence the generation of temporality. I will start the discussion of prophecy by taking issue with scholar William Rooney’s interpretation of ‘Sibyl’. Rooney states that ‘The general meaning of Sibyl’s Leaves is fear of the destructiveness of death, the terrifying simplification of all things at that final moment, their reduction to black-white, right-wrong’ (1955, p. 507). What I believe Rooney misses here is a movement contained in the sense of prophecy in the poem, for ‘Sibyl’ is ‘Óur tale, O óur oracle!’ The roles of prophecy and reduction are seen as ways of generating that which is new, rather than merely a fear of destructiveness. A reading of the myth of the Sibylline books from Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae will illustrate the value of the reductive elements in Hopkins’ poem. In §1.19 of the Noctes Atticae, Gellius tells the story of an old woman trying to sell the Sibylline books to king Tarquinius Superbus. She asks an exorbitant price for the nine books, at which the king balks. Then the old woman burns three, and then three more, continuing to ask the same price, until, with just three books left, the king agrees to pay the original price the old woman had asked for all nine. He places the books in a temple and forms a council to examine the books, treating them as an oracle which contains powers of communication with the immortals. The fewer books there are, the more valuable they become. The old woman slowly reduces the material aspect of her offering, stopping at each stage to see if she has gone far enough, until Superbus pronounces them oracular and purchases them for the original price. When the set was complete, it was not worth having, but once it became damaged, erroneous, failed, no price was too great and

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Superbus was willing to pay; only when the books became unobtainable in their completeness did the king desire them all. In the Gellius story of the Sibylline books, the combination of destruction and birth are found in the emergence of prophecy. It is the destruction of the books that gives birth to the oracle; with the books intact no Council of Fifteen Men (the interpreting body of the Sibylline books) would have been formed. Prophecy here takes place where destruction and creation meet. The destruction of the texts in front of king Superbus suddenly brought the king face-to-face with himself as the destroyer of the texts. This reflexivity is made apparent in both Cabalistic and hermetic interpretations of oracular powers. Agamben, in Potentialities, collocates a number of sources where prophecy is interpreted as the self standing before itself. Agamben quotes the thirteenth-century Cabalistic anthology Shushan Sodoth: ‘“The complete secret of prophecy . . . consists in the fact that the prophet suddenly sees the form of his self standing before him, and he forgets his own self and ignores it . . . and that form speaks to him and tells him the future”’ (1999, p. 146). It is from the self standing before the self, meaning a repetition of the same, that that which is new, the future, or temporality, is generated. The night, in Hopkins reading, is a place of equality in the sense that it is where the self meets the self, and out of such a confrontation of the same prophecy is created. This is how I read ‘self ín self steepèd and páshed’ (‘pashed’ means to be hurled violently so as to break), as the self confronting itself in sameness, as the repetition of self. Walter Ong comes to a similar reading: In the Elizabethan and Jacobean era, the pervasively oratorical, public cast of thought and expression, the heritage of the ubiquitous rhetorical tradition, still insulated the self somewhat from its own direct gaze, and even lyric poetry could not shed all the insulation. Donne’s poem [‘Batter My Heart, Three-Personed God’] is personal and certainly deals with the self, but there is in Donne nothing quite like Hopkins’ confrontational ‘self in self steeped and pashed’ . . . Hopkins’ self, including his body, is more urgent and obtrusive . . . (1986, p. 138)

Another way of representing this dealing with the self is in how ‘Sibyl’ is also a poem about the turning away from the questioning of God and a turning inwards during the questioning of self.

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The questioning of God, apparent in many of Hopkins’ poems but usually seen as absent in ‘Sibyl’, is addressed by Hopkins scholar Lesley Higgins in her essay ‘“To prove him with hard questions”: answerability in Hopkins’ writings’. For Higgins, the lack of questioning is what pashes the self: But what about the absence of questions in ‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves’? This extraordinarily desperate text, I would suggest, represents the complete failure of the paideia. The speaker is ‘disremembering, dismembering 'áll now’; the discipline itself is ‘unbound’ . . . Without the methodical play or imposition of interrogatives, ‘thoughts against thoughts in groans grind’ . . . the mind cannot ‘reckon’ as it has been accustomed to doing, and is wrecked instead . . . the ‘groans’ wrenched from the speaker and the ‘bleak’ assertiveness of the poem that exceeds all generic and formative bounds. (2001, p. 52)

I read the ‘absence’ of the interrogative in a different way (the question as to whether this interrogative is absent is challenged in this chapter’s section on the term ‘vaulty’). Instead of being the catalyst for thoughts grinding against thoughts, I rather read the absence of questioning God as a necessary step in order to place the self before self, thereby enacting a space for prophecy to happen. Heidegger reads the becoming of godlessness in a similar way, seeing it as the first real experience of the ‘religious’: The transition to godlessness is far from excluding religiosity; on the contrary, it is through religiosity that the relation to the gods becomes, for the first time, a religious experience. When it has come to that, the gods have fled. The resulting void is filled by the historical and psychological investigation of myth. (1979, p. 2)

The Gods have fled and yet there is still a relation to the beyond, or to the gods. This self-reflexive relationship to the beyond is godless and yet does not exclude religiosity, because it is concerned with that which is not a part of the humanized world. The state of the gods that have fled is the in-betweeness of the attunement of Ereignis. Such an attunement of questioning ‘sets the man of the future in that in-between area, in which he belongs to being and yet remains a stranger to the existent’ (ibid., p. 14). An open being is a part of the humanized world and yet is a stranger to it; one is open to the beyond. This in-betweenness is a part of the title of Hopkins’ poem, of the

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prophecy indicated by the inclusion of ‘Sybil’. This generation of temporality can then be read into a thinking of the end of history. In On Time and Being Heidegger states that ‘the history of Being is at an end for thinking in Appropriation [Ereignis],that is, for the thinking which enters into Appropriation’ (2002, p. 41). This end of history, which for Heidegger is a part of the thinking which enters Ereignis, is, I believe, that to which White calls attention in his connecting equal with the flattening of Judgment Day (just as the presence of Ereignis is developed here in order to show its eventual negation). From within this flattening, there is nothing to say, there is ‘Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish 'damask the tool-smooth bleak light’ where the self, facing self, is in pieces. It is from within this self-same flattening that prophecy arises, that generation can come forth. Here being does not prophesize anything (there is no dichotomy anymore out of which to make meaning), instead it is only prophecy, being is becoming communication itself. As Jacob Korg argues in ‘Hopkins’ linguistic deviations’: ‘it is the form that speaks’ (1977, p. 981). Prophecy and communication are found together in community, meaning that it is a community, a being-with that develops when history is removed from historicity. So, when history is not a linear development of progress but instead is that which discovers the generation of temporality, or Walter Benjamin’s Jeztzeit, it is the end of history. This is the end of history for us, for a community of humanized peoples who in discovering temporality are also discovering what it is they have in common: they are collected or gathered in the miseen-abyme that is left when historicity exits the stage. Jean-Luc Nancy states this quite clearly: ‘history – if we can remove this word from its metaphysical, and therefore historical, determination – does not belong primarily to time, nor to succession, nor to causality, but to community, or to being-in-common’ (2000, p. 143). The end of history is a thinking of Ereignis where, in the words of Agamben, ‘Being no longer destines anything, having exhausted its figures (the figures of its oblivion) and revealing itself as pure destining without destiny and figure. But, at the same time, this pure destining without destiny appears as the Proper of man’ (1999, p. 131). The end of history is the prophetic or destining of humanity. Heidegger scholar and translator Joan Stambaugh argues that ‘When thinking enters into Appropriation, the history of being as metaphysics comes to an end . . . When Heidegger talks about the history of being, he is talking about the history of the forgottenness of being,

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that is, of metaphysics’ (1992, pp. 75–6). It is the end of the history of forgottenness that thinking Ereignis allows, what was referred to above as the forgetting of the forgetting, and this kind of thinking is what is born out of the self-same night of ‘Sibyl’. The partaking in the end of history is happening with us (Nancy, 2000, p. 152). As a community, we are born with the end of history. This community of others in temporality is what produces a beyond we can share. Therefore there is always a we before an I, an us before a me (ibid., p. 155). The presencing of the end of history is then the loss of a worldly foundation, for there is no longer the long trail of progress behind us to ensure that we are at the pinnacle of those who came before. This abysmal being is what is proper to being, as Agamben noted above, and for Nancy, it is the site of Ereignis: Obviously, this is nothing other than an attempt to comment on or develop (even if it does not directly engage Heidegger’s theory of history) the Ereignis of Heidegger – that is, Being itself as the happening that appropriates existence to itself, and therefore to its finitude in the sense of nonappropriated existence or nonessentiality. The logic of Ereignis is what Derrida expressed as the logic of ‘differance,’ which is the logic of what itself differs from itself. I would add that this is the logic of existence and (as) community, not as they exist or are ‘given,’ but as they are offered. (Ibid., p. 164)

The end of history is a time of equality, of generation in darkness. In addition, as that what differs from itself the end of history takes on the role of prophecy, as seen in Hopkins’ ‘Sibyl’. However, the importance of Hopkins’ poem is that it does not just include this self-same night of prophecy, but it also banishes it. By that what is meant is that Hopkins includes the self-effacement of Ereignis within the banishment of the two spools and the black and white at the end of the poem. It is from within this banishment that the fourfold develops.

attuneable, White reads the next word in the first line of ‘Sibyl’, ‘attuneable’, in much the same way as equal, saying that it perhaps means ‘“bringing into harmony or accord”, and refers to the evening’s bringing to one tone the dapple of daytime earth and sky’ (2002, p. 28). This is not

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‘one note’ in a literal sense, but rather that the world is brought into an organization of tonality, which White relates to the spheres of music in classical times when each main planet that was then known had its own tone on a seven-tone scale. Then White makes an interesting connection: Hopkins suggests that, rather like the ancients’ spheres, the parts of the cosmos, including the earth and its ‘dapple at end’, have lost their characteristic individual tunes and are now all of one note. This would be an obvious sign of cosmic breaking-up and the end of time. (Ibid.)

White connects ‘bringing into harmony or accord’ to ‘an obvious sign of cosmic breaking-up and the end of time’ in much the same way as the previous section looked at the concept of the oracular end of history. Attunement [Gestimmtheit] is one of the key terms in Heidegger’s thought, although it takes on a different definition than White makes for Hopkins here, and perhaps Heidegger’s reading of attunement will help in the reading of ‘Sibyl’ as an act of prophecy. Before looking at Heidegger’s concept of attunement, one aspect of White’s reading should be addressed, and that is the role of the musicality of ‘Sibyl’. For Hopkins, his poems were meant to be read aloud, and the process of such reading forms an essential part of their meaning. The importance of musicality for Hopkins can also be seen in that he composed music.3 In a letter to Robert Bridges dating from 1884, Hopkins describes his effort at hearing the melody in William Collins’ poem ‘Ode to Evening’, which Hopkins was setting to music: ‘Quickened by the heavenly beauty of that poem I groped in my soul’s very viscera for the tune and thrummed the sweetest and most secret catgut of the mind’ (1935, p. 199). While the oral aspect of his poetry was pervasive throughout his work, nowhere did he feel it was more important than with ‘Sibyl’. Hopkins says the poem: is made for performance, as living art should be – reading aloud, leisurely, poetical (not rhetorical) recitation, with long rests, long dwells on the rhyme and other marked syllables, and so on. This sonnet should be almost sung. It is most carefully timed in tempo rubato. (Qtd. in Gardner, 1944, p. 105)

As one of Hopkins’ most attentive scholars, W. H. Gardner, upon quoting the above extract from Hopkins’ letters, says, ‘Like the

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Deutschland and the Echoes, this sonnet is a task for the sensitive virtuoso . . . and the rubato effect allows of individual interpretations within the broad march of a pulsing but not facile cumulative rhythm’ (ibid.). White makes another reference to the musicality of ‘Sibyl’ in his full-length biography of Hopkins. In this text White states that ‘More than any other of Hopkins’s poems [‘Sibyl’] demands a dramatic vocal reading . . . The sounds are orchestrated to express a vast terrestrial movement, broken up into a variety of successive effects which build towards the terrible climax’ (1992, p. 380). Taking both readings of White’s together, what is it that allows the scholar to posit that the ‘notes’ of the poem can both ‘have lost their characteristic individual tunes and are now all of one note’ and be ‘a vast terrestrial movement, broken up into a variety of successive effects’? The becoming ‘one note’ is not possible in either music or language if taken literally, and therefore refers to ideas of harmony and accord. This vast terrestrial movement is then a kind of tonality, which seems to be broken up into its successive effects, which is in a sense poetic creation. However, once again careful attention must be paid to the verbs of this poem. In the second line such a becomingtuned, in the sense of reaching a harmony or accord, has not yet happened. There is a process but yet no product: ‘Evening strains to be tíme’s vást,’ womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night’ (emphasis added). While the darkness of night is usually taken to be the total obliteration of inscape in this poem, what is found here instead is that there is movement and creation; in the first line there are the individual successive effects, and in the second a straining towards harmony. I believe this straining, or rift, of the potentiality of inscape (as of Ereignis) is difficult to keep in view (and will become even more difficult in the fourfold). The sheltering of this primordial movement is a major concern for the poetry of Hopkins. White, when he says that ‘The sounds are orchestrated to express a vast terrestrial movement, broken up into a variety of successive effects which build towards the terrible climax’, has perhaps been swayed by the darkness of the poem to the extent that he finds it difficult to construct a poetics of the strain. Following his comments on the poem’s musicality, White says that in ‘Sibyl’: ‘Now Hopkins was forced to attempt an argument, not from creation, but from destructive dissolution’ (1992, p. 381). An opposite reading is taken up here: ‘Sibyl’ makes every effort to shelter the moment of creation from within the becoming of the self-same of night.

