Paul Celan, notes on the encounter

The notion of encounter is a key part of the Meridian address and a major theme in Celan’s later work. It’s also quite complex so I’ll start with its use in the Meridian speech and then proceed to the notes.

This seems to be talking about an encounter between the poem and the other:

Perhaps, I have to tell myself now- perhaps an encounter of this “totally other” kind with a not all too distant, with a very close “other” is – I am using here a familiar auxillary verb- is thinkable- thinkable again and again.

This elaborates on how the poem proceeds:

The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author remains added to it.

But doesn’t the poem already at its inception stand in the encounter- in the mystery of the encounter?

The poem wants to head toward some other, it needs this other, it needs an opposite. It seeks it out, it bespeaks itself to it.

Each thing, each human is, for the poem heading towards this other, a figure of this.

The attention the poem tries to pay to everything it encounters, its sharper sense of detail, outline, sturcture, colour but also of the “tremors” and “hints,” all this is not, I believe, the acheivement of an eye competing with (or emulating) ever more precise instruments, but rather is a concentration that remains mindful off all our dates.

So, the poem is not an inert object, it goes out into the world and moves towards this encounter a meeting that have been brought into existence at the point when the poem was made/written. This is the kind of stuff that gives Celan his reputation for difficulty and has allowed his detractors more fuel than they deserve. I’ve always understood that the encounter occurs between the poem and the reader but the notes show that this is hopelssly simplistic.

The ‘Encounter’ section of the notes is made up of three parts:

1. Encounter with the Poem;
2. The Dialogical Poem;
3. The Conversation with Things.

I’ll try to deal with each part in turn although there may be some overlaps along the way.

Encounter with the poem.

It’s important to recognise that the poem, for Celan, has agency- it is underway and it is attentive as it heads towards this other. This may seem odd but any writer produces work with a specific audience in mind even if this is a fairly broad group. Some of the more serious writers may have a specific aim in touching or influencing readers in a certain way and this points to a slightly more grounded rationale. I encounter books and poems and other texts all the time, some of these are first encounters and others are with old friends or aquaintances and I give them attention. Does Celan’s idea of the attention that the poem tries to pay allude to the elements placed by the poet to enable a reciprocal encounter to take place?

I’d like to report that the notes add weight to this incisive line of reasoning but instead we get:

The poem as poem is dark, it is dark because it is the poem. Under|with this congenital darkness I do not mean those Lichtenbergian clashes of books and readers’ heads, where the hollow sound does not always come from the book; to the contrary, the poem wants to be understood it is exactly because it is dark that it wants to be understood-: as poem, as ‘poem’s dark‘.Each poem thus demands understanding, will to understand, learning to understand (that is, but let this secondary phenomenon be mentioned here for the last time, a true understanding and in no way some “To enter into the co- or re-production, as fastidiously suggested these days on the federal and other levels. The poem, as I said, wants to be understood, it offers itself up to an interlinear version, even demands it; not that the poem is written in view of this or that interlienear version, rather the poem carries, as poem, the possibility of the interlinear version both real and virtual; in other words, the poem is in its own way occupiable. I want to insist on the fact that here I am using the term interlinear version as an auxilliary word; more specifically I do not mean the empty lines between verse and verse; I beg you to imagine those empty lines as spatial, as spatial – and – temporal. Thus temporal and spatial, and, for this too I beg you, always in relation to the poem.

There exists, I return to this here already, because nothing can be lost sight of, no co- no re-production, the poem is because it is the poem, unique, unrepeatable. (Unique too for the one who writes it and from you and I who are reading it may not expect anything other than this unique shared knowledge.) Unique and unrepeatable, irreversible on the other or on this side of any esotericism, hermeticism, etc – –

The arduity page on the darkness of the poem deals with the idea of primordial darkness (eqated with mortality) as where the poem comes from. We appear to have here this darkness as almost indistinguishable from the poem and that it is this darkness that leads to the poem’s desire to be understood. So, the encounter with the reader carries the potential for being understood but the poem in this encounter demands that the reader has the will (a very loaded noun) to understand and is prepared to learn how to understand.

