If you ever wonder what it is that old man reads, and why, then perhaps the following will give a glimpse into the machinations behind the mania..........

Heidegger, Gadamer, Palmer, Language and A River

For Martin Heidegger, for Hans-Georg Gadamer, and for Richard Palmer as well, language is the very foundation of existence. “It is through language that something like world can arise for us” (Palmer p.228). Language speaking---spoken by man--- namingly calls Things into being, and those Things Thingingly gesture and bear the world. In the intimate, penetrated, unseparated between, the dif-ference “disclosingly appropriates things into bearing a world” and “it disclosingly appropriates world into granting things” (Heidegger p.1130). The “separateness and towardness of world and thing” unified in the dif-ference, emerge in the readiness-to-hand, concern, and solicitude for Things and Others, through language. The concise language of poetry in particular constitutes the bidding that calls the Things that grant the world into being. Rather than poetry being considered as a higher more formal language, Heidegger proposes that when we encounter the everyday language of common speech we find it is a decomposed and dead residue of the speech that is possible, the true speech of poetry. Poetry speaks metaphorically, figuratively and freshly; and brings worlds into being in that speaking. In Georg Trakl’s poem, “A Winter Evening” that ostensibly depicts a winter evening and describes a snowfall and vesper bells, Heidegger finds figuratively and metaphorically commanded into being for him, a clear and concise worlding of his theory of the “between.” This personal meaning that he understood comes into being as a result of his hermeneutical experience upon reading the poem. The language event that Heidegger experiences is a result of the collision of his past, his philosophy and experiences with the presence of the text of Trakl’s poem, in consideration of the future being he becomes as a result of that experience. The historicality of the language event is not the result of some static formal dismemberment of the poem, but rather of a dialectical conversation between Heidegger the critical reader and the text of the poem itself. The message that Trakl may or may not have wished to convey when he wrote the poem is of no import. Once in the world Trakl’s poem is what it becomes in the experiencing. It is the nature of language to convey meaning, but that meaning only becomes in the understanding.
The ontological function of language and of understanding discloses the being of things. “The hermeneutical experience is a language event…it is the truth that happens, emerges from concealment and yet eludes every effort to reduce it to concepts and objectivity” (Palmer p. 243).
Pastor John Maclean, the patriarchal father and minister of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It speaks of the power of the word, specifically the power of the literary word to illuminate truth when he tells his son Norman, “After you finish your true stories sometime, why don’t you make up a story and the people to go with it?
“Only then will you understand what happened and why.
“It is those we live with and love and should know that elude us” (Maclean p. 104)
Maclean knows that understanding is achieved, and truth is disclosed, when one places oneself in the middle of the actions in the world; one finds, in the between, the insights that lead to understanding, and the illuminations of an artful work with the power to pierce the veil of reality.