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For Heidegger, the sense of attunement is the mood or state a being is in, in order to think the between. Attunement is in this sense a disposition of anxiety: One way of attuning oneself to the thinking of Ereignis is through anxiety [Angst]. . . . the rarity of the phenomenon [Angst] is an index that Dasein, which for the most part remains concealed from itself in its authenticity because of the way in which things have been publicly interpreted by the ‘they’, becomes disclosable in a primordial sense in this basic state-of-mind [attunement]. (2004, p. 235)

Anxiety is one of the ways in which Dasein can reveal itself in its authenticity. Heidegger scholar Daniela Vallega-Neu says that ‘Heidegger thinks of anxiety as the grounding attunement that displaces Dasein from every-dayness and opens not only the being of Dasein as a whole but also being as such’ (2003, p. 46). The attunement of Angst, of uncertainty, of the textual strife between earth (inscape) and world (image), is the mode if individualizing: ‘in anxiety there lies the possibility of a disclosure which is quite distinctive; for anxiety individualizes’ (Heidegger, 2004, p. 235). However, what must be remembered here is that the ability to disinhibit one’s forgetting of anxiety in the rift is not, according to Heidegger, within one’s own power to accomplish. Fynsk argues, anxiety is constantly with us but is normally repressed. And our opening to anxiety is not within our power . . . We do not enter into the presence of nothing by our will, then, nor can this encounter be fully mastered or appropriated . . . we cannot bring our own thrownness fully into our power. (1993, p. 123)

Hopkins examines himself and his environment for the location of that which can unselve us, and in contradistinction to Heidegger, and perhaps surprising for a Jesuit priest, Hopkins eventually locates this power in himself. Hopkins develops this sense of self in one of his commentaries on The Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius Loyola (founder of the Society of Jesus to which Hopkins belonged). Hopkins writes: I find myself with my pleasures and pains, my powers and my experiences, my deserts and guilt, my shame and sense of beauty, my dangers, hopes, fears and all my fate . . . And when I ask where does

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all this throng and stack of being, so rich, so distinctive, so important, come from/ nothing I see can answer me . . . when I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of I and me and above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the taste of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man . . . Nothing in nature comes near this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this selfbeing of my own. (1937, p. 309)

The location of such power is in the self, it is self-same in the sense of repetition being developed here. This position is painful, because it involves an openness outside of everyday being-in-the-world. According to Fynsk, ‘[Heidegger] proposes “pain” as another term for difference. Pain tears asunder, he says; it separates (the verb he uses here is reissen); but at the same time it draws together (zieht auf sich) what is rent, in the manner of an initial tracing out or sketch’ (1996, p. 24). The reason Hopkins’ passage is important is that I believe it shows that he sees this tearing asunder is located within the divided self. The ability to access such an attunement is the focus of the next section.

vaulty, In this section, Heidegger’s concept of the ‘fourfold’ [das Geviert] is developed. This concept has been so far usually set against the idea of a dichotomy or a polarity in the previous groundwork laid for an understanding of Heidegger’s term. With Hopkins’ word ‘vaulty’, a reading of ‘Sibyl’ taking account of the fourfold becomes possible. Hopkins develops one of the main issues that has proven difficult for readers of Heidegger, that of an entrance into the thinking of the fourfold. For Heidegger, the fourfold is the thinking of ‘men’s being with one another’ in which, through a reading of Hölderlin, ‘the four – earth and sky, divinities and mortals – belong together in one’ (1993a, p. 351). Before this thought is developed any further, there can already be seen an incorporation of the two in the four in the sense of the sky and earth being symbolic of divinities and mortals, and the earth and mortals relating to dwelling. Such dichotomies are not meant to be denied here, but rather incorporated and negated through a thinking of the gathering or belonging of these elements together.

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With the fourfold Heidegger is rethinking Aristotle’s four causes [aitia]. However, what is most important at this juncture is Heidegger’s thinking of the belonging, the gathering inherent in the fourfold. What is new in Heidegger’s thought at this point, in relation to Ereignis, is that (1) he is including nature in his philosophy, (2) there is an attempt to think of a joining and (3) instead of an anxiety over potentiality and non-potentiality, there is rather an attempt to think four elements in one. Some of the problematics of the thought of the fourfold can be seen in Albert Hofstadter’s summary: In [Heidegger’s essay on the fourfold entitled ‘The thing’ from 1950] Heidegger not only names the thought [Hofstadter is exploring what exactly this thought is] but also shows how it guides errant man in regard to things. By means of this thought the thing – any thing – is grasped as own to man and man is grasped as own to it. In the thing thought by it, earth, sky, mortals, divinities all become own to and with one another. By way of the light this thought brings into the gloomy thicket of the world, the things of the world are able to stand out as what they are, gathers into ownment, and man is first able to descry them there and to come toward them, joining with them in the freedom of the clearing they have opened, entering into their gathering. (1979, p. 20)

There seem to be two ambiguities in this quote. First, in the beginning of the third sentence, ‘In the thing thought by it’, what does ‘it’ refer to? It cannot refer to ‘man’, and therefore must refer to ‘thought’. Therefore it should read ‘In the thing thought by thought’. What is this supposed to mean? And then in first part of the next sentence, where is the agent for the predicate ‘gathers’? Perhaps it could be the light which this thought brings, but this is only a guess. What the ambiguities of this passage illuminate are two of the central problems in the thinking of the fourfold: (1) What is the way of thinking that the fourfold is meant to illustrate and (2) What is it that gathers these four elements within this fourfold? Hofstadter’s quote raises the first question explicitly and the second implicitly, but both will be seen to be addressed by the reading of ‘Sibyl’ here. One thing that Hofstadter does with ‘In the thing thought by thought’ is to indicate reflexivity. If the thought of the fourfold is brought about by the thought of the fourfold, then the question of an access point into the circle arises. However, as Ronell argues, perhaps this is the wrong way to look at things:

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We recognize this thing. The god which the poet brings into being, even in the mediated mode of an absence, is a thing. The question regards how a word can bring a thing into being. Heidegger shows the ‘actual’ situation obviously to be the reverse. (1999, p. 189)

The thing is what brings the poem into existence; the god (image) is that which brings humanity into itself. Such was the reading of Hölderlin’s poem earlier. In one sense Heidegger argues this point, but in another he is not able to remain faithful to it. Ronell claims that ‘Heidegger seems unwilling or unable to work at this limit in a sustained manner’ (ibid., p. 54). What this limit indicates is a sameness that exists between the other (god, image) and ourselves: Now, what if Others were encapsulated in Things, in a way that Being towards Things were not ontologically severable, in Heidegger’s terms, from Being towards Others? What if the mode of Dasein of Others were to dwell in Things, and so forth? In the same light, then, what if the Thing were a Dublette of the Self, and not what is called the Other? Or more radically still, what if the Self were in some fundamental way becoming a Xerox copy, a duplicate, of the Thing in its assumed essense? (Ibid., p. 24)

The Xeroxed connection between the other and the self, or of the sky/divinities and earth/mortals, is located in Hopkins’ use of the term ‘vaulty’. The vault is a construction of humankind used as a shelter from the elements of nature. However, White quotes from a letter from Hopkins which states that it is actually when the vault is broken that the vault really appears, and when it appears it is in the shape of the sky: “‘when anything, as a court, is uncovered and roofless strictly speaking, a dome is just the one kind of roof it may still be said to have and especially in a clear sky and on a mountain, namely the spherical vault or dome of heaven”’ (qtd. in White, 2002, p. 28). It is not through the absence of the vault, or a humanized shelter, that the sky appears, but it is rather through the presence of a broken vault. This broken vault mirrors the concept of the rift in sameness from which temporality arises. Another way to understand this is through Adorno’s reading of natural beauty in Aesthetic Theory. As Adorno argues, art is never an imitation of nature, but rather of natural beauty; ‘the aesthetic experience of nature is that of images’ (1997, p. 65). However, such a role is always full of strife, there is always a rift between art and

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natural beauty. One stumbles over what is different from one’s projections. There is something in nature that needs us to be perceived. Or another way to say this is that the artwork is in need of interpretation. The chance to see beyond these projections comes from within this rift, and is the broken promise of the artwork: ‘art does not want to keep nature’s promise. It is capable of this only by breaking that promise; by taking it back into itself . . . What nature strives for in vain, artworks fufill’ (ibid., pp. 71–2). The broken promise of art is an openness which is removed from this earth. As Mensch argues, in order for something to be beyond the humanized world, to be other than it, it must lack the humanized world (2005, p. 201). In this sense what is beyond is poverty, or lack, and such lack is needed to be present in the subject within the humanized world in order for it to be open to the lack of an other. This is a Xeroxed hollowness that Hopkins captures in the adjective ‘vaulty’.4 The broken vault is a place of gathering, a structure which when cracked reveals its ‘authentic’ roof, that of the heavens. There is a gathering between a firmly established ground and the vault of the sky overhead. This gathering is a process, since evening is straining towards night. Being-vaulty is therefore attunement. This relationship between the earth and sky, mortals and divinities, is captured in this image of the roofless vault. The vault frames the sky just as the tomb frames the night. Without the edges of the roofless walls of the court, the sky would not appear as a dome. In the language of Lacoue-Labarthe quoted earlier, it is the broken edges of the vault that outline the sky. In this way, being-vaulty signifies a bridge between humankind and the gods in the sense that a broken home or an open tomb is needed in order to see the sky above. As Coogan says, ‘instress is the bridge between inscape and the poet’ (my emphasis). For the Heidegger of ‘Building dwelling thinking’, what a bridge (or a thing) does is it gathers [sammeln]. It is within this gathering that the elements of the fourfold (earth and sky, divinities and mortals) play with each other. Heidegger scholar John McCumber defines this sense of play as ‘an interplay of four mobile mirrors, this SpiegelSpiel [Heidegger’s ‘mirror-play’] brings each of the players (mirrors) into a peculiar clarity of essence. Hence none of the four can be understood independently of the others’ (1999, p. 234). It is from within the gathering that the thing-in-itself emerges. This mirror-play can be read as the Xeroxing Ronell foregrounded above. However, before looking towards Heidegger to see how this gathering functions, a naive but important question to ask might be: Can we literally find the elements of the fourfold in ‘Sibyl’?

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At first it seems as if the poem does not fulfill all the required four slots, even though the first two elements of earth and sky seem to be present. Direct references to the earth in the poem are rather grim (but still there): ‘earthless’; ‘For earth her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end,’ and ‘wáre of a wórld where bút these 'twó tell, each off the óther’ are examples. References to the sky are in abundance in this poem of a dark evening, for example: ‘her earliest stars, earl-stars, 'stárs principal, overbend us,/ Fíre-féaturing heaven.’ But what about the divinities? In the section on ‘equal’, Higgins was quoted in reference to the lack of the questioning of the divine in the poem. I disagree with this reading for a simple reason. The poem addresses the unbinding of earth whose dapple is at its end and, for Hopkins, the earth is God in the sense that through inscape God is made present on the earth. For Hopkins, a poem that addresses the loss of earth, light, and dapple (some of Hopkins’ most famous lines are from the beginning of ‘Pied Beauty’, where there is presented quite a different sky in: ‘Glory be to God for dappled things –/ For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow’) is a poem addressing God as much as the beginning of ‘The Wreck’ and its ‘Thou mastering me/ God!’ The poem addresses God through his absence. My argument against Higgins here is that as the loss of nature is addressed throughout ‘Sibyl’, this is inherently an address to God, since to separate God from nature would be unthinkable for Hopkins, and to address the split of nature from God, for Hopkins, is not to assume that split: the poem is this questioning itself. Regarding the fourth part of the fourfold, mortals can be seen at the end of the poem as the generators of the ‘thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grind.’ In order to understand how the four elements play together, Heidegger illustrates their relationship with the image of a bridge. Before a bridge is built, you have just an environment: some land, trees, a river. But once a bridge is in place, all of these things come into definition around this bridge: ‘The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream’ (Heidegger, 1993a, p. 354). The bridge makes a landscape out of land. It makes natural beauty out of nature. The bridge is a place that holds this gathering. ‘Even where the bridge covers the stream, it holds its flow up to the sky by taking it for a moment under the vaulted gateway and then setting it free once more’ (ibid.). The bridge ‘gathers the fourfold in such a way that it allows a site for it’ (ibid., p. 355). The bridge generates the landscape out of the land. At the same time it is that which allows the elements of the fourfold to be: the stream (earth) can pass by underneath, the sky can exist up above.