The poem can also have this interlinear quality which is said to be both spatial and temporal and is differentiated from the ’empty lines between verse and verse’. This opens up a heap of possibilities:

• Does this mean that we should pay attention to the significance of the placing of the line breaks?
• Sould we be looking for each line break as indicating a shift in time and/or place?
• Can we consider these qualities in the same way as the dark of the poem?
• Does this interlinearity have the English sense of ‘reading between the lines’ – i.e. looking for the things that aren’t said or are occluded?
• What exactly might have been meant by virtual in 1960, in this sense does it mean ‘nearly’ or ‘almost’ real?

The notes to ‘breathturn’ make use of Plotinus to make clear that ‘ Original and reproduction are the same / the yearning to become world-free’ which seems at odds with the apparent distinction made here although the second paragraph seems to insist that attention must be paid to those versions even though the poem, as poem, is unique

Celan denied the charge of hermeticism- something that was increasingly levelled at him during the last ten years of his life, he did however acknowledge that his work carried more than a degree of ambiguity. This denial seems to be undermined by the referal to the ‘other on this’ side of hermeticism.

These two paragraphs contain one of the most explicit statements of Celan’s poetics and it is again fascinating to see this insistence on the agency of the poem, as if it is a conscious and acting thing- it is the poem that ‘demands’ that ‘offers itself up’ that carries its darkness with it. The ‘giviing itself up’ can refer to surrender but also to scarifice for the sake of this interlinear version.

Christoph Lichtenberg was an eighteenth century scientist who apparently (according to the editors) asked the rehtorical question about the head and the book.

The other ‘significant’ extended passage is more explicit about the encounter:

Even for the one,- and beyond all for the one, for whom the encounter with the poem belongs to the quotidian and self-evident, this encounter has to begin with the darkness – of the self-evident what makes every encounter with a stranger strange. “Camarado, who this is no book, who touches this, touches a human

Only from by this touch – that is not a “making contact” – comes the way to intimacy. Aisthesis is not enough here, man is more than his sensorium; it is a question of conversation, as it is a question of language (noesis does not suffice; it is the question of the angle of inclination under which one came together; it is a question of fate, as is the case with every real encounter, of the here and Now. the place and the hour

(The text after ‘suffice’ is a later addition)

To get the obvious barriers out of the way first, the “Camarado” quote is from Walt Whitman’s “So Long”:

     Camerado, this is no book,
     Who touches this touches a man,
     (Is it night? are we here together alone?)
     It is I you hold and who holds you,
     I spring from the pages into your arms--decease calls me forth.

This might suggest an additional intimate and deeply personal element to the poem/reader encounter.

The OED defines aisthesis as ” The perception of the external world by the senses” and sensorium is ” The seat of sensation in the brain of man and other animals; the percipient centre to which sense-impressions are transmitted by the nerves”. .

Apparently ‘noesis’ is used in phenomenology to mean “a process or an act of perceiving or thinking, as opposed to an object of perception or thought; (also) the subjective aspect of an intentional experience”. All of this would seem to suggest that what we normally consider as our way of apprehending things will not suffice, that there needs to be a conversation and this needs to be under this enigmatic ‘angle of inclination’- an idea which is in the Meridian speech and which I’m still puzzling over:

This strange encounter with the stranger, in order to be real, needs to be focused on a conversation between the poet and the reader. This more than resonates with me because I’m only really keen on those poems and those bodies of work that give something in return for my readerly attention. As a very amateur and inept practitioner, I’m most pleased when a poem of mine develops in response to how audience members react. It’s when Celan goes beyond the ordinary workings of perception that I begin to struggle. The process works for me by explicable exchanges. I read a poem and then think about it. If I’m sufficiently intrigued and impressed by it then I will return to the text in the hope of finding things that weren’t initially apparent and which may give an entry point to what might be going on. I find this ongoing relationship to be both satisfying and involving.

Another brief note in this section appears to make my case for me;

The one writing and the one understanding poems remain complimentary to each other.

This is from the Meridian Address itself;</p.

This always-still of the poem can only be found in the work of the poet who does not forget that he speaks under the angle of inclination of his Being, of the angle of inclination of his creatureliness.

I’ve puzzled over this particular angle of inclination for a Very Long Time and keep coming back to a kind of attentive leaning forwards as an expression of care for the Other but I may (again) be entirely wrong…. but I’d like it to infer that our existence (Being) is intertwined with this concern and concentrated attention. i recognise that I’m ignoring the Heideggerian usage of both ‘being’ and ‘creatureliness’ because this particular emphasis seems in Europe in 2019 to be less than helpful.

