Speeches on Poetry

Abstract

Paul Celan’s ‘Speeches’ determine what poetry is and why we need it. He does not want ‘timeless’ poetry but still ‘lays claim to infinity’; he would ‘reach through time’. He neither refuses poetry as contrary to reason, nor elevates it as pure immediacy of meaning. He questions the ambivalent attitudes towards art—as ‘artifice’ or as ‘profound’. Celan cuts into the loose fabric of such ordinary language to shape it. Those who trumpet ‘plain sense’ against such incisive art deface it as degenerate. Celan’s poetic language presents us as ‘of the earth’ and as ‘released from it’—Büchner’s Lenz seeks clarity in the silence of alpine light but falls into madness in his isolation. He is drawn towards the life of the villagers at the foot of the mountains. He perceives the warm household fires, but it is an illusion that he can be a part of that scene. Thus, Celan enquires into art’s intensity. It is at the risk of reciprocity that a reader entertains the language of a poem. Eliot’s old ‘shadow’ between ‘the idea and the reality’ now falls between the poet’s production and the reader’s reciprocation. The reader may need someone with a free hand to hold a lantern to the script.

1. Introduction

SPEECH IN THE FREE HANSEATIC CITY OF BREMEN,1958

SPEECH ON BEING AWARDED THE GEORG BÜCHNER PRIZE 1960

PROSE POEM CONVERSATION IN THE MOUNTAINS, 1959, published 1960

The aim of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the relations between philosophical, poetical, and ordinary language. As for ‘ordinary’ language and its relation to the poetical, I draw upon Paul Celan’s ‘The Meridian’—a formal speech on what poetry is, what it might achieve, and why it may seem ‘obscure’. Paul Celan’s speech on poetry involves striking departures—in his speech and in the poems that he cites—departures from the syntax of ordinary language—departures that convey or create extraordinary effects with (for the most part) ordinary words [1] (pp. 401–403). The other approach of these investigations into ‘ordinary’, ‘poetological’, and philosophical thought is determined by David Macarthur’s interest in Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophie dürtfe man eigentlich nur dichten’, for which this editor of this collection of papers finds, as most apt, Marjorie Perloff’s translation: ‘Philosophy ought really to be written as a form of poetry’. In these terms, we may see Celan himself as working towards Wittgenstein’s ideal—to create philosophy poetically’. Furthermore, since Wittgenstein’s belief that philosophy should not be restricted to writing it, we can regard David Antin’s phrase, ‘One should really only do philosophy as poetry’, as a further refinement of this concept. Finally, since Wittgenstein’s desire is not that, in doing philosophy, one should produce a poem, we could say that, when doing philosophy, he wants to weigh his words, phrases, apostrophes, and sentences poetologically.

Celan’s iterated ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ is a summons to surpass the ‘ordinary’ expectations of public speech—to face the challenge of ever more intense and fine-grained thought. It is in these terms that Celan introduces, dramatically, the conflict in our ideas about art—whether poetry is one of the arts, or whether its role is to shatter the stereotypes—and archetypes—of every mode of art. To describe further how Celan deals in ‘The Meridian’ with this question, we shall take his lead and give a prime place to what he relays from Georg Büchner’s Lenz.

Having now distilled such meaning, we may observe that, in his speech on poetry, in a paper titled ‘The Meridian’, Celan departs ever more dramatically from the use of ordinary language. Still, at the same time, he moves towards Wittgenstein’s ideal of doing philosophy. He creates a speech with a poetological quality, which, as a critique and explanation of this poetology, is now philosophical in character and direction. So, we can read Celan’s work as navigating what is virtually a reversal of Wittgenstein’s desire to move philosophy towards the poetical. In his use of the trope of meridian lines between the poles, he enables us to see how the poetic impulse may unfold towards the philosophical.

