Douglas Mercer
September 4 2024
For that is the tragic with us, to go away from the kingdom of the living in total silence packed up in some kind of container, and not to pay for the flames we have been unable to control by being consumed in the fire.
That a god created beings which are to become independent of it is the abyss into which philosophy always falls.
When romanticism held sway poets like Keats returned to the odes and the Greeks, Winckelmann wrote of the serenity of the Greeks; and Byron was so enraptured by the Greeks that he died for their modern incarnation; but unbeknownst to them (and right under their noses so to speak) the Poet Friedrich Holderlin had already taken the laurel wreath in the Olympic games of Poetry and Thought. To say that he slipped under their radar is an understatement; Goethe knew him well but thought him unhinged; Hegel and Schelling were his roommates at the Tubingen seminary, so they were well aware of him; but his poetry was not to their taste and he toiled without the fame that was his everlasting due; when he made his epochal word for word translations of Pindar and Sophocles his learned contemporaries considered him either to be perpetrating a joke or to be deranged; what he was really doing was traversing back to the mouth of the river of the muses and bringing back the sacred heavenly fire; but outside of a few poetasters and an odd assortment of friends he might as well not have existed. Nietzsche knew of him and revered him but he himself was working in obscurity; it was not until the time just before the first world war when Hellingrath came out with his seminal editions that his fame began to vault; and then Martin Heidegger made Holderlin the centerpiece of his mature thought and the Poet is now in the Pantheon, where he resides all alone in his grandeur, peerless.
MADNESS
When visitors came to the carpenter Zimmer’s household to visit the poet Friedrich Holderlin in his madness (mental estrangement) the poet would frequently say: nothing happens to me. He wrote a little bit including the mysterious In Lovely Blue and the Lines Of Life but mostly he would play the piano with his long fingernails, tapping out fugue like avant garde music which unsettled those who heard it, or beautiful but simple melodies ad nauseam until his visitors would grow weary of the incessant repetition; to everyone who came to meet him he treated them as if they were noblemen of the highest order, everyone was royalty to him, replete as it were with coats of arm draped in heraldry, he would address them as Baron this or Baron that, or as Your Holiness or Your Majesty or Most Merciful Father, and in flowery language address them with ritual and ostentatious and exaggerated bows like a particularly punctilious courtier from some strange and unknown court; from time to time he would write in a strange script that was not decipherable, and now and then he would try his hand at German verse being able to come up with a powerful line or two and then his cognition failed and it trailed off into vague poetry which would soon transform into unbridled absurdity; when addressed by his name he would say that he did not know that man; his preferred way of being addressed was as Herr Librarian; when taken for walks he would often sit on a rock in rapt contemplation for hours but if he was disturbed by the least thing he would fly into paroxysms of uncontrollable rage and would often need to be restrained; he was most at home lying on his divan alone reading his novel Hyperion or an ode of Klopstock; once when he read Aeschylus in the original Greek he said it seemed fine indeed but he could not truly understand it as it was written in the Kalmatta language; sometimes he would claim that his own name was Killalusimeno, and after a brief verbal interchange with someone when he could not trace the conversational flow he would politely say ah: but it is of no consequence to me. And then he would retreat and go by the name of Scandarelli, a name he used for some of the poems he was still to write. He seemed to have an uncanny fascination with the phrase one and all which was etched on one of his visitor’s books; he would look at is over and over again as if it held some puzzle he was trying vainly to solve; the memory of the past, the struggle with gods, the celebration of the Greeks, seemed to have passed him by though they say in a moment of lucidity he did say to the celestial deity: how it has been for us, when I came through all our battle and won more than a few notable victories. It is true that throughout the first years of his madness more than a few suspected him of having decided to put on the antic disposition by feigning his insanity; his final poetry of translations of Sophocles and Pindar seemed to push language past its capability where communication was no longer at issue, as if the abyss of words was reached and he found that there was in fact no bottom, falling all the way down forever, as if human communication was to be a thing of his past. Some spoke of his “mannerisms’ of madness; Shakespeare too towards the end adopted a knotty and elliptical style which was resistant to interpretation, as if he was writing for himself and that whatever was going on in his head was infinitely more interesting than what occurred in the world; Holderlin too was given to making up words and uttering beautiful long sinuous and seemingly incoherent phrases; when pressed enough he seemed also to jettison the mask of humility and harbor grandiose views of himself; when he wrote of Sophocles’ Ajax that he was dwelling with the divine madness, that his house was divine madness he seemed to be speaking of himself in a high rank. He lived on until 1843, a man out of time, and out of season, his poems forgotten, and his visitors infrequent; curious travelers and autograph seekers stopped by from time to time; he would play the piano for them or write some verses, all well metered but without emotion; as if the heavenly fire had absconded and left an empty shell of itself; the Zimmer family were his only mourners at his internment; his patrimony from his father had been kept away from him by his mother and over time grew to great proportions; so he died rich man, but never knew it. He wrote the following for Zimmer, etched on a piece of wood:
The lines of life are various,
Like roads, and the borders of mountains.
