My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  Spoke, spoke.

  Was, was.

  To speak is to be within language, and the pervading mistrust of what the poem says on all levels is attached to being. Is what it deals with the language of being? Or are the two things separate?

  Yes.

  Gales, whirl of part-

  icles, there was

  time left, time

  to try it out with the stone – it

  was hospitable, it

  did not cut in. How

  lucky we were:

  Grainy,

  grainy and stringy. Stalky,

  dense;

  grapy and radiant; kidneyish,

  flattish and

  lumpy; loose, tang-

  led –: he, it

  did not cut in, it

  spoke,

  willingly spoke to dry eyes, before closing them.

  Spoke, spoke.

  Was, was.

  Gales, whirl of particles, these have already been established as being within the opinion-community of the book and the society; this is the time in which “we” was meaningful and was good. This is before it becomes lost, and before the grieving over it, but it is written after, and remodeled not into the now of the I, but the now of the poem. It stands on the very brink of meaning, not because it has no meaning in itself, a stone has no meaning, merely a state of being, but because it has no meaning to anyone but the I.

  But try what out with the stone? How is the stone hospitable? What does it mean, that it did not cut in? Stones are among the commonest and least meaningful of entities; a stone is a stone, neutral and moreover most usually unspecific, a stone looks much like any other stone. In itself it is unchanging, or changes only unimaginably slowly, without conveying any trace of its age to anyone but a geologist, thereby in a way existing beyond culture, history, and time, or in a time other than our historical time, but the fact that whenever we see a stone we are confronted by something infinitely older than humanity, which existed here before even the beginnings of life, is something we rarely if ever think about, a stone is simply a trivial phenomenon of nature, no, not even a phenomenon, an object of simple existence, something we skim across the water’s surface without thought, for the pleasure of our children, for instance, or in the case of larger ones, something on which we sit down to drink coffee on picnics in the woods.

  In ancient religions stones were used as a symbol of the continuous and everlasting; raised in circles at certain places they enclosed what was deemed to be sacred and were often associated with the heavenly bodies. The laws given to Moses were inscribed on tablets of stone, rendering eternal and unalterable the otherwise transient script of God’s commandments to humankind. In religious life the stone was in contrast to the tree: whereas the tree symbolized life and rejuvenation, the stone was the symbol of eternal being. Not much remains of that world in our day and age, the tree and the stone are no longer opposites by which we make sense of our lives, but here and there we find remnants of its very tangible mode of thought, not least in the funeral ritual, in which we continue to erect stones over the dead, while the coffin is of wood. Into the stone we inscribe the name of the deceased. While the body decomposes in the earth below, the name stands in stone for all time, belonging no longer to the social world alone, but also to matter.

  There are no traces at all of ritual or religion in Celan’s poem, on the contrary, the stone is shrouded in the quotidian, it is something we must “try it out with,” it is “hospitable.” “Try it out with” preserves the stone quality of the stone, an object we move or share, whereas “try it out at,” as the German might also be interpreted, makes important the place of the stone and would seem to make it a question of proximity to it. “Hospitable” is a radical anthropomorphization, hospitable being a human quality, not even animals can be hospitable, yet the stone is hospitable in the poem. To be hospitable is to be accommodating toward others. In this case “we.” What made it hospitable was the fact of it not cutting in, of it being accommodating of the “we.” But what it did not cut into was the discourse that was conducted outside it, meaning perhaps, in the logic of the poem, that it was not seen through words. Was it then with its property of absolute duration that it exists outside the fleeting community of the human? That it did not cut into language with its radical otherness? An otherness to which “we” then also belong, since our bodies contain not only our beating hearts, but also our skeletons, that part of us which remains when we die, along with the names on our stones. The stone belongs to “it,” the nonhumanity of the world, is that what did not cut in? Because it was woven into the veil of language? The puzzle deepens in repetition:

  he, it

  did not cut in, it

  spoke,

  willingly spoke to dry eyes, before closing them.

  To speak here is in other words the opposite of cutting in. And not only does “it,” the stone, speak, it is also drawn into “it,” which must be all things indirectly referred to after it: grain, grapes, kidneys. It is this that “speaks.”

