Linguistic Blank, Empty Slot, and the Home of Being: A Study of Poetic Language, Part Three

“Language is a region; that is to say, it is the house of being,” Heidegger says. [1] Then: is the language that is the home of being the same language as the language that is the prison-house of the spirit? And how does language become the home of being? When we look deeply into the questions of the linguistic blank and the empty slot, we come to a more fitting understanding not only of language but also of the human being and of the human home of being.

1. The Concretizing Intention and the Empty Slot of Language

Setting out from literature as an intentional object, the phenomenological aesthetician Roman Ingarden proposed the question of the “spot of indeterminacy.” He writes:

I call “spots of indeterminacy” those aspects or components of the represented object that have not been specifically determined by the text. Every object, character, event, and so on that a literary work portrays contains many spots of indeterminacy, especially in the depiction of the fortunes of persons and things. [2]

In Ingarden’s view, the “determinate aspects” of any work are always finite, while the “spots of indeterminacy” are necessary and cannot be shed. However detailed the narration and depiction, the work cannot exhaust the object; selection must be made. The work’s selection of indeterminacies determines its aesthetic-value quality and constitutes its stylistic and rhetorical features. Wolfgang Iser took up Ingarden’s view of the “spot of indeterminacy” (also rendered as “a place of underdetermination”) and went on to propose a theory of the “blank,” drawing a careful distinction between “blank” and “spot of indeterminacy”:

The term “indeterminacy” is used to refer to the gap within the sequence of determinations or schematized aspects of an intentional object; the “blank” refers to the empty places within the textual system as a whole. [3]

As one of the important founders of reception theory, Iser’s “blank” differs from Ingarden not only in conceptual content but also in the dimension within which its function is examined. In Iser’s thinking, the blank contains the latent links between parts of the text; functionally, it serves as a motive force for the communication of reading, regulates the relation between reader and text, and balances the whole communicative process.

In distinction from Ingarden’s “spot of indeterminacy” (or “gap”) and Iser’s “blank,” the present paper holds that within the literary text there exists a still more fundamental “empty slot” — or, on the linguistic plane, an “empty slot” that exists with literary language as inseparably as shadow with form. It is the root feature of the literary text and at the same time the basic mode of being of literary language.

In The Literary Work of Art, Ingarden takes the literary work as an intentional object: it is built into an intentional object through concretization in the reader’s aesthetic intention. Yet why is it that, in a literary work, language (which is itself concept) can be built into an intentional object, while scientific and philosophical writings remain stuck at the conceptual plane — at logical operation upon concept? Mere appeal to aesthetic intention or to virtual intention [4] is not enough to explain this. To untie the knot one must enter the roots of language.

In primal language, language is tightly tied to vivid sensuous impression. This point has been confirmed by large bodies of anthropological research. Even in Homer there is a residue of this feature: concepts such as soul, mind, time, courage, feeling, or thought have, in the epics, a strong substantiality. These words are tied tightly to material images bound up with bodily change-processes or concrete objects. [5] With the widening of social interchange and the development of human thought, language develops in the direction of abstraction and generality. As Vico writes:

Men today form sentences with lip and tongue, but the heart is “empty,” for the heart contains only false ideas with no real reference. So men of the modern age can no longer imagine such great phantasmic figures as a “Nature endowed with sympathy”; we have likewise lost the power to feel the great imaginative power of primal men. In the heart of primal man there was not yet the slightest trace of abstraction, refinement, or spiritualization, for his mind was still fully submerged in sensation, tormented by passion, and buried in the body. [6]

Vico rightly named the overall tendency of the development of human thought and language, but he overlooked the deep imprint left on man by the long primal age. On the one hand, with historical development, language is built into a system of abstract concept and logic, and man too develops logical thinking; the two are mutually cause and effect and develop in step. On the other hand, the long primal age — when language was tightly bound to representation and feeling — has left, as a primal sediment, the concrete-vivid-feeling-rich features of language as a residue in human instinct; it has become a psychological tendency and a deep pattern — the concretizing tendency of language.

In The Speaking Human Being, Claude Hagège notes:

Speaking humans dream of the world without ceasing. This is not to say that humans, in defiance of a fact that has held at least since Aristotle, fantastically wish that finite words could express infinite things; it is to say that humans are unwilling to see the trace of the material world disappear entirely from language.

