The House of Being

Churchill sits in "Hitler's chair" amid the ruins of the Führerbunker in Berlin, July 1945

Language is the house of being. In its home human beings dwell.

—Heidegger, "Letter on 'Humanism'" (1949)

How I agree with what the old villain meant!

He rattles on about the "quiet power" of the possible,

But has already said it all—and only four years since April 30 '45.

A member of the NSDAP throughout its twelve-year Reich,

He had, after all, come back from his Syracuse alive

(as did Plato, returning a slave). The bow is fashioned as the wood is bent.

Epigraph: Translated by Frank A. Capuzzi in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge University Press, 1998). Heidegger elaborates: "Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home."

Header image: https://ww2db.com/image.php?image_id=5489

Sunday, January 11, 2026

The Sameness of the Same

Wolf Kibel, Interior with bed, oil on canvas, 310 x 670 mm, Sanlam Art Collection, Cape Town

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

—Ecclesiastes 1:9 (KJV)

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose,

A French savant said in 1849, a year of failed revolutions:

"The more it changes, the more it stays the same."

Born in 1939, I could say that, too, Heaven knows!

I lie in bed and sip my coffee gratefully. So it goes.

I was just born lucky, I suppose!

But am I —or aren't I—to blame for the Sameness of the Same?

Saturday, January 10, 2026

Anyone Smell Burning Paint?

Prepositions are like burning paint. Forget grammar and think about potatoes.

—Gertrude Stein

The despotic words that I inherit

Wanting recognition of their merit,

Syntactic insolence gets worse and worse,

With young prepositions asserting rights,

Adjectives complaining bitterly of slights,

Conjunctions that have learned to curse,

Pronouns unwilling apparently to wait,

Verbs that attack the prefrontal gate.

Fractious nouns keep slipping out of date,

While rhyming couplets—idle, vapid things—

Desiring hotter music drag their wings.

I write a poem almost every day—

But could anyone unravel what's to say?

Rejoice, O fond musicians, in your craft,

Whose genius elevates you far above

Loquacious vocables in search of love!

Written upon reading Francesca Wade's superb new biography Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife (New York: Scribner, 2025)

Friday, January 9, 2025