It is what has no name.
Understanding and meaning are not the same thing. The Israeli-American sociologist Aaron Antonovsky defines meaning as a feeling or experience of coherence. Religion sets up such states of coherence, drawing the stone and the tree into the human sphere, where they are what they are, tangible objects in their own right, and moreover represent aspects of the sacred or divine, which is to say that which lies outside the human. Science, which took the place of religion, also sets up such states of coherence, placing the stone and the tree within an enormous system of differences and similarities that man has established and is himself a part of. And the social world establishes connections and coherences, an intricate system of rules as to what may and may not be done, what is desirable and what is not, what can be said and what not, organized in a hierarchy in which the individual may ascend or descend according to how finely the society’s various strata are divided. Meaning is not something in itself, but a feeling that may arise, and the coherence on which it is dependent is relative and may be based on misunderstanding as well as understanding, superstition as well as true belief, illusion as well as reality, immorality as well as morality. Meaning is a sense of coherence, and the greater the coherence, the greater the meaning. Affinity with the all of the universe and with the divine, as experienced in ecstasy, is the strongest feeling of coherence a person may experience. Love is a coherence-bringing emotion. And the sense of community that arises when we are together with other people in a shared experience is also coherence-bringing and fosters meaning. The great insight of whoever wrote the Gospel of John was not only that the human world arose in the word, but also that mankind itself arose in the word, and that all meaning that may exist in that world derives from the word. The word is a light that illuminates our world, beyond that world is but darkness, and this is so because the word creates differences while the dark is without difference. In Paul Celan’s poem the darkness and the undifferentiated are not something belonging outside the human sphere, our perimeter, at which we stand when we encounter death or the divine, but something that has pervaded the very core of humanity itself, which in this understanding is the same as language.
If language falls, darkness invades our world, flooding in like an ocean.
But what does it mean for language to fall? How can language fall? Or, put differently: why did the word not shine when it wanted to shine? In the Gospel of John the word is God, and this can be understood as saying that God is what gives the word meaning, that in which meaning resides and from which meaning emanates, which is to say a securer of coherence. In the poem there is no such meaningful coherence. Words relating to the world destroy the world, the grass is written asunder and the wheel turns of itself, unconnected with its surroundings, a symbol detached from context, where perhaps that very detachment is the most important aspect, certainly it is emphasized, for the night sky under which it turns is without stars. Stars are lights in darkness, lights are words, the word is God. The evocation of the word as light immediately afterward must be understood as a longing for another kind of word, the wish to establish another coherence after the one that has broken down, and when that does not occur, and that light does not shine, the poem collapses into ash, ash, ash, night, night-and-night, and the call to go to the eye, not the one that sees and distinguishes, but the one that weeps.
* * *
However, coherence or meaning are not exclusively found where the word comes from, but also where the word is going, which is toward a you. To this you, absence of meaning is meaning too. Without this you the poem would have been mute. It would not have collapsed into ash and night, which are proximate to the language-less, but into the language-less itself. The you is the poem’s hope, the poem’s future, the poem’s utopia. But the poem’s you is not the same as me, reading it now, but a semantic role into which I can insert myself or not. If I do, I must do so with caution, since this is what it means to read, to give up the self and yield to the alien voice, obeying it, in this instance a voice created by a Paul Celan, a human being long since dead but who in these words and their fine shades of meaning emerges into view, an I directed toward a you, which I, more than fifty years after it was written, endeavor to identify with. If I bring too much of myself into that endeavor, I turn the you of the text into my own I, and the poem then becomes a mirror, its potentials in terms of yielding insight constrained by my own limitations, since I know what I know. That prejudice operates not only in respect to my own personal self, but also in relation to the culture as a whole, which is also a part of my reading self, and quite necessary; without it I would be blank at every word. The “you” that exists in Paul Celan’s poem, to whom the poem is addressed, is denied all words that are creative of such common prejudices, precisely because the perceptual space in which it is written