In terms of the classical ‘quarrel’ between philosophy and poetry, Celan’s actions are designed to avoid the pre-eminence of the poetic mode or of the philosophical. Neither are we encouraged to engineer a departure of both philosophy and poetry from the whole classical trope of dispute. And, for us then, in perceiving the issue in terms of Wittgenstein’s ideal, what we may gain is the control needed to loosen the grip on thought that the classical antithesis still maintains. For Plato’s Socrates, philosophy fears the beauty of poetry in its power to move us by its own kind of ‘argument’. In combatting such a power, Plato’s Socratic philosophy alleges that poetry only leaps to its conclusions; it makes a detour around the ‘Men at Work’ whose labour of critical enquiry and logical challenge allows us to arrive safely to our conclusions. Poetry’s role in this dispute would then to be cast as pre-eminent in sounding the depths and netting the fish of experience.1

In this context, I have chosen as my primary point of reference the public speeches delivered by Paul Celan on the nature and need for poetry—poetry that the publisher’s well-known, ‘educated reader’ may find ‘obscure’—allusive in its references and elusive in its kind of narrative. I am also interested in the shorter speech that Celan delivered upon being awarded the Literature Prize from the ‘Free Hanseatic City of Bremen’. As it proceeds, we find that this pair of speeches2 amounts to work upon and within the art of poetry and of philosophy. His artfully expressed ideas about these related experiments with language connect, then, with Wittgenstein’s ideal, in our philosophical pursuits, of employing modes of speech that define poetry.

It was vital for Celan that, in exhibiting how poems and poetic prose are used to express common concerns and ordinary language, in his speeches, he should draw upon the advancements in dealing with these themes—advances made by the narrative, Lenz and the play, The Death of Danton—by Georg Büchner, 19th C avant-garde writer of plays and short fictions. Here, there is a rapid movement from his address to the dignities within a formal code to explaining, affectively, how he can write poetry (non-barbarically!)—in fact, he must do so. Celan writes about the possibility of creating poetry—or any of the arts—after ‘that which happened’ to the Jews of Europe. In explaining poetry and citing significant sections of some poems, he must make us think again of that difficult utterance of Adorno’s on the ‘barbarity’ (later, Adorno speaks of ‘impossibility’) in writing poetry after Auschwitz3 [5]. In relation to what Celan offers us in his speech, I am sometimes an expositor, adopting his directions and speaking in pursuit of his chosen ‘meridian’ line. At other times, I look in a direction that glances away from this line. In any case, the work of this co-operation has the aim of escaping the stasis of the age-long embattled stand-off between a philosophical and a poetological sensibility.

In the boldness of his many-times iterated address, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen!’, Paul Celan shows his determination to speak and to be heard by people perhaps more bent upon preserving past literary glory than wrestling with a new, baffling, contemporaneity. To us still he calls—addressing us with the question of what we may expect of poetry—or philosophy. The vital distinction may be the one we can make between poetry or philosophy as critique, on the one hand, and philosophy or poetry as display, on the other. Whether we work within poetry or philosophy, equally, we practice a critique of concepts and we work to display what is the case. At each stage, we see anew what has not been seen; we say what has not been said.

**. **. **

• ON ACCEPTING THE LITERATURE PRIZE OF THE FREE HANSEATIC CITY OF BREMEN.

2. Infections of Speech

In Bremen, within the space of only a couple of pages, Celan raises key issues about the nature of poetry as he finds it and as he practises it—in particular, in relation to the question of a ‘loss’ of language in the period that was not only that of the mass murder of the Jews in Europe, but the systematic co-option and distortion of the German language and Yiddish idiom. In speaking to this Hanseatic League, Celan recalls it as a centre and force for political and economic liberality. It ‘comprised merchants widely renowned for their access to a variety of commodities’; it was an organisation that, in the 12th C, ‘encompassed nearly 2000 settlements’ in Europe. Historically, it spread across what are now seven countries. ‘At its zenith’, Celan remarks, ‘it appeared within a loosely aligned confederation of city states’. Towards the end of the 17th C, it began to unravel, but the historical legacy of the League was such that the Senat of Lübeck did not permit Hitler to speak there during his 1932 election campaign. In fact, that ‘Hanseatic League’ is now seen as a precursor to the European Union. Celan refers to the strength of the tradition of publishing in Bremen as, historically, a ‘free Hanseatic city’. It is in the context of how the German language was distorted during the Nazi period that Celan refers to the strength of Bremen in sustaining a culture of liberationist publication. Members of Celan’s audience for this speech would have known what he was referring to—particularly in relation to the language used to describe Jews, and the ‘murderous restrictions’ placed upon Jews in their use of the German language:

[But it] had to pass through frightful muting… the thousand darknesses of death-bringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again—‘enriched’ by ‘all this’ [1] (p. 395).

