There's a clay-pit with a nest of white animals.
There's a cathedral coming down and a lake going up.
There's a little carriage abandoned in the woods or rolling down the path, with ribbons all over it.
There's a troupe of child actors, in costumes, whom you can see on the road through the edge of the wood.
And then there's someone who chases you off when you're hungry and thirsty.*
{GA 14: 49} The French il y a ( cf. the phrase of South German dialect es hat, "it has") corresponds to the German es gibt, "it gives." Presumably, Trakl was familiar with Rimbaud's poem just cited.
We clarified somewhat the "it is" of poetic language which Rilke and Benn also use. First we can say that "It is" confirms the existence of something just as little as the "It gives" does. In contradistinction to the customary one, the "It gives," the "It is" does not name the availa,bility of something which is, but rather precisely something unavailable, what concerns us as something uncanny, the demonic. Thus the relation to man is also named in the "It is" far more emphatically than in the customary "It gives."
What this "It is" means can only be thought in terms of Appropriation. Thus this remained an open question, similar to the relation between the poetic "It is" and the "It gives" belonging to thought.
A few grammatical discussions about the It in "It gives," about the kind of sentences characterized by grammar as impersonal sentences without a subject, and also a short reminder about the Greek metaphysical foundations of the interpretation of the sentence as a relation of subject and predicate, today a matter of course, hinted at the possibility of understanding the saying of "It gives Being," "It gives time" other than as prepositional statements.
In this context two questions were discussed which had been raised about the lecture. One had to do with the possible end of the history of Being, the other with the manner of Saying adequate to Appropriation.
Re 1. If Appropriation is not a new formation of Being in the
* Translation by Wallace Fowlie, Harvill Press, London, 1953.