is concerned with the inadequacy of those prejudices in relation to the world it strives to reach, and this is why the poem is so difficult to grasp; it moves away from points of commonality, and when nevertheless it approaches them it is somehow free of the usual associations and resonances: a stone is a stone. This idiosyncracy is the method employed by the poet in order to write about something other than words that awaken words, and this forces the reader to read idiosyncratically, complicating all associations between the image of the poem and that which the image “represents,” that which it “in essence” is an expression “of.” The poem expresses itself. But it does so using the words of the community. That makes it difficult to interpret, but not to understand, for while the associations the words give rise to are denied space and rejected by the other words in their vicinity, no such rejection occurs of the moods and emotions awakened by the same words. Nor is it the case that the poem’s true and absolute meaning lies, beyond its language, in the heart and the weeping eye. It is where the “you,” which may well be a personification of the reader, is urged to go. Not read, not look, but go to the eye, the moist one. On the other hand, the eye that does not see but that weeps, is a kind of equivalent of the light that wanted to shine, an image in this darkness of futility, the fall of language. Language has fallen, since the “we” from which it both arises and issues has fallen, but it is not only to show this that the poem has been written, it is itself an attempt to find a way out and as such reestablish meaning, if only here, in this poem, and if only negatively, by way of making the loss of meaning visible. The figure for this loss is not the night that conceals, nor the word’s lack of force, but the ash, into which everything has vanished. Ash is the form of absence. Religion, which in its laws and rules relates everything in the human world to God, thereby rendering it significant, has incorporated the ash too in its delineation of the borders between our social reality, our physical reality and the divine reality of God; ash is mentioned particularly in the Law of Moses, given by the Lord to the Israelites through Moses, where it is the object of certain rules. Not ash in itself, but the ashes of burned offerings. The priest must be clad in linen when he removes the ashes, and he must place the ashes beside the sacrifice. Then he must put on different garments before carrying the ashes from the camp to a clean place. The ritual of sacrifice consists of a series of transitions, an animal is slaughtered and brought into the sphere of the holy, becoming holy in itself, becoming God’s own. The ashes are still within the holy and therefore holy in themselves. The priest changing clothes marks a transition, completed by the ashes being removed from the temple and taken out of the camp, returned to the world once more. But even in the differentiation of the holy, ash is a remnant that in contrast to life cannot be brought to conclusion – it being already dead – and which is carried away, thereby becoming unholy.
The question is what this dimension of ash has to do with Paul Celan’s poem. Ash, ash, ash, it says, as if insisting on it being merely that, ash, and nothing else. At the same time, the burned offering of which the ashes are a remnant is called holocaust in Greek. And in a poem written by a German Jew in 1959 it is hard to read “ash” and “holocaust�
� in any neutral way. But is such a reading historicizing? To turn the issue on its head: what else would “ash” and the wound suggested by “seams” and “grew together” point to, relate to, if not the Holocaust? Is it reductive? In a way, for it is exactly the reduction of the name the whole poem, with its fierce negative force, tries to avoid, for the simple reason that it would close what the poem strives to keep open. But it is precisely this and nothing else that is going on in the poem. It addresses something quite specific that it cannot name, and in that it strives beyond the specific, that which applies in historical time, to reach into the fundamental existential categories where what is important is the relationship between language and reality. Without the human catastrophe of the Holocaust, the poem would very likely have been able to speculate as to the difference between words and stones, and to circle about the nothingness of death, but I can hardly imagine it would have been able to lament the absence of light from on high, the divine light, to bewail that it did not shine.
“Engführung” is clearly no exercise in language, clearly not an academic excursion into presence and absence, it is an elegy and a requiem to those who perished, but also to what was lost with their death, which is to say “we.” It was in Celan’s native tongue, German, that the Jews were first separated from the “we” of the language to become “they,” and subsequently, in the extermination camps, “it.” The Jews were deprived of their name; in the name lay not only their identity, but also their humanity; they became “it,” bodies with limbs that could be counted, but not named. They became no one. Then they became nothing. All that was left when they were gone was ash.
