Breathturn into Timestead (6 page)

unumschnürt:

Ziw, jenes Licht.

N
EAR, IN THE AORTIC ARCH,

in the light-blood:

the light-word.

Mother Rachel

weeps no more.

Carried over:

all the weepings.

Quiet, in the coronary arteries,

unconstricted:

Ziv, that light.

This poem centers around both historical and kabbalistic Judaic motifs (
Ziv
is Hebrew for “light” and refers to the mystical light of the Shekinah, the female aspect of God, and also to various symbolic accretions, such as the figure of Sophia/Wisdom, and connects to that of Rachel, as maternal figure/personification of Zion), though the place it opens out from and which grounds it—“the aortic arch” of the “coronary arteries”—clearly links it to the biological/anatomical topos of “Line the wordcaves.” More could be said of this poem and its topoi, but let's return briefly to the first poem and close this excursus by presenting another, additive reading of some of the complexities of “Line the wordcaves.” In a brilliant essay, Werner Hamacher discusses the movement of the figure of inversion as central to the poetics of late Celan, using a poem from
Speechgrille
, “Stimmen,” and concentrating on the line “sirrt die Sekunde” (the second buzzes) where he de- and reconstructs the expression “die Sekunde” (the second) as “diese Kunde” (this message, this conduit of information). In a footnote he includes a brief analysis of “Line the wordcaves,” which I will cite and let stand as conclusion to my own analysis, if only to show how the polyperspectivity of a Celan poem permits multiple approaches, all of which help to shed light on the wordcaves these late poems are. Having also picked up on the sound pun of
antre
, and the transference of the animal's outer layer into the word's inside, Hamacher writes:

Here too we have an inversion of familiar ideas … Sense is only one—and indeed an alien, second—skin, an inner mask. Tone, as “that which is always second,” is in each case distanced further than the audible tone, infinitely secondary; it too a
second
. Celan's later poems are written out of this second and for its sake; they are
dated
, as finite language, on the second. The inversion of the secondary into the “primary,” of the outer into the “inner,” is always effected in them so that they expand the character of the secondary,
in fine
, instead of domesticating it. Thus, as he himself stressed, we can only “understand” his texts “from a distance.”

In addition,
auskleiden
is one of the possible meanings of
auslegen
(to interpret). Insofar as the poem takes on this—second—sense in the image, in the clothing, in the pelt, it itself practices the hermeneutic operation it recommends: the whole becomes feline,
fellhin und fellher
, although not without falling into what would count as failure for a normative understanding.
23

For Hamacher, the tropes and images of Celan's poetry are thus “not metaphors for representations but metaphors for metaphorization, not images of a world but images of the generation of images, not the transcription of voices but the production of the etched voices of the poem itself.”

4. “… ABOVE THE GRAYBLACK WASTES”

Breathturn
, which so forcefully marks the entrance into the late work, includes a poem titled “Fadensonnen” | “Threadsuns.” Celan will reuse this title to name his next volume of poems. It should therefore prove useful to read the poem closely as it may not only help with clarifying some of Celan's poetological thinking but also throw light beyond that on his philosophical outlook—if these two can, in fact, be separated.

F
ADENSONNEN

über der grauschwarzen Ödnis.

Ein baum-

hoher Gedanke

greift sich den Lichtton: es sind

noch Lieder zu singen jenseits

der Menschen.

T
HREADSUNS

above the grayblack wastes.

A tree-

high thought

grasps the light-tone: there are

still songs to sing beyond

mankind.