What we are here, a god can complete there,
With harmonies, eternal reward, and peace.
Toward the end he implored god to give him just one more year to complete his cycle of poems, then he would gladly go under. He was given this request and encoded the prophecy and then entered into oblivion, whether self-imposed or not who knows, a question which is neither here nor there.
LIFE
Friedrich Holderlin was born in 1770 in Lauffen am Neckar; it was said that he was a dreamy youth given to private musings, delicate, noble, profound, perhaps too sensitive; in October 1788 he began to study theology at the university of Turbingen, where fellow students were Hegel and Schelling; he received his magister degree but to his mother’s great dismay he did not enter the ministry, instead falling into the life of being a private tutor, which turned out to be a precarious living; he met Goethe and Schiller and wrote his novel Hyperion, attended classes from Fichte and met Novalis. That is he was on the ground floor of the German Renaissance, when the great gift of Hellenism was translated into the modern world; that he was at the epicenter of it, that he surmounted the Greeks and put his contemporaries in the shade, took over a century for anyone to realize and, outside of a coterie, is unknown to this day.
In his late twenties he was diagnosed as having hypochondrias, what we would call schizophrenia, defined as break with reality, whether hearing voices, or seeing things, or delusion of grandeur. The problem with this diagnosis is that it is predicated on the belief that the one who makes it know what reality is in the first place.
Holderlin fell in love with Susette Gontrad, the wife of his employer Jakob Gontard. It is generally believed that his descent into insanity was precipitated by this relationship. Susette is the famous Diotima, the woman who inspired his great elegies and his incomparable hymns; that the love was ill fated goes without saying, after a stay in Bordeaux one of the great mysteries of his life happened; he went by foot via Paris and arrived in Nurtingen physically and mentally exhausted, with tattered clothing and sunken eyes, looking like a beggar, having been, by his later account, robbed; when he walked into the city he announced a single word to the astonished town folks: Holderlin. He had a few more years of his most supreme poetry until the mental darkness, if that is what it was, descended on him finally. All in all it had been a great journey at the end of which all he needed to say was: Holderlin.
continued below in first reply
Heavenly Fire
-
Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10963
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
Re: Heavenly Fire
continued from above
POETRY
The god is near and hard to gasp
Holderlin has one theme: the heavenly fire, the fled gods and their inevitable return; this return is occasioned first and foremost by the Poet, the one who stands on earth unprotected before the gods and beckons their imminent arrival. The poet is the select of gods who must withstand and be exposed to being in its fullness and must continually cross and re-cross the border between sanity and madness; above all the poet must listen and be open to the call of being so that in the end he can call being into existence. He does this by copying the image of god and engraving it in words given to the people. The gods condition, print, forge and construct and reconstruct the poets’ soul and, should the poet lapse, they will even guide his fingers by force so that he will give up his heart to them. Every god requires a sacrifice and the poet is that until one makes it through to the other side with all his faculties about him. What the god most wants of the poet is that he keep the sacred letters in his care and properly interpret them.
In ancient times the heavenly ones interpreted themselves and stole the very strength of the gods, they lived as nature lives, free; but now we have gone astray in the workshop where spirits are formed and only know what we see growing, but we have no idea what he is thinking. To be born is to be made and the poet (the sacrifice) under the auspices of heaven grows up in the arms of god, whom he calls the god of fate; nestled in the womb of time as if rocking in a cradle he looks neither before nor after but only in the distance where time grows in secret; being the creator he is the genius of the people and he knows that everything is a test and that one must say thanks and go wherever he wants to go. But although he can travel the world the poet wants to stay and float in one place, for the god is pure and has sacred strings and whomever holds god in his heart will gladly stay in place and be free, and freely translate the language of heaven; hearing the voice of thunder he feels closely the brazen one come near to whisper in his ear, whisper a tremor in the foundation of the earth, a shaking of the roots, and words resound across the spheres; attending its coming the poet knows that his words must be holy, words that are older than time and which time worships; for the call of the poet is the call of the gods, calling on the gods, and the words of the poet have the power to awaken the gods; nature has awakened and from the upper air to the chasm below the all inspiring begins to stir from his long slumber.
