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Intemporality in Hlderlins Last Poems

Daniel Whistler

[This was a short paper given at the University of Copenhagen in October 2012. It is
unpublished.]

To begin, I want to quickly mention the philosophical context for this paper which is mostly
missing from what follows. What youll hear over the next 20 minutes is part of a larger piece
that attempts to identify a speculative form of life. It jumps off from a recent challenge set by
Steven Shakespeare to the more sci-fi elements in recent speculative philosophy. He argues
that, rather than Lovecraftian monsters, Kierkegaards knight of faith that stock figure of
the theology/poststructuralism alliance of recent years is the conceptual persona of
speculation. I agree with Shakespeares polemical intent but I want to go one step further and
reinstate Hlderlin as the philosophical poet in direct opposition to some recent comments by
Graham Harman, the high-priest of speculative realism. Harman writes,

[Both Husserl and Lovecraft] revive a metaphysical speculation that embraces the
permanent strangeness of objects. If philosophy is weird realism, then a philosophy
should be judged by what it can tell us about Lovecraft. In symbolic terms, Great
Cthulha should replace Minerva as the patron spirit of philosophers, and the
Miskatonic must dwarf the Rhine and the Ister as our river of choice. Since
Heideggers treatment of Hlderlin resulted mostly in pious, dreary readings,
philosophy needs a new literary hero.

My contention is that there is another Hlderlin, one who Heidegger neglects and so one who
remains free of the (supposed) piety and dreariness of Heideggerian interpretation. This is the
last Hlderlin, who, I argue, returns to nature as a means of marvelling before the permanent
strangeness of objects. His poems give voice to a genuinely speculative form of life.]

Michel Tourniers novel, Friday, describes the passage of Robinson Crusoe from empty
body-without-organs wedded to the earth, through unstable periods of oscillation between
cultivated reterritorialisation and deterritorialising lines of flight, to the point where under
the unconscious tutelage of Friday Robinson becomes an aerial, solar surface through
which intensities pass. On the threshold of this final transformation, Robinson reflects,
What has most changed in my life is the passing of time, its speed and even its
direction. Formerly every day, hour and minute leaned in a sense toward the day,
hour and minute that was to follow, and all were drawn into the pattern of the
moment, whose transience created a kind of vacuum. So time passed rapidly and
usefully, the more quickly because it was usefully employed, leaving behind an
accumulation of achievement and wastage which was my history. Perhaps the sweep
of time of which I was a part, after winding through millennia, would have coiled
and returned to its beginning. But the circularity of time remained the secret of the
gods, and my own short life was no more than a segment, a straight line between two
points aimed absurdly toward infinity Yet there are portents which offer us keys to
eternity. There is the calendar, wherein the seasons eternally complete their cycle on a
human scale, and even the modest circle of the hours.
For me the cycle has now shrunk until it is merged in the moment. The
circular movement has become so swift that it cannot be distinguished from
immobility. And it is as though, in consequence, my days had rearranged themselves.
No longer do they jostle on each others heels. Each stands separate and upright,
proudly affirming its own worth. And since they are no longer to be distinguished as
the stages of a plan in process of execution, they so resemble each other as to be
superimposed in my memory, so that I seem to be ceaselessly reliving the same day.

Robinson here identifies three structures of temporality: first, a very human form of linear
time in which moment follows on moment in a straight line that seemed to go on ad
infinitum; second, a divine time which is circular the end coiling back to the beginning and
recommencing; third, a time of the moment, in which circular time compresses itself to the
limit of the infinitely small, so that it seems almost immobile and every one of these moments
becomes self-contained and self-affirming absolute. This is the time of Nietzschean eternal
return. It is worth noting the relation between the second and third time: the former consists
in cycles that exceed all possible human experience; the latter shrinks these cycles into the
very atoms of experience. One might even speak of the time of the moment as a

secularisation of divine time. Moreover, the novel also describes a fourth time which
Robinson momentarily forgets (although he returns to it a paragraph later), this is the
escap[e] into timelessness or eternity: the forgetting of time which is associated with the
pigs of the swamp, descendants of Nietzsches forgetful cows. This timelessness is of course
not only the preserve of semi-conscious beasts, but also a deity who exists outside of time.
The divine has two times everlasting cycles and atemporal stasis.
Robinson goes on to critique the neuroses associated with human time ticking on and
on without end; he also rejects the longing for eternity as illusory. Rather, Robinson finds
himself at this late stage in the novel whole-heartedly affirming the time of the moment. He
describes a new mode of comportment that has come over him as he experiences this
revolutionary temporal structure:
[The island and Friday] call [now] for my attention, a watchful and marvelling
vigilance, for it seems to me nay, I know it that at every moment I am seeing them
for the first time, and that nothing will ever dull their magical freshness.

