Desperately Seeking Celan

Here’s my story for the week. First off, know my plan was to be multi-tasking, as I was trying to understand Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” and then ways Daniel Libeskind, the architect for the Jewish Museum in Berlin, channeled Celan in creating that building. My goal this week, I thought, seemed centered around the sense of “soul.” I could search out the “spirit” of the building. My task looked easy enough. I had Eric Kligerman’s article, “Ghostly Demarcations: Translating Paul Celan’s Poetics into Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin” in hand. “Todesfuge” is one of those poems I carry in my heart, so I set off to find the connections. First thing I did was write all over the printout of the essay. I mean, all over every page. It’s not that I don’t understand Kligerman as he connects Celan’s work to the voids and halls and lines of the museum. All of it comes together in a clear way for me. A central concept, that of the uncanny, that literary state of being “unhomed,” familiar and foreign and somehow alone, also resonated for me in a way that was, well, comfortable enough. I’ve read the uncanny poetry of Elizabeth Bishop for years. The place that Celan writes from is terrain I recognize. Sometimes I write from there myself.

At any rate, I realized I wasn’t nearly ready to write about the essay. Maybe, I thought to myself, the problem was the German that came from Celan’s speech as he accepted the Georg Büchner Prize in 1960. I don’t have German, right? So to begin to sort out the article, I printed myself a copy of that speech. I read it and marked it up quite a bit, too. The problem was not a lack of understanding. What Celan says about art lines up in important ways with my own work and understanding about the making of art. The problem here is to force this material into some kind of logical mold. That will happen another day. Another day I’ll compress Kligerman’s article into a scholarly shape. Today I prefer to stay in the abyss, the human but uncanny world where Celan wrote and Libeskind designs. In my last semi-scholarly moment, I note that in the following I am not putting quotations into quotation marks.

Okay, so the first thing we need to do is breathe and travel the distance poetry must cover. This will be a search for liberation, for freeing ourselves while encountering the other. The way to do this is by allowing that poet-self to move into free fall, into the terrifying silence. There’s a feeling here that Celan does not quite explain, but has to do with the uncanny, in ways it hangs on the body. For me, it’s as if my human skin is electrical. It has to do with a certain kind of concentration along with a sense of danger. And being brave enough to stay in that state to record that territory, mindful, Celan might say. It has to do with being in the moment, one moment, always one moment, and paying attention. Attention is the natural prayer of the soul (Walter Benjamin, sorry, I slipped on my pledge.) In a while, we’ll do a breathturn. The poem has become a desperate conversation. The encounter, what the poem knows, what the poem needs. There is only one moment and only one place. The poem is still here.

I read to the end of the speech. I found what Celan that day had called “a meridian,” the imaginary line connecting pole to pole around the world. Because he and I had journeyed for a while on that map, in that realm, I came to that word, “meridian” and nearly cried. That’s how it is when the poem is of that world, of the experience itself, not a description. I felt in familiar territory, yet so nearly lost, with only one thin line, the meridian, to guide me. And I knew that would be enough.