Final Paper Proposal

Blind Willie Johnson--Poet of Destitute Times

The line, “Gesang ist Dasein,” implies that song is what it is to be. Poets think “of the Being of beings. Nature, as the venture. Every being is ventured in a venture” (WPF 132). In other words, poetic language engenders a turn toward the open, toward death and pain. Recall the line, “Fürchtet euch nicht zu leiden,” reminding us that suffering is a monumentally important experience. After all,

Und so drängen wir uns und wollen es leisten,
wollens enthalten in unsern einfachen Händen,
im überfüllteren Blick und im sprachlosen Herzen.
Wollen es warden.—Wem es geben? Am liebsten
alles behalten für immer…Ach, in den andern Bezug,
wehe, was nimmt man hinüber? Nicht das Anschaun, das hier
langsam erlernte, und kein hier Ereignetes. Keins.
Also die Schmerzen. Also vor allem das Schwersein,
also der Liebe lange Erfahrung,—also
lauter Unsägliches. Aber später,
unter den Sternen, was solls: die und besser unsäglich.
Bringt doch der Wanderer auch vom Hange des Bergrands
nicht eine Hand voll Erde ins Tal, die Allen unsägliche, sondern
ein erworbenes Wort, reines, den gelben un blaun
Enzian. Sind wir vielleicht hier, um zu sagen: Haus,
Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster,— (DE IX).

It is not some aspect of material gain, not “dieser voreilige Vorteil,” but the essential nature of truly existing. Being there, in unshielded presence, in the world. Though, partially, this passage urges a full embrace of the totality of existence, or better, of Being, this is but one of several salient aspects. Firstly, the world beckons in a way; toward being at one with the world, toward saying and experiencing Being itself. In one sense, this has to do with what Heidegger has called to “acknowledge the positive as what is already before us and present” (WPF 123). It is “to turn unshieldedness into the Open,” which means, “to ‘affirm’ unshieldedness within the widest orbit” (WPF 122). Both Heidegger and Rilke urge us to find in the widest orbit everything, including, of course, pleasure and love, but also and perhaps more importantly, pain and death.

Secondly, there is a kind of inner space, an interiority, that “is beyond the arithmetic of calculation, and, free of such boundaries,” and “can overflow into the unbounded whole of the Open” (WPF 125). The location of this space, for Rilke, is the heart. Heidegger’s analysis is helpful: “The widest orbit of beings becomes present in the heart’s inner space…the world’s whole presence is in the widest sense ‘worldly existence.’ That is another name for the Open” (WPF 125). Recall, however, the above-quoted line from the ninth Duino Elegy, in which Rilke refers to our sprachlosen Herzen. Within the heart’s inner space, experience takes reign: “Also die Schmerzen. Also vor allem das Schwersein, also der Liebe lange Erfahrung,—also lauter Unsägliches” (DE IX). In this space, certain central aspects of experience are unsayable or speechless. But the poet’s task is to “sprich und bekenn” (DE IX). Because “mehr als je fallen die Dinge dahin, die erlebbaren” (DE IX).

For Rilke, there are things unsayable and things sayable, and “hier ist des Säglichen Zeit, hier seine Heimat” (DE IX). Heidegger agrees, or at least nods to the difficulty of what he calls more fully saying: “But the saying that is more fully saying happens only sometimes, because only the more venturesome are capable of it. For it is hard. The hard thing is to accomplish existence…the song is hard because the singing may no longer be a solicitation, but must be existence. For the god Orpheus, who lives in-finitely in the Open, song is an easy matter, but not for man” (WPF 135). Thus, in one way, Rilke’s insistence on preserving a certain kind of sentiment as speechless likely stems from a conviction shared with Heidegger. Contrast this with another line from Rilke’s ninth elegy: “Sind wir vielleicht hier, um zu sagen: Haus, Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster,—” (DE IX). He seems to be encouraging people to “preise dem Engel die Welt, nicht die Unsägliche” (DE IX).

