rene and featureless netizens,
To think the demigods is to think the essence of a Zarathustra or the overman. The demigod as the in-between the sky and the earth lives on the threshold, on a frontier. In a borderland no longer at home but away, out of the foreign or the uncanny a demigod like Hermes passes an encrypted message impossible to comprehend in a definitive manner and so retain as an experience of life in memory. Hermetic angels don't leave pictures of themselves that is why they are featureless and purely virtual and in search of embodiment. In GA39 pg 165 Heidegger writes that the fundamental tone of Holderlin's poem Germania is that the gods for us have taken flight and are veiled. Holderlin in Germania evokes a hallowed sadness (Heiligtrauernde) of gods who are fled (Entflohene Gotter!). He writes in Stanza II that:
The priest is the first to be struck, but lovingly
The temple and the image and the cult
Follow him down into darkness, and none of them now may shine.
Only now from a funeral pyre henceforth
A golden smoke, the legend (Sage) of it, drifts
And glimmers on around our doubting heads
And no one knows what is happening to him. He feels
The shadowy shapes of those who once were here,
The ancients, newly visiting the earth.
Holderlin invokes the gods by mimicking their withdrawal. Withdrawal counters withdrawal also in his denken of the demigods in the last few stanzas of The Rhine starting with X. He writes of the mortal man (den sterblichen Mann) who is surpised and startled by the blessing of his mother earth when he considers the heaven and feeling the burden and responsibility finds the most prudent action that is the best -- to be withdrawal:
Then often to him it seems best
Amost wholly forgotten to be
Where the beam does not sear,
In the forest's shade
By Lake Bienne amid foliage newly green,
And blithely poor in tones,
Like beginners, to learn from nightingales.
(Stanza XI, The Rhine)
The ambience of light as it is shown in Stanza XII is that of the chiaroscuro of an evening twilight which is to say the growing darkness of conceptual knowledge that now is entering dreamtime. This is where the threshold is or the borderland that is the frontier which as a limit no longer operates as a horizon for the understanding of being which is let go, abandoned, renounced for the unexpected and incipient arrival of Persephone during spring time in the month of may. Here in the frontier between the homely and the uncanny cognition having been dismembered by the imbibing of nectar and wine a de-cisive cut (oscillating vibration) differentiates the sky and the earth, mortals and gods in a fourthfolding differentiation that releases the itenary of the mad poet who thinks (thanks) : "To pose the question of demigods, is to pose the most *decisive* question in the most rigorous sense of the word, that of where the differentiation of gods and mortals decides itself, where this differentiation finally becomes a question, and where finally thinking takes a step towards difference as such (differentiation= that which stablishes a frontier"(GA 39, pg. 167). It is this kind of thinking that *institutes* the dimension or site of Beyng. Difference here is not the ontological difference as that which differentiates Being and beings, essence and existence in the Scholastic sense. The rationalism of the Scholastics is bracketed in an epoche where now the difference is between Beyng and the ontological difference between Beings and beings. It is only within the ontological difference of the scholastic, or within the ontological argument for the existence of God that a rationalistic horizon could be the ground for the understanding of Being. Prior to God or Being is the Godhead (Beyng) of God according to the tradition of Rheinland Theology where all plants and flowers bloom without a why, without having to provide any reasons or causes for their actions.
tympan
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