And he says repeatedly:

Humans have not entirely given up the mimesis of nature in speaking; in spite of themselves they have the desire to cling to the material world. [7]

This human “unwillingness” cannot be made up for; this “desire” can no longer be fully satisfied. Once language is born, it sets out on a road of departure from the material world — going ever further, never turning back. Yet the inborn “Ah-Q spirit” cleverly lets man escape despair, and what reveals it within language is the concretizing tendency. Through concretization, language unfolds itself as an intentional object and, by it, “imitates” nature, “stands in for” the material world, so that human desire gains substitute satisfaction and the heart is comforted. So man is no longer a drifting, homeless soul; he has found a home to rest in, even if it is only a substitute, non-real world.

The concretizing tendency of language is suppressed and weakened in the everyday utilitarian activity — especially as language rule and language logic develop and impose forcible repression — but it is encouraged, awakened, and strengthened in poetic language. One may say: poetic language is language that uses various devices to break the repression of rule and logic, and so allows the concretizing tendency to be strengthened. It is language that draws out and liberates the latent concretizing tendency in man. Or: the root character of poetic language consists precisely in possessing a strengthened concretizing intention. A literary work is vivid in image not because language — which has long since shed its connection with the sensuous and become concept — can, by its own force, model a vivid sensuous object. It is because poetic language, by its concretizing tendency, calls forth the reader’s participation in a joint concretizing process, and so builds up what Ingarden calls the intentional object. The strength or weakness of the sensuous feature of language is no doubt tied to the accumulation of representation in the reader; but at the root, it lies in the strength or weakness of the concretizing tendency of language itself. The more fully language can attract, mobilize, and draw out the reader’s concretizing potential, the more vivid and bright it is. Scientific and philosophical texts are different: the relatively abstract words they use, especially the tight organizing modes, the strict grammatical rules, and the logical structures, severely repress — even smother — this concretizing potential between language and man, holding language and human thought to the level of conceptual operation. So Schopenhauer says:

The meaning of words is grasped directly and accurately, without — usually — the intervention of imagination (Phantasmen). It is reason speaking to reason — reason speaking within its own domain. What reason transmits and receives is all abstract concept, non-intuitive representation. [9]

Because poetic language draws the reader into the joint building of an intentional object, there must exist, between the language as concept and the intentional object, an “empty slot.” This empty slot does not exist in scientific and philosophical language, for these are themselves linear logical operations from concept to concept. They too create meaning, but in a way wholly different from poetic language: they do not — as poetic language must — first build an intentional object and, in the building, fill in the slot, generate the meaning, and experience the meaning. At the same time, this empty slot differs both from Iser’s “blank” within the textual system as a whole and from Ingarden’s “gap” within the sequence of schematized aspects. It is bound up with poetic language, present everywhere and at every moment; it is itself the space within which schematized aspects unfold — a constitutive component of poetic language. Lose the empty slot, and language loses its life and falls into being a conceptual statement.

This feature gives poetic language an immense creative potential and a free range for its unfolding; in some respects it surpasses the media used in sculpture and painting. In Laokoön, Lessing analyzed in detail the difference between poetry and painting, holding that painting should not depict the “climax,” for

once the climax is reached, the end is reached, and the eye can look no further. The imagination has its wings tied. [10]

Poetry is not so confined: it unfolds in time and need not concentrate its depiction on one moment. More importantly,

the image of poetry is spiritual; so the field within which our imagination may roam is limitless. [11]

Lessing keenly grasped the root point in which the poetic image differs from the painted work — it is spiritual, that is, an intentional object. If we go a step deeper and look from the features of poetic language itself, the difference between poetry and painting is clearer still. Poetic language is no longer concept alone; it is a language with concretizing intention and latent empty slots, a language of strong modeling and creating power that calls upon the reader, draws him into the empty slots, and jointly creates the intentional object. So, by comparison with the relatively determinate material medium of painting, the language used as the medium of literature is wholly different — at once determinate and indeterminate. From the angle of literary linguistics it is determinate: once made, it becomes an unchanging fact; from the angle of the features of poetic language, it is indeterminate, because it carries empty slots within itself. This feature decrees that literary reading, at root, is a free creative activity that needs the roaming of the reader’s imagination — and the field of that imagination is limitless. So even though Virgil’s poetry depicts the climax, it does not become a hedge to the reader’s imagination.

