by Paul Celan
"me here, me, who can tell you all this, could have and don't and didn't tell you; me with a turk's-cap lily on my left, me with cornsalad, me with my burned candle, me with the day, me with the days, me here and there, me, maybe accompanied — now — by the love of those I didn't love, me on the way to myself, up here."
THE MERIDIAN
Speech on the occasion of receiving the Georg Buchner Prize,
Darmstadt, October 22, 7960
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Art, you will remember, is a puppet-like, iambic, five-footed thing without — and this last characteristic has its mythological validation in Pygmalion and his statue — without offspring.
In this form, it is the subject of a conversation in Danton's Death which takes place in a room, not yet in the Conciergerie, a conversation which, we feel, could go on forever if there were no snags.
There are snags.
Art comes up again. It comes up in another work of Georg Buchner's, in Woyzeck, among other, nameless people in a yet more "ashen light before the storm" — if I may use the phrase Moritz Heimann intended for Danton's Death. Here, in very different times, art comes presented by a carnival barker and has no longer, as in that conversation, anything to do with "glowing," "roaring," "radiant" creation, but is put next to the "creature as God made it" and the "nothing" this creature is "wearing." This time, art comes in the shape of a monkey. But it is art all right. We recognize it by its "coat and trousers."
It — art — comes to us in yet a third play of Buchner's, in Leonce and Lena. Time and lighting are unrecognizable: we are "fleeing towards paradise"; and "all clocks and calendars" are soon to be "broken" or, rather, "forbidden." But just before that moment, "two persons of the two sexes" are introduced: "two world-famous automatons have arrived." And a man who claims to be "the third and perhaps strangest of the two" invites us, "with a rattling voice," to admire what we see: "Nothing but art and mechanics, nothing but cardboard and springs."
Art appears here in larger company than before, but obviously of its own sort. It is the same art: art as we already know it. Valeria is only another name for the barker.
Art, ladies and gentlemen, with all its attributes and future additions, is also a problem and, as we can see, one that is variable, tough, long lived, let us say, eternal.
A problem which allows a mortal, Camille, and a man whom we can only understand through his death, Danton, to join word to word to word. It is easy to talk about art.
But when there is talk of art, there is often somebody who does not really listen.
More precisely: somebody who hears, listens, looks ... and then does not know what it was about. But who hears the speaker, "sees him speaking," who perceives language as a physical shape and also — who could doubt it within Buchner's work — breath, that is, direction and destiny.
I am talking — you have long guessed it as she comes to you year after year, not by accident quoted so frequently — I am talking of Lucile.
The snags which halt the conversation in Danton's Death are brutal. They take us to the Place de la Revolution: "the carts drive up and stop."
They are all there, Danton, Camille, and the rest. They do not lack words, even here, artful, resonant words, and they get them out. Words — in places Biichner need only quote — about going to their death together; Fabre would even like to die "twice"; everybody rises to the occasion. Only a few voices, "some" — unnamed — "voices," find they "have heard it before, it is boring."
And here where it all comes to an end, in those long last moments when Camille — no, not the Camille, a fellow prisoner — when this other Camille dies a theatrical, I am tempted to say iambic death which we only two scenes later come to feel as his own, through another person's words, not his, yet kin — here where it all comes to its end, where all around Camille pathos and sententiousness confirm the triumph of "puppet" and "string," here Lucile who is blind against art, Lucile for whom language is tangible and like a person, Lucile is suddenly there with her "Long live the king!"
After all those words on the platform (the guillotine, mind you) — what a word!
It is a word against the grain, the word which cuts the "string," which does not bow to the "bystanders and old warhorses of history." It is an act of freedom. It is a step.
True, it sounds — and in the context of what I now, today, dare say about it, this is perhaps no accident — it sounds at first like allegiance to the "ancien regime."
But it is not. Allow me, who grew up on the writings of Peter Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer, to insist: this is not homage to any monarchy, to any yesterday worth preserving.
It is homage to the majesty of the absurd which bespeaks the presence of human beings.
This, ladies and gentlemen, has no definitive name, but I believe that this is ... poetry.
"Oh, art!" You see I am stuck on this word of Camille's.
I know we can read it in different ways, we can give it a variety of accents: the acute of the present, the grave accent of history (literary history included), the circumflex (marking length) of eternity.
I give it — I have no other choice — I give it an acute accent.
Art — "oh, art!" — besides being changeable, has the gift of ubiquity. We find it again in Lenz, but, let me stress this, as in Danton's Death, only as an episode.
