Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Poet and astronomer (amateur) in response to Heidegger

Any amateur poet (unpublished in any book by third parties, itself a book devoted principally to poetry) who is also an amateur astronomer (whether by sundial, lunar records, binoculars, azimuth-mounted telescope or other telescope either solar or astral, reflector or refractor, planetary or nebular or spectrographic) may wish to reply to Herr Heidegger.
It has long been claimed that a geocentric viewpoint is of more value in navigation on the seas than a heliocentric viewpoint.  Heidegger was concerned more with hiking than with celestial navigation, but some matters can be addressed to his followers.
The heideggerian speech among those with a reverence for Being can be compared to communication among those making astronomical observations: this need involve no technology.  Somewhat north of the Mediterranean, the stars which are visible throughout the night travel about in the heavens as would indicate the thumb of the right-hand outstretched when facing north (what techno-trolls call "counter-clockwise") while some considerable distance south of that Sea, the stars visible all night have no central star about which they swing, but swing they do, as indicated by thumb of the outstretched left-hand when facing south.
Heidegger was very fond of notes left by ancients, so we can imagine how disconcerting [throwing them for a loop] that those to the north should read that only a few thousand years earlier, the stars of the northern summer sky swung about a major star such as that of the Lyre.
The structuralists should have been able to demonstrate that to the south lay left-handed languages and to the north lay right-handed languages.  The heideggerian could explain that the technology of the pack camel and the barge had led to commerce which had allowed these languages to be polluted and the origins lost.
Worse yet, the moon far south of the Mediterranean in the reverse of the moon far to the north: both see a "man in the moon" but for one the grey Mare are an eye, for the others a mouth.  This heresy is easily disposed of by condemning the idolatry of the lunar images and the technology of charcoal on parchment.
But surely we are not doomed to be unable to communicate the peculiar balancing of the crescent moon such that it face one way in the heat of summer in the north while it sets facing quite the other way far to the south and yet never sets in the east when south nor rises in the west when the observer is south.
Heidegger on the search for "grounds" rightly reminds us that all understanding and explanation occurs against a background and in a situation in which the wonder of the world makes itself available to itself and in which the friend is willing to listen or the wise one willing to speak, the better slaves permitted to pose questions at the end and the women content to quietly serve beer or mead or peppermint tea.

[Husserl began as a student of astronomy, whatever his reservations later about the epistemology of Galileo]

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