The Dialogical Poem.

Many of Celan’s poems are addressed to a ‘You’ and this part of the notes deals with this and also expands further on what the encounter between poem and reader might be about. I’ve thought of the ‘you’ in Celan’s work as being either God or his parents or the Jews who were murdered or a lover or himself and I can produce examples where this appears to be the case. What I hadn’t given too much thought to is the ways in which may be addressed to the reader and these brief notes have caused me to reconsider.

I’ll start with something reasonably explicit-

I speak, in that I as I write my poems, in my own and most own matter. With that I hope, and that seems to me to belong to the last, because oldest, and still to be defended hopes of the poem, to promise also in strange matters. In the strangest matter; in the You-distance. At the perihelion of poetry. -The poem has, I am afraid . entered the phase of total You-darkness: it speaks in the strangest matter!-.

I speak alternately in the first and second person; by naming at times the one at times the other, I mean the same. –the possi In the You-Darkness the possibility of the selfencounter x/ remains.

I have to document this I quote (Buchner): “…”

This is followed by a shortish horizontal line and beneath that this has been added later “x/ mystical motive-“.

So, this ‘you’ could be both the particular addressee of the poem and, at the same time, the reader of the poem. I’ve already described what Celan has to say on the darkness of the poem so I won’t dwell on this here but the Poem-darkness is a primordial darkness that is congenital/inherent in the poem and moves with it as it is underway towards the encounter. The reference to a ‘phase of total You-darkness’ suggests that there may be other phases that may not be You-dark or may not be totally You-dark. What is more important to me at least is this reiteration of ambiguity as in ‘I mean the same’ which isn’t quite the same as ‘I mean both at the same time’ but it’s close enough for my small brain at the moment. The other intriguing element is this business of the poem as a way to encounter the self or there is the chance of encountering the self in the You-darkness phase of the poem. Both of these do help with my encounter with the work. This is ‘Soviel Gestirne’ form the ‘Die Niemandsrose’ collection in 1963- I’m using the Michael Hamburger translation-

      SO MANY CONSTELLATIONS that
      are held out to us. I was,
      when I looked at you- when? -
      outside by
      the other worlds

      O these ways, galactic,
      O this hour, that weighed
      nights for us over into
      the burden of our names. It is,
      I know, not true
      that we lived, there moved,
      blindly, no more than a breath between
      there and not-there, and at times
      our eyes whirred comet-like
      towards things extinguished, in chasms,
      and where they had burnt out,
      splendid with teats stood Time
      on which already grew up
      and down and away all that
      on which already grew up
      is or was or will be-,

      I know,
      I know and you know, we knew,
      we did not know, we
      were there, after all, and not there
      and at times when 
      only the void stood between us we got
      all the way to each other.

This can be read as being addressed to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the proximity to the ‘you’ may refer to Celan’s near-death experiences in the German work camps. This would ‘fit’ with “the burden of our names” as having a recognisably Jewish name invariably meant death. I’m not going to dwell too long on capitalised time being splendid with teats only to note that teats are sources of sustenance and that the capital t usually denotes Heideggerian notions of existence. What I think is important here is that darkness or blindness seems to be an essential part or precondition of the encounter. The play on knowing and not knowing and presence and absence can be read as the paradoxical nature of the encounter, that it occurs in the dark and at the edge(s) of experience. Elsewhere Celan seems to be talking about the poem as containing the potential for an encounter with a reader who is able to fully apprehend it.

We now come to ‘cathexability’:

In the poem something is said, but in effect so that the said remains unsaid as long as the one who reads it will not let it be said to him. In other words: the poem is not topical, but can be made topical. That too is, temporarily, the ‘cathexability’ of the poem: the You, to whom it is addressed, is given to it on the way to this You. The You is there, comma even before it has come. (That too is a sketch-for-being \Daseinsentwurf\.)

(The german word at the end has been inseterted by the translator, Pierre Joris, to indicate that there isn’t an appropriate equivalent for this in English).