2. The Interaction of Blank, Gap, and Empty Slot

Linguistic blank and empty slot stand on different levels and yet are closely linked. The blank within the linguistic-system-whole is a challenge to the linguistic system, a dissolution of linguistic rule and semantic logic. The word, by its hiding and absence, deliberately produces a break and a missing in the order of language and the chains of logic, and so opens up an opening within the tight network of linguistic rule and logic. Linguistic rule, logic, and order are thereby loosened in their hold upon language and their binding of the word, and so the latent concretizing intention between language and the human being is released — and the empty slot latent in language reveals itself as the space of free human creation. Once the human being is called by language and is drawn into the concretizing process of the empty slot, his creative force is immensely awakened. He not only makes the linguistic concept concrete into an intentional object with schematized aspects; he goes further to fill in the gap and enter the free imagination of the blank. The more fully the imagination unfolds, the more thoroughly are linguistic rule and semantic logic dismantled; the more effectively are the concretizing intention of language and the concretizing potential of the human being drawn out and exalted. Blank and empty slot stand in a mutually generative interactive relation — what is meant by the “mutual giving-birth of the empty and the full.”

This interactive relation between blank and empty slot in poetic language inevitably drives poetry, in pursuit of its own poetic realm, to demand that language tend to leap and to be implicit. For the leap is precisely the break — the linguistic blank — and the implicit is precisely the blank too, that which drives the dissolution of linguistic rule and semantic logic and brings the empty slot of language into being, drives the concretizing operation forward. Take the Yuan-period lyric “Tian jing sha: Autumn Thoughts”:

Withered vine, old tree, evening crow; / Small bridge, flowing water, household; / Ancient road, west wind, lean horse.

Within it there are only solitary words; grammar and logic are nearly all done away with. Yet it is just these broken sentences and isolated words that yield images especially vivid and bright, and offer a space of imagination especially wide. In Talks on Ci Poetry from the Human Realm, Wang Guowei put forward the theory of “realm” (jingjie), holding:

“At the tip of red-apricot branches, the air of spring stirs (nao).” With one word, “nao,” the realm comes out wholly. “The cloud breaks, the moon comes, the flower toys (nong) with its shadow.” With one word, “nong,” the realm comes out wholly.

In these lines the words “nao” (stir-in-noise) and “nong” (play-with) deviate from people’s habitual use and habitual experience and so produce an experiential “blank,” at the same time breaking semantic logic. This use against experience and against semantic logic opens up the full sensuous richness of the word, and so lets the “realm” come out wholly. Liu Xie, in the “Hidden Brilliance” chapter of Wenxin diaolong, writes:

As to the hidden in style, its meaning is born outside the words. The secret resonance reaches across; the latent splendor breaks forth. It is like the change of yao and xiang in the Yi-jing, where one xiang becomes another; like the hidden treasure of streams and rivers, where pearls and jade lie beneath. So through the change of yao-xiang the four images are formed; through the lying-under of pearls and jade the surface ripples in shapes round and square. It begins straight and ends strange; the inner is bright and the outer moist, so that the one who turns it over has no end, and the one who savors it never tires.

By contrast,

if a poet pursues logical harmony excessively, the poem he writes will resemble the prose of rhetoric. [12]

Gestalt psychological aesthetics offers a fine account of artistic blank. On their view, the human mind has a natural tendency to seek “closure” (Prägnanz). So the blank in an artwork sets up just this “closure-pressure” and tension within the aesthetic mind, awakening the appreciator to use his creative imagination to fill in the blank. Yet to use this theory alone to explain blanks in linguistic artworks will not do. If language were only concept, how would the leap, break, or absence between concept and concept be made up? Can the broken-pieces of linguistic concept directly build a whole image? A more reasonable account is this: the linguistic blank releases the concretizing potential between man and language; when reading begins to build the intentional object, when the reader is steeped in the mood of creation, the blank takes effect as a “closure-pressure” and only then truly does its work. In The Imagination of Poetry, Christopher Caudwell holds:

Poetry breaks many words into lines of free arrangement and cuts apart their logical construction. Through inverted syntax and a series of artificial divisions and contrasts, poetry breaks up the associations drawn from the external real world into parts. So the external real world recedes into the secondary, and the instinctual world, the agitated emotional links hidden behind the words, grows into the foreground and becomes the real world. [13]

Human passion and the inner creative force only break out after they have shaken off the bonds of logic. So the language of poetry often makes use of cutting the logical construction in order to liberate the instinctual world and the agitated feelings of the human being, and so to build up a different “real world.”