This ‘language’, then, ‘remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything’. One can read these brief and searing remarks as one more of Celan’s responses to the feeling that was expressed so dramatically by Theodor Adorno—that ‘after Auschwitz it was barbaric to write poetry’. So, Celan makes a declaration about his use of this [German] language:

I have sought, during those years and in the years since then, to write poems to orient myself and to sketch out reality for myself. It was event, movement, a being underway, and attempt to find direction—a movement that involves the question of the clock-hand’s direction. For a poem is not timeless … it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time [1] (pp. 395–396).

‘Towards what does this movement bear us’ Celan asks, in the sudden intensification of language that bespeaks poetry itself. The answer he provides is contained within the project that he declares as his own, of moving ‘towards something standing open … perhaps to an addressable Thou, towards an addressable reality … [which is] what is at stake in a poem’. Celan would write ‘towards infinity’, though the origins are found in real and specific times. He shares and continues the historical ‘Hanseatic’ bent towards publication—characteristic of the city of Bremen. Celan recognises other lyric poets—those of a younger generation whose efforts are ‘over arced by stars that are human handiwork’. They are the efforts of a poet who, ‘shelter-less in this till now undreamt-of sense and thus most uncannily in the open, goes with his very being to language, stricken by, and seeking, reality’ [1] (p. 396).

• ON ACCEPTING THE GEORG BÜCHNER PRIZE

2.1. The Meridian

In ‘The Meridian’, speaking of the problem of art and clarity—and thus poetry—Paul Celan says that, faced with such a problem, the revolutionary figures (in Büchner’s Death of Danton) have (in their bravado, their political melodrama) ‘strung words onto words’ [1] (p. 402). Thus, Celan remarks mordantly, ‘It feels good to talk about art’, as he persists in the formalities of his public speech. A dozen times he calls upon the ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’. In setting the theme of speech as a summons, he sets the tone of what he has to say about poetry. Language is used to address some ‘other’—summoned to lend him their ears. 4 Not a few of Celan’s audience on such an occasion would have been dignitaries accustomed to ritual clichés rather than to intricate, highly charged discussions of what we should expect of poetry. What Celan asks of them is precisely what a poet asks of their reader. Thus, he uses this familiar (though formal) register of language to explain, without losing his audience, what poetry is, and why contemporary poems can seem ‘obscure’.

A meridian, of which Celan makes deft use as metaphor in his ‘In der Luft’ (‘In the air’), involves an infinity of geometrical lines of longitude from one pole to the other. With regard to the facts of our homely globe, each pole is equally frozen [6]. As a matrix for the argument between philosophy and poetry, however, we are liable to employ the tropes of a ‘northern’ cold reason and a ‘southern’ warmth of feeling.

• In the air your root stays on, there in the air.
• Where earthliness clusters, earthy,
• Breath-and-Clay.
• …
• With him the meridians wander: sucked
• up by his
• sun-steered pain, which bonds these lands after the noonday speech of a
• loving distance. Every-
• where is Here and Today, is a radiance
• made of despairs, that
• those who’ve been sundered step into with their
• blinded mouths
• $$
• a kiss, at night,
• brands the sense of a language they waken to, they—:
• $$
• gone home again to
• uncanny anathema
• that gathers the dispersed, those
• led through the star-desert soul,
• the tentmakers up there in the zone
• of their gazings and ships
[1] (pp. 211–213).

In this poem from Die Niemandsrose, the meridian is the line of longitude from the North to South Pole. Also, it is midday, which it always is along some meridian. Celan is playing with the idea of having one’s ‘root’ in the air (as does an epiphyte). Yet, Celan dares to say, this ‘air’ has the character of being ‘earthy’, both in the sense of supplying nutrition and as placing one in some place—on this meridian, of all the infinite number of meridian lines between the poles. In these gestures, Celan counters someone (the poet? The thinker?) who is prepared to stray from the line of longitude. For, to be ‘sun-steered’, he must move continuously, so to be in the full sunlight. So, ‘Everywhere is Here and Today’ for such a traveller along the (time) line. This ‘radiance’ is, however, ‘made of despairs’. Rather than the warmth and total illumination the one who wishes to remain at ‘midday’ desires, it is ‘sun-steered pain’ that they will endure. The travellers, wanting to be always in the noon-day sun, have been ‘sundered’ from any place that could be theirs; in stepping into midday along another meridian, they step into despair. In this radiance, nothing is hidden—there is no respite from seeing just how the world is. Their very capacity to speak has been ‘blinded’. (There is a striking parallel with the torture by excessive sun as described by Plato’s Socrates.)