Yet it also seems to require a delicate balance. With regard to the fellow mortals, the poets are the more venturesome, specifically, “poets whose song turns our unprotected being into the Open. Because they convert the parting against the Open and inwardly recall its unwholesomeness into a sound whole, these poets sing the healing whole in the midst of the holy” (WPF 137). Heidegger hints at a different mode of expression, suggesting, “there is a saying that really engages in saying, yet without reflecting upon language, which would make even language into one more object” (WPF 134-135). The more venturesome, namely, the poets, “turn the unwholesomeness of unshieldedness into the soundness of worldly existence” (WPF 135). These more venturesome poets, according to Heidegger and Rilke, push toward the open, das Offne. They do this, paradigmatically, through song, and the rewarding nature of this move is expressed in Rilke’s line, “Hiersein ist herrlich” (DE VII). It is not being any one place, or being in any particular state, but the affirmation of the whole, of the totality, that Rilke so admires: “Da sie ein Dasein hatte. Alles. Die andern voll Dasein” (DE VII).

Casting ourselves into the Open is only for the venturesome, and those able to it, once again, are tracking the traces of those fugitive gods. Rilke reminds us of the real task of embracing the Open more fully, of saying and being more fully:

Daß mich mein strömendes Antlitz
glänzender mache; daß das unscheinbare Weinen
blühe. O wie werdet ihr dann, Nächte, mir lieb sein,
gehärmte. Daß ich euch knieender nicht, untröstliche Schwestern,
hinnahm, nicht in euer gelöstes
Haar mich gelöster ergab. Wir, Vergeuder der Schmerzen,
Wie wir sie absehn voraus, in die traurige Dauer,
ob sie nicht enden vielleicht. Sie aber sind ja
unser winterwähriges Laub, unser dunkeles Sinngrün,
eine der Zeiten des heimlichen Jahres—, nicht nur
Zeit—, sind Stelle, Siedelung, Lager, Boden, Wohnort (DE X).

Turning bravely toward the Open thus mandates an understanding of the nature of suffering, pain, and death, and most importantly, the relationship they have to love and passion. Heidegger appropriates Rilke’s idea that the more venturesome are “adventurous more sometimes than life itself is, more daring by a breath” (WPF 116). He cautions, though, against a misunderstanding: “The breath by which the more venturesome are more daring does not mean only or first of all the barely noticeable, because evanescent, measure of a difference; rather, it means directly the word and the nature of language” (WPF 137). This particular breath is distinctive because it does not relate to desire, transactions, or exchanges; it is for nothing…the song is the belonging to the whole of the pure draft. Singing is drawn by the draft of the wind of the unheard-of center of full Nature. The song itself is ‘a wind’” (WPF 137). The reference to wind recalls the above-quoted line, in which true singing is about nothing; it is a different breath, a gust from inside god, a wind. It is not attached to particularities, but rather achieves a sort of kinship with what it is to be. It is Dasein, or existence, or reality. The breath of the singer, or of the poet, should turn the others into the Open, exposing the truth of Being in its substantive determinations.

The affirmation of this widest orbit, the turning of the mortals toward the Open, these make the poets the singers of the whole. “Holiness can appear only within the widest orbit of the wholesome. Poets who are of the more venturesome kind are under way on the track of the holy because they experience the unholy as such. Their song over the land hallows. Their singing hails the integrity of the globe of Being” (WPF 138). These more venturesome ones are the poets in a destitute time.

Heidegger’s measure of a poet, the criterion by which we can assess whether in fact there is a poet of destitute times, has to do more with the purity of the arrival of that poet’s words. If the arrival of these words is pure and timely, then the arrival occurs as present. It is a matter of the degree to which the poet’s saying “attains to the poetic vocation of the kind of poet who answers to the coming world era. The era is neither decay nor a downfall. As destiny, it lies in Being and lays claim to man” (WPF 139). In other words, the important consideration is “whither his song is bound, where the poet belongs in the destiny of the world’s night” (WPF 139). Only the ethos of a culture, in combination with the prevailing and enduring sentiment of the poet’s words themselves, can reasonably be understood as conditions for finding the poets of destitute times.

It’s possible that Rilke was just that.[4] But, there is one figure who might better fit the description, whose timely expressions have pervaded a culture and whose enduring legacy has bravely and continuously turned mortals toward the Open. The arrival of his words has managed to stay present, to continue un-concealing the bare nature of Being itself. In this mode of poetic expression, the paradigmatic instance of which is wordless, Blind Willie Johnson puts his finger on the pulse of a culture and sings “the healing whole in the midst of the unholy” (WPF 137).