Among the three — blank, gap, and empty slot — and their mutual play, it is blank that first breaks the constraints of linguistic rule and logic, releases the concretizing intention between language and man, and lets language move beyond the conceptual plane to disclose the empty slot that awaits concretization and schematization. The reader is thereby drawn into a creative activity; the gap is then revealed and filled in the very course of concretization. Across the unfolding of creative imagination, the filling of the empty slot, because it is directly guided and constrained by the word, has less freedom; the gap is the filling of indeterminate points within determinacy, with somewhat greater freedom; the blank, owing to the absence of words and even sentences, has the largest and fullest free space. It removes the direct constraint of language and, along the great creative-energy released by the activity of concretization, enters an unprecedentedly free new realm. This is a space without boundary and without outer bond; it is here that the human creative potential receives its fullest and freest unfolding. Man creates his own spiritual universe; he also experiences his own creation, lingers in it, turns it over and savors it — and keeps unfolding and deepening, on into endlessness.

When language has become the space that man creates and experiences — and become the very creative activity of man — at this point language is no longer a tool but the home of human being, the human being himself. Literary language is creation: it is at once the writer’s creation and the reader’s; it embodies the unfolding process of life and manifests the state of life’s being — a free, poetic state of being. Literary language is also language’s own creation: it has shaken loose from bonds, has displayed a free space; it has broken through the finite and entered a boundless universe and an unending process. If everyday language — especially scientific language — bound by its rule, logic, and system, can only be unfree language and end up the tool of man, never able to inter-soak and inter-fuse with the human being, then poetic language — being the spiritual universe that man freely creates and the very process of free creation — fuses with man into one. It is itself the unfolding of an ideal state of human being and becomes the home of human being.

In this spiritual home, the human being, by the full release of his latent potential and by the free unfolding of his creative force, returns most fully to himself and most fully experiences the surge of life and the joy of the spirit. In the transformation of language from human tool into home of human being, the linguistic blank plays an extremely important role: it is both the starter of language’s freedom and itself the freest spiritual space. Heidegger says:

The nature of language is not consumed in reference. It is not only a thing carrying the character of sign or code. For language is home; we reach to what is by crossing this home unceasingly. [14]

Poetic language lets language return to its native state; lets language regain a nature forgotten in everyday use; and at the same time lets man find his own authentic being and return to his own spiritual home. In a literary work, language is no longer the “prison-house” of which Jameson speaks, nor is it the language that, as Roland Barthes says, “is fascist.” Language has become the home of man’s poetic dwelling, has become a free spiritual territory, has become the liberator of human creative force and the guardian deity of the heart.

In Poetics and Cultural Semiotics, Ikegami Yoshihiko compares scientific and artistic texts and points out:

Ordinary texts generally require at least some measure of “cohesion” (粘着性). The feature of the scientific piece is its high degree of cohesion. By contrast, the artistic text does not strongly demand cohesion. Rather, it is precisely by breaking the “norm” of ordinary texts — that is, cohesion — that the artistic text gains effects that ordinary textual constructions cannot reach. [15]

Ikegami goes on to analyze ellipsis and leap in poetry, especially the “cutting word” (kireji) in the Japanese haiku, writing:

The so-called “cutting word” severs one expression from the over-precise logical relation with the other parts, and so brings the line of sight to focus on this expression — which, having gained independence, comes to the fore. [16]

Ikegami here grasps with great sharpness that poetic language stands opposed to the cohesion and logicality of language, and that it is precisely through ellipsis and the cutting word that it resists cohesion and logical relation and so gains its artistic effect. The point is no doubt correct. Yet two further questions arise. First: why is it that the word, once independent and become the focus of human sight, is no longer concept but possesses expressiveness? Second: Ikegami holds that, after the logical relation is severed, the reader’s line of sight is brought to focus on “a certain expression” — but the leap, ellipsis, and cutting word of poetry (or of haiku) do not isolate “a single expression” from the logical relation in order to focus the reader on “some single expression.” They sever “each expression” from the logical relation, making each into a dispersed-independent but mutually-acting-and-generating “various expressions” that build up a new organic whole and draw the reader. Take the example Ikegami cites:

Old pond / a frog leaps in / sound of water.

Plainly, the reader, in facing this haiku, does not focus the line of sight on one word or phrase; he overlays and fuses each word and phrase into a poetic realm rich in implication, and looks at this whole-expression. A more reasonable account is this: the poet uses ellipsis, cutting word, and the like — linguistic blanks — to sever the grammatical and logical relations among words. The breaking of grammar and logic then liberates language and man. Language is no longer tightly bound to grammar and logic, and the reader is no longer firmly chained within the logical relation, no longer follows the logical thread step by step in his thinking; his concretizing impulse is set loose, and together with language he jointly builds the intentional object. In this process, the word grows from concept into sensuous image and condenses into a poetic realm — drawing the reader to perceive and to experience that realm.