‘Cathexability’ is given in the preceding note as ‘occupiability’ and it is here that Celan insists that the reader must allow the poem to say what it needs to say. In a previous note however we have this;

The addressee of the poem is no one. No one is there when the poem becomes poem. to take the fate of that no one upon oneself is what leads to the poem –

This is where things begin to get tricky in that I’m not sure whether ‘oneself’ here refers to the reader or the poet. It may be that the poem can only be made when the poet assumes the ‘fate’ or potential for encounter upon himself. It could also be that the encounter only occurs when the reader accepts the same thing. Incidentally there are more than a few of the poems where the addressee is quite clearly identifiable as a real person.

The Conversation with Things

I’d like to report that this part of the notes provides further clear and unambiguous insights into the work but they don’t. The name of Osip Mandelstam occurs more than any other poet and it’s clear that his work is a presence in Celan’s poetry. Now, there is a long and convoluted debate to be had about the nature of this influence but here we have Celan’s personal take:

A word about the poems: By nearly none of his As for only a few of his contemporaries, and with that not only those writing not only those writing in the Russian language, are meant? for Osip Mandelstam born in 1891 the word in the poem are sign and signified the poem is the place. where what can be reached through language by the individual seems gathered is gathered; to make the perceived in the word “thing-fast” enters into an indissoluble connection with the what his (the individual’s) speechlessness with WHERE it thingfast its (indecipherable word meets the question after the whereto and the wherefrom of the one who speaks, voiced \stimmbegabt\ and voiceless at the same time, meets the wish to gain world and the wish, the original wish of the poet, thus, in the poem, to become free of the world.

For the things in the poem have a relationship with are related to those things that one calls the last ones.

I think we have here this important point, all of the following are the same;

• the poem and the thing it writes about;
• the poet who is voiced and the poet who is voiceless;
• the wish to ‘gain’ the world and the wish to be free of it.

These kind of paradoxes will be familiar to readers of Celan’s work but I wasn’t aware that. in this, he saw himself as walking in Mandelstam’s footsteps. I’m not going to go over the arguments about the relationship between language and things because others do it much better but I do want to note this relationship which Celan contrasts favourably with the use of metaphor:

The reification, the becoming-object dialogue of the poem: in the vocabulary too (as indeed it has to is everywhere a question of self incarnation). A naming, that is before it is something else, always still an invocation (there too where it is a silent gaze): hence, from this naming the poem according to its Being is anti-metaphorical; what is transferred to the objects is at best the I: it is, from the naming of the silent consonant of the name

Why not give an extreme formulation? The poem is the unique, the untransferable real the present \Gegenwartige\

Asthe objective \Gegenstandliche\ it can also have the object’s muteness and opacity; it only wakes up thro in the true encounter, which it has as its secret. Therefore every real encounter is also remembrance of the poem’s secret.

(The last two paragraphs were added at a later date).

I think I can now be forgiven for being more than a little confused. What (exactly) might the ‘silent consonant of the name’ be? Is the self who incarnates itself the poem, the reader, the poet or the subject of the poem or any combination of these. Is the capitalised ‘Being’ a reference here to the wilder shores of Heidegger’s mystic streak? Is this secrecy that belongs to the poem in any significant way different from the charge of obscurity that so many have levelled at the work?

I’m reasonably okay with naming as invocation but I can’t make the leap to the silent gaze especially as we go straight back to the authentic name according to its Being or essence as being in opposition to metaphor. A brief galnce at the possible meanings of ‘gegenstandliche’ (objective, representational, concrete, graphical) leads me to believe that this could be a combination of any of these?

So, this last part of the encounter notes throws up much more debate than it resolves but parts can also act as an important marker for further reading of the work.

Thinking about the encounter in a wider frame leads me to consider whether the same term or idea can be applied to work by other poets. I think of myself as being in a relationship with the work of four or five poets and a component of that is attending to particular poems. For example, I have a complex but rewarding relationship with the work of Edmund Spenser and can chart in my head how my reading of the Faerie Queene has evolved over the last 20 years. In my head I think an encounter is more of s single short event rather than an evolving and involving relationship.

My initial experience of Celan’s work was almost 50 years ago and has much more of an immediate impact in that the poems were terse, mysterious and very powerful and the development of that relationship has been more of a series of a working through of what that initial encounter may have been about.