In the next (two-line) stanza, there is ‘a kiss, at night’ enjoyed by one who has abandoned their quest for a permanent noon. The kiss they enact now that there is a night, ‘brands the sense of language they waken to’. This is not an easy thought. Celan develops it in the next stanza: ‘they—[have]/gone home again’. And yet, after a peripatetic life, home is no longer homely; it has become uncanny; it is now, even, anathema—as it was for the little soldier in Stravinsky’s music5. That anathema is all that the ‘dispersed’ have in common, whether they dwell in the desert or ‘in the zone of their gazings and ships’.

2.2. Paul Celan—Georg Büchner

Celan calls upon the fierce force of Georg Büchner, an author who, in the preceding century wrote short fictions, plays, and opera scripts. He was famous particularly for his short fiction, Lenz, and for some of his plays, such as Woyzeck, which Alban Berg used later as a libretto for an opera—Léonce and Lena (to which Celan frequent refers) and The Death of Danton—that dramatizes the fate of that leader of the French Revolution. Events have revolved to bring him and his associates to the tumbrils. In explaining the ‘obscurity’ of contemporary poetry, Celan calls upon Büchner’s avant-garde writing—work that has discombobulated readers too confident that they know what art is. Celan deploys his being invited to address representatives of ‘culture’. He reminds them that the value of the prize they award him is predicated on the value of literary experiments, such as those of Büchner.

So, in defending the ‘obscurity’ of contemporary poetry, Celan anchors his case in (what he may dare assume as) a shared understanding of Büchner’s adventurous prose—ways of describing and evoking dramatic feelings and actions that require full, intelligent attention. That is precisely what Celan requires of his audience in speaking to them about poetry. He calls upon the ‘Ladies and gentlemen’: we ourselves feel, within that appeal, the force of a command. It is no small thing that he asks of those proper people; nothing less is required of anyone who, as do we, drop in on the event [7].

Celan’s first ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ frames this declaration: ‘Art, you will recall, is a puppet-like, iambic, five-footed and … childless being … [that] forms the subject of a conversation … that could go on endlessly … if nothing intervened’ [1] (p. 401). Something does intervene. ‘Art returns’. This is what he declares in his first reference to Büchner as he steps outside the conventional terms of a eulogy. He studies some details of lines in Büchner’s Woyzeck, and in The Death of Danton. ‘Art returns in a thunderstorm’s more livid light’, he says. Such a thought requires a mental shift for us contemporary readers; we are being asked to define where we stand with regards to Celan’s writings—as he did in relation to Büchner, who had to meet the challenge of treating with enough and not too much ‘art’, ‘this wholly different age’ that Büchner articulated concerning Danton, Camille, and Lucile’s revolutionary life and times.

Thus ‘Art returns’—as it does for us in Celan’s poetry and prose—as also in Büchner’s Leonce and Lena, the satirical play whose ‘paste-board figures move as if by the forces of a watch’s spring’. Celan is building up a repertoire of words, phrases, and references in order to articulate this rare thing called ‘art’; he can raise up the hapless figures in The Death of Danton’; he can face the ‘elusive’ problem of art—of how it can enable us to understand something about some mortals, such as Camille and Danton, for whom the scaffold is but one more stage on which to recite their lines—and about Lucile who, sealing a fate that others have decided for her, cries out, madly, brilliantly, ‘Long live the King!’ For Celan, she is ‘cutting the wires of the theatrical machinery’ of the revolutionary process.

Celan is concerned at the ease with which people ‘string words with words’ to neutralise what is happening—‘when the talk is a matter of art’6, says Celan, ‘there is always someone who is present and not really present … someone who hears and listens and looks … and then doesn’t know what the talk is about’. In The Death of Danton, that someone is Lucile. As Danton, Camille, and the others arrive for their execution, each busily finds the words in which to declare what Celan describes as a ‘communal-going-to-our-death’—an already historicised event in which ‘everyone is at their best’. All around Lucile, ‘pathos and proverbialism confirm the triumph of ‘puppet’ and ‘wire’. Her ‘Long live the King!’ is an artful intervention [7]. She ‘nails’ the absurdity of a political scene where a mere rumour of ‘counter-revolutionary sentiment’ will have the erstwhile executioner themself sent to the guillotine. Celan observes how he evokes the theatrics on the executioner’s stage. One of them, Fabre, aggrandises himself as such a revolutionary that he would like to be able to die ‘twice over’. It is in the here and now of these affectations that Lucile’s cry, ‘Long live the King’ undoes the whole scene. It is this here and this now that call for the instant vivacity of her absurd, eventful, reckless display.