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Humans (mortals) cross the bridge from one side to another, and by straining on one side to reach the other they may believe in a beyond (divinities). The bridge is that which both gathers and sets free. I believe this is a change in thought for Heidegger regarding the realm of poetic dwelling. Now, instead of being only the space of the potentiality of the poetic and unpoetic (Ereignis), the bridge (or the thing) is that which holds the four, and which allows the sky, divinities, mortals and earth to coincide. But what is it that the bridge does to make it as mirror-play the relationship between the four elements? This can be seen in how the fourfold is not so much four as an incorporation and, in its straining to go beyond, a negation of twos. Hofstadter addresses both Ereignis and the fourfold together: If we were to give the most literal possible translation of das Ereignis it would have to consist of en-, -own-, and -ment: enownment. Enownment is the letting-be-own-to-one-another of whatever is granted belonging-together. It is the letting be married of two or more – Being and time, Being and man, earth and world, earth and sky and mortals and divinities (the fourfold), bridge and river, automobile and speedway, buying and selling commodities, management and labor – which can only be by means of belonging to one another. Enownment is not their belonging, but what lets their belonging be. Sein is not Seiendheit. (1979, p. 29)

In discussing the fourfold Hofstadter lists a number of one-plus-ones: being and time, being and man, earth and world, and so on. What is important for the fourfold is not that it is four per se, but rather that it is a thinking beyond the two. In order to do this, as Hopkins’ poetry shows, an incorporation and negation of the two opens a rift from which what Stambaugh calls a richer description of being may come forth: The Fourfold . . . is an even richer name for being than is Appropriation, the belonging together of man and being. It introduces something sorely neglected by almost all philosophers, including the early Heidegger himself: nature. It also includes the elements of divinity: the godlike ones (die Göttlichen). Finally, with the Fourfold, Heidegger tries to work out belonging together, to delineate the kind of relatedness. (1992, p. 83)

What does the inclusion of nature and the divinities add here? Relating to the reading of Hölderlin’s poem and Hopkins’ ‘Binsey

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Poplars’ above, both nature and the divinities are aligned with a reading of not of this earth (which also falls under the term ‘world’) but rather that earth, of that which is not of the humanized world. Rather than the divine one could think of this as the cosmos. As Adorno indicates, the only way to access this beyond is through the humanized world, but through the broken promise it offers. This broken promise is the mirror-play of what brings these elements together. But how does one enter this play? It is this point of the relatedness, of how to access the relation, that is being delineated here. It is also the aspect of the fourfold for which Heidegger comes under the most criticism, and where, I believe, ‘Sibyl’ provides an answer. Stambaugh’s criticism of the fourfold is that in order to think the fourfold properly, you have to already have it; there is no entrance point into the fourfold way of thinking (ibid.). I believe that an entry point is what is made manifest in Hopkins’ ‘Sibyl’ in the way the poem provides the inclusion of earthless in the thinking of earth, of the inclusion of the polarization (and hence, Ereignis) of right-wrong, black-white within its warning against that very polarization. In the words of Lacoue-Labarthe, In the ‘time of distress’ and the ‘world’s night,’ between, as Heidegger says, ‘the ‘no more’ of gods who have fled and the ‘not yet’ of the god to come,’ the possibility of poetry, and with it that of a world, is ecstasy. And risk; one may be bested, may sink or ‘touch bottom,’ as Nietzsche says, ‘by way of the truth.’ (1999, p. 30)

To touch bottom by way of truth is, in short, to indicate the entry point to the gathering as that which is not pure, as negation, or as error. By error I do not in any way mean to insinuate something ‘not correct’. By ‘error’ I mean that what ‘Sibyl’ offers is not a clean argument, but rather that the poem shelters branches and tangents that should be discarded in order to make the argument cleaner (these branches were given physicality in Gardner’s diagram of the lines from ‘The Bugler’s First Communion’); it is the sheltering of these tangents that generates the fourfold. The main manner in which we have come across these tangents has been through repetitions and what seem like re-wordings within the poem. This can be seen in ‘Sibyl’, for example in the following lines: womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night her earliest stars, earl-stars, 'stárs principal Disremembering, dísmémbering

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óur night 'whélms, whélms, ánd will end us Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind / Off hér reckon but, reck but, mind / But thése two

Illustrated here are a number of examples from ‘Sibyl’ where the accidental is alive in the finished product. These examples of ‘error’ are not meant to suggest a poetry that is more ‘raw’, meaning one that does not have the mediating effect of revision to separate the finished product from the ‘pure’ emotional experience from which it emanates. ‘Sibyl’ is a highly stylized poem. There is nothing ‘natural’ about these stutterings. It took Hopkins over two years to write it (White, 2002, p. 24), and Hopkins’ revisions of another poem, ‘(Carrion Comfort)’, will play a role in the next chapter. What these constructed stutterings do is to hold the question open; they deny not only the space for an answer to be formed, but even the opportunity for a question to be completely formulated. Error, the interrupted utterance (this was seen in ‘The Wreck’ for example in the line ‘Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?’) is what keeps the mirror-play in play. There is a quivering allowed to presence itself in these jitterings, a quivering that is tied to the anxiety of the poem, that keeps the reader in a place of coming closer to understanding but yet at a distance of irresolute meaning. This I believe is the meaning of the ‘vaulty’ broken roof of Hopkins’ court, a space that is pointing outwards through a jagged viewfinder. Here is the entrance to the thinking of the fourfold. Fynsk also collocates the stuttering and a notion of being ‘on the right path’ in Heidegger: Only our experience, perhaps, of a certain pressure (a contracting and a kind of surge – the same pressure we feel when we cannot find the right word) can give us an indication that we are still on the right path. (1996, p. 70)

But in ‘Building dwelling thinking’ I do not believe that Heidegger was too far from this notion of error. For him, ‘The proper dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the essence of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell ’ (1993a, p. 363). This ever-anew in Heidegger is turned into an ever-making-‘mistakes’ in Hopkins. It is the notion of ‘error’ that generates the space in which the fourfold might be thought. In the final section on ‘. . . stupendous’ this ‘error’ is examined along with the notion of gesture. But first, the penultimate word in Hopkins’ syntagm.

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voluminous, Again, a turn to White. Here is his passage on ‘voluminous’ in full: Note the concealed ‘luminous’. Vastness on a three-dimensional scale; the container of this volume is the vault of ‘vaulty’. Compare Milton, Paradise Regained, IV. 382: . . . if I read aught in Heaven Or Heav’n write aught of Fate, by what the Stars Voluminous, or single characters, In their conjunction met, give me to spell. (2002, p. 28)

The question to ask White here is what the relationship between vaulty and voluminous is. White says that ‘the container of this volume is the vault of “vaulty”’; so there is a relationship of container to contained. For Hopkins, the broken vault is the sky, ‘the spherical vault or dome of heaven’; but in what way does the vault contain the volume? In relation to the sky, Hopkins might have been thinking of the more technical meaning of volume, as in the filling-out of threedimensional space. Volume is derived from the Latin volumen, meaning a roll or scroll and hence the word is also used for a book; voluminous is used to mean filling-out three-dimensional space but, it also carries the sense of a writer filling up or out a book. This is a thinking of the three-dimensionality mentioned earlier in the examination of ‘The Wreck’. What was stated there was that in Hopkins’ poem there was a three-dimensionality, meaning, that there was a space before and behind the narrative ‘I’ of the poem. In Heidegger there is a being faced with the potential of the fearsome coming closer, and in Hopkins, anxiety is not only coming from above but also from below. Again, this is a space ‘beyond’. White asks us to keep in mind the lines from Milton’s Paradise Regained. In these lines heaven is aligned with stars that conjoin. This is the language of astronomy and astrology. The reason that astrology is important here is that it is also a kind of knowledge that is ‘beyond’ humanized experience. As Agamben argues in Infancy and History, in the late antiquity of Greece it was astrology that acted as the gathering of mortals and the divine, of the earth and sky. Before this connection, there was a separation between knowledge gained by the experience of humanity and that gained by reading the stars. Knowledge from the stars was always separate, unalterable by human conduct. It existed before humans

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and it will exist after, unlike finite experience. However, ‘Connecting the “heavens” of a pure intelligence with the “earth” of individual experience is the great discovery of astrology’ (2007a, p. 23). The filling-out of the book of humanity is this connection between the heavens and individual experience, partly because the combination is ‘a necessary condition of modern science’ (ibid.). This connection is necessary because modern science allows for a belief in a knowledge, laws or axioms that are beyond an individual’s experience. In one sense experience is diminished (the subtitle of Agamben’s book is On the Destruction of Experience), and on the other hand the possibility for a scientific disposition is born. The three-dimensionality of ‘voluminous’ is connected to an attempt to think beyond poetic dwelling. As both the filling of space and the writing of books, voluminous takes on a thickness beyond a dichotomy of poetic dwelling. Going beyond this dichotomy is part of the connection between experience and astrology: their commingling is the play of the fourfold, and it is generative of knowledge. Voluminous as filling-out is gathering. Such a gathering is contained in being-vaulty because it is that which makes being-vaulty possible: it is its ground.5

. . . stupendous The argument of this last section on ‘Sibyl’ rests in part on the ellipsis dots that come before the last word in the first line of the poem: ‘. . . stupendous’ (although only two ellipsis dots appear in the first edition of the poem, subsequent editions using three ellipsis have also made an appearance) and those in ‘. . . Poetically man dwells . . .’ and Hölderlin’s ‘In lovely blueness . . .’ What is argued is that these ellipsis dots function as a gesture, meaning that they function as a means of communication beyond the humanized world of language. The term ‘gesture’ will be defined along with both Hopkins’ sense of self in the poem and Heidegger’s thinking at the end of his Contributions to Philosophy where he considers what he calls ‘the last god’. Then the concept of gesture will be used to look back upon the poem as a whole. White’s take on ‘. . stupendous’ is the most detailed exegesis he provides on any word in the whole first line of the poem. White discusses a ‘deep breath’ which the ellipsis dots bring forth from the reader, claiming that The three points indicate the process of emerging from the stupefaction, while ‘stupendous’ describes and summarises not the six words,

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which represent qualities emanating from the sunset, but the effect the qualities and the whole sight have on him. (2002, p. 29)

In effect the ellipsis dots provide the space for a kind of turn, one away from describing the sunset and its qualities and towards the narrator of the poem. At the same time, the consonance/ alliteration between the s of the last two terms ‘voluminous, . . . stupendous’ both ties ‘stupendous’ to the rest of the line (through alliteration of the first s) and leads on beyond the line through (through consonance of the final s). The movement of the final term creates a tension over the rift of the ellipsis while driving the reader beyond the end of the line. Much of this tension resides in that the space for this abyss is not taken up by letters but rather by punctuation. How does the punctuation of this line function? And how does it relate to the poem as a ‘whole’? In examining the role of the gesture of the ellipsis dots, I will be looking at philosopher and literary theorist Werner Hamacher. A one-sentence parable of Kafka’s which rephrases the biblical injunction not to create any graven images illustrates the role of the gesture in a simultaneous incorporation and negation of the law. As a physical movement lacking verbal content, a gesture could be a head sunk down, picking a leaf from the ground, or the readiness of a waiter. These are motions that, for Hamacher, ‘point towards what Kafka found graspable and yet incomprehensible’ (1996, p. 329). In this sense a gesture is a hesitation before signification, and is actually nothing but this hesitation. Hamacher argues, Gesture is what remains of language after meaning is withdrawn from it, and it is gesture that withdraws from meaning . . . just as the reader is left over from the text, gesture is left over from language, from its law. This gesture carries the mere possibility of language and at the same time holds back its actual arrival. (Ibid., pp. 329–30)

Gesture is a place removed from language, removed from the law, and yet it makes this law possible. Hamacher illustrates this place of removal with an example of the use of ellipsis dots in what is perhaps the shortest parable ever written. According to Deuteronomy 4:23, there exists the canonical law ‘Take heed unto yourselves, lest ye forget the covenant of the Lord your God, which he made with you, and make you a graven image, or the likeness of any thing, which the Lord thy God hath forbidden thee.’ The issue raised in this law is that the writing of the law actually violates the law itself; the letters of the law are themselves

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a graven image. Kafka illustrates this with his ‘micro-parable’: ‘“Thou shalt – no image . . .”’ (qtd. in Hamacher, 1996, p. 336). Hamacher reads this as the wording of the law now corresponding to the prohibition itself; in order to correspond to the law, the wording of the law needs to hesitate, to stumble. ‘By adhering to the prohibition, however, the only sentence in which it could present itself as law is interrupted’ (ibid.).6 The ellipsis dots of Kafka’s micro-parable are performative in the sense that they enact the law, but there is hesitation in that in order to perform there needs to be a space opened by the absence of language, by the gesture of punctuation. Borkowska also makes the connection between Hopkins and the fourfold via such openness: The idea of the perfect union of the divine and the mortal, sky and earth seems to reverberate in Heidegger’s obscure concept of the fourfold (das Gevierte [sic]) defined as man’s opening to being, abiding in front of deities in the territory where being breaks itself into openess [sic]. The Fourfold as ‘gathering, assembling, letting stay is the thinging of things’ and, as such, the appearing of tradition in the opening of the presence. (Borkowska, 1992, pp. 48–9)

While I would take issue with Borkowska’s use of the ‘perfect’ union here: the stuttering location of openness in a relationship to things themselves is essential. A vision of this location is actually punctuation. Agamben discusses the role of ellipsis dots in relation to the title of philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s essay ‘Immanence: A Life . . .’ Agamben examines how the ellipsis dots both close and leave open simultaneously. This he relates to one of the very first treaties on punctuation, Dionysius Thrax’s Grammar. In the Grammar the collocation between ellipsis dots and breath is made, ‘the middle dot indicates where one is to breathe’ (Agamben, 1999, p. 223). While this leaves one wondering what the purpose of the other two dots may be, in the case of Deleuze’s title, the punctuation serves, as it does in Kafka’s micro-parable, as a hesitation, a breath, a kind of indefinition. But how does the hesitating gesture relate to the ‘. . stupendous’ of ‘Sibyl’? And how might this be understood in relation to Heidegger’s thinking of ‘the last god’? ‘Stupendous’ is perhaps the most positive word in the poem (and an interesting frame with ‘earnest’) and before it can appear there is a gesture of hesitation. The term stupendous itself means to be so

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overwhelmed by something that you are stunned. The term comes from the Latin gerund stupere, which is also the root of stupid. While stupendous and stupid may not seem related at first, both indicate a hesitation, in a sense of a removal from intelligence (which has been rigorously thought by Ronell in her text Stupidity). I read the gesture of the ellipsis dots in much the same way as I read the backtracking and staccatoed voice of lines such as ‘Óur évening is over us; óur night 'whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.’ In this sense hesitation, whether it be in the form of punctuation, repetition, polarity or rephrasing, takes on the role of the gesture as what, in the words of Hamacher, ‘carries the mere possibility of language and at the same time holds back its actual arrival’, i.e., it is an indication of language communicating itself (or what was called prophecy). This is a reworking of the role of the potentiality. My argument in this section is that this space of the gesture is what holds or gathers the thinking of the fourfold. This holding, or sheltering, is the function of the bridge for Heidegger, or of the broken and roofless court for Hopkins. This place is a way of thinking, of being, in that its sheltering allows generation to take place. Hesitation can also be read as a kind of ‘error’ (or stupidity, if one does not answer a question posed) which was discussed above as a possible entry point into a thinking of the fourfold. As a final gesture in this non-linear reading of poet and philosopher, I believe that Heidegger develops his thoughts regarding gathering in what seems to be a somewhat incongruently religious, or at least spiritual, turn of thought in his later writing, meaning his thinking of ‘the last god’ in the penultimate section of Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning). This thinking will be shown to be one way of thinking the gesture. For Heidegger, it is impossible to tell whether the last gods have left us or if they are coming towards us. There is a feeling that the time of the gods has passed, that a life in which there is a context for the gods to exist in discourse and worship is no longer relevant. But it is exactly this distress over the abandonment of the gods that causes a state of anxiety and therefore an openness to them. Anxiety here is the state between the departure of the last gods and the arrival of the next. Heidegger scholar David Crownfield, in his essay ‘The last god’, argues that To live toward the return of the god, to keep the commandments and trust the promises, is exposed to nondelivery; to repudiate the god and strive toward mastery of our fate, or toward reconciliation with

