Is there anything in Paul Celan’s poem to justify employing Ezekiel’s ancient vision in its reading? What, in a poem, decides whether the reader’s association is relevant or tenuous?
The key word in the verse is “no.” No sisters, no stars, no place. “No” denotes an absence. In that absence, that which is not, exists that which is. You, a wheel, spokes, field, the night, are characterized by this absence, and it is against the background of this absence that they are presented to us. The night is characterized by the absence of stars. The wheel turns on its own, this is emphasized, and seems not to belong together with anything else. The sky beneath which it slowly turns is empty. Read positively, as it stands, there is no connection between the wheel in the poem and the wheels in Ezekiel’s vision. But read negatively, in terms of what it lacks, the wheel is a symbol without context, where the lack of context together with the emptiness of the sky expresses something extremely important, linking up with the “no” of the hour, the “no” of the night, and the “no” of the nowhere: something is no longer. And in that: something is no longer possible.
The wheel that rolls slowly, out of itself, and which is tied up with the darkness of the night and the emptiness of the sky, has to come from somewhere too, and that place, one might imagine, would be a place of cohesion, where things hung together and meaning was apparent. In the here of the poem, wherever it might be, the you is alone, the wheel on its own, the sky empty, and if all cohesion is absent, the reason is not because it has been written asunder like the grass – that terrain was centered upon what was written and the eye that saw, for the grass that is written asunder has been left behind; the you did not read in order to come here, did not look in order to come here, but went. This is not the terrain with the unmistakable track, this is home.
What is home? Home is the place you belong, the place you know, often the place you come from. This home is something to which the you comes. The you thereby returns; time has passed. There is a before, and there is a now. This home is empty, and there is no one there who knows the you. Nowhere does anyone ask after you. Where are they who might have asked after you, and who were they? The way they are mentioned, impersonally, without even a “they,” connects them with whoever drove, whoever wrote the grass asunder, in the sense that they are quite as remote.
“Nowhere does anyone ask after you.” In the original German this is “nirgends fragt es nach dir,” in the Norwegian translation “ingen steder spørres det etter deg.” What is the “es” in the German? The “det” in the Norwegian? The vague, impersonal agent: it’s raining, it’s snowing. The human is as remote as can be without having vanished completely. Even the act of asking after you is unperformed, visible only in its negation. No one asks after you, and as such they who do not ask are presented to us. Yet they were here once, this is implied; once they asked after you. Now all there is here is a wheel, a field, a night sky devoid of stars. The terrain being empty, the emphasis of absence, means that the one entity to be named is accorded special weight indeed. The wheel that rolls “out of itself,” of its own volition.
* * *
A wheel appears in Dante’s Divina Commedia too; Dante is in the Earthly Paradise and witnesses a procession, and this is also allegory. He sees twenty-four elders, representing the books of the Old Testament; he sees four animals, representing the Evangelists; he sees a griffin, representing Christ; he sees a chariot, representing the universal church; he sees two wheels, representing the two Testaments, or the active and the contemplative life, or justice and devoutness. But the allegory is no abstract vision, it is a tangible occurrence, the procession comes toward him as a physical reality, so physical even that the wheels leave ruts in the ground. The image is a poetic monstrosity in that when the allegory materializes and is accorded particular time in particular space, the griffin is not primarily Christ, but a griffin, the wheels not primarily the two Testaments, but wheels. What happens in Dante is that the timeless construct of the medieval world, the untouchable and schematic system to which all things and powers are subordinate, present for instance in the Divina Commedia in the form of all manner of devilish cycles and heavenly spheres centered upon the number three, is implanted into time and space, where the symbolic level is pervaded by the concrete in an impossible equivalation.
