Not an Essay. .

I have come to the conclusion that I am working way, way, too much. I was hired at Easy Street on July 1st, started July 2nd, and have worked at least eight hours (and up to sixteen hours) a day since. My first day off will be Friday, July 17th. For these reasons I am not where I want to be, but that is ok. This week I am only working single shifts each day [which is how it should be from now on] so I will have three to four hours a day to work on this project. Right now I am about halfway through Martine Heidegger's Building Dwelling Thinking but no where close to 1,000 words on dwelling. For now I am just going to take excerpts  from my notes on the essay regarding part one on What it is to dwell. Tomorrow I will post on part two, and hopefully by the end of Friday I will have something to reflect on in a more holistic way [including images, drawings, ect]. We will see where it goes I guess though. 

 

Thoughts on Dwelling [Heidegger] :

 

First, I think it is important to take notice of Heidegger's introduction where he states, "This thinking about building does not presume to discover architectural ideas, let alone to give rules for building". I think understanding that this project, wherever it leads between now and September, or whenever, can not definitely tell me anything at all about architectural ideas. I am not sure what outcome or consequence this exploration will have on my perspective, but I can not expect anything at all. It is simply an exploration, an exploration which is meant to simply observe as much as possible. 

 

In part one Heidegger breaks down the history of the word 'dwell'. The intension of this is to resurrect the true meaning behind the word in its more essential state. He says that: 

 

Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man… That we retain a concern for care in speaking is all to the good, but it is of no help to us as long as language still serves us even then only as a means of expression.

 

This begins a long explanation of the word Bauen, the Old English and High German work for building, which means to dwell. [I remember a lecture Denis Mann gave Fall quarter of our freshman year that started to get into the meaning of words, including the word Bauen and this paper by Heidegger, it was one of my favorite lectures.] It will do no good to retrace the steps Heidegger took, but in the end he concluded that the word dwell has many facets, and a true identity that has been lost to us. What he did establish is that to be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal, which means to dwell. That it is our nature, in fact, to dwell. At the same time it means to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, to cultivate. More importantly, in my experience of this essay, was that to dwell also means to be set at peace, to free. This is based from the Gothic wunjan which says more distinctly how this remaining is experienced. To free really means to spare, and that “the sparing itself consists not only in the fact that we do not harm the on whom we spare. Real sparing is something positive and takes place when we leave something beforehand in its own nature. Heidegger says that “the fundamental character of dwelling is this paring and preserving.

 

Once he breaks down the meaning of the word he speaks of a primal oneness, the four : earth and sky, mortals and divinities, and how they belong together. The connections he makes between the four are quite beautiful but he concludes by saying that :

 

In saving the earth, in receiving the sky, in awaiting the divinities, in initiating mortals, dwelling occurs as the fourfold preservation of the fourfold. To spare and preserve means: to take under our care, to look after the fourfold in its presencing. What we take under our care must be kept safe. But if dwelling preserves the fourfold, where does it keep the fourfold's nature? How do mortals make their dwelling such a preserving? Mortals would never be capable of it if dwelling were merely a staying on earth under the sky, before the divinities, among mortals. Rather, dwelling itself is always a staying with things. Dwelling, as preserving, keeps the fourfold in that with which mortals stay: in things.

The next section will discuss how building belongs to dwelling.

This is all sort of hard to absorb, but most of it, I believe, I understood. I reiterated only bits and pieces and I am sure it makes no sense, but that is ok, for now, as these are really only notes…

There are two things that I really enjoyed about the first section, well three I suppose. The first is that he says “We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have build because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers”. This, to some extent, reinforces my own assumption that these ‘ad-hoc structures’ may have some character of the desire to dwell. I also found his definition of ‘to set free’ very important. The idea of freedom creates a sense of severing control over something… I think it is much more appropriate that to be free is to preserve the true nature of something. To free is to return it specifically to its being. The third aspect of this section was his rather poetic thoughts on the four-fold. I am still not sure how I feel about it… the unity and connection is something beautiful but… well I am not sure. What I did take from it is a sense of what it is to be mortal. Not that this was something I previously misunderstood, but Heidegger phrases the connections of four essential things in a very specific manner. As I read the remainder of this essay I think I will have more to say on this.

Reading this has been a very slow process. I have taken the time to look up words to find their appropriate and distinct meaning and inserted them within the essay for my own benefit and reread many parts various times.

More tomorrow. I have to be at work in eight hours… Ugh.