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it, is equally vulnerable to nonattainment. And either way mortality is ineluctable. Both the essential exposure to refusal and its intractability are decisive for the sense of ‘to be.’ (2001, p. 220)

In order for the gods to be present, there needs to be both exposure and refusal (or inclusion and negation). Otherwise there is no place to shelter the gods; there is no opening-anxiety. I believe this relationship between gods and humans is what Heidegger means, in what is perhaps one of his most controversial statements in a religious context, that ‘The utmost god needs be-ing’ (Heidegger, 1999, p. 287). Both ‘utmost’ god and the ‘last’ god are valid translations of Heidegger’s ‘letzte’ (Crownfield, 2001, p. 217). This need has already been shown to be a part of the thinking of Ereignis in Heidegger’s ‘man is capable of poetry at any time only to the degree to which his being is appropriate to that which itself has a liking for man and therefore needs his presence’ (emphasis added, qtd. above). This need comes from a place of lack. In The Disappearance of God, J. Hillis Miller argues that experience of such a lack is not only paramount in Hopkins’ poetry, but also of the spiritual history of the nineteenth century: Hopkins wavers neither in his faith nor in his vocation. His experience is not incompatible with Catholicism. It is a spiritual desolation, a vanishing of God from the soul which, as St. Ignatius said, is God’s way of testing the soul, and showing it how powerless it is by itself. But though the inner experience of Hopkins’ last years is perfectly compatible with Catholic tradition, it is also to be understood in the context of the spiritual history of the nineteenth century. The experience recorded in the ‘terrible’ sonnets, and in the late letters and retreat notes, is a striking example of the no longer and not yet, a time of the absence of God. (2000, p. 352)

For Heidegger, the need of the gods comes about in the strife between their coming and going, what Miller calls ‘the no longer and not yet’. But what should be taken into account here, and I believe it is the weakness of Crownfield’s reading (and is the connection between Ereignis and the fourfold I would like to stress), is a warning that Heidegger gives right at the beginning of his section on ‘The last god’. For Heidegger, the refusal, the hesitation is ‘neither flight nor arrival, and also not flight and arrival, but rather something originary, the fullness of granting be-ing in refusal’ (1999, p. 253). This ‘refusal’

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I see as the gathering of the fourfold in negation, or hesitation. This negation is seen in the imperative warning ‘Sibyl’ offers in its closing lines: Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds – black, white; 'right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these 'twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, 'thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

Both Hopkins and Heidegger caution against the dualities of neither/nor and the and. Hopkins’ strength is his inclusion of such dualities through a negation, for while ‘Sibyl’ is often read as a poem of the end of the world, a sonnet of the flattening equivalence of Judgment Day, it is also a poem about the generation of the world. Derrida thinks such a presentation of negation as an access to being in his Aporias. In discussing the aporia of whether one can know or actually expect their own death (which is the negation, or the absence of life), Derrida argues is this aporia the fact that the impossibility would be possible and would appear as such, as impossible, as an impossibility that can nevertheless appear or announce itself as such, an impossibility whose appearing as such would be possible . . ., an impossibility that one can await or expect, an impossibility the limits of which one can expect or at whose limits one can wait [aux limites de laquelle on peut s’attendre], these limits of the as such being, as we have seen, the limits of truth, but also of the possibility of truth? (1993, p. 73)

The appearance of inscape as impossible is actually the appearance of that which is beyond the humanized world. By this I mean that in order for something not to be a part of the humanized world, it must lack this world. Therefore it must still be impossible to this world. The aporia of the appearance of this impossibility is found in the manner ‘Sibyl’ shelters error and hesitation through the warning of ‘wáre’ and of the two spools. Error and hesitation are found in repetition and ellipsis, and their sheltering is found in the inclusion of such gestures within the poem. As such these stutterings are removed from an everyday manner of communication, as a beyond. This celebration of stuttering is what I see as an access into a thinking of the more

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than two, a thinking which necessarily contains the two, but also more.7 In order to help clarify this thought, in the next chapter Hopkins’ poem ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ provides another avenue along which to explore a reading of the fourfold.

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Chapter 4 ‘(Carrion Comfort)’: That which is Not Itself

One of the ways to access being, as Heidegger’s reading of aletheia has partially indicated, is through the step-back de-sisting offered by repetition. Repetition is not recollection, the latter being the unifying, time-smoothing reification that memory uses to sort out the mess of the every day. Instead, repetition is an action, a movement, but a movement of the same, the same and same again, and this repetition, as a removal, at least as an attempt at a removal of interpretation, allows something else to come through, a minimal difference, a broken promise. In this sense it is an attempt to be situated ‘before’ the metaphysics of appearance and hiddenness, although such a claim needs to be addressed in its impossibility, as Hopkins does through his incorporation of dichotomy through its negation. Repetition here is both a closeness and a distance, what LacoueLabarthe calls de-sisting. It is de-sisting because there is a removal from the idle-talk of the everyday of interpretation, elaboration and enunciation. However, as Lacoue-Labarthe warns, it is not a ‘complete’ negation: it is also incorporation. It is a step towards silence. But this step towards silence takes place on floorboards that creak, because this step towards silence, at least in the examples thought through here, takes place in the form of poetry. This is not to say that it cannot happen in other places, in a kiss or a purchase or a fight, but poetry is a place where the de-sisting that is a part of language, a part that mortals usually negotiate to ignore, is allowed some space to breathe. Poetry is a place where de-sisting can be sheltered. Hopkins shelters this de-sisting in repetition, error, linguistic deviation, coinages, metric irregularities and semantic conundrums; Hopkins shelters de-distancing in the finitude of language. The reason that this sheltering is important is because it is a manner of being who we are before we forget who we are in the distracted business of the everyday. This strife-filled being we are surrounds us every 83

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minute, we speak it every time we open our mouths, it speaks us, as Heidegger says, but it takes silence to listen. This silence is created in the action which is repetition, an action that creates a minimal difference through which aletheia can, sometimes, be heard. The sheltered error was seen in ‘Sibyl’ in the incorporation of the duality of Ereignis as the bringing forth of the unconcealed through the strife of the concealed, through negation into the gathering of das Geviert. Hopkins worked hard to preserve this messy coming forth. It was not easy. It is a highly wrought style. In his book on Hopkins’ last sonnets, Inspirations Unbidden, Daniel Harris traces a number of the changes in the final, ‘terrible’ sonnets, of which ‘(Carrion Comfort)’1 is a part. Harris says of the poem, the speaker finally drops his Job-like mask of self-justification and confesses an absolute terror of confrontation: ‘me frantic to avoid thee and flee.’ It is instructive to note that Hopkins could not drop that mask immediately: the phrasing in his first draft: – ‘me frantic to arise and flee’ – shrinks from the emotion of dread. (1982, p. 98)

However, the ‘me frantic to avoid thee and flee’ that Harris quotes is actually more ambiguous than he allows. ‘Thee’ appears only in the first stanza, and not the second. Harris seems to assume that the ‘thee’ referred to here in the last line of the first stanza is God (because he calls the speaker ‘Job-like’), but perhaps there is another reading possible. In order to facilitate this reading, ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ is presented here in full: ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist – slack they may be – these last strands of man In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be. But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan, O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear. Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer. Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród

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Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (My God!) my God.

In the first line of the poem there is a figure of apostrophe: ‘I’ll not . . . Despair, not feast on thee’. What seems to be addressed here as ‘thee’ is not god but rather ‘Despair’, which is personified through the use of the capital letter. The rude and ‘terrible’ addressee in ‘O thou terrible’ that rocks a foot against the speaker is what the speaker wants to avoid in the last line. There is a shrinking away here, as Harris indicates, but the object of fear is not the same in the first stanza and the second. In the second stanza, God is addressed, but there is always a distance. God is addressed in the third person, as ‘him’ or as ‘my God’ rather than Hopkins’ usual God-directed poems. One question is whether in despair it is possible to address a god at all. What is important for this reading is not so much the answer to the question, but rather that Hopkins is able to hold the question forth within the poem. Hopkins is able to shelter this avoiding, although by sheltering what is not meant is hiding but rather a holding close and preserving, a preserving that takes place out in the open of the broken vault. Martin, in his biography of Hopkins, also directs attention to the brokenness of Hopkins’ experience in his last sonnets. Martin says the terrible sonnets ‘are not emotion recollected in tranquillity or even in terror, they are experiences so immediate that the reader constantly feels that they wholly possessed Hopkins at the very moment of composition, as indeed they probably did’ (1991, p. 383). Martin sees the terrible sonnets as removed from the placid recollection in tranquillity that tends to unify the past into a neat package for the mind to process, learn from or dismiss. Instead he locates the poems in experience, in the heat of composition. I would perhaps rather locate the poems in the heat of revision. This revision is a part of the incorporation of the negative that is complex, meaning both positive and generative. Again, Lacoue-Labarthe, in his Heideggarian reading of Celan in Poetry as Experience, warns against a straightforward understanding of the negative: That Heidegger’s ceaseless return to the motif of pain in his readings of Hölderlin, Trakl, George – of poetry – is a sure indication that in his eyes, it is urgent to pry the essence of pain, and thus language, away from its negative, laborious and servile definition. Or that it is urgent to think of difference as other than negative. (1999, p. 99)

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One of the main arguments of this book is the unveiling of a generative aspect through the incorporation of error and repetition. The first quatrain of ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ contains such incorporation. Four ‘nots’ in the first two lines and three ‘cans’ – ‘cry I can no more. I can;/ Can something, hope’ – in the third and fourth. This is not a servile negativity, nor a servile sense of repetition. Rather repetition is a form of searching, of grasping for the right way to pose a question. This ‘right way’ is actually found in the process of imperfect grasping itself. Here is a way, through the sheltering of ‘error’, of the poem’s ability to ask what kind of thing can happen. This opening held in Hopkins’ poem is similar to the difference Aristotle sees between the historian and the poet in his Poetics: ‘the difference lies in the fact that the historian speaks of what has happened, the poet of the kind of thing that can happen’ (1970, pp. 32–3). This reading of error is an argument for the strength of the weakest link. What I mean is that it is the weakest link in a chain that often offers strength to the rest of the group (the weakest animal defends the others by being taken as prey, Judas is Jesus’ greatest friend by being a traitor and thus allowing the crucifixion hence resurrection to happen). The revisions that the poem underwent show how the poem was crafted in order to be, in a sense, weaker rather than stronger. This can be seen in older versions of the first line of the poem: Out, carrion comfort, despair! not, I’ll not feast on thee; [Despair, out, carrion sweetness, off! not feast on thee;] (reproduced in Harris, 1982, pp. 148–9)

What Hopkins revises into the poem is more repetition, more questionings, and he strains out the more positive ‘Out, carrion comfort, despair!’ The poem is made weaker, there is wrought less interpretation and more letting-be. Virginia Ellis reads the revisions to this line in a similar manner, although she does not develop the potentiality allowed by weakness: ‘The negative weariness of the opening line resulted from several stages of revision that steadily sap the strength of the original’ (1991, p. 255). In my reading, Hopkins can be seen revising his poem to come to a position that is closer to Heidegger’s Gelassenheit, the thinking that is aletheia. He is moving his poem closer to silence. Scholar Karsten Harries, in an essay on Heidegger and Trakl titled ‘Language and silence’, says that ‘Poetry communicates the poet’s journey away from the established community into the night. The language of poetry has its place in-between idle talk

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and silence’ (1979, p. 164). Poetry, as Hopkins and others such as Hölderlin, Celan and Deguy write it, is an attempt at silence in words, and one way of doing this is not through less words but more, through repetition used as a means of pointing towards a stuttering interpretation. In Martin’s discussion of the poem he provides a curious quote from a letter from Hopkins to Bridges. Hopkins says: ‘“I have after long silence written two sonnets, which I am touching: if ever anything was written in blood one of these was”’ (qtd. in Martin, 1991, p. 382). Which poem from the ‘terrible sonnets’ was the one written in blood is unknown, although Gardner assumes it is ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ (1944, p. 333). But which poem it actually was is of little importance. What is interesting in this quote is the gathering of four elements, which will form a rough guide for looking at the poem as a whole: in a slightly different order than presented in the Hopkins quote above, these four elements are writing, blood, touch and silence. The reason these elements are being used here is to show how the fourfold is not dependent on its terms but rather on the movement of their gathering, which I argue is a negation of dichotomy from within. The first term that will be developed is that of the gesture of writing. This gesture, as the discussion of Hamacher and Kafka indicated above, is one way of holding, and not abandoning, the hermeneutic circle. By this I mean that the gathering of the fourfold as a means of poetics includes the negation of the hermeneutic circle as a way of holding it, or of holding the elements of the fourfold in the openness of being. Such a holding can be seen in the gesture of writing, of writing as a presencing of the errors of being. This can be seen in an often-quoted passage from Plato’s ‘Seventh letter’: . . . any serious student of serious realities will shrink from making truth the helpless object of men’s ill-will by committing it to writing. In a word, the conclusion to be drawn is this; when one sees a written composition, whether it be on law by a legislator or on any other subject, one can be sure, if the writer is a serious man, that his book does not represent his most serious thoughts; they remain stored up in the noblest region of his personality. If he is really serious in what he has set down in writing ‘then surely’ not the gods but men ‘have robbed him of his wits’. (Plato, 1973, pp. 140–1)

Plato’s fear of the not-best of humankind being represented in their writing indicates how writing can function as a storehouse for

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the clearing of being. What I mean by the clearing of being here is that writing can hold the traces of a stuttering. As Derrida has indicated, writing is not anterior to speech. The errors that Plato saw in writing are taken by Derrida as a starting point, an origin, but an origin to both speech and writing, as an aporia that needs to be unconcealed and sheltered. For Derrida ‘Discontinuity, delay, heterogeneity, and alterity already were working upon the voice, producing it from its first breath as a system of differential traces, that is, as writing before the letter’ (1982, p. 291). A writing before the letter is a communication of delay (part of the meaning of Derrida’s différance), it is writing’s removal from the answer, a removal from a full-blown step forward. What becomes foregrounded is a not-knowing what to say, a kind of stupidity. By stupidity I am looking towards the thought of Ronell who also embraces the kind of nakedness Plato reads in writing. However, Ronell does not take sides of for or against, but rather takes up the position of Nietzsche’s amor fati, or not-turning away (Nietzsche, 1974, p. 276). Ronell says, Stupidity sets the mood that afflicts anyone who presumes to write. To the extent that writing appears to be commandeered by some internal alterity that proves always to be too immature, rather loudmouthed, often saddled with a pronounced narcissistic disorder . . . to the extent that the powerhouse inside you is actually too smart for the dumb postings of language. (2002, pp. 24–5)

Ronell describes Plato’s imagined intelligent being who is trapped inside and held back by the immature words on the page. The page proves your stupidity; it is a difficult physicality to ignore. Stupidity, however, is read here as a kind of potentiality, it is a stupendous suspension. Suspension here is meant as a gesture that aims not at something always already in writing, but rather at something that is always already created every time a word is created, a movement that is captured and confounded on the page. Such error can be seen in the beginning of the second stanza of ‘(Carrion Comfort)’: Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.