* * *
A short while ago I watched a documentary film about the extermination of the Jews, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, which deals exclusively with what was left, exclusively with what exists now; no old photos, no old footage, just people in the present time, relating, one by one, what they saw and experienced during that time. Trains, forests, faces. Some spoke frivolously of what they had seen, without understanding, they didn’t know what they were saying, others were mute, others broke down under the weight of a single recollection, abruptly unbearable. As a viewer I could understand what it was about, that this and that event had occurred, I could assess the accounts of the various people in the film and place them into perspective with everything else I knew, and in relation to their own psychologies and character types, but only twice during the course of the nine hours the film lasted did the reality of what had happened, in all its horror, come home to me, two glimpses of insight, by which I mean that I grasped what it was telling me emotionally rather than intellectually. In both instances this lasted two, perhaps three, seconds, and was then gone. One of these glimpses of insight I related to Paul Celan’s poem.
A railway official who had been working at a station next to a German camp in Poland in 1942 spoke of something he had experienced there one afternoon. The camp had been under construction for a short time, there was talk of what it might be for, perhaps he asked some of the Germans, I can’t remember, but the assumption, for whatever reason, was that it was a labor camp for Jews. That afternoon he was just about to knock off work when a train came into the station. It was made up of many wagons, all crammed with Jews, and as he cycled home the soldiers began to empty the wagons and herd the Jews into the camp. The station being so close by, everyone at work there heard the murmur and commotion of this great number of people passing through the area as evening fell: the shouts, the cries of the children, the hum of voices. But when he came back the next morning all was still. He could hardly comprehend how still it was. Where had they all gone? They had not been transported on, he knew that, so they had to be there, in the camp. But how could so many people be so quiet?
That stillness, in which every human distinction is erased, is what Paul Celan was writing about. That stillness is nothing, but in that nothing resides a something, all those who have disappeared within it. That stillness, and the darkness of that stillness, is what makes the poem’s I lament the word that came and did not shine, and what compels that I to write: wanted to shine, wanted to shine, and then ash, ash, ash, night, night-and-night. All distinctions are erased, everything has become nothing, and what it once was cannot be called back, is lost forever, and not even in language can it be called back, for in the empty dominion of this undifferentiated void a word cannot make a difference. The only thing left behind is stillness, which is to say the wordless, which is to say night, and ash. The one’s entire differentiated world: ash. The past, the future: ash.
* * *
Perhaps a cynical person might say that a life is a life, and that a child dying in a gas chamber is no more terrible than a child dying in a car accident; the grief of the bereaved is the same; grief is grief, it is not increased by multiplication, people are not numbers, grief is not arithmetic. This indeed is true. To lose a child is always the same. But the accumulated number represents more than just one added to another; the dead were a community in themselves, a collective entity. When a person dies in a society his or her memory lives on among the others and their physical belongings are divided up among the next of kin. A we has lost a you, which in death has become it.
The Holocaust saw whole societies wiped out in one swoop, in such a way that not only what they were became nothing, but also what they had been. All memories and stories were wiped out with them. What they were when they died, their own “is,” ceased to exist, but also their “was,” and that nothing, which is absolute, in which no one and nothing is left, creates a distinction between is and was which death in itself does not establish, for the we never dies, it lives on, all our institutions, all that we build and all that we do is directed toward the continuation of the we, more resilient than any of its individual parts, which all will die, remaining for a short time in the memory of the closest we, which in turn dies too, until the we, fundamentally the same, eventually comprises completely new individuals.
This is what culture is.
