A philosophical call to set out on your own photographic fieldpaths
First one might ask, an escape of what? Heidegger 1953 begins his short text 'The Fieldpath' with a possible answer to this question, because "when mysteries urged each other and there was no escape, the fieldpath helped." It seem to be the ontological mysteries of Being that led him to this very special fieldpath also as an adult.
In contrast to his first paragraphs which read themselves like a melancholic description of his childhood. Wherein the little Martin carved wood from oak barks with his younger brother, to build boats for letting them swim in the nearby stream. While his father the sacristan, who got some rest from woodcutting in the forest as mainly a cooper, could be found at the bells of the church clock during his break.
For Heidegger "those journeys of play did not know anything about the later walks on which all banks stay behind." His deep perception not only reminds me of Rilke's verses on childhood, where we later get included within these sequences of images in which to remain perhaps confuses us. It also seems to me that his deep existential sense might have caused the contemptuous title of a 'mystic of being' for him.
'The Fieldpath', Regensburg, 2009 © Dr. Christine Lehr
But this is probably of highest value for the creative fieldpath photographer! When he tells about oak trees that begin to speak at the edges of the fieldpath, or when the fieldpath itself tells from the "mystery of the remaining" - "The simplicity holds the mystery of the remaining and of the big." In the same way the oak tree opens itself up to the vastness of the heaven and simultaneously puts its rooots into the dark of the earth, men will only grow, if he locates himself within the "demand of the highest heavens and the protection of the bearing earth.
But growing - exceedingly few want to. Heidegger draws a pessimistic but timeless picture of the distracted, who are bored by simplicity. "They are weary of the uni-form. The annoyed only find the monotony. The simplicity has fled. Its silent power has vanished." Yet it isn't the simple, but the manifold motives that are told about in the 'Fieldpath'. For example the bells of the church clock of the nearby village, that tell something about the much invoked time and temporality. Or the dance of the opposing seasons of which the fieldpath echoes.
Especially in those poetic representations his mystic quality shimmers through - in the artful articulated connection between unity and multiplicity. Heidegger's 'Fielpath' reads itself like a poem of Rilke or some seasonal verses of Lao Tse. The multiperspectivity of his language, where trees talk and the fieldpath awards men, reminds of our embeddedness in also a cosmological context.
Finally Heidegger doesn't stay with his somewhat sad view on drying up strengths and fled simplicity. Especially talking about sparkling seasons, despite the natural oppositions he senses an "unified harmony whose echo the fieldpath silently carries (...) that brightens up everything. The knowing brightness is a doorway to the eternal."