A desolate landscape, truly “north of the future,” as Celan writes in another poem. But also one that lets us formulate exactly where and how the late poetry of Paul Celan settles—even as it unsettles. Neither utopia nor dystopia, Celan's topos is a visionary-realistic land- and language-scape mapping the second half of the twentieth century, from the devastating aporia constituted by World War II, with its extermination camps and nuclear wastelands, and reaching beyond Celan's own dates through that fin de siècle into the mauled dawn of the twenty-first century. Today, nearly fifty years after the composition of these poems, their readability has opened up, making the very difficulties they present not a stumbling block but a gate to anyone attentive to the times and the words. This gate may be narrow; indeed, it needs to be narrow—it is an
Engführung
, a “straightening,” a “leading into the narrows,” as Celan calls an earlier poem that rewrites the “Todesfuge”—if only as an index to the irreducible complexity of the age and to the effort needed to crack—“à la pointe acérée” (with the sharpened tip) of pen and thought—the husk humanity frantically consolidates, thickening around the kernel of whatever truth there may be. And Celan believed in being, in working, at all costs, in a realm where clarity was law.

Celan insisted, and rightly so, I believe, on the fact that his poetry was directly linked to, and arose from, the real. This insistence is important to keep in mind today, here in the United States, even though it was first formulated in the narrower focus of an answer to the early German critics who wanted to dismiss the work as just “surreal,” that is, as imaginary/fictive imagery, or, even worse, as psychotic ravings, and did so in order to cover up their own inability and actual refusal to acknowledge the lethal reality (and German responsibility for it) from which Celan wrote himself into the present.
24
This is shared reality—thus not only Celan's landscape but ours too, even if we are often unwilling to acknowledge the starkness and the darkness of the place in which we live. For indeed, we no longer live, as the plural of the poem's title immediately makes clear, under the cozy reassurance of a world held in place, centered around
a
or
the
sun,
our
sun, Helios, as it was called under an older dispensation. We have had to acknowledge, at least at the macrocosmic level, the fiction of the one star from which we have been able metaphorically to derive the (to us) reassuring though fictitious conditions of a single belonging, a single origin, a single fate—a realization that traverses Celan's work: In a poem from the 1963 volume,
Die Niemandsrose
, there is “eine Sonne”—a, one, one could nearly say “some,” sun—that comes along “swimming.” The prose
récit
“Conversation in the Mountains” opens with the sentence “Eines Abends, die Sonne, und nicht nur sie, war untergegangen” (One evening, the sun, and not only the sun, had set), where “untergegangen” (to set), especially because the sun is accompanied in this action by something else (“and not only the sun”), also clearly carries its further meanings of “to perish,” “to disappear,” “to sink,” “to founder,” “to drown,” etc. Ezra Pound lamented in the Cantos that “the center does not hold”—Celan knows that this is so because there is no single center, no single sun that can hold it all up, that, in fact, there has always been only a decentered multiplicity of centers.

But not only have the centers multiplied (or maybe because of that), the shape of our certainties has also altered radically. That most reassuring of shapes, the circle, the sphere, the form of perfection, the unalterable, unbreachable, unanswerable form of the truth, which we had derived from the single sun as source of our world, that form too has, under the pressure of the multiple and the many, been changed, has ex- or imploded: these suns are threads now, thin, elongated—lines of flight. And there is doubt how much light, if any, such suns may shed—clearly the scape beneath or against which these suns appear is barren, desert, a wilderness—
eremiai anthrôpôn
. Threads are fragile, they can break: we can no longer barter our own finitude for the possible transcendental infinitude of the sun-circle, Helios, or Jahve, or however he was named. Our, man and woman's, finitude is our measure—and, as the expression has it, it hangs, we hang, by a thread. The thread spun by the Fates, or their Norse counterparts, the Norns—these latter dwell, as it happens, in a northern scape, a place, in Celan's phrase, “north of the future.”