  Earlier in the poem speaking was placed on an equal footing with not seeing, and with sleeping, which is another way of not seeing, though stronger since the person asleep is wholly turned away from the world in which he or she lies. But sleeping and not seeing apply to humans; not cutting in, which is to say speaking, applies in this instance to things. What the things speak to are eyes. To speak to eyes is to be seen. But not in the way those awake see, for they do not cut in. They are seen sleeping. The eyes that see are dry, in contrast to the eye at the poem’s midpoint, which is moist. That was before the grief, of the poem’s we. But to go to the eye, to the moist one, may of course be read less sentimentally, moist can point simply to a property of the moist, that it flows, runs, is not firm in its form, is never the same. The contrast between the dry and the moist is found in other places in the poem too, for instance between the “unmistakable track” at the beginning and the “water-level traces” at the end. A track is something that points to something else, an imprint, and that imprint must have duration in order to be meaningful. Water does not have duration, it forms itself according to the now, so a water-level trace contains at one and the same time the trace and the dissolution of the trace. The entire poem rests here, between the traces in time and the tracelessness of time. The traces are not themselves that which once was, but signs of what once was, at the same time as they are something in their own right. When the trace is water, the traces are more transitory, their mistakability drastically increased. But the trace is not merely water, it is groundwater, something that lies below the surface, pervaded by that which comes from above, all that seeps through the soil. The moist, the liquid, belongs to the eye, which sees the now, whereas that which pegs down and gives form belongs to writing. The fact of the eye never seeing the same thing, the seen always in flux, is something the poem addresses on a number of levels, not only in tracks and traces, but also for instance in the way the nouns are transformed into adjectives, from entities into properties of entities – not grain but grainy; not stalk but stalky; not grape but grapy; not kidney but kidneyish. Thereby the poem describes, rather than specifying membership of any class or category. Together these properties make up an “it,” which along with that of the stone does not cut in, but speaks to dry eyes before closing them.

  Why are the eyes dry? Is it because they are untouched by grief, or because they see only the immutable and invariable? Is it because the grapes and the grain and the stone do not cut in? It does not cut in, the speaking, the talk of words is compared earlier on with sleep, and their closing their dry eyes might also be sleep, or death, or a mere doze, but in any case it has to do with not seeing. “It” is active, it “closes” the dry eyes; the unseen closes the eyes of the unseeing, who then becomes “it,” dead? But while the dry eyes are outside the “it,” the poem is not; the poem calls it forth, in a time and in a form that is the poem’s own. The poem sees. The poem sees the eyes of the sleeping, they are
dry but good, in the stone, the grain, the grape; yet it sees the stone, the grain, the grape as well.

  Good, but is it true?

  The question the poem does not pose directly, though it may be read as a response to it, is how reality is to be represented when language by its very nature renders general all objects and phenomena, depriving them of time and thereby veiling their uniqueness, and moreover is bound up with a society and a history attaching to that society, which has charged and depleted them in slow ebbs and flows of meaning, in the sense of ways of seeing, and which, more than merely concerning the existential and the social, is what actually makes the existential social. For “blood” is not simply blood, “soil” not simply soil. One way of getting away from that would be to create a new language altogether, freed of history, wholly constrained in respect to its generality, but that would not be a language at all; the wholly particular cannot be communicated, but requires community, a you, to create a we; this is the foundation of language. The poet would understand the poem, but no one else would, and so the question would then be what the poet understands, in a solipsistic world.

  Another way of getting away from it would be to change languages. But for one thing all languages generalize and are laden with culture and history, and for another this poem goes so far into the particular that it becomes hard to read as an instance of the specific language, German, or the specific culture, the German; its crisis goes deeper, to the very foundation of our understanding of what a human being is, what a language is, what reality is, what memory is, what death is, what time is. Such questions can be neither posed nor answered in the language in which the general understanding of the concepts is seated without losing their own particularity and radicality. But at the same time it cannot step outside the language and become one with its own particularity and radicality, since then it would reveal itself to no one. It is through language that reality reveals itself to us, not as it is but, as it is revealed by language, and if that language is to be genuine it must reveal to us the singular reality of the own, in its own singular language, but without severing either the connection with reality or the connection with others who share that language. “Engführung” inhabits that borderland. And existing at the very limits of meaning means the question of what meaning actually is becomes inevitable, at the same time as each single word is accorded quite extraordinary weight. That weight comes not from meaning, but from the basis of meaning. “Stone” is such a word. It is there, almost like a stone in the poem, unconnected with its surroundings, and if we try to draw in aspects of the stone’s connection to the human sphere, to give it meaning in that way, it does not “answer.” It is within language, and yet outside the contexts of language.

  In the unique lies the own, in the own the private; the path that evades generality passes through here. And perhaps the stone in Celan’s poem is laden with something unknown to the reader, at which he or she cannot even guess. In the afterword to his Norwegian rendering, Øyvind Berg writes that Celan’s parents, Friederike and Leo, German-speaking Jews resident in Romania, died in a German work camp known as the Stone Pit. “This brings to mind a poem such as ‘Engführung,’” Berg writes, “though at the same time it is important to keep some measure of air between biographical background and the poems that transcend it: historicizing interpretations deprive the poetry of contemporary interest.” What Berg points to here is the fundamental hermeneutic issue: where exactly is the line between what is in the poem, what is in the poet, and what is in the reader? Celan writes the word “stone.” Was he thinking about his parents? Are they contained in the word “stone”? We will never know. Now I know that Celan’s parents died in the Germans’ quarry, or stone pit, and I can read that connection into the word “stone,” but is it right to read the poem in that way, or am I forcing something upon it that it does not contain? How much is outside and how much inside the poem?