Blind Willie Johnson recorded “Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground” before the Great Depression. But he would live for the next (roughly) fifteen years in rural Texas, as a blind black man, piecing a living together as a roaming cigar box guitarist: “He eventually took to the streets with a tin cup, either looped around his neck or hanging from the headstock of his guitar, growling a repertoire of fire and brimstone Gospel for Saturday afternoon shoppers on the streets of Hearne, Texas.”[5] His sound is full of gravelly, raspy, melancholy, but also a kind of hope and faith. It is not insignificant that the song, “Dark was the Night,” was chosen to be sent into the solar system with Voyager 1 in the summer of 1977. Along with a variety of sounds (laughter, greetings in many languages, etc.), Beethoven, and Bach, Blind Willie’s “Dark was the Night” says “this is who we are.”[6] It is meant to speak for us in a way, to evince what it is like to be, in our characteristic mode.

Michael Hall astutely suggests that the song “sounds less like a song than a scene—the Passion of Jesus, his suffering on the cross, the ultimate pairing of despair and belief.”[7] Not all of Blind Willie’s songs are instrumental; in fact, most of his recordings are Gospels with words. But this song captures the mode of expression that Heidegger would call a poem in a destitute time.

It hardly needs an explanation to assert that rural Texas between 1930 and 1945 was a time of destitution in a social and economic sense. During this period of the rural south, and especially after the collapse of the market in October of 1929, money became worthless, crops became unaffordable for many, and poverty became a constant norm. But, this is not precisely the kind of destitution Heidegger was most concerned with. Heidegger’s vision of the poet in destitute times has more to do with the fact that god is dead and that mortals are not aware or capable of their own mortality. This capability regards a sort of reconciliation with a core experience of life: death. Death, for both Heidegger and Rilke, is not the opposite of life. It is something toward which life moves, but not in some negating aspect; death is the Open, das Offne, the recognition of radical alterity in the form of the unsayable. And poets transfigure it, shaping it into new forms and, once again, trace the fugitive gods.[8]

Rilke’s fixation on openness of death and pain, and not only that but the importance of embracing them and finding beauty in them, is vindicated by “Dark was the Night.” It is not a pristine recording. There is distortion and background noise. Johnson’s breath, and the moaning that forms the only semi-vocal expression, is irregular and labored. There is no standard rhythm. At times, it feels like the moaning and bottleneck guitar mimic one another; at times, it feels like they only create dissonance and push each other in opposing directions.

This song is about the crucifixion. But there isn’t a description, historical or narrative, of the crucifixion. It is not even, strictly speaking, a phenomenological reflection on the crucifixion itself. Rather, it expresses what it is like to encounter the suffering, pain, and death, and appropriate it into our own conception of the fullness and richness of life. Songs with no words, or limited and incomprehensible words, are standard in country Blues and Gospel. Charlie Patton, for example, would sometimes finish a lyric with a trailing-off voice and a slide with his bottleneck.[9] Blind Lemon Jefferson, too, trails off during words, swallows syllables, and generally sings in an unclear fashion. But the opacity of his vocals is met by clarity with respect to his guitar playing the overarching sound and feel, which is complex and rich. Consider, for example, the song “Lectric Chair Blues,” in which his vocals are alternatingly buried and expressive; but the overall feel articulates “a view of the world, a view which went beyond simply feeling low down, and embraced attitudes which went beyond the pathos and pain of his sound. This, and the lonesome quality of his voice, convey a strong sense of self, an awareness of existing as an individual.”[10] The broader point is that Blues songs “transcend their limitations. They have a universality of feeling even when the words are incomprehensible, or obscure. As the blues singer will tell you, ‘blues is a feeling.’”[11] For that matter, Blues songs have a universality of feeling even when there are no words, as in the case of “Dark was the Night.”

It is indeed true that the Blues more broadly embody the attempt to harness suffering, and embrace the whole of existence, through an active engagement with sound. But “Dark was the Night” epitomizes this move, particularly, in a couple of ways. Firstly, Blind Willie was never certain with regard to concrete or ultimate meaning. In an early song, he wonders, “won’t somebody tell me, just what is the soul of a man?” He is actually fine with embracing the questions, though, and while the essence of the soul of humans might be unknown, his music offers a glimpse of the experience, of what it is like to be a creature of a certain kind. Rilke has a sense that meaning will actually come through the process of affirming life. In the Letters to a Young Poet, he writes,

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.[12]

Blind Willie embodies this sentiment in “Dark was the Night” by treating experience as essential, and uncertainty as a part of life to be embraced just like answers. Secondly, language “is at best capable of making immanent the radical absence through which we experience death. Their failures, if they can be called such, accentuate the irrevocability of loss, but they do succeed in providing dazzling, and poignant, glimpses into the ineffable.”[13] Blind Willie is able to eschew this problem, in a sense.

