Cheese Danish #35

[Terrance]

 I am reminded here of Seamus Heaney's poem "Digging", where
the spade cutting the earth reveals the poetic in the earth
and the movement of the spade and the man are what to
Heidegger would be a primordial activity that becomes more
intuitive, an extension of the human, with time and
proficiency, but for Heidegger the spade also discloses the
rich black soil below the surface of the earth's crust,
reveals what is inherently earth and may be of use to
humans, but the tool, the spade here is involved in a direct
interaction between Man (in this example, Heaneys's Father
digging) and a specific natural feature of the earth. 

		"Digging"
             

        Between my finger and my thumb
        The squat pen rests: snug as a gun.

        Under my window, a clean rasping sound
        When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
        My father, digging. I look down

        Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
        Bends low, comes up twenty years away
        Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
        Where he was digging.

        The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
	against the inside
        knee was levered firmly.
        He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
        To scatter new potatoes that we picked
        Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

        By God, the old man could handle a spade.
        Just like his old man.

        ... 

        The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
        Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
        Through living roots awaken in my head.
        But I've no spade to follow men like them.

        Between my finger and my thumb
        The squat pen rests.
        I'll dig with it.

        1966 from "Death of a Naturalist" 

			--Seamus Heaney 

However, when it comes to Modern Technology, the interaction
is quite different. In the Modern world we extract energy
(oil, although thinking of Heaney's father again, Potatoes
are fuel for the rocket, or booze for an Irish wake) from
the earth. We put it in a big tanks, store it for use at
another time, war perhaps. Nature was once thought of as the
energy we needed to live, the womb that brings life, the
goddess that we can suck from, but with the modern
technological perspective, the earth is not the women buried
in the earth in GR, the energy flowing with lifedeath
fecundity, but a source of this energy, this new energy,
needed for war and survival. An energy source, a material
trasnformed, and thus now having  a meaning apart from
nature. We remove it, we move it, store it, and plan with it
how we will transform it and use it to transform. The
rivers, most of the rivers in the world, are no longer
considered as the course of water, the life system, the
dynamic landscape and so on, but are now considered for what
or how much they can generate, how that energy, with the
language of gigawatts say, may be stored, moved. The impact,
one of them any way, is progression of human concerns as
viewed from (perhaps the only perspective allowed or
available to humans?)  the human perspective enframed. 

Perspective: 

"Construct an elevator from the elevator's point of view." 

Wouldn't that be the perfect elevator? Wouldn't that be that
black box?"

	--Colson Whitehead's Intuitionist  

Heidegger is careful not to condemn human making itself. It
is the enframing essence of technology that he rails
against, the way in which we have constructed; a way that
endangers other ways of constructing because it works so
well unto itself. 

The comprehensive enframing forecloses the possibility of
conceiving of or discovering its own limitations within the
huge confines circumscribing modern life and knowing. We
don't learn from Heidegger how it is that technology took
the steps from directly revealing the forces of nature to
transforming what those forces mean by placing them in a new
framework of the resources extracted, stored, retrieved.
What brought about enframing? Was it a sudden blaze, a
standing erect? What? He doesn't say, GR says, Nature is
locked up (JAMF) behind a doors and the only key we can use
to open the doors to nature are those keys that open nature
to use, we cannot discover nature, it's "shining forth",
"its truth", and besides, in Pynchon we have locks without
keys because we toss anything of value, the keys overboard
or forget them, like Bianca.   Its as if the technology of
Modern life, the microscope or the particle accelerator and
the telescope or the Hubble deny, because of their powerful,
pervasive, success, their Bigness, the uncertainty, the
faith we might say, the magic, the Intuitionist's
perspective, required for other less verifiable modes of
apprehending the world. 

"The sense of historic importance is the intuition of the
universe as everlasting process, unfading in its deistic
unity of ideals." 

			--Alfred Whitehead