To cover something up involves something coming between one thing and another, an intervention, and so far in the poem this has been expressed in terms of the grass written asunder and the speaking of words, and time separating the I from them. The attention has been on the what, the act of covering, but here it is directed not toward the what, but toward a who.
Who covered it up? And why is “who” so important that their identity has to be asked for in a question?
Thus, cautiously and without naming anything that might propel it back into the darkness from which it is lifted ghostlike, the poem approaches its center or zero point.
Came, came.
Came a word, came,
came through the night,
wanted to shine, wanted to shine.
The repetition of the word is of the same intensity as that of “I” and “years”: three times a “came.” And it is intensified further still, mentioned twice more. Came, came, came, came, came. The effect is much like that of an incantation, a ritual recitation. The word that came represents the opposite of the covering up, it came “through” the night, that which covers up or makes things the same, thereby canceling it out. The word is the opposite of the nothing, the word came forth as something against the darkness of the nothing, and for this reason it is recited. It is, therefore, a different kind of word those of which “they” spoke, for those words prevented them from seeing, and were the very hindrance. In that instance there was a contrast between seeing and the words, a negative relation: they who spoke, spoke of words, and they did not see. Here it is the similarity between seeing and the word, a positive relation: the word wanted to shine in the night. And light makes visible. But the word did not shine, it wanted to shine, and in this lies the idea of the light being an insubstantiated possibility. The word could shine, but it could not shine here, the poem appears to say.
Why not? What is it that prevented the word that could shine from shining?
It is the night.
What kind of night is it? At the beginning of the poem it is described as a night that needed no stars. This is a different night to that which ends at dawn: it is tempting to think of it as an image of death: the night needs no stars, needs no light, for there is nothing there to illuminate, there is nothing. This night is of a different quality, there is something in it the words lack strength to illuminate. Night is darkness, darkness is undifferentiated, the opposite of words, which by their nature are differentiating, establishing of distinctions. Whereas the first night did not need stars or light, this one does. Why? The poem has predicated a moving forward, and in that moving forward it has approached something, and in that approach this something, at first distant and remote, has gradually become clearer in shape, and in this, the gradual uncovering of something whose nature is still unknown to us, the intensity of the poem has increased and is now so acute that the words are repeated with the forceful effect of the incantation. Came, came, came, came, came. This incantation comes immediately after the ascertainment that the wound, unmentioned and unshown, present merely by virtue of the “it” that “grew together,” is covered up, and immediately after the question as to who covered it up. The words repeated are repeated in a time other than that of their occurrence: came a word, it says, in the poem’s present, in the time of the you and the I, whereas the will to shine, and the lack of ability to do so, is in its past: wanted to shine.
Is it so because the night is the very force that makes present past, that it is this, the darkness of what has been lost, that is meant, in that case also comprising the light of the words, and turning their want into a wanted, by virtue of their being words, immobilizing what is and transforming it, inevitably, into something that was? Or is the night connected with the covering up of the wound and the writing asunder of the grass, the language then being a part of the night, a part of what covers up – something that lies in the description of those who “spoke of words” and did not “see”? Would that be why the words cannot shine, nor, thereby, make it possible to see, because they offer only darkness themselves? The desire that lies in “wanted to shine, wanted to shine” suggests that it is not the language in itself that darkens, but a particular kind of language, spoken by “them,” and that some other language exists, but even that language cannot penetrate this night. This night is associated with events, they who did not wake before sleep came over them, and they who caused a wound, and they concern the I who once lay between them, who opens up the space between the absence of the wound in the present and the presence of the wound in the past.
“Came a word, came / through the night,” and yet in vain, the word wanted to shine but could not. The will is without subject, the poem says only “wanted to shine, wanted to shine,” according weight to the will, which is strong, yet futile.
Wanted to shine, wanted to shine.
Why can the words not shine here? What is it that makes the night so undifferentiated that no word can make a difference in its darkness?
Ash.
Ash, ash.
Night.
Night-and-night. – Go
to the eye, the moist one.
Ash, it says three times, night three times, though without a verb, nothing “came,” there is no motion of any kind, no “through.”
Ash, ash, ash.
Ash is the form of that which has been incinerated without it bearing any similarity to its former state, ash is nothing, yet it is what is left of an object when that object has gone, at the same time as it is something in itself, a blackish-gray dust, the same in any instance of incineration. In a poem in which nothing came from nothingness, the ash can be read as an actualization of that which is not, the physical form of absence. And it can be read as the material instantiation of the undifferentiated. Ash is nothing, yet it is something, and it is the same for everything.
After the ash, night and night follow night. In this night even the undifferentiatedness of ash becomes undifferentiated.
Ash.