The culture not only bears the deaths of the you and the I, but exists to overarch and build on them. And the most important element in that endeavor is language. Language belongs to the we, it is ours, but what we express through it is our individuality. That individuality, expressed again and again in language, through the centuries, is the cacophony of the we. In language and culture we overcome death, and this is perhaps their most fundamental function. When Mallarmé wrote about his son and his son’s death, his writing edged toward the brink of the nothing, staring into its darkness, but the fact that the language broke up had to do with his venturing out to language’s very perimeter, and at that exact point it came apart, faced with the fact that it was powerless, but it is not intrinsically so, for if the language shifted itself from there toward the center, toward life and the social world, it would again become meaningful and whole. Mallarmé remembered his son. In the Holocaust, the child and those who remembered the child perished.
But this is not what sets Celan’s death poem apart from Mallarmé’s death poem, though the absence of memory makes the undifferentiatedness of the nothing that much greater. No, what sets them apart is that the dissolution of meaning in Celan’s death poem does not apply to the outermost zone of the language, that which language cannot grasp, the negation of the problem of God’s name, but applies to language as such, the language in itself. Not the individual words of the language, like stone or grass, but the foundation of coherent meaning established by the language’s we, since it was this we that had separated you after you from the community of the we and recategorized them as a “they” and then an “it,” expelling them from the language and from the domain of the human.
Can an I who has seen this then say “we”? And if it cannot, how then to write and speak at all?
* * *
Language is a social activity, all language presupposes an I and a you, together a we.
The reality of language is thereby a social reality, it is the reality of
the I, the you, and the we. But language is no neutral phenomenon giving expression to the existent; the I, the you, and the we both color and are colored by the language they create and are created within. Identity is culture, culture is language, language is morality. What made the atrocities of the Third Reich possible was an extreme reinforcement of the we, and the attendant weakening of the I, which lessened the force of resistance against the gradual dehumanization and expulsion of the non-we, which is to say the Jews, bolstering the we still further. This dehumanization took place in the language, in the name of the we, where morality too is found, and within only a very few years the voice of conscience in Germany went from Thou shalt not kill to its reverse, Thou shalt kill, as Hannah Arendt points out.
In this language, where morality, ethics, and also aesthetics were perverted, Paul Celan uttered an “I.” To utter the word “death” in the same language would be to say something other than the absence of life, something other than nothing, for Nazism, which had pervaded all parts of the culture, was a death cult; to say “dead” was not to say “nothing,” but to say sacrifice, fatherland, greatness, fervor, pride, courage. To say “soil” was to say history, belonging, heritage. To say “blood” was to say rage, purity, victim, death. Death in the gas chambers was another death, its nothing was something else, referred to as one refers to the extermination of insects or vermin, an elimination of the undesirable, something other than human, and how was it possible to refer to that death, which was without identity, without awakening the fluttering banners or the teeming rats that lay in the very word “death”?
* * *
Seven years earlier, in 1952, Paul Celan published another poem concerning the Holocaust, perhaps his most famous, “Death Fugue.” The theme is the same, but the world described is very different, not least because the poem contains names. Germany is mentioned five times, Margarete with the golden hair four times, Shulamith with the ashen hair three times. Death is personified, a master from Germany, violence is exemplified, “he grabs at the iron in his belt he waves it,” “he strikes you with leaden bullets his aim is true,” “he sets his pack on to us,” the violence is directed toward Jews and is associated with music, “he whistles his pack out/he whistles his Jews out in earth has them dig for a grave/he commands us strike up for the dance,” and above him, the master from Germany, flash the stars. “Death Fugue” is a suggestive and hypnotic poem, its beauty is wild and compares with that of Hölderlin’s poetry. And it is not untrue, Nazism was wild, barbaric, and carnivalistically grotesque in the extreme, it sought the sublime in its banners and uniforms, its parades and posters, invoking history and history’s depths, holding German culture, including Hölderlin, proudly before it, its I dissolving in the we of the masses, and the dissolution was good, for it was to dissolve itself in something greater than the self, to leave behind the strangulating narrowness of class and enter the proud all of us, blood, nation, Germany, and then night fell, brutal and perverted, its darkness lit by fires of violence and destruction.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 54
