Poetic Colors of the Holy: Heidegger on Pindar and Trakl

In this chapter, I examine the work of two poets who, on Heidegger’s interpretation, use particular colors to characterize Being and the related concept of the Holy. Although separated by two and a half millennia, Heidegger finds that the victory odes of the Ancient Greek lyricist Pindar and the melancholic poetry of the twentieth-century Austrian expressionist Georg Trakl were both written under a sort of “holy compulsion.” Through them, Being spoke itself— synesthetically—in colors: gold in the case of Pindar, blue (along with gold) in the case of Trakl. I first try to listen for this voice in Heidegger’s extensive excursus on Pindar’s 5th Isthmian in the undelivered lecture course Der Spruch des Anaximander (§1). Then, I will show how many of the motifs Heidegger identifies, including their timbre or ‘color,’ are reprised in his discussion of Trakl in the first two chapters of On the Way to Language (§2). While it might seem that, at the ontological level, golden shining is proper exclusively to the ancients and bluish twilight to the post-Hölderlinian moderns, I argue that, in his respective analyses, Heidegger is drawing out different aspects of Being and the Holy that belong to all epochs, even if they cannot always be seen as such, and even if different gods show up in them. I conclude with some reflections on what might be called, following Goethe, a Heideggerian Farbenlehre or ‘color theory’ (§3).