The speaker is not even sure if he has kissed the rod, and then backtracks and says it was the hand, and then suddenly another part

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of the body, the heart, leaps. Who is this body that laps strength, steals joy, laughs and cheers? While the initial reading of the poem indicated that God was the addressee of the second stanza, there is further ambiguity. The addressee here is ‘the hero’ who flung and trod on the speaker with his foot. The agent who plods in the poem thus far has been Despair as indicated in the first stanza. Thus it seems that ‘the hero’ of the second stanza, at least at first, is also Despair. While readers such as Ellis see the speaker and not a personified Despair as the agent (1991, pp. 256; 263), the ambiguity here, which should be sheltered rather than solved, allows for a Despair who laps, laughs and cheers. All of these actions are those of a mouth, a mouth that is also kissing the rod, or perhaps the hand, or perhaps it only (seems) as if it were happening. However, if it is Despair who is cheering, the next lines increase the ambiguity: Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, foot trod Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one?

The question posed by the reading here is whether Despair should cheer ‘the hero’, which is Despair himself, or the ‘me’ that fought despair. Or perhaps Despair is cheering both; Despair is cheering itself for putting the speaker in a position from which his chaff can be flung from his wheat, and Despair is cheering the speaker who has successfully not committed suicide in the process. However, this reading is further complicated by the end of the poem: That night, that year Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (My God!) my God.

The end of the poem forms a realization (with bracketed exclamation) that the wrestling done in that ‘now done’ year was actually a wrestling with God rather than merely depression.2 In other words, God = Despair. If this is so, and the wretched Despair is really a path towards God, then what to make of the first lines of the poem where Despair is that which will not be feasted upon? Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist – slack they may be – these last strands of man In me

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Why is feasting upon God/Despair resisted here? Feasting in the poem, as Harris argues, ‘defines the semibarbaric nature of colloquy: the communication of messages is accomplished through cannibalism, not language’ (1982, p. 97). This not-feasting, which is mirrored in the more restrained mouth-action of kissing in the second stanza, is again an incorporation of negation, a de-sisting. This is the movement sheltered in Hopkins’ poems: a not turning a way and yet a not being completely subsumed. This is the moment of the ‘last god’ of Heidegger, a position where one god has left and the others have not yet arrived. Feasting is actually given a more central role in one aspect of Hopkins interpretation regarding ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ that has been, as far as I have discovered, completely ignored in the academic literature. This aspect is Bram Stoker Award-winning horror writer Dan Simmons’ novel Carrion Comfort. The reason that Simmons’ novel is being brought in here is that it is an over the top but intelligent look at the reflexive nature of feasting on both blood, which is the second of four terms from Hopkins’ letter, and anxiety, which functions as a reading of Hopkins’ poem, albeit in the form of a horror novel. Simmons takes the title of his novel from Hopkins’ poem and quotes the poem not only at the beginning of his book but a number of times throughout. Simmons is a genre writer who likes ‘literature’ and he often uses more traditional authors as the stepping stones for his novels. Carrion Comfort is the story of a group of ‘mind vampires’ who are engaged in a game of chess, using the world as their board. These mind vampires are not great in number but that is counterbalanced by their ability to take over most people’s minds, after a bit of conditioning, and make them do their bidding, which usually involves either sex or murder. The story focuses on Saul Laski, a Polish Jew and concentration camp survivor who is on the hunt for his camp’s commander, known simply by his military rank as the Oberst (and who is now a Hollywood producer). The Oberst is a mind vampire who took over Saul’s mind while Saul was his prisoner. What I see as important here is the way Hopkins’ poem is being appropriated and given life as a signature of evil. The poem is seen as a description of evil, as the context of the use of the word ‘carrion’ throughout the novel shows – the word is used, for example, to describe the breath of one under the control of a vampire (Simmons, 1989, p. 454) and also to describe actors in general (ibid, p. 610). In addition, Simmons’ reading of evil in the poem has consequences for its last salvational lines.

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The first reference to Hopkins is in the epigraph to the book. Most of the first three lines of ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ are quoted: Not, I’ll not, carrion comfort, despair, not feast on thee; Not untwist – slack they may be – these last strands of man In me or, most weary, cry I can no more . . .

Simmons both cuts off and extends the poem. He cuts off the poem by not allowing the next lines of the quatrain to appear: I can; Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.

He extends the poem by turning the period which follows ‘I can no more’ into a set of ellipsis dots. Ellipsis dots were seen as a major component in the interpretation of ‘Sibyl’ as a non-verbal gesture of gathering, as a means of encompassing what had come before in the first line in the poem in an extra-linguistic movement of reticence. While Simmons cuts off the next relatively more positive lines of the poem, the ellipsis he sets into the text lean towards and encompass what is to come in the novel. It is a smart if invasive move on Simmons’ part, as he allows the epigraph of the novel to move throughout the work in a way that a denial of suicide would not do. This extension of life should not appear incongruent in a novel about vampires. As Laurence A. Rickels argues in The Vampire Lectures, ‘The blood and the life have been given a long-standing equation’ (1999, p. 7). From the Greeks only being able to speak to the dead after a drink of blood to the guarantee of eternal life promised by Christ’s blood and the blood of virgins being prescribed in the Middle Ages as a ‘cure-all’ (ibid.); blood and ellipsis, the latter of which can be read as an extra-diegetic breath, have a history. Within the narration of Carrion Comfort there is only one moment of explicit intertextuality relating to Hopkins, and that is when one of the mind vampires, Melanie, is speaking: I despair at the rise of modern violence. I truly give into despair at times, that deep, futureless pit of despair which Hopkins called carrion comfort. I watch the American slaughterhouse, the casual attacks on popes, presidents, and uncounted others, and I wonder if there are many more out there with the Ability [to control the minds of others] or if butchery has simply become the modern way of life. (Simmons, 1982, p. 18)

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The speaker in ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ does not feast on despair, but rather merely kisses the rod. Melanie, on the other hand, does feast. She takes the despair from Hopkins’ poem and admits that it is an accurate description of those with the Ability, but she also sees that while the Ability is something shared by only a few, its effects are pervasive in the non-vampire world. This is a mirror of the ellipsis Simmons inserts into Hopkins’ poem, extending the poem beyond the closure of its quatrain, just as Melanie extends the horrors of the Ability beyond the mind vampires that possess it. Taking up another angle, Simmons faces one of the fundamental ambiguities of the poem: Where are the feared and fearing of the poem located? Simmons allows one of the mind vampires, Melanie, to name and feel the deep despair of Hopkins. She locates this despair both inside herself as a vampire and outside herself in the nonvampire world. The anxiety that is fear is contained both in the blood-thirsty murderer and outside, in her victims. Despair goes beyond. But Melanie seems afraid of the non-vampires in the quote above. In this sense it is a god, or the all-powerful, which fears the mortal. There is a commingling, or as Ellis argues the speaker of Hopkins’ poem ‘becomes almost one with the divine Hunter’ (Ellis 1991, p. 254). This intertwining of hunter and hunted in Carrion Comfort is perhaps its clearest reflection of Hopkins’ poem and points towards the rereading offered above of the first lines of the poem, especially once one makes the connection between God and Despair (the only two capitalized nouns). Not feasting on Despair is what keeps the last strands of the speaker from untwisting. Feasting, in this sense, would be an act of incorporation, of turning what is other into me through mastication and digestion. The movement of ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ is that of a closeness and becoming ‘almost one’, but also of the struggle or strain to maintain difference.3 It is a poem of closeness rather than opposition, or as Harris argues, it is ‘pinioned between damnation and disaster, not damnation and grace’ (Harris, 1982, p. 100). This difference is seen in the straining of night in ‘Sibyl’ and in the concern of Melanie that there is or will be no difference between mind-vampires and their victims. They will be too close. A gathering that is almost ‘too close’ leads into a thought of touch, the third term from Hopkins’ letter quoted above (which mentions writing, blood, touch and silence). For Nancy, the non-systematic touch at the heart of gathering is related to, and yet goes beyond, the mirror-play of Heidegger (1993a, p. 276) as a place in which the rupture of the one touching the beyond can be sheltered. The reason that touching is Nancy’s reading of this kind of gathering is that

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touch is the extra-sense among senses, that which comes forth from the body but does not give signification of the body (1993b, p. 198). Touch is the relation of the body to that which it is with. Touch is what is always already my body and that which allows my body to be a part of the world. For Heidegger, the body is usually a topic to be skipped over. However, he did develop his thought on the body in a series of lectures that lasted for a decade, beginning in September 1959 as lectures to physicians and psychiatrists at the University of Zurich’s medical clinic. As Kevin Aho summarizes them, ‘Heidegger wants to turn our attention to the ordinary activity of human existence itself that underlies and makes possible any and all theorizing. According to Heidegger, we are “always already” (immer schon) thrown into a shared socio-historical world’ (2005, p. 3). Dasein is then a way of being outside the human body, but it also touches the body through being-in-the-world. Touch is when the body is abandoned to its amor fati, a letting-be and openness to the fate that comes forth. Touch is a clearing for potentiality. Nancy calls this kind of touch ‘tact’, and tact is one of the key words throughout Derrida’s book on Nancy, On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy. Tact is the name for the aporia of a touching that does not touch, ‘a touch without contact’ (Derrida, 2005, p. 296). Touch as tact is similar to the gesture Hamacher described in his discussion of Kafka’s parable ‘Thou shalt – no image . . .’ This parable was a way of touching the law without contact, a stuttering removal or letting-be that is yet a part of the hermeneutic circle, which can also be a place of intimacy. Kafka’s parable takes on the commandment of no graven images by saying the law for what it is, something unsayable, the prohibition of itself. ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ is located in the tradition of tactful questioning of the law from within. This is the self-reflexivity encased in Ereignis as developed by Agamben and others. Tact ‘is to lose the proper at the moment of touching upon it, and it is this interruption, which constitutes the touch of the self-touching’ (Derrida, 2005, p. 111). The location of tact in the hermeneutic circle is inside the circle but not holding on to the sides too tightly. This movement is sheltered in the de-sisting touching and the stuttering repetitions seen not only in the hesitation involved in the parenthetical standing back in ‘since (seems) I kissed the rod’, but also in the seemingly violent contact described at the end of the first stanza. Here the ‘action’ of the beating received is jumbled in a similar way to ‘The Bugler’s First Communion’. ‘Straightened out’, the lines could read: But ah, but O thou terrible, rude wring-world,

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why wouldst thou rock thy right foot on me? The naive question should be asked here, which is what is the ‘point’ of ‘messing up’ these lines? An earlier version of this section is less, not more convoluted: [O yet, thou terrible,] Yet why, thou terrible, wouldst thou rock [?] rude on me thy [With] wring-earth tread; launch lion-foot on me? . . . (reproduced in Harris, 1982, pp. 148–9)

The stylistic incorporation of de-sisting is a way of putting the force of the touch into question, of making touch tact. The stuttering holding of the question is a part of both the joy and the sorrow of being. It is a part of both and a measure of neither, and in this sense it is removed from the measure of happiness or spiritual fulfillment as it is a touching without clear, straightforward contact: a touching as potentiality. The last of the four elements from Hopkins’ letter looked at here, silence, is heard when language is used as the medium from which silence can be heard, when that medium is the empty, earthless space of night. While this seems paradoxical at first, the poetry of Hopkins looks towards language that is silent, or approaching silence. The connection between language and silence is essential, meaning that one cannot exist without the other, that the saying of aletheia will be spoken only through the speech of the poem as stuttering and faltering. As Hopkins states in ‘(Carrion Comfort)’, such silent speaking is the position where you ‘Can . . . not choose not to be.’ In Contributions to Philosophy Heidegger sees silence and reserve as wrought, and not as flashes of inspiration: ‘The nearness to the last god is silence. This silence must be set into work and word in the style of reservedness’ (1999, p. 9, my emphasis). As stated above, an enactment of silence in speech can be seen in the form of repetition, as a removal from speech and a letting-be of what lies under speech, as language, so that it might come through. ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ is a highly wrought sonnet comprising sprung Alexandrines, and a number of different versions of the poem exist (see Ellis and Harris). However, in order to keep silent, clearly one first has to have something to say. This is the aporia that is being developed by thinking silence in the poem, and the flat earthlessness from which Hopkins came, or which he broke in order to touch, with blood, the writing of his terrible sonnets. In Being and Time Heidegger develops the

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connection between this a priori having-something-to-say and keeping silent. To be able to keep silent, Dasein must have something to say – that is, it must have at its disposal an authentic and rich disclosedness of itself. In that case one’s reticence [Verschwiegenheit] makes something manifest, and does away with ‘idle talk’ [‘Gerede’]. As a mode of discoursing, reticence Articulates the intelligibility of Dasein in so primordial a manner that it gives rise to a potentiality-for-hearing which is genuine, and to a Being-with-one-another which is transparent. (2004, p. 208)

Hopkins illustrates this aporia in his own way through the difficulty regarding his verbal address in ‘(Carrion Comfort)’. Although the whole poem may be seen as an address, and so an act not participating in silence, through repetition and idiosyncrasies the poem, through reticence, does begin to do away with idle talk. In an early poem, ‘The Habit of Perfection’ (1866), there is a verbal call to hold back speech and the senses and to listen to the silence sing. The first two stanzas are presented here: Elected Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear. Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only makes you eloquent.