"Over dinner, Lenz recovered his spirits: they talked literature, he was in his element..."
"... The feeling that there is life in a work was more important than those other two, was the only criterion in matters of art. . ."
I picked only two sentences. My bad conscience about the grave accent bids me draw your attention to their importance in literary history. We must read this passage together with the conversation in Danton's Death. Here, Bikhner's aesthetics finds expression. It leads us from the Lenz-fragment to Reinhold Lenz, author of Notes on the Theatre, and, back beyond the historical Lenz, to Mercier's seminal "Elargissez 1'art." This passage opens vistas: it anticipates Naturalism and Gerhart Hauptmann. Here we must look for the social and political roots of Biichner's work, and here we will find them.
Ladies and gentlemen, it has, if only for a moment, calmed my conscience that I did not fail to mention all this. But it also shows, and thereby disturbs my conscience again, that I cannot get away from something which seems connected with art.
I am looking for it here, in Lenz— now you are forewarned.
Lenz, that is, Biichner, has (IA, art') only contemptuous words for "idealism" and its "wooden puppets." He contrasts it with what is natural for the creature and follows up with his unforgettable lines about the "life of the least of beings," the "tremors and hints," the "subtle, hardly noticeable play of expressions on his face." And he illustrates this view of art with a scene he has witnessed:
As I was walking in the valley yesterday, I saw two girls sitting on a rock. One was putting up her hair, and the other helped. The golden hair hanging down, and a pale, serious face, so very young, and the black dress, and the other girl so careful and attentive. Even the finest, most intimate paintings of the old German masters can hardly give you an idea of the scene. Sometimes one would like to be a Medusa's head to turn such a group to stone and gather the people around it.
Please note, ladies and gentlemen: "One would like to be a Medusa's head" to ... seize the natural as the natural by means of art! One would like to, by the way, not: I would.
This means going beyond what is human, stepping into a realm which is turned toward the human, but uncanny — the realm where the monkey, the automatons and with them ... oh, art, too, seem to be at home.
This is not the historical Lenz speaking, but Biichner's. Here we hear Biichner's own voice: here, as in his other works, art has its uncanny side.
Ladies and gentlemen, I have placed my acute accent. I cannot hide from you any more than from myself that, if I took my question about art and poetry, a question among others, if I took it of my own — though perhaps not free —
will to Buchner, it was in order to find his way of asking it.
But you see: we cannot ignore the "rattling" voice Valerio gets whenever art is mentioned.
This uncanny, Biichner's voice leads me to suppose, takes us far, very far back. And it must be in the air — the air we have to breathe — that I so stubbornly insist on it today.
Now I must ask, does Buchner, the poet of the creature, not call art into question, and from this direction? A challenge perhaps muted, perhaps only half conscious, but for all that — perhaps because of that — no less essentially radical? A challenge to which all poetry must return if it wants to question further? In other words (and leaving out some of the steps): may we, like many of our contemporaries, take art for granted, for absolutely given? Should we, to put it concretely, should we think Mallarme, for instance, through to the end?
I have jumped ahead, reached beyond my topic, though not far enough, I know. Let me return to Biichner's Lenz, to the (episodic) conversation 'over dinner' during which Lenz "recovered his spirits." Lenz talked for a long time, "now smiling, now serious." And when the conversation is over, Buchner says of him, of the man who thinks about questions of art, but also of Lenz, the artist: "He had forgotten all about himself."
I think of Lucile when I read this. I read: He, he himself.
The man whose eyes and mind are occupied with art — I am still with Lenz— forgets about himself. Art makes for distance from the I. Art requires that we travel a certain space in a certain direction, on a certain road.
And poetry? Poetry which, of course, must go the way of art? Here this would actually mean the road to Medusa's head and the automaton!
I am not looking for a way out, I am only pushing the question farther in the same direction which is, I think, also the direction of the Lenz fragment.
Perhaps — I am only speculating — perhaps poetry, like art, moves with the oblivious self into the uncanny and strange to free itself. Though where? in which place? how? as what? This would mean art is the distance poetry must cover, no less and no more.
I know there are other, shorter routes. But poetry, too, can be ahead. La poesie, elle aussi, brule nos etapes.
I will now leave the man who has forgotten about himself, who thinks about art, the artist. I believe that I have met poetry in the figure of Lucile, and Lucile perceives language as shape, direction, breath. I am looking for the same thing here, in Biichner's work. I am looking for Lenz himself, as a person, I am looking for his shape: for the sake of the place of poetry, for the sake of liberation, for the sake of the step.
