* * *
According to Scholem, mysticism arises in the third phase of religion, once religion has assumed its classic expression in communities of faith, and when the new religious impulses that occur, rather than stepping outside the prevailing context to establish something new, instead remain to shape themselves within the old religion, where the abyss between the divine and the human is considered a mystery that inner experience of the divine may resolve.
Mysticism is free of the practical sides of religion, the morality, the obligations, the tasks, directed entirely inward toward the experience of the divine and its nature. The original revelations, the burning bush seen by Moses, for instance, or the winged creatures with the heads of animals that appeared to Ezekiel, are to the mystic somewhat obscure and poorly developed, Scholem suggests.
His definition of mysticism is approached firstly by way of a quote from Rufus Jones as “the type of religion which puts the emphasis on immediate awareness of relation to God, on direct and intimate consciousness of the Divine Presence,” subsequently by reference to Thomas Aquinas, who defined it as “cognitio Dei experimentalis,” the experiential knowledge of God. The great canonical revelations are placed side by side with the individual’s own experience. As Scholem states:
With no thought of denying Revelation as a fact of history, the mystic still conceives the source of religious knowledge and experience which bursts forth from his own heart as being of equal importance for the conception of religious truth
The heart is the very symbol of the innermost human self, our deepest emotional being, in direct contrast to the rational intellect and the outer world. And it is here, in the perception of and meditation upon the nature of the divine, present in our souls, in the ecstasy of the heart, that language becomes a problem in religion. Religious ecstasy contains all manner of vast and formidable emotions; they are wordless and cannot be represented, cannot be described, cannot be repeated, at one with themselves, and only in the very particular experience is the presence of God real. And what reveals itself, what is perceived, the divine, is outside the human sphere, drawn into it only by the very nature of language. A strong tradition in mysticism is therefore the negative; only by stating what the divine is not may it be approached without reduction. Can it be said that God is living? Scholem ponders, citing Maimonides. Would that not imply a limitation of the infinite nature of his being? The sentence “God is living” can only mean “He is not dead,” which is to say that he is the opposite of the negative, the negation of negations. But what is he then? Can we say that God is anything at all? It is to this progression that the Kabbalist notion of God resting in the depths of his nothingness belongs. God is nothing. This is not to say that Celan’s poem explores any sort of mystical experience, merely that the language employed in it has certain things in common with the language of mysticism, the issue being the same: how to approach that which is not, without turning it into something that is. But if the abyss of religion is that separating the divine from the human, bridgeable only by that which is without language – the heart, ecstasy, delight – and the challenge in the texts of mysticism for that reason lies in giving words to the wordless presence, then the challenge of Celan’s poem lies rather in approaching wordless absence. The poem’s unutterable word is not God, but death, since death is nothing, whereas the name of nothing is something. This awareness of the impossibility of representation is fundamental to the poem; it is as if the relationship between the world and its linguistic representation has broken down, and the poem exists, ruin-like, within that destruction at the same time as being about it. Its basic distrust of language reveals itself firstly in the image of the grass written asunder in the opening lines, then in the opposition between seeing and speaking about: they saw not, and spoke of words. The words exist between them and reality, and they do not see through them, but see them, and speak of them. This again has to do with being asleep.
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.
Yet the poem itself consists of words, the poem “speaks.” This can hardly be understood in any other way than that the image of the grass written asunder and of the sleeping who speak of words are not an expression of misology, it is not the language itself which is distrusted, but the conceptions that attach to it, the fact of language not only evoking what it names, but also the idea of what belongs to “the word,” which is to say the community of language, and not the “thing” or the “phenomenon.” This becomes especially clear when language names that which is not, the past, which language makes present, and death, which language makes into “something.” The poem turns this latter point to its own advantage, since by naming nothing, the nothing emerges as something, to exist in the text, then to be withdrawn, not existing after all, here and not here at one and the same time. The first instance of this strategy being used is in connection with the name, that which turns the open, indefinite, diverse, and heterogeneous into one, the emblem of place, the place name, which seems almost to accommodate both the terrain itself and the history of the terrain, in that way becoming an existence in the language, which is to say the culture, and not in the world. “The place where they lay, it has/ a name – it has/ none.” The place does and does not have a name. The fact of it having or not having a name is no more significant than the name itself, but the name cannot be mentioned. Mention the name, and the place and those who lay there become something they are not. Then the poem too would speak of words, and sleep.