The poem then continues to call for restraint from the eyes, palate, nostrils and hands, the last of which ‘unhouse and house the Lord’. A letting-be is then called for in the last stanza, showing that silence is in a way an effortless lack, or what was called above a weakness: And, Poverty, be thou the bride And now the marriage feast begun, And lily-coloured clothes provide Your spouse not laboured-at nor spun.

Poetry can be a place where the trauma of language can be sheltered, where the question can be preserved outside the economy of

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the answer, preserved in an earthless silence. Vallega-Neu also connects keeping silent with the difficulties inherent in language: the silent call of beyng [Seyn] resounds at first in an incapability of speech, it resounds as a necessity of speech in the failure of the words for beyng. One might say that at least for the thinker Heidegger, the truth of beyng as enowning is first experienced out of the necessity of saying the truth of beyng. And in an originary response, Da-sein’s enowned projection would occur through a saying that lets the silent call of beyng resound. (2003, p. 72)4

When Dasein speaks in an originary way, meaning in a way that has not been forgotten, or lost, in the everyday of speech, then aletheia can be present, meaning that the truth that is always already there in the speaking of the everyday is allowed to come forth because the chatter is beginning to be silenced and yet its murmur can be heard. Each note of the song can be heard once the expectations of harmony (or polyphony) have been challenged. This letting-be of the silent call of being is illustrated by Gardner in a discussion of the reading aloud of the last line of ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ which reads: ‘Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (My God!) my God’, the successful reading of which depends upon the silence of the reader: The speaking of this line as it is written and as Hopkins intended it to be spoken has been described as ‘a physical impossibility’. But Mr Valentine Dyall the actor, in a broadcast reading of the poem, has shown that it can be done: he reduced the parenthesis to a whisper of horror without destroying the sequence of ‘wrestling with my God’. (1949, p. 334, n1)

This attunement of a whispered wrestling with God is a possible and powerful weak mode of articulation. Heidegger connects silence and wrestling with God in Contributions to Philosophy. This passage was quoted above with regard to the wrought style needed in order to enact such silence. The quote is here given again, along with the lines that follow: The nearness to the last god is silence. This silence must be set into work and word in the style of reservedness. To be in the nearness of the god – whether this nearness be the remotest remoteness of undecidability about the flight of gods or

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their arrival – this cannot be counted as ‘happiness’ or ‘unhappiness.’ The steadfastness of be-ing carries its own measure within itself – if it still needs a measure at all. (1999, p. 9)

This then is the measure of man from Hölderlin’s ‘In lovely blueness . . .’: ‘Is God unknown? Is He manifest as the sky? This rather I believe. It is the measure of man.’ The measure is carried within the divided subject itself: it is in the temporality born from rift of the self-same. This is not a question of happiness or unhappiness. In fact, whether the sonnets Hopkins wrote towards the end of his life are actually ‘terrible’ is not important. The attunement of the poems is not within the measure of happiness. Instead they perform a place of a proper attunement of being, and in this sense they are terrible only in the sense of terrifying, of causing anxiety by being in the proximity of the question of being, which is challenging because it is true; it is a forgetting of the self which shines, and which calls forth the truth through letting-be. However, what exactly is the measure here? It is not a belief in the God unknown. Rather, it is the possibility of being able to question that belief, to question that God, or to put it in other language, to question the humanized world. Fynsk argues: ‘Hölderlin doubted the possibility of defining such a measure himself and was able to pose only the question of such a measure’ (1993, p. 220). In Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger again stresses the importance of abiding in the question, which is another way to say keeping silent in the sense of removing oneself from spinning an answer: Whoever seeks has already found! And originary seeking is that engrasping of what has already been found, namely the self-sheltering as such. Whereas ordinary seeking first finds and has found by ceasing to search. Therefore the originary find in the originary sheltering is sheltered precisely as seeking as such. Acknowledging what is most question-worthy (means) staying in the questioning and inabiding. (1999, p. 56, emphasis in original)

But why is poetry a special, or reserved place for the keeping of silence (or staying in questioning)? Poetry is a place where the unconcealing potentiality of language can be sheltered, preserved and passed on. Mensch argues that the ethical potentiality of literature lies in such refraining and circumvention: ‘Proceeding by indirection, literature is capable of unmasking the self-concealment of evil . . . It does this

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by grasping the absent by the halo, that is, by the details that surround what should be present but is not’ (2005, p. 158). Perhaps one of the strongest thinkers of silence in literature, however, is Maurice Blanchot, who looks at the silent potentiality of poetry in The Space of Literature: Poetry expresses the fact that beings are quiet. But how does this happen? Beings fall silent, but then it is being that tends to speak and speech that wants to be. The poetic word is no longer someone’s word. In it no one speaks, and what speaks is not anyone. It seems rather that the word alone declares itself. Then language takes on all of its importance. It becomes essential. Language speaks as the essential, and that is why the word entrusted to the poet is the essential word. This means primarily that words, having the initiative, are not obliged to serve to designate anything or give voice to anyone, but that they have their ends in themselves. (1989, p. 41)

This revelation of where ‘the word alone declares itself ’ is also a part of Derrida’s criticism of Heidegger’s notion of aletheia, especially as expressed in the book Veils, co-authored with Hélène Cixous. This book first presents an essay by Cixous, and then a longer essay by Derrida responding to the first. In the first essay, Cixous describes an operation she had in order to remove the myopia with which she was born. In the essay she describes the advantages of myopia, and then the feelings of love that were generated upon its removal. In ‘The Habit of Perfection’ Hopkins calls ‘Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark/ And find the uncreated light’. This double dark is not only of the myopia, but of the myopia removed. Again, this is the movement of a presence of negation (the presence of sight in the negation of myopia). Cixous, speaking of herself in the third-person, credits her myopia with a kind of magic: ‘She had been born with the veil in her eye. A severe myopia stretched its maddening magic between her and the world’ (Cixous and Derrida, 2001, p. 6). Perhaps at first it seems as if the loss of myopia is the cause of the intrusion of idle talk into a primordial mode of being. Myopia, in a sense, interrupts the everyday: ‘There is an advantage in the blind confidence of which she was deprived. Myopia shook up everything including the proper peace that blindness establishes’ (ibid., p. 7). However, what is important here is that for Cixous, it was only once myopia was removed that what seemed a weakness was revealed as a strength:

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Such an experience could take place only once, that’s what was disturbing her. Myopia would not grow again, the foreigner would never come back to her, her myopia, so strong – a force that she had always called weakness and infirmary. But now its force, its strange force, was revealed to her, retrospectively at the very moment it was taken away from her. (Ibid., p. 16)

In his accompanying essay, Derrida reads Cixous’ experience against Heidegger’s notion of aletheia as authenticity revealed through a letting-be. Instead of a single step-back, Derrida suggests that it is only when myopia is removed that you start living with myopia. This is also the coordinates of Hopkins’ poetry as read here: it is only through the presence of negation that presence can begin to be livedwith. Another way to say this is that once you rip the veil (or once you ‘let-be’, or have your myopia removed) it is only then that you start living with the veil. Derrida says, You poor thing, you poor thing: finishing with the veil will always have been the very moment of the veil: un-veiling, unveiling oneself, reaffirming the veil in unveiling. It finishes with itself in unveiling, does the veil, and always with a view to finishing off in self-unveiling. Finishing with the veil is finishing with self. Is that what you’re hoping for from the verdict? (Ibid., pp. 27–8)

Cixous says: ‘Now at last I can love my myopia, that gift in reverse, I can love it because it is going to come to an end’ (ibid., p. 11). The beginning is to be found in the end, a similar movement as found in Hopkins’ poem ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’, the beginning of which offers the repetition of a final despair: So be beginning, be beginning to despair. O there’s none; no no no there’s none: Be beginning to despair, to despair, Despair, despair, despair, despair.

The question of the silence of the held question, which can be found in depletion, ambiguity, error and stupidity, is reflected in the questioning in ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ regarding who is fighting/liberating whom. After the speaker realizes he is capitulating to a God that is separating the wheat from the chaff through a violent test, room for a cheer is opened. But this cheer is immediately questioned: ‘Cheer

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whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot trod/ Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? . . .’ Even in the totalizing acceptance of the rod of God the poem still accounts for a sheltering of the question. There is even space open in ‘is it each one?’ for God/Despair and mortal to co-exist, in an equal and conflicting gathering. This is a capturing of a gathering that displaces duality by a letting-be of the conflicting nature of a coming together in a clearing of the earthless. This is a poetry which, in the words of Hopkins quoted above, comes out of silence: ‘I have after long silence written two sonnets, which I am touching: if ever anything was written in blood one of these was.’ This is a poetry of the fourfold.

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Appendix

‘Binsey Poplars’ felled 1879 My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, All felled, felled, are all felled; Of a fresh and following folded rank Not spared, not one That dandled a sandalled Shadow that swam or sank On meadow and river and wind-wandering weed-winding bank. O if we but knew what we do When we delve or hew— Hack and rack the growing green! Since country is so tender To touch, her being só slender, That, like this sleek and seeing ball But a prick will make no eye at all, Where we, even where we mean To mend her we end her, When we hew or delve: After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve Strokes of havoc únselve The sweet especial scene, Rural scene, a rural scene, Sweet especial rural scene.

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‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’

To the happy memory of five Franciscan Nuns exiles by the Falk Laws drowned between midnight and morning of Dec. 7th. 1875

PART THE FIRST 1 Thou mastering me God! giver of breath and bread; World’s strand, sway of the sea; Lord of living and dead; Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh, And after it almost unmade, what with dread, Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh? Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.

2 I did say yes O at lightning and lashed rod; Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess Thy terror, O Christ, O God; Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night: The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod Hard down with a horror of height: And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

3 The frown of his face Before me, the hurtle of hell Behind, where, where was a, where was a place? I whirled out wings that spell

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And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host. My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell, Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast, To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.

4 I am soft sift In an hourglass – at the wall Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift, And it crowds and it combs to the fall; I steady as a water in a well, to a poise, to a pane, But roped with, always, all the way down from the tall Fells or flanks of the voel, a vein Of the gospel proffer, a pressure, a principle, Christ’s gift.

5 I kiss my hand To the stars, lovely-asunder Starlight, wafting him out of it; and Glow, glory in thunder; Kiss my hand to the dappled-with-damson west: Since, tho’ he is under the world’s splendour and wonder, His mystery must be instressed, stressed; For I greet him the days I meet him, and bless when I understand.

6 Not out of his bliss Springs the stress felt Nor first from heaven (and few know this) Swings the stroke dealt – Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver, That guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt – But it rides time like riding a river (And here the faithful waver, the faithless fable and miss).

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7 It dates from day Of his going in Galilee; Warm-laid grave of a womb-life grey; Manger, maiden’s knee; The dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat; Thence the discharge of it, there its swelling to be, Though felt before, though in high flood yet – What none would have known of it, only the heart, being hard at bay,

8 Is out with it! Oh, We lash with the best or worst Word last! How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe Will, mouthed to flesh-burst, Gush! – flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet, Brim, in a flash, full! – Hither then, last or first, To hero of Calvary, Christ’s, feet – Never ask if meaning it, wanting it, warned of it – men go.

9 Be adored among men, God, three-numberèd form; Wring thy rebel, dogged in den, Man’s malice, with wrecking and storm. Beyond saying sweet, past telling of tongue, Thou art lightning and love, I found it, a winter and warm; Father and fondler of heart thou hast wrung: Hast thy dark descending and most art merciful then.

10 With an anvil-ding And with fire in him forge thy will Or rather, rather then, stealing as Spring Through him, melt him but master him still: Whether at once, as once at a crash Paul,

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Or as Austin, a lingering-out sweet skill, Make mercy in all of us, out of us all Mastery, but be adored, but be adored King.

PART THE SECOND 11 ‘Some find me a sword; some The flange and the rail; flame, Fang, or flood’ goes Death on drum, And storms bugle his fame. But wé dream we are rooted in earth – Dust! Flesh falls within sight of us, we, though our flower the same, Wave with the meadow, forget that there must The sour scythe cringe, and the blear share come.

12 On Saturday sailed from Bremen, American-outward-bound, Take settler and seamen, tell men with women, Two hundred souls in the round – O Father, not under thy feathers nor ever as guessing The goal was a shoal, of a fourth the doom to be drowned; Yet did the dark side of the bay of thy blessing Not vault them, the million of rounds of thy mercy not reeve even them in?

13 Into the snows she sweeps, Hurling the haven behind, The Deutschland, on Sunday; and so the sky keeps, For the infinite air is unkind, And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow, Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind; Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivellèd snow Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.

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14 She drove in the dark to leeward, She struck – not a reef or a rock But the combs of a smother of sand: night drew her Dead to the Kentish Knock; And she beat the bank down with her bows and the ride of her keel: The breakers rolled on her beam with ruinous shock; And canvas and compass, the whorl and the wheel Idle for ever to waft her or wind her with, these she endured.

15 Hope had grown grey hairs, Hope had mourning on, Trenched with tears, carved with cares, Hope was twelve hours gone; And frightful a nightfall folded rueful a day Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone, And lives at last were washing away: To the shrouds they took, – they shook in the hurling and horrible airs.

16 One stirred from the rigging to save The wild woman-kind below, With a rope’s end round the man, handy and brave – He was pitched to his death at a blow, For all his dreadnought breast and braids of thew: They could tell him for hours, dandled the to and fro Through the cobbled foam-fleece, what could he do With the burl of the fountains of air, buck and the flood of the wave?

17 They fought with God’s cold – And they could not and fell to the deck (Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled

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With the sea-romp over the wreck. Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble, The woman’s wailing, the crying of child without check – Till a lioness arose breasting the babble, A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.

18 Ah, touched in your bower of bone Are you! turned for an exquisite smart, Have you! make words break from me here all alone, Do you! – mother of being in me, heart. O unteachably after evil, but uttering truth, Why, tears! is it? tears; such a melting, a madrigal start! Never-eldering revel and river of youth, What can it be, this glee? the good you have there of your own?