The terrain at the beginning of Celan’s poem is, like the terrain of Dante’s epic poem, bound up with death or nonexistence, though only implicitly so, by way of suggestion, in the wording “your hour has no sisters,” and in the caesura between “you are –” and “you are at home.” But if we take this in the sense that this starless, blackened terrain is the terrain of death, through which the “you” of the poem proceeds, the wheel is something that reveals itself. In the poetry of the death realm this is a trope: he who wanders through the kingdom of death sees something, and what he sees is shown to him so that he may tell of it when he returns to the land of the living. What the wanderer sees is meaningful. In the first fifteen lines of Celan’s poem perhaps the most obvious trait is the archaic, the fact that everything that is named is in some way timeless – terrain, track, grass, stones, grassblade shadows, wheel, field, stars. No name can assign time to the space or assign to it any particular culture. We are in what is always the same. And perhaps this is why the wheel turning on its own through the empty night comes across so forbiddingly, or so forebodingly. A wheel turning by itself is not something that should be unfamiliar to us, given that we are surrounded by wheels turning by themselves, from the cogs of clockwork and machines to the wheels of cars and trains. The forbidding aspect here comes from it being a wheel on its own and that its movement is the only movement, indeed the only thing at all to exist in this terrain, and that in every respect it appears so archaic. The wheel turns of itself. This gives rise to associations of God’s wheel, seen by Ezekiel, which like this wheel also existed tangibly in a tangible terrain. It gives rise to associations of the culture infusing the wheel with meaning; the wheel of life, rolling on unalterably, and the wheel that gives order to chaos and gives form to the formless. But in these cases the wheel is everything; here in the poem it is an entity surrounded by everything. And it gives rise too to associations of the mechanically driven wheel, which in such case is not only an image of time, but of our time. The wheel is archaic and religious but not to us, since to us the archaic aspect of the wheel has dissolved into the modern age in which the wheel now exists, and the two levels are made to converge here, the single wheel in the timeless terrain is the archaic wheel, while its forward motion, which is not connected to the divine, the sky above it being empty, renders the archaic strange to us, and the ambivalence renders it forbidding. And forbidding it is, certainly. No one is there to steer it, no one in control; it rolls slowly “out of itself.” It is beyond the human. The grass, written asunder, and the agent of not asking after the you, are beyond the name, faceless, invisible higher powers, almost though not quite, for they still belong to the human sphere. The wheel does not.
Does it leave a rut in the terrain, like Dante’s wheels?
The poem says nothing about this. But the word “track” appears only a few lines above. “The unmistakable track,” it says. A track is at once something in its own right and a sign of something else. A track is language. Usually, tracks are temporary, while that of which they are a sign is more permanent. Animal tracks in the snow or sand are blown away and disappear. This track is different, it is unmistakable, the way for instance a railway track is unmistakable. The poem doesn’t say railway track, and it says nothing of the wheel turning the way the wheels of a train turn. There is no mention of machinery, nothing to do with mechanics. All we have are the words “unmistakable” and “out of itself.” And the fact of the grass being written asunder, which is to say that something is damaged. The line of progression goes from the damaged to what is at home, where a single wheel slowly turns, the night prevails and no one asks after whoever has come. This is the terrain of the poem, this
is the home of the you, accorded more depth in the verse that follows:
Nowhere
does anyone ask after you –
The place where they lay, it has
a name – it has
none. They did not lie there. Something
lay between them. They
did not see through it.
Did not see, no,
spoke of
words. None
awoke,
sleep
came over them.
This is the first time someone other than “you” appears directly in the poem. They are without name, referred to simply by the pronoun; they are “they.”
Who are “they”?
And what is meant by the fact that they “lay”? Were they dead, were they buried, or were they asleep? In which case, where? The place has a name, but the name is unstated, and then the very fact of it having a name is withdrawn – it has none. “They” too are unnamed. Their namelessness, their being referred to merely as “they” or “them” is disquieting, for while the “it,” the agent of driving and writing asunder and not asking, is so remote as to defy association, the pronoun here draws “them,” whoever they may be, closer, and their namelessness, which is the facelessness of language, becomes menacing in a different way altogether, much like the eyes of a blind person, one might imagine, the absence of the human in the human gaze. Disquieting also because they are surrounded by negation – none, not, no, none – it is almost as if they do not exist at all, as if they are on the very brink of erasure, at the same time as the neutral aspect, the remoteness of the nonpersonal, lends to their presence an aura of representation, something solemn and ritual; as if they were kings or gods. But “they” are not gods, they do not see and barely exist; we are told that “none awoke,” so they were asleep even before “sleep came over them.” The sleep of sleeps is death. But the poem does not say death, nor does it say sleep of sleeps, but: none awoke, sleep came over them. Why?
