our return into the homely. Yet this is to say that we must now first seek what is our own and learn to use it freely. Because these poets are only at the beginning and are still overwhelmed by the foreign fire, "we," the poets, are as yet unread—we are not yet able to read and to show. We are almost as though consumed by fire so that "the pain" has yet to stir. Pain, however, is that knowing proper to being distinct, in which the belonging to one another of human beings and gods first attains the separation of distance, and thereby the possibility of proximity, and thus the fortune of appearing. Pain belongs to being able to show: it belongs 10 the poet as the knowledge of his own essence. This essence resides in each case in being the between in which the demigod stands and that he has to sustain: the "between" between the heavenly and human beings. The draft of the hymn "Mnemosyne" has another title in addition to this. which simply reads: "The Sign" (IV, 369). From this title it becomes clear that here "the sign" pure and simple is named in its essence. "A sign" therefore does not mean the extrinsic aspect of "a" mere "indicator" or "a" "signal." The sign is showing, which stands in an essential relation to "reading," to pain, and to language. Sign here does not mean "mere showing in the direction of" but rather a sign that stands only at the very beginning of its being a sign. How else could the same poet say in the Ister hymn:
Ein Zeichen braucht es.
Nichts anderes. schlecht und recht. ...
A sign is needed.
Nothing else, plain and simple . ...
This alone is the singular need of journeying into the locality of what for the Germans is their ownmost: "A sign" (a poet), "Nothing else, plain and simple"—there is need of this unconditional founding of what remains. "Plain and simple." that is to say: The sign's showing must be simple. and in its simple unequivocality it is also straightforward. It shows that which is to be shown. and nothing else.2 Yet to satisfy this simplicity in learning what is one's own. and to know of one's own "plain and simple" at all, is what is most difficult. What Hölderlin in the rigorous claim of these words enunciates almost unpoetically once again (in terms of their
2. There is no need for the affected extravagance, the loud gestures and bewildering din, or the immense monuments characteristic of the un-German monumental of the Romans and Americans. And such things arc not needed if the sign remains plain, that is, oriented directly toward that which is to be said, and if it has nothing to do with all those other things that are adverse and detrimental to one's own.