It is only a ‘nameless’ ‘few’ who find the artful power to distance themselves from a bloody institution to voice ‘this has all happened before’—that despite the melodrama of blood, it is all too ‘tedious’. Lucile disrupts this scene not in some bravado of not being stifled in her beliefs. She is not confessing to having been a covert royalist. Celan puts it this way: ‘After all those words uttered on the rostrum (scaffold) what a word! It is a counter-word, a word that snaps the wire, a word that no longer bows to ‘history’s loiters and parade horses’. It is an act of freedom. It is a step, far from any expression (as if long suppressed) of allegiance to an ancien régime. As Celan puts it: ‘Homage is here to the Majesty of the Absurd’ [8].

2.3. The Question of Art in Büchner’s Lenz

Celan declares himself ‘caught’ on a word (‘alas, Art’) of Camille’s. He refers to a scene in Büchner’s Lenz that demonstrates an ambiguity about the role of art as, on the one hand, displacing a desperate silence about how to live—a literary grasp that steadies us in the midst of what we are living through—and on the other hand, the supplanting of natural feelings by the mechanisms of Art. For Lenz had been searching the sublime to steady his wild feelings. Now, he has come down from mountains—the heights of that sublime. He would immerse himself in the day-to-day cultural life of the village at the foot of those mountains. Lenz is now ‘in good spirits’, writes Büchner: ‘they talked about literature’. Lenz, a writer himself, felt he was on ‘home-ground’. What he is given to say is self-belying, however. He yearns to be caught up in the simple realities of everyday life, but this involves him in the use of literary devices. He protests against a ‘feeling that what’s been created [by Art] possesses a life [that] outweighs these [simple realities]’7. He shows, in relief, how absorption in those realities becomes a criterion of art’s ‘authenticity’ [1] (p. 403), [6].

Yet, Celan himself cannot ‘free his mind of something that seems linked to art’. He has some sympathy for Lenz’s ‘scornful words for Art and its wooden puppets’—for the way Lenz sets them off against what is ‘natural and creaturely’. Something goes amiss for Lenz, however, in the use he makes of an experience he underwent the previous day:

Yesterday, as I was walking up along the valley rim, I saw two girls sitting on a rock; one was doing up her hair, the other helping her, and the golden hair hung down, and the pale serious face, yet so young, and the black dress, and the other girl taking such pains. The Old School’s finest, most intimate pictures can scarcely give any idea of it [1] (p. 404).

In remarking upon what Büchner gives this Lenz to say, Celan confesses his own discourse as that of a public speech delivered to a society dedicated to upholding the value of a literary life—of Büchner. ‘Ladies and gentlemen’, he appeals, ‘please take note [of what Büchner’s Lenz is saying]’. Lenz goes so far as to declare this: ‘One might wish to be a Medusa’s head … so to … grasp the natural by means of art!’ [1] (p. 406), [7]. The more Lenz strives after the purely natural, the more he becomes caught up in producing not only literature, but also literary ideas and theories. Celan examines the ambiguities of our attitudes towards art in its desire to present objects truthfully. He confesses that he cannot ‘free [his own mind] of something that seems linked to art’. He is reminding us of Lenz who sets Art and its ‘wooden puppets’ against all that is ‘natural and creaturely’. He illustrates his literary views by reference to ‘an experience’—that exemplary source in which those two girls made such a perfect picture.

This is Lenz’s irony of beauty as perfect mimicry. One might wish to be a Medusa’s head because that would produce the perfect freeze-frame, ‘so to … grasp the natural by means of art!’ ‘One might wish to, it says’, remarks Celan, ‘not: I might’. Celan draws upon the way that Büchner has, in his semi-fiction about a real Lenz, given voice to doubts that artworkers have about their calling. To grasp ‘by means of art’ the natural as natural requires one to ‘step out of what is human, [to] betake oneself to a realm that is uncanny yet turned towards what’s human’—a degraded form of the same realm—one where ‘the monkey, the robots and thereby… alas, art’ all seem to be at home [1] (pp. 404–405).