We wake the gods and abjure false idols
Beckon them from their subterranean slumber
Knowing we can make fate, not discover it,
What will be is not what will be but what we will to be
Knowledge is to know the ledge; to jump or leap
And to hang in the air
We can create the denouement according to our specifications
The most beautiful will win out in the end
Passing the threshold, crossing the border land
Passing the limn here and now
We roam through the field
And with fanaticism create a new world
Having learned how to play the game.
Under the god’s thunderstorms the poet remains unprotected, exposed to being; to grasp god’s radiance without hands and wrap the gift as song and give it to the people, that is our wish, that things should not go undecided forever; as when from an organ in a holy hall purely swells the prelude awake and the prologue to the omens coming on; the morning beginning from one mouth to another god’s holy word travels like fire and light; memories of melodic streams will run in an endless harmony filled with inspiration, a sacred breath; they will arise the sun of celebration and will answer our calls with a choir united, they will call humans into being; the divine light with its calm radiance will fall like brightness from the sky on smooth running water, slowly descending to the earth and what is beautiful will be born in waking sleep, will dream like an infant breathing.
Heaven and all fate
Heaps themselves on our shoulders
For days we root ourselves in the mountains
We who were the first to
Understand how to speak to god
The ancients would never tell us
How to name you
Under holy stricture
But we name you nature
For new as from a bath
Emerges all that is born of god
What springs from a pure source remains a mystery, even the poet must barely reveal it until the time is right; nature and breeding have their effect but as you began so you will continue the important power is birth and the gleaming light and eternal springs that meets all newborns; the gods were satisfied with their immortality but if the heavens need one thing it’s for men and heroes to join them, to share and feel for them, it’s a law that the gods want one who seeks to be like them and refuses like a fanatic to bear inequality to the gods.
Not them, the gods who appeared
In the old land I don’t need to call
Them anymore; my soul won’t
Flee back to you vanished ones
Though I loved you once
Gods who have fled
You’ve had your time!
Here Holderlin specifically rejects the notions of the gods who had slumbered; he believes that anything ossified needs to be replaced by something new; the old gods can remain dead and buried in order to make way for the new. For the land lies in heightened expectation with these novel images; the poet is the first one struck for in his inner ear close to the ground he can decipher vague tales of flames from sacred fires from which drift golden smoke betokening the legend of it which glimmer and gleam around doubting heads; in this time of transition from the older to the new fugue like sounds go back and forth—and no one knows what his happening to him. At first we feel the shadows emerge from the ancients departing the earth, and we feel the burning intensity of the pressure of the ones to come for soon no longer will the holy choir of heaven incarnate remain in blue heaven but will inhabit the earth; as such offerings must be prepared for the sacrifice and the river and streams of fire must run around prophetic mountains; for then true magic will fall down from the ether of the upper air and the words of the gods rain immeasurably down and resonate.
The poet the quietest offspring of god
Was happy to keep silent in the
Depth of purity
The gods seek him who looked up
With open eyes as though he did not
Know when a threatening storm
Resounded around his head
But prophesied for the better
And the gods in astonishment
Spread the word in heaven
That there was one with as great
A faith as the holy ones
And so they sent a messenger
Who said: you, the unbreakable one
The one looking toward Germany
Try different words and cry
It is you, the chosen
All loving who have grown strong
In bearing all fortune
You, the unbreakable one
The flower of your mouth
And all alone you speak
And an abundance of golden words
Like a river flows unceasingly
Drink the morning air
Until your eyes are opened
No longer does the unspoken
Need to remain a mystery
Though it will remain disguised
For we mortals are made for
And it’s often wise
To speak of the gods like this
This is the final break of the rupture for the poet; he has lived beside the holy rivers and the awe filled mountains and heard the incessant clamoring of the shooting stars and the rolling of the thunder and the flashing of the lightening; having withstood all of this in pain he has emerged in pure innocence, a holy oblivion content to remain in place and sing; and to his surprise his dedication and devotion are finally recognized by the gods in a most unexpected way; he is called the holy one, the one who dreams as much as the god and whose hard exterior is implacable and cannot be bought or broken; and so the vessel prepared the gods prepare the time for the uncovering of their secrets, the time of showing is at hand now that a poet has been found to sing it beautifully enough and not quake or waver.
But when the time ripens
And the gold become over abundant
That the purest well springs
And heaven’s anger is
In earnest between night and day
A truth will need to shine forth
Yet even if you must rewrite it
Three times, that’s alright,
Innocent it must remain
How it all has changed!
