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EVERY ANGEL IS TERRIFYING

EVERY ANGEL IS TERRIFYING

Duino Elegies–Ranier Maria Rilke

Letting Things Be

Letting Things Be

January 10, 2019 Jerry King Comments 0 Comment

This morning according to the NPR newscast the President is to visit the border region between our country and Mexico.  I visited that part of our country once, many years ago.  Traveling from Chicago to San Francisco on the California Zephyr the train stopped for about twenty minutes somewhere in New Mexico.  I marveled at the spare barrenness of the desert which I had never seen before.  While stretching my legs I found a taco stand, and ordered several tacos.  That was my first taste of a taco, fresh made.  I remember the deliciousness of the filling and wiping with a napkin the sauce which overran my fingers.

I dreamed that our President would go to a taco stand somewhere along the our side of the border.  He enters without his security detail and orders several tacos and a coke.  He sits down to eat next to a man or woman from Honduras, or Guatemala, or El Salvador.  I imagine that the man or woman speaks English.  (This is a dream.)  The president asks the immigrant to tell him about where he/she grew up, about his or her memory of his or her  parents, about the physical circumstances of their life together.  The individual speaks at some length, about the history that has formed themselves.  They eat together and the president listens.  The President asks the immigrant about their memory of their grand parents, about how they lived, and whether they owned any land, did they farm, or did they work for the United Fruit Company on one of their banana plantations.  The President and the immigrant finish their meals, and the President leaves.


Freedom,
understood as letting things be,
is the fulfillment and consummation
of the essence of truth,
in the sense of the disclosure of beings.

“Truth”
is not a feature of correct propositions
that are asserted of an “object”
by a human “subject”
and then are “valid” somewhere,
in what sphere we know not;
rather, truth is disclosure of beings
through which an openness essentially unfolds.

All human comportment and bearings
are exposed in this open region.
Therefore man is,
in the manner of ek-sistence.

–excerpt On the Essence of Truth
by Martin Heidegger page 127

Yes, my dream-story is easy enough to understand.  It is an imagined scene that will never happen, because everyone knows the option of such openness is not in the cards.  This is not who Donald J Trump is.  And that is also the point of the quotation from Martin Heidegger.

Man is, you and I are, our nation/society is or is not according to our comportment, our openness or lack thereof to the facticity of those we encounter.

Thus a dividing line between being and non-being, between life and non-life is apparent.

40

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