Johannes Engelkamp points out:

The meaning of the word, gained by abstraction from perception, has the tendency to return to perception. [17]

Poetic language uses all manner of strategies to break the order, rule, and logic of language and to cut the “cohesion” at the linguistic surface, so that the “tendency to return to perception” is released and realized — and language returns to its initial primal state, that living state full of passion and sacredness. For

for a concept, the earliest word is not a simple symbol but an image, a picture, a mental sketch of the concept, a brief story about the concept — indeed, a little artwork. [18]

3. From “Prison-House” to “Home”

Language, at root, is not free. From the day of its birth, it is tied not only with “I” but with “we”; it is bound, as Saussure said, to the “stone-weight of the collective.” As the language of “we,” it must legislate both for language itself and for the human being. No one can refuse to follow this legislation; no one can step beyond it by even one pace. To step beyond linguistic law is to put oneself outside language — that is, to lose language — and thus to lose the very ground of being human.

Heidegger disclosed the un-freedom of language from the important constitutive moment of being — “understanding” — and proposed the concept of “average understanding” (durchschnittliches Verständnis). In his view, language can serve communication because

people’s meanings are always the same — for they share in the same averageness in understanding what is said.

This average understanding constrains the hearer, who stays within the familiar; he already understands what is being said and is no longer curious, much less inclined to investigate or to dispute. It also constrains the speaker, whose words must not go beyond the average understanding; he can only echo what others say, parrot-fashion. So speech falls to what Heidegger calls the rootless state of “idle talk” (Gerede).

Idle talk does not keep the open state of being-in-the-world by an articulated understanding, but closes off being-in-the-world and covers up the inner-worldly entities. [19]

Idle talk fosters undifferentiated understanding, dulls human sensitivity, and even gives the human being free rein to give up the activity of understanding altogether. Idle talk pulls man up from the ground of being and lets him float over a covered, alienated world.

Roland Barthes similarly points out language’s alienation of the human being. He writes:

Language, by its very structure, contains an unavoidable relation of alienation. To speak (parler), or — more strictly — to give out discourse (discourir), is not, as is often emphasized, to communicate; it is to subject. The whole structure of language is a universalized dominating force. [20]

Language is a structural system jointly built by the collective. Once a man opens his mouth or begins to think, he has already fallen into the trap of linguistic structure, a trap from which he cannot escape. Language forces him to speak and to think in accord with its structure. This repression is so severe and so long that it has entered to the marrow, so that the man himself no longer feels it and is willingly its slave and obedient subject.

Language has classified every thing within the concept, and so dispelled the wild jumble of chaos. Things have gained a place in the orderly grid. Things no longer have to play a role in the human being’s life-activity; man, by giving them a name, holds proprietorship over them. [21]

Even as language classifies things and gives them order, it imposes the linguistic order upon man himself. Man has to know and to symbolize the world in accord with this order, so that language becomes a “violence” that overrides him. Language grants man the proprietorship of things and the world, but in substance pulls things and the world out of his life-activity. Things and the world no longer draw near to and fuse with the human being but fall into being alien objects — another other, increasingly heterogeneous to and at odds with the human being’s life-activity. At the very moment man takes possession of things and the world, he sets foot on the path of losing them and at last becoming homeless. Possession is the true having-of-nothing. Once man names a star of the universe by his own name, the star halts its mysterious smile and no longer winks at man. Once man, by linguistic naming, exercises possession of a thing, that thing becomes a “dead soul” in Chichikov’s register, beginning to shed its life into an empty conceptual husk, a label stuck on the thing. The thing itself recedes, vanishes. The world then becomes like offal at a butcher’s stall, classified and laid out on the counter in accord with linguistic order, apparently quite clear, while life is no longer present. Man has joyously and loudly called out the names of all the things of the world, never expecting that, in just so doing, he has lost the ten thousand things and has only the empty names left to himself. Man is pulled up from the world of authenticity; language has become the other world in which he can no longer live in peace. And what kind of world is the world of language? It is, surely, a prison-house — a prison-house whose laws are the harshest and the hardest to shake. The structure of language, as Barthes says, unavoidably contains the relation of alienation.