Things of the future
Gleam glean and speak
Bring joy from a distance
But at time’s center
The earth lives
Sacredly with the upper air
And gladly for memory’s’ sake
Among your holidays
Germania
Give disarming advice
To kings and peoples
The poet is holy glass into which the love of life is poured, the spirit of the heroes and as the fire of life it rises gleaming from the fire of the gods from deep in the earth; may the stark sisters give the poet more time to perfect his song and he will gladly die and leave the song behind, having lived as a god the heroes will name him as a god and take him for a model; for only he who is godlike can believe in the gods and summon them so the master releases the pure sound but until then only fog and dreams abide though the mind is always in flower gazing calmly on eternal clarity.
The god is ready to fall to earth; the time is nearing its completion; and the imprisoned elements and the ancient laws press forward like horses in harness desiring only to be free; and ripe fruit falls to the earth like a lyre dreaming on the mounds of heaven, that’s a prophetic law that all must remember. But in the remaining time what the gods most want is that we make free use of what is ours, and what the one that reigns over everything loves most is when the established words are carefully attended and all that abide be interpreted properly. Nothing needs to remain a mystery forever. And as we go toward the land of the living we will not do so in a box for the flames that consume us have been paid for in full, and now we play with fire and control it and never get burned. German song accords with this.
POETRY
The god is near and hard to gasp
Holderlin has one theme: the heavenly fire, the fled gods and their inevitable return; this return is occasioned first and foremost by the Poet, the one who stands on earth unprotected before the gods and beckons their imminent arrival. The poet is the select of gods who must withstand and be exposed to being in its fullness and must continually cross and re-cross the border between sanity and madness; above all the poet must listen and be open to the call of being so that in the end he can call being into existence. He does this by copying the image of god and engraving it in words given to the people. The gods condition, print, forge and construct and reconstruct the poets’ soul and, should the poet lapse, they will even guide his fingers by force so that he will give up his heart to them. Every god requires a sacrifice and the poet is that until one makes it through to the other side with all his faculties about him. What the god most wants of the poet is that he keep the sacred letters in his care and properly interpret them.
In ancient times the heavenly ones interpreted themselves and stole the very strength of the gods, they lived as nature lives, free; but now we have gone astray in the workshop where spirits are formed and only know what we see growing, but we have no idea what he is thinking. To be born is to be made and the poet (the sacrifice) under the auspices of heaven grows up in the arms of god, whom he calls the god of fate; nestled in the womb of time as if rocking in a cradle he looks neither before nor after but only in the distance where time grows in secret; being the creator he is the genius of the people and he knows that everything is a test and that one must say thanks and go wherever he wants to go. But although he can travel the world the poet wants to stay and float in one place, for the god is pure and has sacred strings and whomever holds god in his heart will gladly stay in place and be free, and freely translate the language of heaven; hearing the voice of thunder he feels closely the brazen one come near to whisper in his ear, whisper a tremor in the foundation of the earth, a shaking of the roots, and words resound across the spheres; attending its coming the poet knows that his words must be holy, words that are older than time and which time worships; for the call of the poet is the call of the gods, calling on the gods, and the words of the poet have the power to awaken the gods; nature has awakened and from the upper air to the chasm below the all inspiring begins to stir from his long slumber.
We wake the gods and abjure false idols
Beckon them from their subterranean slumber
Knowing we can make fate, not discover it,
What will be is not what will be but what we will to be
Knowledge is to know the ledge; to jump or leap
And to hang in the air
We can create the denouement according to our specifications
The most beautiful will win out in the end
Passing the threshold, crossing the border land
Passing the limn here and now
We roam through the field
And with fanaticism create a new world
Having learned how to play the game.
Under the god’s thunderstorms the poet remains unprotected, exposed to being; to grasp god’s radiance without hands and wrap the gift as song and give it to the people, that is our wish, that things should not go undecided forever; as when from an organ in a holy hall purely swells the prelude awake and the prologue to the omens coming on; the morning beginning from one mouth to another god’s holy word travels like fire and light; memories of melodic streams will run in an endless harmony filled with inspiration, a sacred breath; they will arise the sun of celebration and will answer our calls with a choir united, they will call humans into being; the divine light with its calm radiance will fall like brightness from the sky on smooth running water, slowly descending to the earth and what is beautiful will be born in waking sleep, will dream like an infant breathing.