* * *
Up until now the poem has been about a “you” in a world in which other people at first are discernible only as powers unrepresented by pronouns, then, in the movement of the “you” toward “home,” expressed as “they” and “them.” These “they” are unpositioned within the space; to begin with they lay “there,” only then to be called back, “they did not lie there.” They are, however, positioned in time, for while the poem’s “you” is described as being in the present, in the terrain of the now, “they” are assigned to the past. They lay, they did not wake, they slept. This makes it possible to read their presence as a memory, something on which the “you” thinks back. “They” exist in a time remote from the “you,” but the place where they lay/did not lie exists in the same time, since it “has” a name.
The place where they lay, it has
a name – it has
none. They did not lie there.
Then comes the poem’s first turning point. Until now the poem has proceeded steadily, from the terrain with its track, via the call not to read, not to look, but to go, into a deathlike landscape in which the thought of the “they” who once were arises. In the next verse an “I” speaks for the first time, and like the “you” it speaks in the present, about the “they” of the past.
It is I, I,
I lay between you, I was
open, was
audible, ticked at you, your breathing
obeyed, it is
I still, but then
you are asleep.
* * *
It is I still –
The original German has “Ich bins,” a contraction of Ich bin es, a colloquial expression often used when answering the phone, Ich bins, “It is I.” After the mysterious introductory stanzas from which little meaning may be extracted, the everydayness of the introduction of this “I” seeems striking, there is almost something childlike about it, the way it insists, the “I” being named three times in the course of four words. Ich bins, ich, ich, at the same time as the time shifts, ich bins, ich lag, ich war – I am, I lay, I was – then shifts back again, ich bin, I am – noch immer: still. The movement is thereby from I am to I was and back to I
am again. Present, past, present.
Péter Szondi, who has provided the classic and probably most detailed analysis of this poem, now a standard reading, believes that it is time speaking here, time personified. This may be so, but there is another possibility, that the writer is the “I” and that the situation described, when I lay between “them” and was open, is a memory. Both the sudden childlike presence in the text and the wording “I lay between you” make me think of a child lying between its parents. The significance of time in this verse is plain, but so too is “I,” whose presence is conspicuously emphasized in the forceful repetition I, I, I. Regardless of how this “I” is understood, the “they” the “I” lay between may be the same “they” mentioned in the previous stanza, of whom it is predicated “something lay between them.” They were sleeping, and the movement of the “I” from am to was and back to am again is something from which they are excluded; they too “are” still, but sleeping, which is to say dead. That which “is” becomes “was” through the “I,” who turns it into “is” by the evocation of memory – identical with the poet’s evocation of reality, the two things, the past and the written, memory and literature, coincide here – but that possibility does not exist for those he was with at that time, they slept then and they sleep now, their “still” being of a different character altogether, unchangeable, uniform, of death and the timelessness of the nothing. Death is not a state or a quality, it is an absence of states and qualities, and as such it has no time, only non-time. Non-time too has no “is” of existence other than in language, which abstracts the world, and in abstraction nothing too may be accorded form. The gaze of the eye may exist only as an “is,” in the now, whereas the language may strive toward “was,” through memory, where the differences between tangible and intangible are wiped out: in memory the space was the same, the world and its people faded into impalpability, as Joyce defined the ghost.
* * *
If we ignore the “I” and the “they” and the question of who they are and what relation exists between them, or rather, who they are to the “I,” given that the “I” is not something to them, then the most significant thing occurring in this stanza is the time that flows through the verbs and thereby through the I. You cannot step twice into the same rivers, as Heraclitus says in one of his fragments, the ninety-first, perhaps his best known quote, now a cliché. But there is another fragment of his concerning the same thing, the forty-ninth, in which he puts it rather differently and thereby makes a quite different statement:
We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and are not.
Time and identity are drawn together in “are,” we are and yet we are not, and what is “are” then? In Celan’s poem time opens up the same distance in the I, which does not say I am, I was, I am, but shades and complicates it by subtle means, impossible to reproduce in translation to Norwegian, to do with the interplay between ich and bin and es. In English Ich bins has to be rendered as “It’s me” or “It is I,” but another meaning becomes apparent if, leaving aside the idiomatic, one shadows the syntax of the German more closely. That gives us “I am it,” then “I am it still,” and finally “am it still.” This latter nuance is important insofar as it deprives the everyday “It’s me/It is I” of its notional subject, leaving us with “it’s/it is” and thereby drawing attention to that very constituent. What is the “it” that is? “It,” apparently, is “I,” but then what is the “it” that the “I” is? The question projects back to the opening, no longer quite as quotidian, the “I” containing an “it.” The German looks like this.