They are tightly bound to each other, they slept in life, they did not see and did not awake from it, for the next sleep came over them. Their not seeing stands in direct opposition to their speaking of words: they did not see the true world but the world that points toward the true world, that of words. This can be understood in existential terms, as if they were living a life that was inauthentic, unseeing of that which is genuine, but in the space between “none awoke” and “sleep came over them” lies the possibility of an unuttered “before it was too late.” This, along with the failure to see, “they did not see through it,” the repetition of “not see,” the reinforcement of “spoke of words”; all this implies neglect, and the consequence of that neglect was that the other sleep came over them. They died, though the poem cannot state as much, since death would then become “something” and the dead “someone.” Death is nothing and the dead are no one, and it is the absolute nature of this loss, the complete irreversibility of it, that the language has to deal with; this is what it has taken upon itself, at the same time as it must remain true to the unique and individual, which is to say separate it from the undifferentiated void without at the same time maintaining that identity and making it something that “is.” The poem stands at the very borderline between language and the unspeakable, but this is not what it points toward, this is no language game; the poem is out there in the night of nights in order to evoke the unevokable, that which is so brittle and fleeting, so ghostly and indefinite that the slightest glimpse of an eye or a fleeting thought would cause it to recede and vanish; indeed, in a way it is that very movement it seeks to express.
The question posed is this: how to name that which is nothing without making it something? This is the very negation of religion’s great puzzle: how to name what is infinite without making it finite? Even the “all” is finite. How do we name what is beyond humanity without drawing it into the human domain, given that language in itself is human? How do we refer to God?
* * *
In orthodox Judaism, God’s name is unuttered, or uttered only by the high priest in the temple of Jerusalem, which no longer exists. And if the name is written down it cannot then be erased or defaced. The name appears in the Torah, the collection of holy Scriptures that for non-Jews is the Old Testament, in the form of four letters, YHWH, known as the Tetragrammaton, “the four letters.” Instead of reading this name of God in prayer, the faithful read it as “Adonai,” meaning “my Lord,” while mention of God’s name in conversation generally requires the form “HaShem,” literally “the Name.” Adonai and HaShem are thus names of the name. “The name has a name!” as the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas exclaims in a reflection on God’s name. The name is revealed and is hidden. It is as though the name itself were God. A normal name is the name of something or someone, here the name is itself something besides. “God” in Hebrew is Elohim; YHWH is the name of the one God, God’s own name. Its correct pronunciation is no longer known with any certainty; the oldest Hebrew alphabet contained no vowels, these having been added to the Scriptures at some later date, though not in the case of YHWH. Insofar as the name must not be pronouced, this would not seem to matter. But what does this name that cannot be pronounced actually say?