Celan shows how Büchner uses the fictionalised Lenz to create a stage from which he can play out some troubling thoughts of his own about the ambiguous status of poetry. In bringing us into the presence of what it speaks of, it becomes a substitute for the object of speech—and for its subject. In that decline, art creates ‘puppets’ and ‘wind-up devices’8. In the same vein, Celan gives voice to a thought about poetry as ‘calling into question’ poetry itself rather than ‘proceed[ing] from art as something already given’ [9] (pp. 16–27), [1] (p. 405)9. Celan notes how Büchner describes his Lenz, ‘now smiling, now serious’, as having lost sight of himself in his conversations with others who share his desire to go beyond pulling the puppet strings. In the end, they eulogise ‘Art’ after all. Lenz has lost awareness of how the artist can present what is ‘creaturely’—of how to make that presentation without reducing the subject to an object—while cognisant of the need to do that artfully—of how to reify Art itself. In indicating to us what he is talking about, Celan summons, again, Lucile’s ‘cutting the wires’ of Art’s puppets by the use of the force of her utterance of inspired absurdity.

When Celan says: ‘Whoever keeps art before his eyes and in his mind … has forgotten himself’, it is in examining a fault that he thus risks appearing to reify art after all. This ‘forgetting of self’ in attending to one’s thematic works when the art by which the ‘creaturely’ is presented can distance the self from its work. It is in this way that a sense of its work can proceed ‘towards the uncanny and the strange … [thus] setting itself free’. Celan uses a French saying in his German text: ‘La poesie, elle aussi, brûle nos étapes’: akin, perhaps, to the English expressions, ‘burning one’s bridges’ or ‘burning one’s boats’.

Büchner’s semi-fiction written around what is known of the historical Lenz10 ends with the failure of all efforts, whether transcendental or domestic, to bring calm and sanity to Lenz. The story breaks off: ‘His existence was an urgent burden for him—So he lived on’ [1] (p. 406). Lenz was a known author of various works. Celan cites a book on Lenz’s actual life—by a Russian, Rosanow: ‘Lenz was found lifeless in a Moscow street. A nobleman paid for his funeral. His final resting place remains unknown’. So, as Celan puts it, ‘he had lived on’.

2.4. Philosophical and Poetological

This historical Lenz is the one who went walking in the mountains (as if on Celan’s ‘20th January’) and it is he who is troubled that he cannot walk on his head so to ‘have heaven as an abyss beneath him’. It is at this point of welcoming intersections between fictionalised and historicised figures that Celan points to a theme that may be troubling those ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’ whose comprehending attention he summons, relies upon, and assumes at various junctures in this ‘speech’ that makes a work of art of ‘the public speech’. The issue, as Celan reminds us, is that ‘nowadays it’s common to blame poetry for its “obscurity”’. Celan takes up a jesting remark by Pascal: Ne nous reprochez pas le manqué de clarté puisque nous en faisons profession!’11. Going beyond the joke, Celan insists ‘that obscurity is … the obscurity associated with poetry for the sake of an encounter, by a self-devised distance or strangeness’ [1] (p. 407).

Büchner, he claims, makes his Lenz go ‘one step further than his Lucile’ [in The Death of Danton]. Where Lucile’s ‘Long live the King’ disrupts the clichés of the other revolutionaries’, Lenz meets them with a silence. This silence is ‘breathless’, both in Lenz’s own speechlessness and in his causing a ‘frightful’ falling of silence that takes the breath out of the spouters of slogans. (Celan writes in German of an Atemwende that the translator renders as a ‘Breathturn’ [1] (p. 411)12. When we complain about ‘obscurity’ (or stand in awe of it), we are complaining about this ‘turn’ that we experience when reading poetry. The ‘lack’ of this ‘Breath’ is not so much a lack as the active force of a gasp. It is a strangeness of sorts—of being haunted by a disconcerting feeling that we are already familiar with the event that has caused this caesura in breath itself13.