Ich bins, ich,
ich lag zwischen euch, ich war
offen, war
hörbar, ich tickte euch zu, euer Atem
gehorchte, ich
bin es noch immer, ihr
schläft ja.
* * *
Bin es noch immer –
Translating the first assertion as “It is I” preserves, more so than the literal “I am it,” some measure of the colloquialness of the original, the unencumbered everydayness about the wording that keeps the I firmly within the bounds of the social: It’s me. But then the final line would strictly speaking have to be “It is still,” theming “it,” the assertion thereby extending beyond the social. I am it, it is I. This points toward something outside the “I” that encompasses itself. “I am another,” said Rimbaud, but while this is dissolving of the identity it remains within the realm of the social. “I am I” goes beyond the social, beyond the name, into the nameless, “it” being the mark of the impersonal. “It sleeps,” “it laughs,” “it grieves” – no person would be referred to in such a way: “it” pertains not to the human, but to the nonhuman. And yet, it is an “I” that is “it.” Taken positively, the “it” might be that through which existence presents itself, that which is common to us all, bound up with the authentic, in contrast to that aspect of human existence that is joined up with the social world, which is to say all our hierarchies and laws, norms and rules, what Heidegger called das Man, the derivative and inauthentic, the very opposite of the authenticity and independence of pure existence. This pure self of Heidegger’s, open toward existence, is in turn related to the self of the mystics, that which comes together with the divine in the forgetting of the self, the I-less I. It seems beyond doubt that the I of the poem has to do with this, though not in any positive sense; the I is what is left of the person when the name is gone, the I is what dies when the person dies and the name lives on. The I is not erased in ecstasy, filled with the meaning of life, but in its opposite, being erased in the shadow of death, filled with its nonmeaning.
It is I.
It is.
It.
But “it” is not what the poem invokes. What the poem invokes is “I.” Three times in succession it rings out, I, I, I, almost as if it were trying to wrench free of its “it.” The fact that it is, whereas they were, is another way of saying I am alive and they are dead. The constituents are the simplest possible: you, they, I, it, is, was. Being and not being. Being is a matter of existence, we are dealing with being in itself. This is Hamlet’s question, to be or not to be, and it concerns the notion of being without identity. In such being, one is not someone but something. This is where the line goes between being someone and being nothing. But being is also a matter of identity. One is, in such an instance, someone, and the line goes between being someone and being no one. Something/someone, nothing/no one. The first, something/nothing, is that which stands outside the name and the social realm, the second, someone/no one, exists within the name and the social. One can be something in relation to nothing. But one cannot be someone in relation to no one: one can be someone only in relation to others. A you, a they, which together make a we. But here there is no we, only an I/you and a they. The they is absent and no one asks after the you/the I. This is what is at stake here; who is the you, since no one asks after them, since no one knows them or knows about them? In such an instance the you is not someone, but no one/something.
Who is the I? Is the I a part of “them,” does it belong among them, is that what is meant by “home”? Is that the connection that has been lost? The important thing in the verse is what separates I from them, which is time: once, I and you existed together in a present, now only I remain there, while you are in a past. That time, that division, that abyss, is expounded upon in the next verse:
Years.
Years, years, a finger
feels down and up, feels
around:
seams, palpable, here
it is split wide open, here
it grew together again – who
covered it up?
* * *
Covered it
up – who?
The insistence, the repetition of the word three times, joins “I” and “years” together. The space between is and was, present and past, has been opened, within or by the I. Into it the I now enters. Years, years, years; time here
is a space, something within the same, the movement is down, up, around. The finger that feels around is connected to that which ticks in the previous stanza, Aris Fioretos suggests in his reading of the poem; German “ticken” can mean both “tick” and “touch with the fingertip.” The ticking finger that joins the notion of the I as the person writing with that of the I as the voice of time. A finger feels and finds. What does it find? Seams. What are seams? Seams are made of stitches. Stitches join together wounds. The wound is grown together again and is thereby absent and yet present, unmentioned, yet apparent in the mention of that which covers. The wound does not emerge in its authentic form, hardly anything does in this poem, and yet this is somehow different, because here “someone” has covered, the covering is active and has a particular cause, and the question concerns who covered up the wounds, rather than what covered them.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 51