In the Bible, when Moses asks God his name, God replies “I am that I am” or “I am who I am,” more simply “I am.” The Canadian critic Northrop Frye writes that some scholars believe a more correct translation to be something along the lines of “I will be what I will be.” What is important though is the fact that the name is derived from a Hebrew word meaning “to be,” a verb. The name of that which cannot be named is given by God himself to Moses in the form of flames rising from a burning thornbush on Mount Horeb. The Bible says, “There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed.” Moses approaches and suddenly he sees not the angel of the Lord, but the Lord himself, calling out to him, “Moses, Moses! Come no closer,” the Lord says. “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground. I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Moses hides his face, afraid to look at God. And thus, barefoot and with eyes lowered, Moses is given his task, to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Moses replies, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” And God says, “I will be with you,” and he tells Moses he will receive a sign that God is with him; and when he has brought the people from Egypt they are to worship God on that same mountain. But not belonging to the people he must lead, Moses needs a sign now, rather than later, for how else might he persuade them to go with him? For this reason he says to God, “If I come to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what shall I say to them?” To which God replies, “I am who I am. Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”
* * *
The name God gives Moses is not a name, because it defines nothing, locates nothing, yet it is a name nonetheless, but of that which defies definition, location, determination. The inexhaustibility of this name, which is not a name, contrasts strongly with the context in which it is revealed. As in so many other instances in the Old Testament there is something comical about the occurrence, the reason for this being that the highest, the divine, the extrahuman comes so close to the human as to become almost snared up in it. God or the divine revealing itself in the form of some heavenly phenomenon might be sublime, but not in a burning bush, there being something almost trivial about such a thing, at which one might stand and stare in perplexity but never tremble in fear. God asking Moses to take off his sandals diminishes the revelation yet further: sandals or no sandals is a particularly human deliberation, one would think. And when Moses speaks to God, a misunderstanding arises, Moses asking for a sign to bolster his credibility in the eyes of the Israelites, God however promising him a sign once it i
s all over, meaning Moses has to be more exact and explain: but if I come to the Israelites and say to them that the God of their ancestors has sent me, and they ask me what his name is, what am I supposed to say? Moses’s approach is reminiscent of a trick, asking for God’s name by asking for the answer to a hyopothetical question the Israelites might ask him. The answer, the name, points away from the trivial toward the nature of the divine. The two levels intermingle throughout the Old Testament, as when God sews clothes of animal hide for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, or when God gets himself into an argument with Sara, wife of Abraham. The same occurs in other ancient texts, for instance in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, where gods and the divine move in and out of the human domain, not in any metaphorical sense but tangibly so, with physical bodies in the physical world.
Gershom Scholem writes of the three phases of religion, the first occurring when the world itself is divine, populated by gods humankind may encounter anywhere, who can be won over to one’s cause without trepidation: the human and the divine are not separated in any fundamental way. Everything is connected: man, nature, the gods. So too in Homer, where the names of the gods are likewise anything but unmentionable, flourishing in daily conversation. The second phase occurs with the emergence of the great religions, which open a vast and absolute abyss between the divine and the human, Scholem writes, bridgeable only by the voice: God’s voice, instructional and legislative, and man’s voice in prayer.
Some of the texts of the Old Testament carry with them fragments of earlier periods, such as the fairly-tale nature of the incident when Jacob encounters a stranger in the twilight and wrestles him all through the night, until the stranger beseeches Jacob to release him because dawn is approaching. Jacob refuses, only if the stranger blesses him will he let him go. The stranger does so and tells Jacob that from that moment on his name shall be Israel, for he has striven with God and prevailed. Then, although the stranger has made himself known as God, Jacob asks his name. God replies, “Why is it that you ask my name?” blesses him, and is gone. That God may physically be encountered and even wrestled with – the physical nature of the meeting being made plain in the detail of Jacob’s hip being put out of joint during the struggle – brings to mind the world of which Scholem writes, shared by humans and gods alike, and God’s wish to end the struggle before the dawn draws the encounter into the world of the folktale and the ancient reality of myth, in which the troll turns to stone in daylight. Northrop Frye writes that the world is characterized by what he calls a metaphorical language in which words are substantial in their own right, invoking their objects, the entities or phenomena they denote, much like hieroglyphics, posessing powers used in spells and evocations, as for instance is shown by the account of the creation when God’s word becomes real: Let there be light, and there was light. Names may create, and names may rule. In such a world to know the name of God would be to possess the power of the divine, one might imagine, it hardly being accidental that Jacob measures himself against God, eventually even prevailing, before asking for his name. “Tell me your name!” he demands with some presumption. “Why is it that you ask my name?” asks God, and vanishes into the shadows of the night.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 50