19 Sister, a sister calling A master, her master and mine! – And the inboard seas run swirling and hawling; The rash smart sloggering brine Blinds her; but she that weather sees one thing, one; Has one fetch in her: she rears herself to divine Ears, and the call of the tall nun To the men in the tops and the tackle rode over the storm’s brawling.

20 She was first of a five and came Of a coifèd sisterhood. (O Deutschland, double a desperate name! O world wide of its good! But Gertrude, lily, and Luther, are two of a town, Christ’s lily and beast of the waste wood: From life’s dawn it is drawn down, Abel is Cain’s brother and breasts they have sucked the same.)

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21 Loathed for a love men knew in them, Banned by the land of their birth, Rhine refused them. Thames would ruin them; Surf, snow, river and earth Gnashed: but thou art above, thou Orion of light; Thy unchancelling poising palms were weighing the worth, Thou martyr-master: in thy sight Storm flakes were scroll-leaved flowers, lily showers – sweet heaven was astrew in them.

22 Five! the finding and sake And cipher of suffering Christ. Mark, the mark is of man’s make And the word of it Sacrificed. But he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken, Before-time-taken, dearest prizèd and priced – Stigma, signal, cinquefoil token For lettering of the lamb’s fleece, ruddying of the rose-flake.

23 Joy fall to thee, father Francis, Drawn to the Life that died; With the gnarls of the nails in thee, niche of the lance, his Lovescape crucified And seal of his seraph-arrival! and these thy daughters And five-livèd and leavèd favour and pride, Are sisterly sealed in wild waters, To bathe in his fall-gold mercies, to breathe in his all-fire glances.

24 Away in the loveable west, On a pastoral forehead of Wales, I was under a roof here, I was at rest,

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And they the prey of the gales; She to the black-about air, to the breaker, the thickly Falling flakes, to the throng that catches and quails Was calling ‘O Christ, Christ, come quickly’: The cross to her she calls Christ to her, christens her wild-worst Best.

25 The majesty! what did she mean? Breathe, arch and original Breath. Is it love in her of the being as her lover had been? Breathe, body of lovely Death. They were else-minded then, altogether, the men Woke thee with a we are perishing in the weather of Gennesareth. Or is it that she cried for the crown then, The keener to come at the comfort for feeling the combating keen?

26 For how to the heart’s cheering The down-dugged ground-hugged grey Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing Of pied and peeled May! Blue-beating and hoary-glow height; or night, still higher, With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky Way, What by your measure is the heaven of desire, The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?

27 No, but it was not these. The jading and jar of the cart, Time’s tasking, it is fathers that asking for ease Of the sodden-with-its-sorrowing heart, Not danger, electrical horror; then further it finds The appealing of the Passion is tenderer in prayer apart: Other, I gather, in measure her mind’s Burden, in wind’s burly and beat of endragonèd seas.

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28 But how shall I . . . make me room there: Reach me a . . . Fancy, come faster – Strike you the sight of it? look at it loom there, Thing that she . . . there then! the Master, Ipse, the only one, Christ, King, Head: He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her; Do, deal, lord it with living and dead; Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there.

29 Ah! there was a heart right! There was single eye! Read the unshapeable shock night And knew the who and the why; Wording it how but by him that present and past, Heaven and earth are word of, worded by? – The Simon Peter of a soul! to the blast Tarpeian-fast, but a blown beacon of light.

30 Jesu, heart’s light, Jesu, maid’s son, What was the feast followed the night Thou hadst glory of this nun? – Feast of the one woman without stain. For so conceivèd, so to conceive thee is done; But here was heart-throe, birth of a brain, Word, that heard and kept thee and uttered thee outright.

31 Well, she has thee for the pain, for the Patience; but pity of the rest of them!

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Heart, go and bleed at a bitterer vein for the Comfortless unconfessed of them – No not uncomforted: lovely-felicitous Providence Finger of a tender of, O of a feathery delicacy, the breast of the Maiden could obey so, be a bell to, ring of it, and Startle the poor sheep back! is the shipwrack then a harvest, does tempest carry the grain for thee?

32 I admire thee, master of the tides, Of the Yore-flood, of the year’s fall; The recurb and the recovery of the gulf ’s sides, The girth of it and the wharf of it and the wall; Stanching, quenching ocean of a motionable mind; Ground of being, and granite of it: past all Grasp God, throned behind Death with a sovereignty that heeds but hides, bodes but abides;

33 With a mercy that outrides The all of water, an ark For the listener; for the lingerer with a love glides Lower than death and the dark; A vein for the visiting of the past-prayer, pent in prison, The-last-breath penitent spirits – the uttermost mark Our passion-plungèd giant risen, The Christ of the Father compassionate, fetched in the storm of his strides.

34 Now burn, new born to the world, Doubled-naturèd name, The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden-furled Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame, Mid-numbered He in three of the thunder-throne!

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Not a dooms-day dazzle in his coming nor dark as he came; Kind, but royally reclaiming his own; A released shower, let flash to the shire, not a lightning of fire hard-hurled.

35 Dame, at our door Drowned, and among our shoals, Remember us in the roads, the heaven-haven of the Reward: Our King back, oh, upon English souls! Let him easter in us, be a dayspring to the dimness of us, be a crimson-cresseted east, More brightening her, rare-dear Britain, as his reign rolls, Pride, rose, prince, hero of us, high-priest, Our hearts’ charity’s hearth’s fire, our thoughts’ chivalry’s throng’s Lord.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Because of the multiple translations available, the frequency of this term throughout the book and a tradition of using the original German term in the literature on Heidegger, I am leaving Ereignis in the original.

Chapter 1 1 Hopkins scholar James Cotter argues that inscape was not a coinage by Hopkins, but rather that Hopkins perhaps modified a term from a 1581 translation of Philippe de Mornay’s The Trewnesse of the Christian Religion. While there is no direct evidence that Hopkins read the work, the OED quotes the translation of de Mornay as the single authority for the similar term ‘inshape’ (Cotter, 2004, p. 195). The reason this is being brought up here is that de Mornay connects inshape (de Mornay’s term in French is idée) to God and essence in such a way that it seems to enact a similar function as Hopkins’ inscape. Cotter quotes the de Mornay translation: “‘there is a certaine Inshape, which Inshape as in respect of God, is the knowledge which God hath of himselfe; and in respect of the worlde, is the Patterne or Mould thereof; and in respect of it selfe, is very essence”’ (ibid., pp. 197–8). 2 Heidegger’s turn from the privilege of the question to a thinking of that which allows one to question at all (which becomes Heidegger’s thinking of Ereignis) is investigated in the ‘infamous’ seven-page footnote in Derrida’s Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Derrida argues that at the moment at which we pose the ultimate question, i.e. when we interrogate [Anfragen] the possibility of any question, i.e. language, we

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must be already in the element of language . . . This advance is . . . a sort of promise of originary alliance to which we must have in some sense already acquiesced, already said yes, given a pledge [gage], whatever may be the negativity or problematicity of the discourse which may follow . . . (1991, p. 129)

Derrida’s note is the focus of Simon Critchley’s ‘The question of the question: an ethico-political response to a note in Derrida’s De l’esprit’. 3 See Nixon for a full development of the relationship between Manley Hopkins and his son Gerard’s respective poems. 4 All quotations from the poems of Hopkins are taken from the first edition of the poems edited by Robert Bridges. 5 Throughout this section I am looking closely at Albert Hofstadter’s essay ‘Enownment’. The term ‘enownment’ is a translation of Ereignis.

Chapter 2 1 There is also a stylistic means of individuation and repetition, a type of metre Hopkins called ‘sprung rhythm’ (Gardner, 1949, pp. 98–136). Sprung rhythm is essentially where one stress makes one foot no matter how many or how few syllables the foot contains. This means that Hopkins focuses on rhythm rather than metre, making each foot defined by one stress and not taking into account the number of unstressed syllables that accompany it. This leads to lines of varying length which lead to potential questions of scansion (Which unstressed syllables go with which stressed?). What I would like to emphasize is how Hopkins uses this one stress/one foot approach to bring out the individuality of each foot, and hence of the poem as a whole. Looking at the first ten stanzas of ‘The Wreck’, the stress count runs 2–3–4–3– 5–5–4–6 (there is enjambment in the first line of the first stanza, so it reads Thóu màstering mé/Gòd!). The indentation of the lines indicates how many stresses are to be counted. A good example of sprung rhythm can be seen in the poem’s second part: ‘The sóur | scýthe | crínge, and the | bléar | sháre | cóme.’ In this line each foot contains one stress, and all but the first and third contain only one syllable. The number of unstressed syllables that accompany the stressed (known as ‘outrides’) is variable, as in the alliterative or stressed verse of Old English and Welsh. (See Ong’s ‘Hopkins’ Sprung Rhythm and the Life of English Poetry’ for an excellent analysis). Hopkins’ own description of his technique is: ‘I had long had haunting my ear the

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echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper. To speak shortly, it consists in scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be many light and one strong’ (Hopkins, 1955, p. 14). 2 More specifically, the dynamically sublime [dynamisch-erhabenen] in which the feeling of the sublime is enacted when faced with nature’s expression of power, in storms and the like. As for the relationship between potentiality and the sublime, the etymological root of potentiality, as mentioned above in regard to Daniel’s reading of the term, is dynamis, which is also the word Ong used to describe the enactment of instress: ‘“Instress”, it will be noted, brings the human self, this particularized human being, into the dynamics of the otherwise “objective” inscape’ (emphasis added). 3 On the relationship between waves and spontaneity in Hopkins see Lawler, 2000, pp. 174–9.

Chapter 3 1 Werner Hamacher, whose concept of ‘gesture’ is discussed later in this chapter, says of the relationship between ‘failure’ and Modernity (a movement into which Hopkins was appropriated by the likes of T. S. Eliot): ‘Modernity is regarded . . . not only as the result of this disintegration [of coherence and continuity] but also as its hero: because it recognizes itself in the collapse of the old, modernity must make failure into its principle’ (1996, p. 294, my emphasis). In another essay from the same collection Hamacher connects the language of poet Paul Celan to inscape in a footnote (ibid., p. 359 n18). 2 Hopkins refers to Scotus in a tone of great affinity throughout his journals and letters, and in his poem ‘Duns Scotus’s Oxford’ he says of Scotus: ‘He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace; // Of reality the rarest-veined unraveller . . .’ (my emphasis). Hopkins got into trouble because of his Scotism; since the Jesuits were staunchly followers of Thomism, Hopkins’ leanings in effect barred him from the highest level of Jesuit priesthood by keeping him from the longcourse (a fourth year) of study (Martin, 1991, pp. 267–8). Heidegger earned his habilitation in 1915 with a dissertation on Scotus. Coogan argues that the meeting of the one and many, as inscape, is the expression of the thing itself, of what makes it different from everything else. The expression of the thing itself Scotus calls haecceitas, which is often translated as ‘this-ness’. Coogan calls this-ness

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‘the individuating difference restricting the specific form of a being and finally determining its essential individuality’ (1950, p. 67). Hopkins scholar John Keating makes a similar connection between Scotus and Hopkins, saying that ‘Developing the Scotist doctrines, Hopkins prefers to emphasize the mystery of a God in whom disparate and seemingly contradictory attributes in some way really coexist’ (1963, p. 42). On Heidegger and Scotus see McGrath, while Pick has made a thorough collection of Hopkins’ references to Scotus (1942, pp. 156–9). Another brief connection between Scotus, Heidegger and Hopkins can be found in a book review by Todd Bender: The connection between the word play in the poetry of Hopkins and that found in Heidegger’s texts is not merely coincidental. Hopkins, while he was in 1872 a Jesuit scholar, read Duns Scotus (c. 1265–c. 1308) and reported in his Notebooks that he was ‘flush with a new stroke of enthusiasm.’ It is widely believed that the notion of ‘inscape’ in Hopkins is related to the idea described by Scotus as ‘haecceitas,’ which might be translated as the ‘thisness’ in the world. Heidegger in his conservative Roman Catholic youth earned his habilitation in 1915 with a dissertation on ‘Duns Scotus’s Doctrine of Categories and Meaning,’ although Heidegger’s commentary was on a text now believed probably written by a mere follower of Scotus rather than the subtle doctor himself. (1999, pp. 229–30)

3 See Martin, 1991, pp. 330–1, and White, 1992, pp. 94–5 for Hopkins’ frustrations in this domain. 4 Hopkins’ derivation of noun into adjective of ‘vaulty’ is an example of his linguistic idiosyncrasy. Hopkins believed that his individual poetic diction was, along with sprung rhythm, essential for the transmission of inscape. While this at times has caused claims of obscurity from his early correspondents, Hopkins rightfully rallied against these accusations. Perhaps his greatest defence of his style is in an 1864 letter to Alexander Baillie. In this letter Hopkins defines three levels of poetry, from highest to lowest: Olympian, Castalian and Parnassian (Hopkins, 1938, p. 68–76), with Olympian being ‘the language of strange masculine genius which suddenly, as it were, forces its way into the domain of poetry, without naturally having a right there’ (ibid., p. 73). However, this masculinity is the cause for Hopkins being the opening example in Gilbert and Gubar’s classic study of women and Victorian literature, The Madwoman in the Attic (Gilber and Gubar, 1984, p. 3).

