Tag: Martin Heidegger

The Buried City of Argia

Sand Casting

For a thing simply to be present, to be, it must exert itself against all other being that is external to it. Our physical selves cut a space out of existence in the shape of our physical selves. And constantly we collide with the world around us. Again, Martin Heidegger: “The being-there of historical man means: to be posited as the breach into which the preponderant power of being bursts in its appearing, in order that this breach itself should shatter against being.” I think this means that external being pours into the observing subject as phenomenon, and in doing so it crashes against the essence of the subject. The identity of the subject impedes the course of being, yet being washes around it like a stream around a rock; it inundates it and slowly erodes it.

When I read the passage above and considered its meaning, I was reminded of a literary image I had come across at some point of a society encased within the earth. Its citizens inhabited an environment that was solid rather than spatial, and they moved about by pushing themselves incrementally through a thick medium of stone and soil, like earthworms. I had a very difficult time finding the image in my books. After spending a few hours looking through all of Borges’s work, I began to think I had dreamed the idea up myself, even though that would have taken strength of imagination which I probably do not possess. I ended up finding it late last night in Italo Calvino’s Imaginary Cities. The place is called Argia:

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“What makes Argia different from other cities is that it has earth instead of air. The streets are completely filled with dirt, clay packs the rooms to the ceiling, on every stair another stairway is set in negative, over the roofs of the houses hang layers of rocky terrain like skies with clouds.”

We forget that existence presses against us and jostles us around wherever we go. The buried city of Argia is an exaggeration of this.

The Violent One


I do not mean to denigrate farmers and fishermen with what I have written the past few nights. I do find the drunk, desperate Canadian fisherman who were filmed slaughtering seals to be cowards and numb skulls. But I am not aligning myself with the environmentalist organizations I have recently described. I admire their resistance to custom and aggressive reaction. I am indifferent to their cause. We cannot fault humanity for being a destructive presence in the world. It is what we are. Our inclination to force and power is what makes us unique among the animals. Violence against all things is our defining trait. It is why the other animals fear us and run away. It is why our domesticated animals warily follow us without protest. Heidegger calls this trait deinon, an ancient Greek adjective meaning fierce and stunning. As I remember, the Attic poets commonly used it as an epithet for the goddess Athena. It describes the human propensity to know the world and to shape it, an impulse which, Heidegger observes, is at its root violent and domineering:

“The violent one, the creative man, who sets forth into the un-said, who breaks into the un-thought, compels the unhappened to happen and makes the unseen appear—this violent one stands at all times in venture.” An Introduction to Metaphysics (161)

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Yes man is assertive and forceful, but so is nature, and in the perpetual conflict between the two, nature prevails just as often. I cannot censure those who impose themselves into the world’s supposedly delicate ecology and alter the land around them, because this is the way of the hominid species. We are perpetuators of the artificial. We synthesize objects and concepts from material hewn from the wild, uncooked world. Everyday every one of us destroys great swaths of existence and manufactures new being from the ruins. We extract it from the earth or wherever and mutilate it into a shape that suits out inane purposes. Sometimes we call the output goods and commodity. Sometimes pollution. Sometimes art.