  * * *

  The key words of the poem, besides “no one” and “nothing,” are “night,” “words,” and “ash.” When Celan wrote “came a word through the night, wanted to shine,” was he addressing the beginning of the Gospel of John? There we find the classic connection of word and light, the word there is God, God is life and life is man’s light shining in the darkness. If this was indeed what Celan was thinking about, does it then “exist” in the poem, as opposed to if he was not? If he was not and it does not “exist” in the poem, but only in me, a reader, am I then understanding it “wrongly”?

  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

  Came, came.

  Came a word, came,

  Came through the night,

  wanted to shine, wanted to shine.

  If one hears the tone of the Gospel of John in those four lines of Celan, one will also hear the tone of God in the word they evoke, which wants to but cannot shine. But God is not only the word, he is life, and life was the light of mankind; that tone too then fills the words; just as light is a word that cannot penetrate the undifferentiatedness of night, there may be people who cannot penetrate the undifferentiatedness of death. Yet the opening verse of the Gospel of John not only associates the word with God, and God with the light of mankind, it also tells us we are “in the beginning,” in the manner of the creation narrative. Thereby it becomes an echo of the Old Testament’s account of the creation, which also starts with the words “In the beginning.” Whereas in the Old Testament the creation is of the material world, the sky and the earth, which to begin with are empty and desolate places in the midst of an expanse of darkness, gradually gaining light, land, life, and which in keeping with all accounts of creation are brought from chaos to order, the beginning in the Gospel of John is not the dawning of a day and land rising out of eternal darkness in the material world, but the word. What begins here is the human world, and it emerges in the word, which establishes differentiation in the undifferentiated, meaning in the meaningless, order in the chaos. If a person falls out of language, he or she falls out of the world. A world without language is a world without distinction, and a world without distinction is a world without meaning. Instead it is chaos, the expansion and collapse of all things. But language is not above the world and the people in it, a ring-binder system of distinctions and differences, but something existing in every one of us, by whose means we understand ourselves, our fellow humans and the world in which we live. Language is the human. In language I exist, but only if there is also a you to which the I of the speech act can relate, because if not, how then should the I separate itself and find form? The you-less I is no one and everyone.

  What does a language look like without the other? Not like Joyce’s inner monologues, for although the language in them purports to come from the most particular own, it listens to it at the same time, and it is this presence in the entire, quiet flood of memories, thoughts, fragments of life, and an I that pass through a mind, as for instance in Molly Bloom’s concluding monologue in Ulysses, that is the other to whom the inner human being relates, no longer enclosed within itself. Joyce’s merit was precisely in knowing how tightly the innermost I was bound up with the other and to the culture through language, and in his next novel he proceeded further along the same path, where language was no longer decoded within the one, he wrote of an “all,” or within an all, which is to say the language in itself, without sender or receiver, an I or a you, but a gigantic we extending in all directions, for every single word has part in another, all words are open toward one another, and all that they contain in the way of history and culture and centuries of meaning flows through them, and thereby they come to exist at the second limit of meaning: the first is where the I disappears into the own, which cannot be communicated without losing its character o
f ownness and becoming the other, therefore ultimately being without language. The second limit, at which Finnegans Wake is written, is that where the I disappears into the self of the language. In the instance of our crossing the first limit, the you ceases to exist, and the I becomes it; in our crossing the second limit, the you ceases to exist, and the I vanishes into an “all”; in both instances meaning departs the language, which accordingly becomes mysterious.

  But what is the mysterious? It is that which cannot be understood. But then what is meant by understanding? Do we “understand” a stone? Do we “understand” a star? Do we “understand” water? The most important concept in the first verse of the Gospel of John is “logos,” the word. “Logos” is Greek, and in the Greek culture, from Plato onward, language is abstract to a greater extent than in the Jewish culture, where, according to Northrop Frye, if I have understood him correctly, the word, “dabar,” is taken more tangibly, as if closer in some way to what it denotes, almost as if words were entities or actions in themselves. If the Gospel of John is not a presence in Celan’s poem, the Greek certainly is, and not only in the suggestion of reference to Democritus, where the physical world is divided up into its smallest component parts, but also in the abstract, relational, all-connecting language world that was the prerequisite of the we that no longer is possible: without connection, the stone lies in language. What does the stone mean? This is a question for language, for the “stone.” We know what it looks like, we know how it is built up, and we know what kind of properties it has. But as for what it is, in itself, we have no conception. “It,” we can say. “It is a stone.” “It is a star.” “It is water.” “It is I.” Or, perhaps, “I am it.” What is “it”?