Ash, ash.
Night.
Night-and-night.
Why the “and” in night? Separated by a comma it might be the same thing, night, night, night, an insistence, an incantation, but the “and” inserts a relation, which is to say a distinction, and in so doing introduces a course of events. Night-and-night. Night follows night, but so closely joined, the hyphens connecting the two nights in a single word, “night-and-night,” that nothing exists between them, no light, no dawn, no day.
Then the “go” is resurrected, the plea from the beginning of the poem, at that point open, general, a simple “go” instead of “reading” and “looking.” Now “go” is directionally specified: “to the eye.” And further: “to the moist one.” This is at the end of the poem’s fifth section, and since the poem consists of nine sections in all, it comes exactly midway, at the very center.
Came, came, came a word, came, came, wanted to shine, wanted to shine, ash, ash, ash, night, night-and-night, go to the eye, to the moist one. From the word, that which is general, and its light that is not possible, to the ash and the night and to the eye, but not to the eye that sees, it carries on, to the moist one.
Do not read, look, do not look, go, go to the eye that weeps.
* * *
“Ash” and “night” enter into the series of words that are given weight by being repeated three times and which establish particular places in the poem where meaning becomes concentrated. I (identity), years (time), came (incantation), ash (absence, destruction), night (undifferentiatedness). These words make up an axis of meaning within the poem. Another axis consists of the pronouns, you-I-they-who. A third is comprised of the imperatives, read, look, go, which to begin with lead into the deathlike and the terrain, empty of both people and stars, down into the past and up again to the here, where for the first time a direction is specified. The weeping eye is the midpoint of the poem around which the entire text revolves, for after the eye, and the long way toward it, the poem radically
changes character.
Until now the human presence has been a “you,” an “I,” and a “they.” The significant aspect of the relationship between “I” and “they” has been their separation from each other. By time, sleep, death, darkness. The gaze of the eye and the word have been likewise separated from the world. This latter separation, from the unnameable wound, which is a wound no longer, but covered up by someone, was followed by the coming of a word and its failure to shine. From the ash and the night, nothing may be extracted but ash and night. There is nothing to read, nothing to see. But there is something to feel. This eye does not separate, does not divide, it is not primarily connected with the external and with seeing, but with the internal and with feeling; indeed, it is hard to understand “to the eye, to the moist one” in any other way.
In mysticism the source of innermost truth is the heart, locus of the ecstatic coming together of all things. Celan’s eye can be understood conversely as a place whose wordless concentration is not of joy and expanded awareness, but of grief and the implosion of awareness. Both places exist outside the social world, and outside the name.
The heart is full of the all, the eye of the nothing. The heart, filled with what is, is blind and sees nothing; the eye, filled with what is not, sees, and sees nothing.
* * *
Here, at the place of grief and the weeping eye, the poem turns away from its now to face a then, not what grew together and was a wound, but that which went before. The time of the “we.”
Gales.
Gales, from the beginning of time,
whirl of particles, the other,
you
know it, though, we
read it in the book, was
opinion.
Was, was
opinion. How
did we touch
each other – each other with
these
hands?
Gales are specified in two different ways here. Firstly as being from the beginning of time, which is to say archaic, immutable, the same then as now. Secondly as a whirl of particles, something known by a “you,” because “we” read it in “the book”: it was opinion. The next stanza emphasizes the past nature of that opinion. Was, was opinion.
What is a gale? A strong wind, a force of nature, arbitrary, violent, destructive, chaotic, something of the “it” we name when we say “it’s blowing outside.” But also “the other,” the whirl of particles, the explanation in that, the resonance of science in “particle,” something broken down into its smallest elements, and thereby also the concept, though not unconditionally; the “whirl” is that which has been whirled together into something beyond concepts, something more and other than the mere whirling together. The word “particle” points toward something invisible to us, but which nonetheless we know to be there. This line of thinking stems from Democritus and the atomic theory of the ancient Greeks, as pursued by Lucretius in his poem De rerum natura, in which poetry meets science; it seeks to explain a phenomenon, to command and delimit, whereas the word “gale” points to a phenomenon. The significance of this distinction becomes clear in what comes next: the whirl of particles was in “the book,” it was “opinion.” Knowing something is associated with reading, which in turn is associated with opinion. But that opinion no longer exists, as suggested by the emphasis of past time in the repetition. Was, was. Opinion, opinion. The plea not to read any more might be directed toward this time, the time when what was written was opinion. In other words, that opinion is now lost. But the emphasis is not so much on the reading itself as on what “you” and “we” read. There is a community there, and the fact of opinion now being of the past, and perhaps no longer valid, is followed by a question that has to do with the connection between those who comprised the “we,” and it is hard indeed not to construe this in such a way that it is the socially cohesive aspect of the opinion that is at stake, the common foundation shared by people belonging to the same culture: “we” read, “we” touched each other.