Yet all is not loss. These “Fadensonnen,” these threadsuns fold into the word that gives their elongation—the
Faden
, the thread—something more, something which in English is still there in the word “fathom,” which comes to us via the Indo-European root
pet
and Germanic
fathmaz
: “the length of two arms stretched out.” The thread is thus a way of measuring space, or of “sounding” depth (the poem also speaks of a “Lichtton,” a “light-tone” or sound), and, maybe, of a measure, or a new measure for the world and for poetry. If the first volume that announced the late work and its radically innovative poetics was called
Breathturn
, to indicate that a turn, a change, was needed—had, in fact, taken place—then the title of the next volume spoke of a new measure, of new measures, to be accurate: of those new measures needed in a world seen as “grayblack wastes” to link the above and the below, the inside and the outside, the tree-high thought and the wastes, because, Celan goes on, “there are / still songs to be sung,” poems to be written even under the duress—
Lightduress
will be the title of the next collection—of the present condition. Even if these poems are “beyond mankind”—beyond any older humanistic category of aesthetics. (As he told Esther Cameron at this time: “But I don't give a damn for aesthetic construction.”
25
) His writing had moved toward such a postaestheic, posthumanist condition nearly from the start, even if early work, say the “Todesfuge,” achieves this only through an acidly sarcastic use of a traditional aesthetic form. The late work would realize this condition, exactly.

5. “… EACH POEM HAS ITS OWN ‘20 JANUARY' INSCRIBED IN IT.”

Always mindful of dates—those of history as well as those of his own story, inscribed as often as not in the poems—Celan wrote a poem on November 23, 1965, his forty-fifth birthday (“All deine Siegel erbrochen? Nie.” | “All your seals broken open? Never.”), and on the manuscript added the following motto, taken from Psalm 45 in the Buber-Rosenzweig translation of the Bible: “Reite für die Treue.”
26
Although the King James version gives this as “ride prosperously because of truth,” in this context it would be better to translate the motto as “ride for the Truth” or “ride for the Faith.” John Felstiner comments: “The Psalmist, having said ‘My tongue is the pen of a ready writer,' was urging his king to ride forth righteously. The poet, for whom certain dates and dates as such held more than natural significance, was marking his birthday with an ancient motto that renewed his task.”
27
For Celan, this truth or faith he was willing to ride for should, however, not be seen as theologically based. In 1960 he had told Nelly Sachs, after she had indicated that she was a believer, that he “hoped to be able to blaspheme until the end”—a stance that comes through in many of the poems of the late work, which show (while hiding, in a very Celanian fashion) a biting sarcasm often overlooked by critics, who tend to approach the work all too piously.

The conditions of the writing of the poems of this period, the midsixties on to the end, were difficult ones, as already mentioned. If the “Reite für die Treue” motto points to Celan's wish for movement, for the poet's desire, maybe, to be that “figure of outward” (as Charles Olson put it) this movement is never a simple, linear, one-to-one relation and interaction with some immutable outside, especially if the basic position from which the “traveler” moves is already exilic. It is then rather a nomadic line of flight over mutable, friable terrain: in one poem Celan speaks of phosphorous “detour-maps” pointing toward movements the temporal and spatial coordinates of which did not, could not, follow any straight two- or even three-dimensional map, but had to happen in accordance with other, at times controllable, and at times uncontrollable, modes of displacement, willed and unwilled
dérives
, drifts. Even the dates—which on the surface would seem to anchor at least the temporal coordinates—are caught up in movement, as he puts it a few lines later in the Meridian speech: “But don't we all write ourselves from such dates? And toward what dates do we write ourselves?” This is not the place to analyze the question of the date(s) further, but I would like to refer the reader interested in this central Celanian topos to Jacques Derrida's superb essay “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan.”
28
That essay, like other critical writings about Celan, investigates a line, seen as of core importance to the poetics, from the Meridian speech, which says “perhaps one can say that each poem has its own ‘20 January' inscribed in it” and which refers to the fact that in Georg Büchner's novella
Lenz
, the poet Lenz is said to have set off for the mountains on a twentieth of January. This date then gets linked to further events in Celan's life and to other historical occasions. Celan followed that sentence by this one: “Perhaps what's new in the poems written today is exactly this: theirs is the clearest attempt to remain mindful of such dates.” Which Derrida glosses as follows: “Let us not believe that what thus becomes readable would be the date
itself
; rather, it is only the poetic experience of the date, that which a date,
this one
, ordains in our relation to it, a certain poetic seeking.”