having brought the olive leaf to Olympia "from the Ister's shaded sources." Yet this "literary-historiographical evidence" explains very little unless we direct our thought toward the essential connection between becoming homely and poetizing. between the poet and the demigod. between the homely and the unhomely.
Hölderlin's word concerning the Ister, which has invited Heracles as guest, thinks an entirely other and new relation that could not be a necessity for the Greek poet and therefore was not even possible. Yet the fact that the Greek demigod has come as a guest to the shades and water sources of the Ister also says that Hölderlin, in his hymnal poetry that poetizes one's "own" and what is "of the fatherland," by no means turned away from the Greek world, let alone turned toward Christendom. The presence of the guest in the homely locale tells us that even in, indeed precisely in the locality of the homely, journeying still prevails and remains determinative, albeit in a transformed manner. The guest, that is, the Greek poet of the heavenly fire, is the presence of the unhomely in the homely. The guest makes the thinking of the homely into a steadfast remembrance of the journeying to the foreign (to "colony"). The appropriation of one's own is only as the encounter and guest-like dialogue with the foreign. Being a locality. being the essential locale of the homely, is a journeying into that which is not directly bestowed upon one's own essence but must be learned in journeying. Yet journeying is at the same time and necessarily locality, a thoughtful, anticipatory relation to the homely, for otherwise the danger threatens of being struck, blinded, and scorched by the fire and its "hot rays."
The river "is" the locality and the journeying at once, because it is the river spirit and as river spirit is of the essence of the demigod. This means here: The river is one that poetizes between human beings and gods. That which is to be poetized is the poetic dwelling of human beings upon this earth. The poetizing of becoming homely, however, must follow the essence of this becoming. Becoming homely demands a going away into the foreign. The poetizing river spirit, because it seeks the homely and must learn to use freely what is its own, must come from the foreign into its own. The river must remain in the realm of its source in such a way that it flows toward it from out of the foreign. The poetizing of the locality of the homely is the provenance of journeying from the foreign:
Der scheinet aber fast
Rükwärts zu gehen und
Ich mein, er müsse kommen
Von Osten.
He appears, however, almost
To go backwards and