When poetry (or any art) is considered in this way, ‘the Medusa’s head shrinks’; the poet’s look is now arresting rather than immobilising—less terrifying in its ‘capture’ of what it wants to present. The disconcerting point where the robots break down is a ‘unique brief moment’; the estranged I, along with some Other, ‘becomes free’ [1] (p. 408). As for ‘obscurity’, we may say this: what we can understand derives from its moment of production, and then the moment of reception: ‘Perhaps every poem has its 20th of January’, Celan suggests: ‘Perhaps what’s new about [the ‘obscure’] poems written today is just this: that here the attempt is clearest to be mindful of such dates’. He adds, ‘I think that a hope of poems has always been to speak in this way … in the cause of an Other’14. The poem, Celan says,, ‘wants to reach an Other … it seeks it out, speaks towards it [and yet] … even in a poem’s here and now—the poem really has only this one, unique, momentary present [in whose] immediacy … it lets the Other’s inmost quality speak’ [1] (p. 410). What Celan says here recalls Luce Irigaray’s correction of Sartre’s account of one’s loss of a sense of identity when in ‘the great human stream, which has flowed incessantly into the corridors of the station ‘La Motte-Picquet-Grenelle’ [11] (p. 424). She says,’ ’I am not reduced to ‘a someone or other’ in the passageway of the Métro ‘La Motte-Picquet-Grenelle’ if I walk towards you [à toi]. My interiority, my intention, remain with me contained and close, despite the crowd’ [12] (p. 72).

Celan again summons his ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’—this time to listen to a ‘little quatrain’ he wrote a few years before:

• Voices from the nettle path,
• Come on your hands to us
• Whoever is alone with the lamp
• Has only his hand to read from
[1] (p. 412).

This is a powerful image—of how prickly making one’s way ‘through nettles’ would seem to one who was proceeding on their hands and knees. The image stings. If, proceeding on all fours, we pick up a book with one hand, then we need another’s hand to hold a light by which to read it. So, to read an intense language such as poetry’s we need other people, hard by, to shed light on it. Celan writes, ‘a year ago, in memory of a failed encounter in the Engadin, I set down a little story [‘Conversation in the Mountains’] in which I had a man ‘like Lenz’ walk through the mountains’. He recalls: ‘In both instances I’d begun writing from a “20th of January, from my 20th of January”’15. He concludes, ‘It was … myself I encountered’.

It was on that date in 1942 at the ‘Wannsee Conference that there was officially enacted the (already de facto) policy of killing all the Jews of Europe16. The enactment of this decision is significant for three meetings that did not occur—absences of meetings that become the pretext for some significant writings by Celan: a meeting ‘in the Engadin’ (see below); a meeting with Adorno concerning the possibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz; a meeting with Heidegger that failed to produce any word from him; and finally, shortly before Celan took his life, a meeting (that did not occur) with Samuel Beckett17.

In referring to that prose poem entitled ‘Conversation in the Mountains’ [1] (pp. 397–400) (Gespräch im Gebirg)—written to be read at a literary event18– Celan says that in writings such as Büchner’s, ‘he finds something, like a poem, that binds the reader so that they will themselves to be led to a new encounter’: ‘I find something—like language—immaterial yet earthly …. returning upon itself by way of both poles and thereby—happily—even crossing the tropics [tropes and topics] I find …a meridian’ [1] (p. 413).

Thus, Celan has completed his circle; he has justified and explained the title of his speech: The Meridian’. He has traced a line of longitude from one pole—that poetry is art and art is deceitful—to the other pole—that poetry derives from a Reality that lies always on the horizon of perceptual thought. Then he has traced his way back along various longitudes between the poles. In such proceedings, we begin to understand an art such as poetry. We ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ shall find poetry’s art in a series of ‘tropics’, along some north-south line. Yes, understanding can run loose. Still, it cocks an ear to a driver’s or drover’s command.

The poles of the meridian represent impossible extremes. At one pole we find the Socratic critique of literature as an artful contrivance that must yield to Reason as pre-eminent over Feeling. At the other pole is a poetry that senses a deep nameless reality behind the scenes of everyday life—something toward which such Romanticism can allude—a presence that it demonstrates in its poetic practice of evoking it. Celan’s poetry, for its part, produces truths that lie within his intense and austere articulation of the individual event. Thus, his poetry approaches the universal. In stepping beyond its origins in the romantic tradition such poetry achieves, in its steadied perception and economy of diction, a critical force that does speak ‘after Auschwitz’.

Such poetry concerns not only the individual in their universality; it analyses the self in relation to its other. We are shown how truths are produced, whether by philosophy in its ‘discursive reasoning’ or by poetry in its precise use of words that take us by surprise; its shifts in rhythm and syntax catch in the mouth—in the interrupted breath of our thinking. It is not only at the behest of a pure receptivity that we, like Lenz, would wish to transgress—or step away from—the machinery19 of art [1] (pp. 397–400).