In “Dark was the Night” and the Blues more broadly, meaning does not always come from the words uttered. Imagine the attempt to found an art-form without a common language, without a common culture, essentially without any robust shared world at all. This was the experience of early slave cultures, whose home lands, languages, and religions were varied and rich. Out of the early ‘Negro Spirituals’ grew the tradition of the Blues, which relies less on words, lyrics, and linguistic expression, and more on feeling, experience, and passion or suffering. As in Rilke’s poetry, “the passage of time, inevitable change and loss are construed not as things to be feared and lamented, but rather as things to be embraced and praised. Rilke perceives existence unambiguously as transformation in which we must participate and not become static.”[14] So it is with the spirituals that form the substance of the Blues; they harness suffering in an attempt to embrace all of existence. And they sing the holy, tracking the trace of the fugitive gods during times of destitution. Blind Willie Johnson, perhaps Heidegger’s wordless poet of destitute times, still says more sayingly Being in its essential determinations, that is, if we are willing to listen carefully.

[1] Thomas Haweis. “Gethsemane.” The Christian Church Hymnal. Ed. H. R. Christie. (Cincinnati: The Standard Publishing Co., 1906), 197.

[2] I will work primarily with two essays: “What are Poets For?” and “The Origin of the Work of Art.” All citations of these essays refer to: Martin Heidegger. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. (New York: Harper Perennial, 1971). I will cite these two essays parenthetically, utilizing the following abbreviations: WPF (“What are Poets For?”) and OWA (“The Origin of the Work of Art”). For Rilke: Rainer Maria Rilke. Werke. 4 vols. (Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1996). I will abbreviate the Duino Elegies (DE) and Sonnets to Orpheus (SO) and cite them by number.

[3] WPF 97. This portion of an untitled poem of Rilke—given and translated in full by Heidegger—is a constant source of study for Heidegger in his essay, and thus also in mine. The full poem: “As nature gives other creatures over/to the venture of their dim delight/and in soil and branchwork grants none special cover,/so too our being’s pristine ground settles our plight;/we are no dearer to it; it ventures us./Except that we, more eager than plant or beast,/go with this venture, will it, adventurous/more sometimes than Life itself is, more daring/by a breath (and not in the least/from selfishness)…There, outside all caring,/this creates for us a safety—just there,/where the pure forces’ gravity rules; in the end,/it is our unshieldedness on which we depend,/and that, when we saw it threaten, we turned it/so into the Open that, in widest orbit somewhere,/where the Law touches us, we may affirm it.”

[4] Perhaps Foti’s claim [Veronique M. Foti. Heidegger and the Poets. (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992), 43.] that even poetic language tends to fall short of the realization Heidegger strives for might be best responded to in terms of a different kind of language that is not, strictly speaking, language. Blind Willie Johnson might well fit with the idea of renunciation of linguistic mastery that Foti finds essential.

[5] John Kruth. “Evangelizing the Blues: The Fierce and Enduring Legacy of Blind Willie Johnson.” Sing Out. (Vol. 54, No. 1), 46. (Henceforth “Evangelizing the Blues”)

[6] Michael Hall. “The Soul of a Man: Who was Blind Willie Johnson?” Texas Monthly. December 2010, 133. (Henceforth “Soul of a Man”)

[7] Hall, “Soul of a Man,” 133.

[8] Kelly S. Walsh. “The Unbearable Openness of Death: Elegies of Rilke and Woolf.” Journal of Modern Literature. Vol. 32, No. 4. (2009), 4. (Henceforth “Openness”)

[9] Giles Oakley. The Devil’s Music. 2nd Ed. (London: Da Capo Press, 1997), 50. (Henceforth Devil’s Music)

[10] Oakley, Devil’s Music, 118.

[11] Oakley, Devil’s Music, 56.

[12] Rainer Maria Rilke. Letters to a Young Poet. Trans. Steven Mitchell. (New York: Random House, 1984), 34-35. (Henceforth Young Poet)

[13] Walsh, “Openness,” 3.

[14] Carol Keon. “Flowers as Pure Existence in Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus II: 5 and 7.” Modern Austrian Literature. Vol. 15, Issue ¾. (1982), 112. (Henceforth “Flowers”)