Heaven and all fate
Heaps themselves on our shoulders
For days we root ourselves in the mountains
We who were the first to
Understand how to speak to god
The ancients would never tell us
How to name you
Under holy stricture
But we name you nature
For new as from a bath
Emerges all that is born of god
What springs from a pure source remains a mystery, even the poet must barely reveal it until the time is right; nature and breeding have their effect but as you began so you will continue the important power is birth and the gleaming light and eternal springs that meets all newborns; the gods were satisfied with their immortality but if the heavens need one thing it’s for men and heroes to join them, to share and feel for them, it’s a law that the gods want one who seeks to be like them and refuses like a fanatic to bear inequality to the gods.
Not them, the gods who appeared
In the old land I don’t need to call
Them anymore; my soul won’t
Flee back to you vanished ones
Though I loved you once
Gods who have fled
You’ve had your time!
Here Holderlin specifically rejects the notions of the gods who had slumbered; he believes that anything ossified needs to be replaced by something new; the old gods can remain dead and buried in order to make way for the new. For the land lies in heightened expectation with these novel images; the poet is the first one struck for in his inner ear close to the ground he can decipher vague tales of flames from sacred fires from which drift golden smoke betokening the legend of it which glimmer and gleam around doubting heads; in this time of transition from the older to the new fugue like sounds go back and forth—and no one knows what his happening to him. At first we feel the shadows emerge from the ancients departing the earth, and we feel the burning intensity of the pressure of the ones to come for soon no longer will the holy choir of heaven incarnate remain in blue heaven but will inhabit the earth; as such offerings must be prepared for the sacrifice and the river and streams of fire must run around prophetic mountains; for then true magic will fall down from the ether of the upper air and the words of the gods rain immeasurably down and resonate.
The poet the quietest offspring of god
Was happy to keep silent in the
Depth of purity
The gods seek him who looked up
With open eyes as though he did not
Know when a threatening storm
Resounded around his head
But prophesied for the better
And the gods in astonishment
Spread the word in heaven
That there was one with as great
A faith as the holy ones
And so they sent a messenger
Who said: you, the unbreakable one
The one looking toward Germany
Try different words and cry
It is you, the chosen
All loving who have grown strong
In bearing all fortune
You, the unbreakable one
The flower of your mouth
And all alone you speak
And an abundance of golden words
Like a river flows unceasingly
Drink the morning air
Until your eyes are opened
No longer does the unspoken
Need to remain a mystery
Though it will remain disguised
For we mortals are made for
And it’s often wise
To speak of the gods like this
This is the final break of the rupture for the poet; he has lived beside the holy rivers and the awe filled mountains and heard the incessant clamoring of the shooting stars and the rolling of the thunder and the flashing of the lightening; having withstood all of this in pain he has emerged in pure innocence, a holy oblivion content to remain in place and sing; and to his surprise his dedication and devotion are finally recognized by the gods in a most unexpected way; he is called the holy one, the one who dreams as much as the god and whose hard exterior is implacable and cannot be bought or broken; and so the vessel prepared the gods prepare the time for the uncovering of their secrets, the time of showing is at hand now that a poet has been found to sing it beautifully enough and not quake or waver.
But when the time ripens
And the gold become over abundant
That the purest well springs
And heaven’s anger is
In earnest between night and day
A truth will need to shine forth
Yet even if you must rewrite it
Three times, that’s alright,
Innocent it must remain
How it all has changed!
Things of the future
Gleam glean and speak
Bring joy from a distance
But at time’s center
The earth lives
Sacredly with the upper air
And gladly for memory’s’ sake
Among your holidays
Germania
Give disarming advice
To kings and peoples
The poet is holy glass into which the love of life is poured, the spirit of the heroes and as the fire of life it rises gleaming from the fire of the gods from deep in the earth; may the stark sisters give the poet more time to perfect his song and he will gladly die and leave the song behind, having lived as a god the heroes will name him as a god and take him for a model; for only he who is godlike can believe in the gods and summon them so the master releases the pure sound but until then only fog and dreams abide though the mind is always in flower gazing calmly on eternal clarity.
The god is ready to fall to earth; the time is nearing its completion; and the imprisoned elements and the ancient laws press forward like horses in harness desiring only to be free; and ripe fruit falls to the earth like a lyre dreaming on the mounds of heaven, that’s a prophetic law that all must remember. But in the remaining time what the gods most want is that we make free use of what is ours, and what the one that reigns over everything loves most is when the established words are carefully attended and all that abide be interpreted properly. Nothing needs to remain a mystery forever. And as we go toward the land of the living we will not do so in a box for the flames that consume us have been paid for in full, and now we play with fire and control it and never get burned. German song accords with this.
