On Aletheia

How a specific type of language uncovers the truth of the world

Let’s be honest. Very few people read or write poetry anymore. After all, what is it for? What purpose does it serve? Of course, in the (ancient) past poetic inspiration was considered a gift from the otherworld, and poetry was a form of mantic expression. The Irish Filid or poet-class enjoyed a rank similar to that of a regent, purely on the basis of their poetic power: they could ward or curse, offer protection from sorcery or literally ‘rhyme to death’ men and animals. But that was then. What use could poetry possible have in the modern world?

Heidegger, who held poetry in high esteem, provides us with an answer. He regarded poetic language as best equipped to reveal the condition of being in the world. He rejected the notion that philosophy was concerned with ‘right answers’ and asserted instead that its purpose was to uncover the world. But he found the technical language of philosophy inadequate for the task; it did not reveal truth, nor the right way of getting to it. In fact, in his view, there was no right way to explain the world, only better ways of uncovering it.

Heidegger uses the word aletheia, which he translates as ‘unconcealment’ to encapsulate this idea of uncovering the world. Aletheia is a kind of non-calculative thinking; a mindfulness concerned with a specific but simple engagement with things, and a form of relatedness. Poets are required to go into phenomena to uncover them; it is almost as though they have the power to excavate truth through poetic language, which conveys the relatedness of self and the world. In the same way that a sculpture resides within a lump of stone, waiting to be uncovered by the sculptor, so too do words reside in things – they are immanent – waiting to be discovered by the poet. We might say that philosophy uses a language about things; poetry is a language of things.

For Heidegger, poetry preserves the deep meaning of language because it sits outside everyday, prosaic, common speech. Through the poet’s careful consideration of word use, syntax, grammar, metaphor, simile, metonymy, rhyme, metre etc to communicate thought (and, I would add, feeling), poetry articulates aletheia; its expressive power captures the mystery of existence that otherwise eludes us when we use everyday, technical or other non-poetic languages. Poetry is the language of unveiling.

In the week that Peter Gizzi won the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024 for his collection Fierce Elegy, us amateur poets must once again consider what makes good poetry, and whether ours is any good. Heidegger would perhaps not have considered it in terms of good or bad, but whether it uncovers truths about the world. His position makes sense to me. When I respond to poetry it is because of an intuited relatedness; its arrangement of words – the balance between specificity and vagueness – alchemize into a truthfulness beyond everyday language.

I think that writing poetry is a unique experience, a kind of intellectual intuition. It brings joy to the poet when, through the process of meditatively seeking and unconcealing, a specific arrangement of words reveal, in the mind of the poet at least, a small truth. And through that providential or ‘inspired’ use of language, there is a forcefulness, a resonance and power.

So here then is a poem about exactly that: the magickal power of words, and language and, in particular, poetic language. I couldn’t say whether it’s any good or not, or even if it reveals anything about the world. But the experience of groping for its words was, for me, a fruitful activity.

Words

They are carved from quartz and excarnated bones
Ossified with the soil of this earth
Hewn by thought and desire
Uttered, intoned,
Their meanings only half-known
Coming into being
Roused to purpose
Made carnate with every breath
Made certain with each summoning
Growing, forming, approaching wakefulness

They are inspected with obsidian wands
Their entrails and vertebrae
Studied for omens
Arranged and assembled 
Into auspicious catenae
Into ligatures of stronger magick
Transmuted into keys
For locks that lead 
Beyond graves and hills 
Beyond stone altars upon the horizon

They are winged and feathered furies
Flocks of beating blood and marrow
Colonising the worlds
And returning in rapture
Captured and bound like
Spirits in a jewel or
A reliquary's terrible cargo
Until one day called upon
To eviscerate their secrets
The marrow broken open
Feathers scattered
Forever sacrificed by those with tongues to speak

Here then are the words
The precious words of power
That you must learn to speak
That you must desire to speak

To become incandescent