Paul Celan Archives

I was reading Paul Celan in the season of coming into awareness of a need for glasses but not yet seeing the full picture (!) so I kept having these delightful misreadings which were less graceful than what he said but somehow more intimate, like the poetry of glances between secret lovers in a crowded room while everyone else is speaking in very matter-of-fact tones. Instead of cavity awake, I read sanity sneakers, and not heartstorm but heartstream, and not blessed but bleeded, and in a sentence about libraries, I saw beaks, not books, like Oh Paul, you imp, I see you, winking back, and then when I got the glasses there was a moment of trepidation before I opened his collection, because maybe after all that winking and innuendo of double meanings in a room crowded with strangers we would find ourselves alone with frank expressions and nothing much to say, like how he looks on the cover with eyes that seem to be daring the would-be speaker to break the silence of that pause, and it turns out that the words I’ve been reading as whispers have been in larger letters all along, not whispers at all but a normal tone like two people sitting in a room full of space and regular furniture even though everyone knows about the bodies interred in the cellar walls and when that happens what do you even talk about anyway that can do any justice to the naked fact of being the only other person in a room and all that human baggage? This is why it is no small relief to see, in a line about hands, that the speaker still calls what he is doing arrowing with you. (!) And why I close the book and stop there for the day and hold the thought like Oh Paul. How did you–––?

One wonders about official days of remembrance sometimes, to what extent any one of them might serve as convenient cover for a miasma of forgetting that is, if not enforced exactly, afforded by numerous conditions, one of which is the immediacy of other disasters, collecting in such a swarm that they naturally imply a single organism, a looming and shapeshifting singular catastrophe, foreclosing belief in tomorrows.

And yet. Afraid for the living––all of us, I want to remember. The admission feels like a prayer from when my grandparents were living and the top of my head reached only their waists, and there was much to worry about but I had yet to come into full awareness of the idea that the moment at hand was one where the systematic extinguishing of living beings was as common and transactional an operation as real-estate sales. I am not worthy, the prayer went, but say the word and I shall be healed. Adjacent to another prayer, I believe. Heal my unbelief, and both came before the commercially-manufactured wafer was transubstantiated into the body that made all tomorrows possible for everyone, however few so long as we are gathered in that faith, however wavering.

I suppose I remember this now because I am aware that such a day of remembrance suggests celebration but also a sense of something hanging in the balance yet to be resolved. A call, perhaps? To which I may respond or stand in silent defiance, doubting its veracity. My favorite writer on these matters, Richard Rohr, reminds me that “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”

By this spirit, I am compelled to hope against despair, aware that I am not alone in wanting to remember in a room with a vast table from which none will be excluded. In this spirit, I want to remember every tomorrow, especially those newborn flames in danger of being snuffed out for lack of oxygen. To each tentative baby flame I want to whisper, I see you, and this of course is not selflessness but a symptom of hunger, for I am a wretched specimen of a so-called species (I mistrust taxonomies of the living) which after all may undeserving of persistence, and yet I am also a baby flame, not yet fire but not yet gone.

It is summer and I have a break from teaching so I read with the thirst of someone who is crossing an arid region in a heat wave. As so many are. And to what end? I cannot answer but this morning it is Paul Celan’s “The Dead Man,” an early poem written while his parents were being extinguished in the death camps of the last century. I nod my heavy head into its image of a passing wind, considering this life the kite that depends upon it, which can fly only as long as the wind persists and a hand other than its own holds at the other end. The speaker witnessing the poppies near the man’s wormy body, face down in the dirt, notes how they scrape blood from him, urging, kneel now, and drink it in!

Such is the posture that is now. To kneel, cupped hands, amid the collected bodies of this impossible moment as the machine drones on. And yet, the eyes before the single body still blink. The hands in anticipation yet hold. The word, does it come? Even now, can it be said? Perhaps I only move my pen to reenact the waiting for the moment when the body becomes. Tomorrow and tomorrow, heal my unbelief and breathe. Baby flame of we, ignite.

Tag: Paul Celan

Seeing Paul

Witness, Say the Word