The world built by linguistic concept seems to be a world more determinate than the real world; it gives man an illusory feeling of stability and safety. So man has labored to build, again and again, theoretical systems that, by linguistic concept, simulate worlds. Yet just because of the relative determinacy of linguistic concept, language has lost its vitality. Language is no longer the green of life, and is not even the grey: it has become a “nothing-there,” a spiritual hedge without form or trace, yet firmly unchanging. Man has, with his own hand, created the world of language, and has, by the same hand, built for himself a cage hard to escape.

And yet — language is at once man’s spiritual prison-house and his home of being.

When language is a tool, an “other” heterogeneous to the human being’s existence, language can only be a prison-house. Whether in conversation, idle talk, oratory, writing, cognition, transmission . . . man can never break loose from the bonds of linguistic concept and linguistic structure; his activity is forcibly partitioned and forcibly fitted into linguistic order. But when man and language stand in a different relation — when language manifests its concretizing tendency and its empty slot — then it turns from the finite into the infinite, from the unfree into the free; it calls the human being into a space of free creation, and man and language come into a mutually rousing, mutually generating, mutually blending “I — Thou” relation. Language is no longer the outer tool detached from man; it is, in fact, co-present with the human life; the unfolding of language and the unfolding of life have, at last, fused into one. The indeterminacy of the empty slot of language offers rich and various possibilities for the existence of human life, and its infinity opens up a vast free heaven for the unfolding of human life-activity.

In the essay “The Thing,” Heidegger gives a fine exposition of the pottery jug as a work of art. In his view, the thingness of the jug consists in its being a vessel — a container. As a container, the bottom and the wall of the jug do not truly realize the function of containing; the jug is able to hold something precisely because of its emptiness — because of the inner space. So strictly speaking, the one who makes the bottom and the surface of the jug has not made the jug. Plainly Heidegger here is in close communion with Eastern philosophical thought. The Laozi already says:

Thirty spokes share one hub; in the emptiness lies the usefulness of the cart. Knead clay to form a vessel; in the emptiness lies the usefulness of the vessel. Cut out doors and windows to make a room; in the emptiness lies the usefulness of the room.

This is the mutual giving-birth of being and nothing. Heidegger seizes upon the empty place of the jug and asks further:

Is the jug a true emptiness?

For him, the essence of the jug lies in its “emptiness.” Because of this emptiness, the jug

receives and keeps, gives and pours out.

The jug can hold water and wine to give man to drink, or to offer to the gods as sacrificial wine; and by this it gathers the fourfold of heaven, earth, gods, and mortals:

The spring stays in the gift-water. In the spring the stone dwells, and in the stone there dwells the trust of sky and earth. The wine stands in the wine made from the grape, and in this fruit the nurture of the earth and the sun of the sky trust one another. In the gift of water, in the gift of wine, sky and earth dwell. It is the pouring gift that makes the jug a jug. In the jugness of the jug, sky and earth dwell. [22]

In Heidegger’s view, the pottery jug as artwork is not merely the outer shell shaped of clay, nor only the sum of outer shell and inner space; the inner space of the jug has become an organic component of the jug. And it is precisely the existence of this emptiness that lets the jug break through its own finitude, give birth to the infinite, and so gather heaven, earth, gods, mortals — embracing the whole of being. As Joseph Margolis puts it:

Heidegger’s dialectic of part and whole has found a dwelling-place for what has been individuated. The individuated, as a part, has found the whole as being. By this same dialectic, the artwork — a work of sharply distinctive individuality — has likewise found its place: although the artwork is only a part, it gathers within itself the whole of being. [23]

Poetic language is like the jug with the jug-nature that Heidegger expounds. It is not concept alone; behind the concept of poetic language there exists the empty slot. Poetic language is language that embraces the empty slot, language that embraces flow and the infinite; it therefore issues an invitation, a call, to the existence of life. In poetic language, man and language at last fuse deeply into one and enter the self-forgetting aesthetic realm — enter the primal undifferentiated chaos in which there is no “you” and no “I.” In poetic language, the ten thousand things dwell at peace here and bathe in the radiance of the divine. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva said:

Every home is strange to me; every temple is empty to me. [24]

Yet poetry — and poetic language alone, only poetry and poetic language — offered her a warm spiritual home, and likewise offers a warm spiritual home to human existence.

* The factors that drive the poetic generation of language are manifold; the present paper focuses on the relation between blank and the poetic generation of language.