He continues,
I watch Friday as he walks towards me and the emptiness of sea and sky is so vast
that I have no scale by which to measure him, so that he might be a figure three
inches high within reach of my hand or a ten-foot giant half a mile away.

As I interpret it, the experience of this affirmatory temporality of the moment has two
consequences: it gives rise to a new mode of attention on the part of the subject the subject
attends closely but also marvels as if seeing the object for the very first time. It is a moment
of critical innocence or, in a Ricoeurian register, post-hermeneutical naivety. Second,
integral to this innocence is a loss of measure: there is no longer any way to determine
objects by a pre-given standard; there is no longer any means for comparison. The gaze of
wonder does not measure.

In what follows, I employ Tourniers description of such a temporality as a key to unlocking

the last poems of Friedrich Hlderlin. There is, I argue, a similar shift in these poems away

from a human or divine time to a time of the moment. Each poem celebrates a different but
equally perfect moment in time self-contained and self-affirming. What is more, integral to
this new experience of time is the appearance of the very modes of comportment Tournier
associates with it: marvelling attention and loss of measure. My aim in describing this
revolution in poetic time is to set out the possibility of a time without transition (to refer to
the conference theme), a time not governed by the interplay of presence and absence, a time
independent of difference (and perhaps even diffrance). This of course makes it an inhuman
time (as well as an in-divine time), yet nevertheless it is not necessarily, as Hlderlin shows,
an impossible time.
So, first of all, what do I mean by Hlderlins last poems? After the second part of his
novel, Hyperion, was published in 1799, Hlderlin embarked on, what are termed, his late
poems ambitious hymns and elegies marked by their complexity, disjointedness and their
technically fiendish verse forms (as well as, of course, their brilliance). It is on these poems
that Hlderlins reputation rests, but let me stress it is not these poems I am here interested in.
In 1806, Hlderlin was committed to an asylum in Tbingen as a dangerous schizophrenic,
and released six months later as still mad but no longer dangerous. He was to spend the rest
of his life 36 years as an invalid, nursed by a carpenters family in Tbingen. 1806 also
(as one might expect) marked a break in Hlderlins poetic production: he abandoned the
complex verse forms and mythic content characteristic of his pre-1806 work. The 47 poems
that survive from these last 36 years termed Hlderlins spteste Gedichte (his last poems)
are very different. And it is on these I concentrate in the time remaining.

Pierre Bertaux makes the following observations on these last poems. They form the guiding
motif for my own exposition.
The fifty or so poems which remain of his productions from the era of the tower are
of a style and tone totally different from the high style of the preceding phase:
infinitely simple and sparse, almost nave and intemporal.

Bertaux goes on to expand on this notion of intemporality: What is at issue is another

temporal dimension than that of human agitation or the historical dimension of dates;

[Hlderlin] rediscovers the cyclic time of agrarian civilisations. Some earlier comments of
Bertauxs also shed light on this notion of the intemporal:
[During this phase, Hlderlin] shuts up he integrates himself into the landscape,
while his body is reduced to the earth. It lives the rhythm of the seasons. Duration is
abolished. Around him exist solely the elements, the breath of air, light and water
Around him, life is renewed.

What I am contending is that Bertauxs identification of the intemporal closely maps

Tourniers description of a post-human time. There is the same refusal to think of time as
passing away, a refusal to think of it in terms of a series of linear presents: Duration is
abolished. And as a consequence, Bertauxs Hlderlin comports himself in his poems in a
marvelling and nave manner. This is a time of perpetual beginning (life is continually being
renewed), but simultaneously it is a time of perpetual perfection. Every new moment stands
alone complete and radically new. Bchenstein calls this a despotism of the present in
Hlderlins last poetry. Miles similarly writes that the poems are lived out in the naked
present, free from all tensions in time [they celebrate] an idyllic landscape experienced
totally in the present. And Thomas Ryan also provides a helpful gloss,
[Noteworthy is] the monotony of form and theme, the lack of a sense of historical
time, the almost exclusive use of present tense, the tensionlessness It is above all in
the total absence of historical consciousness that this transformation [from late to
last] is most apparent. The same poet who once attempted to contain in his words a
sweeping vision of the plan of history [now] reflects the condition of ataraxia, a
nearly complete acceptance of, and contentment with, the dispensation of things as
the poet observes them.