Who are “we”?
Seemingly, the “we” would refer to something in the past, a community no longer in existence and which now in some sense defies understanding. How did we touch each other, is the question, though it does not stop there, but continues with a specification: – each other with these hands? These hands exist now; what they touched, which comprised the “we,” exists in the past, the verb form being “touched” rather than “touch,” and this is the abyss the question spans. “You,” “you,” “they,” “we,” and “our” are all past, only the “I” is present, so what happens is that something of what has been lost is separated out. The difference between being an I looking toward other I’s that existed once, and being an I looking toward the “we” the living and the dead once comprised, is huge. Not only has the community of those particular people been lost to time, but what made that community possible then, the very conditions of its existence, has been lost too. It is within the field of this loss that the poem is written. It is as if what this entails, what “we” represents, cannot be stated until after the plea to go to the eye, to the moist one; only then can the lost “we” be named; and this is the most painful thing of all.
* * *
Another of Heraclitus’s fragments, the twenty-sixth, concerns the relationship between the living, the sleeping, and the dead:
Man kindles a light for himself in the nighttime, when he has died but is alive. The sleeper, whose vision has been put out, lights up from the dead; he that is awake lights up from the sleeping.
The states described exclude each other – when sleeping, one cannot be dead, when awake one cannot be asleep – and yet are connected by the very ambivalence of those states, the borderlands between them. Man is in the nighttime, which is to say the darkness, where nothing is visible and nothing may be differentiated. He kindles a light, but the light cannot make visible, his eyes are put out and cannot see, he is himself darkness. Man is dead, but is alive, which is to say that he is sleeping. The sleeper lights up from the dead. He that is awake lights up from the sleeping, he is outside sleep, even further from death, yet the border is by no means absolute; like the text, we pass through the various states, consciousness waxing and waning within us, and when it wanes something else comes into view, unknown to those awake; the shores of the dead.
But this proceeds in one direction only, from the living to the sleeping to the dead; the dead do not look back.
There is another of Heraclitus’s fragments likewise concerning death and sleep, the twenty-first:
All the things we see when awake are death, even as all we see in slumber are sleep.
In both fragments seeing is pivotal, and both relate to sleep and waking, life and death. Both fragments are opaque, and to begin with seem to point in different directions. In the first, he who is awake lights up from the sleeping, but not the dead. In the second, death is all that he who is awake can see, while the sleeper sees only sleep, i.e., that which is his, not that of the other. But they may also be understood as expressing the same thing. When we are awake we see death, in the sense of absence and nothingness; when we sleep we do not, in sleep death is sleep, too. There may also be a point relating to a qualitative distinction in the act of seeing; to be awake is to see clearly, faithfully, we see that death is all around us, a fundamental condition of our lives, while to sleep is to not see clearly, in that we see only that which is ours, sleep, which hushes us up. The authentic life, which recognizes death, and the inauthentic life, lived as if death does not exist.
All these various levels are present in Paul Celan’s poem, those that distinguish between gradations of awake, asleep, and dead, and those that distinguish between gradations of authentic and inauthentic. From the poem’s beginning:
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.
&nbs
p; Did not see, no,
spoke of
words. None
awoke,
sleep
came over them.
They do not light up, but slip away. At first it is the place where they lay that slips away, it has a name and then does not, and they lay there no longer. This is what they are to those who write, who in their woken state seek to “touch” them. Then we are told what they were in themselves, unseeing. They saw not, because they spoke of words, in a sleep. The agent of the writing is awake, and if it is to “touch” them it cannot speak of words. The name of the place is such a word, something that lies between. It existed, and it exists, but not to them, nor therefore to the poem, which by naming it would have included them within it. The world of the name is the world of opinion, it belongs to the we that was, but which is no longer. Here the world of the name has become still, deactivated, because its foundation, the we, is no longer viable or must be established anew. This stillness of the name exists on two different levels. Nowhere does anyone ask after you, it says, and as such you are something concealed, outside language. The wound is covered up by someone unknown to the I, it is kept under cover. In both instances we are dealing with agentive forces outside the terrain opened up by the poem. The first, the no one asking after you, may also be down to “you” being dead, or because all others in the terrain in which you are present are dead and cannot ask after you, no longer know that you exist. But the covering up is not ambivalent in this way, merely vague. The second level exists in the relationship between those who write and what is written, between “you” and “they,” “I” and “we.” “They” did not see, they spoke of words. “You” know this, we read it in the book, it was opinion. Was, was, opinion, opinion. And then:
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 52