Biichner's Lenz has remained a fragment, ladies and gentlemen. Shall we look at the historical Lenz in order to find out what direction this life had?
"His existence was a necessary burden for him. Thus he lived on ..." Here the tale breaks off.
But poetry, like Lucile, tries to see the figure in his direction. Poetry rushes ahead. We know how he lives on, on toward what.
"Death," we read in a work on Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz published in Leipzig, in 1909, from the pen of a Moscow professor, M. N. Rosanow, "death was not slow to deliver him. In the night from the 23rd to the 24th of May, 1792, Lenz was found dead in a street in Moscow. A nobleman paid for his funeral. His grave has remained unknown."
Thus he had lived on.
He: the real Lenz, Biichner's figure, the person whom we encountered on the first page of the story, the Lenz who "on the 2oth of January was walking through the mountains," he — not the artist thinking about art — he as an "I."
Can we perhaps now locate the strangeness, the place where the person was able to set himself free as an — estranged — I? Can we locate this place, this step?
"... only, it sometimes bothered him that he could not walk on his head." This is Lenz. This is, I believe, his step, his "Long live the king."
"... only, it sometimes bothered him that he could not walk on his head."
A man who walks on his head, ladies and gentlemen, a man who walks on his head sees the sky below, as an abyss.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is very common today to complain of the "obscurity" of poetry. Allow me to quote, a bit abruptly — but do we not have a sudden opening here? —a phrase of Pascal's which I read in Leo Shestov: "Ne nous reprochez pas le manque de clarte puisque nous en faisons profession." This obscurity, if it is not congenital, has been bestowed on poetry by strangeness and distance (perhaps of its own making) and for the sake of an encounter.
But there may be, in one and the same direction, two kinds of strangeness next to each other.
Lenz — that is, Biichner — has gone a step farther than Lucile. His "Long live the king" is no longer a word. It is a terrifying silence. It takes his — and our — breath and words away.
Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way — the way of art — for the sake of just such a turn? And since the strange, the abyss and Medusa's head, the abyss and the automaton, all seem to lie in the same direction — it is perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can sort out the strange from the strange? It is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, that Medusa's head shrivels and the automatons run down? Perhaps, along with the I, estranged and freed here. In this manner, some other thing is also set free?
Perhaps after this, the poem can be itself... can in this now artless, art-free manner go other ways, including the ways of art, time and again?
Perhaps.
Perhaps we can say that every poem is marked by its own "loth of January"? Perhaps the newness of poems written today is that they try most plainly to be mindful of this kind of date?
But do we not all write from and toward some such date? What else could we claim as our origin?
But the poem speaks. It is mindful of its dates, but it speaks. True, it speaks only on its own, its very own behalf.
But I think — and this will hardly surprise you — that the poem has always hoped, for this very reason, to speak also on behalf of the strange—no, I can no longer use this word here — on behalf of the other, who knows, perhaps of an altogether other.
This "who knows" which I have reached is all I can add here, today, to the old hopes.
Perhaps, I am led to speculate, perhaps an encounter is conceivable between this "altogether other" — I am using a familiar auxiliary — and a not so very distant, a quite close "other" — conceivable, perhaps, again and again.
The poem takes such thoughts for its home and hope — a word for living creatures.
Nobody can tell how long the pause for breath — hope and thought — will last. "Speed," which has always been "outside," has gained yet more speed. The poem knows this, but heads straight for the "otherness" which it considers it can reach and be free, which is perhaps vacant and at the same time turned like Lucile, let us say, turned toward it, toward the poem.
It is true, the poem, the poem today, shows — and this has only indirectly to do with the difficulties of vocabulary, the faster flow of syntax or a more awakened sense of ellipsis, none of which we should underrate — the poem clearly shows a strong tendency towards silence.
The poem holds its ground, if you will permit me yet another extreme formulation, the poem holds its ground on its own margin. In order to endure, it constantly calls and pulls itself back from an "already-no-more" into a "still-here."
This "still-here" can only mean speaking. Not language as such, but responding and — not just verbally — "corresponding" to something.
In other words: language actualized, set free under the sign of a radical individuation which, however, remains as aware of the limits drawn by language as of the possibilities it opens.
This "still-here" of the poem can only be found in the work of poets who do not forget that they speak from an angle of reflection which is their own existence, their own physical nature.
This shows the poem yet more clearly as one person's language become shape and, essentially, a presence in the present.
&nbs
p; The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it.
Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?
The poem intends another, needs this other, needs an opposite. It goes toward it, bespeaks it.
For the poem, everything and everybody is a figure of this other toward which it is heading.
