poetizing would even lack what is to be poetized. If we look into this essential connection between Being and unconcealedness, between unconcealedness and salvation versus the concealed, between salvation and preservation, Being and word, word and saying, saying and poetizing, and poetizing and thinking, we will then perceive the first lines of Homer's poems quite differently than we used to:
ILIAD Μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος οὐλομένην,1
ODYSSEY: Ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ πλάγχθη,2
Here the "goddess" and the "muse" are not simply "invoked" for the purpose of a solemn introduction, but these lines say that the utterance of the poetical word is the speaking and the song of Being itself, and the poet is merely the ἑρμηνεύς, the interpreter of the word. The poet does not invoke the goddess, but instead, even before saying his first word the poet is already invoked himself and already stands within the appeal of Being and as such is a savior of Being versus the "demonic" withdrawal of concealment.
If Parmenides names the goddess Ἀλήθεια at the very outset of his utterance, that is not, as philologists maintain, a kind of poetically fashionable introduction to his so-called "didactic poem," but instead it is the naming of the essential place, where the thinker as thinker dwells. The place is δαιμόνιος τόπος.
For us of today the μῦθος of λήθη at the conclusion of the dialogue on the πόλις is the last word of the Greeks on the hidden counter-essence to ἀλήθεια. This withdrawing counter-essence to disclosedness "withholds" unconcealedness but at the same time also holds in itself the essence of unconcealedness. What is counter to ἀλήθεια is neither simply the opposite, nor the bare lack, nor the rejection of it as mere denial. Λήθη, the oblivion of withdrawing concealment, is that withdrawal by means of which alone the essence of ἀλήθεια can be preserved and thus be and remain unforgotten. Thoughtless opinion maintains that something is preserved the soonest and is preservable the easiest when it is constantly at hand and graspable. But in truth, and that now means for us truth in the sense of the essence of unconcealedness, it is self-withdrawing concealment that in the highest way disposes human beings to preserving and to faithfulness. For the Greeks, the withdrawing and self-withdrawing concealment is the simplest of the simple, preserved for them in their experience of the unconcealed and therein allowed to come into presence. Therefore Plato could not invent
I. "O goddess, sing of the fatal vengeance of the Peleidian Achilles"—Tr
2 "O muse, sing for me of that much-wandering and much-suffering man"—Tr