Hlderlins experience of time here is that of the intemporal a rejection of human

conventions of linear progress. In such intemporality, there is no progress or decline, but
merely successive and repeated moments of consummation. Each consummation may well be
qualitatively different, but each is on its own terms equally consummate.
What evidence is there in the poems themselves? First of all, only the present
indicative tense is widely used. Whereas Hlderlins earlier hymns and elegies had drawn on
a Schillerian eschatology in which the present is constituted both by its nostalgia for a
classical arcadia and also its expectation of the end-times to come, this is completely absent

after 1806: the present exists on its own terms. It is described for its own sake. This relation
to the present can be clearly seen in the tone of the poems as well. They are cheerful. The
perpetual present of the poems is a time of fulfilment and ease, free of the tensions of the late
poems. Hlderlins guiding thought here is, in his own words, Vollkommenheit ohne Klage
or perfection without complaint. Everything has relaxed. As Coriando writes, Nature is no
longer characterised by the tear of mourning Language rests in the element of what is
simple. She continues, the world is restored to its simplicity: it is what and as it is, and its
simple Being is full of meaning.
The titles of these poems more often than not refer to the seasons: almost half of the
poems have seasonal titles. Bertaux sees in this obsession with the seasons a return to
agrarian cyclical time of annual decline and ascent. However, this is to misrepresent
Hlderlins purpose in these poems: it is not that autumn mourns summer nor that winter
anticipates spring. In each of the four seasons, consummation occurs and what is is present
in its fullness. Hlderlin writes poems for all four seasons, each of which celebrates the
fullness experienced at that time. Each season is embraced on its own terms. Tourniers
Friday again is of help here: Robinson speaks of the annual cycle of the seasons as a cycle
shrunk to human size; however, he still differentiates it from the maximally constricted cycle
of the affirmative moment. The annual cycle of the seasons remains merely an approximation
of divine eternity; it does not fully make immanent this eternity in the moment and it is only
at that point that time, subjectivity and experience in general undergo the revolution which
Tournier narrates in the closing pages of Friday. Similarly, in Hlderlins last poems what is
at stake is not an inter-seasonal cycle but an intra-seasonal one: culmination occurs
immanent to each season in its own right. The cycle is constricted so that it approaches its
smallest and most intense circumference.

Moreover, just as for Robinson, specific modes of poetic comportment follow directly from
this new experience of time. Hence, the opening of Der Frhling is representative of the tone
of much of this poetry in its stress on der neue Tag. For Hlderlin narrates precisely from
the perspective of this perpetual beginning in which all things appear fresh and new. It is a
perspective of constant marvel. It is no surprise therefore that a common verb in the last
poems is sich wundern whether humans sich wundern ber manches / Sichtbares, Hheres,
Angenehmes (feeling amazed by much thats / Visible, lofty and pleasing to them) in Wenn

aus dem Himmel or humanity wundert sich at the return of der Frhling aus der Tiefe
in a 1758 Der Frhling. The poem, Freundschaft, Liebe, begins by merely listing numerous
objects to be found in a church a list in which the poets wonder at the commonplace is
particularly evident: Freundschaft, Liebe, Kirch und Heilge, Kreuze, Bilder, / Altar und
Kanzel und Muzik. (Friendship, love, saints and the church, images, cross, altar and pulpit
and music.) The paratactic rhetoric of this opening mimics the gaze of an enthusiastic child
confronted with an excess of new objects: this and this and this. It is Hlderlins
moment of becoming-Edenic. In a later poem, Der Ruhm, he will speak of such everyday
objects (in this case, Der Garten, Baum, der Weinberg mit dem Hter [The garden, tree,
the vineyard with its keeper]) as ein Wiederglanz des Himmels (a heavenly reflection).
They are miracles or, at the very least, revelations.
If marvel is to be found in the last poems, so too is a loss of measure at least human
measure. Note the list quoted above from Freundschaft, Liebe: Hlderlin begins his list with
emotional relations named abstractly, but immediately switches register to concrete objects:
Altar und Kanzel. Love and candles are placed in the same category; they are forced onto
the same univocal plane. The very fact that Hlderlin here appropriates friendship into the
same list as candles gives the impression of a loss of discrimination an indifference to
categorial differentiation. This is confirmed in one of the versions of Der Winter in which he
claims that reality erscheint besonders gut auf ungemener Weite (appears more clearly on
unmeasured spaces). The disappearance of measure facilitates, according to the last
Hlderlin, the full, clear appearance of what is. Concomitant with times manifestation in
discrete, self-perfected moments is an increasing failure to compare, discriminate and set
bounds. The present can only appear as present when it is no longer measured in terms of the
past and the future. As Im Lieblicher Blau famously reads, Giebt es auf Erden ein Maa? Es
giebt keines (Is there a measure on earth? There is none).
Discussion of measure in Hlderlins poetry cannot, of course, escape the long
shadows cast by Heidegger, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe; however, for my purposes, perhaps
the most interesting discussion of Hlderlinian measure is Peter Fenves article, Measure for
Measure which discerns in the hymns prior to 1806 the emergence of this insistence on
unmeasure. That is, Fenves focuses on a line from Der Rhein, Nur hat ein jeder sein Maas
(Only each has its measure). In this idea of each alone having its measure that is not
common to anything else, Fenves sees something like the incomparability of the affirmative
moment that I have identified in Hlderlins last poems:

The criteria for something being what it is are not thereby lost, as if the absence of a
universal meter implied an undifferentiated mass: rather, only each one has its own
criteria, which means that the criteria for something being what it is cannot be found
in anything but the thing itself The only place to seek the measure of each one is in
onliness itself: in aloneness, in singularity.

Just like the seasonal time of the last poems, singularity of measure here generates autarchy.
Each is perfect on its own terms. Moreover, Fenves goes on to link this new experience of
poetic time to the singularity of the poem itself: each poem is an affirmative, self-contained
moment; each poem not only represents but performs its own completeness. The time of
Hlderlins last poems should be named poetic time itself. And, as such, it is poetic time that
needs to be distinguished from the human time of linearity or the divine time of cycles. Or, as
Fenves concludes his piece, the other measure, the non-human one, is a measure of
languages contraction from the human-divine interplay. The time of language is neither the
time of men nor the time of the gods.

What of the value of this temporal revolution in Hlderlins last poems? That is, is this shift
to a time of self-contained moments where the present is affirmed independently of the past
and future (while the poet marvels anew at the earth perpetually and without measure) a good
thing? Many critics reply with a firm no. David Constantine is representative: The world is
not like that, and such harmony is only possible in poetry not engaging with it. And it must
be admitted that such views happily coincide with Hlderlins biography: the last poems
occur simultaneous to his madness; they can, then, be written off as symptoms of this lunacy.
On this reading, the affirmation of the present is a refusal to attend to how things are.
Confirmation for this dismissal is seemingly to be found in the increasing
impersonality of Hlderlins last poems. There emerges a complete absence of any reference
to individuals, events or eras at all. I quote an example, entitled Der Sommer,
Im Thale rinnt der Bach, die Berg an hoher Seite,
Sie grnen weit umher an dieses Thales Breite,
Und Bume mit dem Laube stehn gebreitet,
Da fast verbogen dort der Bach hinunter gleitet.

So glnzt darob des schnen Sommers Sonne,

Da fast zu eilen scheint des hellen Tages Wonne,
Der Abend mit der Frische kommt zu Ende,
Und trachtet, wie er das dem Menschen noch vollende.

[Brooks thread the valleys, each high mountain-side

Is greening far around this vale so wide
And trees in all their leafage stand outspread
So that the brook glides down an almost hidden bed.

The lovely summer sun so shines on it

That almost the days radiance seems to flit.
Then evening with coolness makes an end,
Seeks to perfect it and for men amend.]

This could be a poem by any poet about any landscape at any epoch. Indeed, in all the last
poems, there is almost no use of personal pronouns, deixis, or reference to immediate
circumstances or historical events. The poems are purely abstract entities, independent of
particular places and times. Hlderlins poetic voice slips into generalisations universal
statements that describe the concrete without themselves being anchored in a concrete time
and place and with this comes the dangers of vagary.
Moreover, the above closely mirrors the definition that Louis Marin famously offers
of utopianism: the cultivation of a non-dialectical neutrality a language that imagines the
concrete from a no-place or utopia. And I want in closing to affirm the utopianism of
Hlderlins last poems. Hlderlins utopianism is best captured in an image from Wenn aus
der Ferne where the poet speaks aus hoher Aussicht (a higher standpoint) and, in so doing,
is able to beschauen das Meer (contemplate the sea) but this is only because, in
cultivating this higher standpoint, he will keiner seyn (is bent on being no one). The
higher standpoint that intuits the concrete presupposes the destitution of personality. In other
words, the simplicity of Hlderlins final poems, their relaxed cheerfulness, is a consequence
of the revolution in temporal experience that the poet undergoes in them. And in turn this
new time is made possible by the development of a neutral, impersonal viewpoint an
inhuman, utopian viewpoint. Yet, even if utopias are not to be politically instantiated; they
can be written and Hlderlins last poems stand testament to this.