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The point of bringing this letter in here is to show how Hopkins went to great lengths to explain and defend his language choices. This has led Peters to say, differentiating between the linguistic deviations in Hopkins’ earlier and later work (and using the first line of ‘Sibyl’ as an example of the latter): ‘In the former alliteration and internal rhyme and assonance are grafted on to the language and are an added ornament; in his later poetry all these devices are essential to the expression of the poetic experience’ (1948, p. 143). Heidegger is also inclined to twist German syntax and grammar into the new rather than redefine the old, and he is likewise criticized for a style which features such coinages as Anwesung and Seinkönnen. Roger Ebbatson, in his text on Heidegger and Victorian literature Heidegger’s Bicycle, seems to take a contrasting view to what is being argued here by suggesting that Hopkins’ syntactical and semantic deviations in ‘The Wreck’ are problematic (although he does otherwise take ‘word play’ as a serious connection between Heidegger and the Victorians): The problematic of Hopkins’s work, and of this text in particular, is generated by the impossibility of its reading and reception – what is broken or wrecked is the work of art in all its potentialities. This brokenbacked state of the text is made literal as a failure of language and vision. (2006, p. 31)

The argument presented here is that such a broken state is necessary for generation and openness. Ebbatson also takes Hopkins to task for his quick-fix turns towards redemption (ibid., p. 38). 5 ‘Voluminosity’ is the term Paul Weiss gives to the ‘ultimate’ (or what I called here the ‘ground’) for the domain of nature in his Being and Other Realities. 6 Another instance of the foregrounding of such stuttering can be found near the end of T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Hollow Men’. (On the connections between the poetry of Hopkins and Eliot see Gardner, 1944, pp. 268–70.) Hopkins’ poetry was not actually published in book form until 1918, and hence first became known in a wider sense to the modernists (see White, 1992, pp. 459–66). The instance of stuttering in ‘The Hollow Men’ can be found in a stanza made up of different incomplete versions of a line from the Pater Noster: “For Thine is the Kingdom” (Eliot, 1974, p. 92). In these lines Eliot provides an answer to a question (in the form of the full line ‘For Thine is the Kingdom’) before the question itself is posed. Even though the line ‘For Thine is the Kingdom’ is given in full, set off from the rest of

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the text, in the right-hand margin, and put in italics, its role as a question seems ineffective and impotent, since the question it is supposed to answer keeps coming in the following lines. The answer has been provided, but that does not mean the question has yet been properly posed. In foregrounding the difficulties of questioning, Eliot’s poem is examining the role of the question, by holding it open, which then becomes the question of the poem itself. 7 Paul Weiss arguably offers a description of a fourfold thinking as access to other domains. He illustrates this through what he terms the Dunamic-Rational. Weiss illustrates his thought through an example of seeing the sun. In order for the sun (represented in the following diagram by the letter A) to be seen by a being (B), there needs to be something that certifies that this being exists. What certifies this being are, for example, the senses (D). The senses do not see the sun directly, but rather pick up on what each sense is sensitive to (heat, light, etc., represented by C ). The top line AB is related through the rational, and the bottom line, CD, through the passions, emotions, or what White designates as the Dunamic. A (sun)

B (being)

C (image)

D (senses)

The reason that Weiss’ thought is being brought in here is because he sees temporality as generated not between AB or CD, but rather only through AC and BD. This means that perceiver D and perceived C are always generated simultaneously, but it is in the seemingly self-same relationship between the sun A and its image C, or a being B and its senses D from which this temporality is generated. This co-dependent horizontal relationship and temporal horizontal relationship is another way of illustrating a fourfold thinking (see Weiss, 1995, pp. 196–247).

Chapter 4 1 The parenthesis in the title of the poem indicate that the title was not chosen by Hopkins but rather by Bridges. 2 For a close reading of the temporality of the poem see Harris, (1982, pp. 98–104).

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3 Jean-Luc Nancy also connects a being-with to struggle: The essence of Being is the shock of the instant [le coup]. Each time, ‘Being’ is always an instance [un coup] of Being (a lash, blow, beating, shock, knock, an encounter, an access). As a result, it is also always an instance of ‘with’: singulars singularly together, where the togetherness is neither the sum, nor the incorporation [englobant], nor the ‘society,’ nor the ‘community’ (where these words only give rise to problems). The togetherness of singulars is singularity ‘itself.’ It ‘assembles’ them insofar as it spaces them; they are ‘linked’ insofar as they are not unified. (Nancy, 2000, p. 33) 4 Fynsk makes a similar argument: language cannot but (not) say the relation from which it proceeds as it ‘speaks’ or is brought to language. Of course, language cannot ‘speak’ without an act of enunciation of some kind. Hence language’s ‘need’ for human speech, as Heidegger describes it. But humankind would not be capable of such originary ‘usage’ were there not a prior assignment of the human being to language – as assignment . . . language cannot come to language, cannot ‘speak,’ without an act of enunciation on the part of a being whose own always prior exposure to language offers language its material site. (2000, pp. 55–6)

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McCumber, J. (1999), Metaphysics and Oppression: Heidegger’s Challenge to Western Philosophy. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. McGrath, S. (2003), ‘Heidegger and Duns Scotus on truth and language’. The Review of Metaphysics, 57, (2), 339–58. McLuhan, M. (1966), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill. Mensch, J. (2005), Hiddenness and Alterity: Philosophical and Literary Sightings of the Unseen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Miller, J. H. (1955), ‘The creation of self in Gerard Manley Hopkins’. ELH, 22, (4), 293–319. —. (2000), The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Moulin, J. (2000), ‘“Meaning motion”: Gerard Manley Hopkins with Heraclitus via Heidegger’. Online Gerard Manley Hopkins Archive. Internet: www.gerardmanleyhopkins.org/lectures_2000/heraclitus. html [Accessed: 9 Nov 2008]. Nancy, J.-L. (1993a), ‘Noli Me Frangere’, in The Birth to Presence. B. Holmes (trans). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —. (1993b), ‘Corpus’, in The Birth to Presence. C. Sartiliot (trans). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —. (2000), Being Singular Plural. R. Richardson and A. O’Byrne (trans). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Nietzche, F. (1974), The Gay Science. W. Kaufmann (trans.). New York: Vintage Books. Nixon, J. (2006), ‘Fathering graces at Hampstead: Manley Hopkins’ “The Old Trees” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Binsey Poplars”’. Victorian Poetry, 44, (2), 191–211. Ong, W. (1949), ‘Hopkins’ sprung rhythm and the life of English poetry’, in Immortal Diamond: Studies in Gerard Manley Hopkins. N. S. J. Weyand (ed.), New York: Sheed & Ward, pp. 93–174. —. (1986), Hopkins, the Self, and God. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press. Parekh, P. N. (1998), Response to Failure: Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson, and Dylan Thomas. New York; Berlin: Peter Lang. Peters, W. A. M. (1948), Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical Essay towards the Understanding of his Poetry. London: Oxford University Press. Pick, J. (1942), Gerard Manley Hopkins: Priest and Poet. London: Oxford University Press. Plato. (1973), Phaedrus and the Seventh and Eighth Letters. W. Hamilton (trans.). New York: Penguin.

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Index

Entries marked in bold refer to an entire chapter or subsection of a chapter.

Adorno, Theodor 25, 26, 69–70, 73 Agamben, Giorgio 6, 22, 29–30, 34, 36, 60, 62, 75–6, 78, 93 Aho, Kevin 93 aletheia 27–8, 30, 83–4, 86, 94, 96, 98–9 amor fati 88, 93 anxiety 1, 38–9, 42–3, 54, 66, 74, 75, 79–80, 90, 92, 97 appropriation see Ereignis Aristotle 22, 24, 68, 86 Arnold, Matthew 51 attunement 64–7, 97 Baudelaire, Charles 47 Beidler, Paul 33, 58 Benjamin, Walter 62 Bertens, Johannes 42 Blanchot, Maurice 98 blood 90–2 Borkowska, Ewa 28, 78 bridge 71–2 Bridges, Robert 12, 43, 64, 87 Brown, Daniel 23–4 Bruin, John 57–8 Bump, Jerome 42, 52 Celan, Paul 85, 87 chiasmus 33 Cixous, Hélène 50, 98–9 Collins, William 64

Coogan, Majorie 4, 70 Cotter, James 113n. 1 Crownfield, David 79–80 Culler, Jonathan 33 darkness see night Day, Brian 4, 15 Deguy, Michel 87 Deleuze, Gilles 78 de Mornay, Philippe 113n. 1 Dennett, Daniel 7 Derrida, Jacques 46–7, 49–50, 81, 88, 93, 98–9, 113–14n. 2 de-sisting 18, 22–3, 25, 28, 83, 90, 93, 94 dwelling 9, 30, 31, 67, 72, 74, 76 Eagleton, Terry 44 earth 7–11, 15–19, 21–2, 24, 26–7, 35, 42, 50, 51, 71, 73, 94, 96, 100 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 117–18n. 6 ellipsis dots 76–9, 81, 91, 92 Ellis, Virginia 86, 89, 92, 94 Ereignis 18, 21, 24–31, 41–2, 44, 50, 53, 61–3, 68, 72, 73, 80, 84, 93 error 73–4, 79, 81, 83–4, 86–8, 99 everyday, the 53, 83, 86, 95–6, 98 evil 90 experience 19, 85

129

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130

Index

fearsome, the 38–41, 58, 75 feasting 90 Fish, Stanley 19 Flusser, Vilém 11, 18, 21 fourfold, the 49, 67–75, 84 Frye, Northrop 40 Fulweiler, Howard 52–3 Fynsk, Christopher 9, 45, 56–7, 66, 67, 74, 97, 119n. 4 Gardner, William H. 13, 19–21, 64–5, 87, 96 gathering 46, 49–50, 67–8, 70, 71–2, 75, 79, 81, 87, 91, 92, 100 Gelassenheit see letting-be Gellius, Aulus 59–60 gesture 76–9, 87, 91, 93 Geviert, das see fourfold, the Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna 26 Hamacher, Werner 77–9, 87, 93 happiness 97 Harries, Karsten 86–7 Harris, Daniel 84, 85, 90, 92, 94 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 25–6 Heidegger, Martin ‘The age of the world view’ 61 Being and Time 26–7, 39, 53–4, 66, 94–5 ‘Building dwelling thinking’ 49, 67, 70–1, 74 Contributions to Philosophy 76, 79–81, 94, 96–8 Discourse on Thinking 27 Early Greek Thinking 123 The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics 7 On Time and Being 27, 62 ‘The origin of the work of art’ 55–6 ‘ . . . Poetically man dwells . . . ' 5, 8–11, 17–19, 22–3 ‘The thing’ 8, 39

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Heraclitus 30, 36 hesitation 22, 25–6, 77–81, 93 Higgins, Lesley 61, 71 Hölderlin, Friedrich 5–11, 17–19, 21–2, 67, 72–3, 87, 97 holding see sheltering Holfstadter, Albert 27–8, 68, 72 Hopkins, Gerard Manley poems ‘Binsey Poplars’ 11–17, 21, 25, 72–3 ‘The Bugler’s First Communion’ 19–20, 73, 93 ‘(Carrion Comfort)’ 83–100 ‘The Habit of Perfection’ 95, 98 ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ 29, 99 ‘Pied Beauty’ 71 ‘Repeat that, repeat…' 35 ‘Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves’ 49–82 ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire’ 30, 34, 42 ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ 14, 32–48, 71, 74, 75 other publications The Correspondence of Gerard Manley Hopkins and R.W. Dixon 114–15n. 1 Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins 116n. 4 The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins 23, 29, 40, 58 The Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins to Robert Bridges 64 The Note-Books and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins 3–4, 5, 24, 30, 37–8, 44, 46, 66–7 The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins 17

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Index Hopkins, Manley 12, 16 Hoy, David 53 Hyppolite, Jean 25 idle talk see everyday, the images 6–11, 14–19, 21–2, 24, 26, 36, 69 inscape 12, 13, 16–17, 24–5, 28, 29–31, 34, 35, 40, 42–4, 45, 52, 57 definition 3–5 instress 6, 17, 35, 49, 52 definition 4–5 Jakobson, Roman 33 Kafka, Franz 77–8, 87, 93 Kant, Immanuel 34–5, 41 Korg, Jacob 62 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 17–19, 22, 23, 25, 34–5, 70, 73, 83, 85–6 last god, the 76, 79, 80, 90 Lawlor, Leonard 8 letting-be 86, 93–7, 100 Levinas, Emmanuel 35–6 Loyola, St Ignatius 66–7 Lyotard, Jean-François 41–2 McCumber, John 70 McLuhan, Marshall 20 Martin, Robert 12, 15, 85, 87 Mensch, James 35, 37, 56, 70, 97–8 Miller, J. Hillis 44, 80 Milton, John 75 mind vampires 90–2 minimal difference 34, 35–6, 84 Moulin, Joanny 45–6 movement 39, 45–6, 57 myopia 98–9 Nancy, Jean-Luc 34–5, 62–3, 92–3, 119n. 3

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131

negation 22, 25–6, 28, 29, 31, 50, 72, 73, 77, 81, 83, 85–7, 90, 98 Nietzsche, Friedrich 37, 88 night 21, 50, 52, 54–5, 58, 59, 60, 86, 92, 94, 98 Nixon, Jude 16 Ong, Walter 4, 60 Parekh, Pushpa Naidu 23 Peters, Wilhelmus Antonius Maria 3, 5, 9, 29 Plato 87–8 potentiality 23, 30, 32, 36–9, 41–2, 44, 75, 79, 86, 88, 93, 94, 97 projection 6–7 prophecy 59–60, 62–3, 79 reflexivity 18, 28–9, 34, 60, 68, 93 repetition 34–41, 43, 46, 47, 50, 51, 60, 67, 73, 79, 81, 83–4, 86, 87, 94–5 Rickels, Laurence A. 91 rift 24, 45, 56–7, 65, 66, 69–70, 72, 77, 97 Riss see rift Ronell, Avital 37, 41, 50, 54, 57, 68–9, 70, 79, 88 Rooney, William 59 Sandywell, Barry 28 Schirmacher, Wolfgang 21 Schrift, Alan 44 Scotus, Duns 58, 115–16n. 2 sheltering 28–9, 34, 42, 44, 48, 50, 55, 65, 73–4, 79–81, 83–4, 85–8, 90, 92, 94, 95, 97, 99–100 silence 83–4, 86–7, 94–100 Simmons, Dan 90–2 sprung rhythm 114–15n. 1 Stambaugh, Joan 62–3, 72, 73 Steiner, George 10

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132 stupidity 88, 99 stuttering 34, 74, 78, 81, 87, 88, 93–4, 117–18n. 6 sublime, the 41–2 tact 93–4 Thrax, Dionysius 78 touch 92–4 Vallega-Neu, Daniela 66, 96 Vycinas, Vincent 49

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Index Watt, Robert 43–4 weakness 86 Weil, Simone 38–9 Weiss, Paul 36, 118n. 7 Well Walk controversy 12, 16 White, Norman 51, 53, 54–5, 58–9, 63–5, 75, 76–7 world-formation see earth writing 87–90 Žižek, Slavoj 36, 57

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