“The Dark-houred Clock”: Embodiment and Abstraction in Celan’s Poetry

Dorit Lemberger

Abstract: Celan’s poetry is replete with metaphors that function in various ways. This article looks at two opposed functions of metaphors there: embodiment and abstraction. They rest on the fact that most cognitive processes occur unconsciously, leaving us with only a limited ability to understand their connections to metaphors. This makes it difficult to understand how a metaphor bridges faraway and even opposed semantic fields. The dual metaphorical functions will be studied as used in three themes of Celan’s language: (1) language as expression and as concealment, (2) interaction with the Other as a key to self-constitution, and (3) the drawing of the boundary between life and death. Because these themes make it difficult to understand the function of embodiment in Celan’s poetry, a systematic integration of common ideas in cognitive linguistics with Wittgensteinian concepts will be suggested with the aim of showing how Celan’s poetic language deals with these complexities.

Keywords: Celan; Wittgenstein; embodiment; abstraction

Introduction: The “blind alley” and the “writing-teeth”

Much has been written in an attempt to elucidate the special qualities of Paul Celan’s poetic language. The present article highlights an aspect that has not yet been considered in its own right; namely, the attempt to understand how metaphorical language functions. Because this endeavor is common to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy and Celan’s poetry, I will draw on the ideas of the former, the originator of the linguistic turn, and his followers in order to shed light on this point. Both Celan (1920-1970) and Wittgenstein (1889-1951) wrote in German and were exposed to the trauma of the Second World War, although in different degrees (as Wittgenstein was in Cambridge and did not suffer from the Holocaust directly. Wittgenstein’s traumatic experience in the First World War is not relevant to our current discussion).

Wittgenstein focused on the tension created by the fact that language functions simultaneously on the social plane and the individual level. My use of his concepts and terminology will help show how this tension is shaped in Celan’s poetic language and open a new horizon for the philosophical and linguistic study of his work. Such a study could escape the boundaries of the concrete events Celan experienced to reach more universal questions about the relations between the individual and society, by focusing on the relationship between embodiment and abstraction.

Wittgenstein reconceptualized the role of philosophy as clarifying the misunderstandings and confusions encountered when running into the limits of language, which also establish the limits of our thought (Wittgenstein,

Philosophical

Investigations

119). In Celan’s poetry, the concept of the limit of language and thought plays a role in the three topics to be examined below: the limit of language, the boundary between the first-person narrator and his audience, and the boundary between life and death. In the words of Lakoff and Johnson, one can say that all our concepts, both abstract and concrete, have a foundation in bodily processes.But the fact that “most of our thought is below the level of consciousness” (Lakoff and Johnson,

Philosophy

in

the

Flesh

556) is an obstacle to understanding and effecting conceptual change (ibid.). This article will show how Celan’s poetry creates and expresses conceptual change and allows for the elucidation of several perplexities that our everyday thought must deal with. For example, the title of the article quotes a line from Celan’s last poem, in which the metaphor of the clock (“dunkelstündige”), actually expresses the lack of a sense of time (and also a dark time), because the hours on the clock are dark. The metaphor shows how a concrete everyday detail can function in an abstract manner that contravenes the common conception of time. In the example below, taken from one of Celan’s last poems, “To Speak with the Blind Alleys,” the tension between the internal compulsion to articulate existential meaning in language and the understanding that meaning has been exiled and can no longer be attained, is presented in a condensed form:

TO SPEAK WITH the blind alleys

of the opposite,

of its

expatriated

meaning-:

to chew

this bread with

writing-teeth. (Celan,

Breathturn

342)

The poetic form that expresses this tension is the movement between embodiment and abstraction: The abstraction is represented in the description of the use of language as lacking a defined audience. “to speak with” — it is not clear who are and what is being addressed given that meaning has been expatriated and is beyond the grasp of the speaker and the reader. At the same time, the speaker expounds this abstract process by comparing it to a trivial and common everyday activity: chewing bread. The metaphor that closes the poem unites the two extremes, the most concrete and the most abstract, in a single locution: “writing-teeth.” The movement from concrete to abstract and the link between the two in Celan’s poetry are the focus of this article. My central claim is that a study of this movement in Celan’s poetic language can contribute to an understanding of Celan’s existential position and help clarify the function of metaphors, thus contributing to the debate about embodiment that has continued from the 1980s to the present.

Celan’s poetry contains multiple tensions that are sometimes formulated as explicit paradoxes and sometimes only alluded to. One of the main characteristics of his figurative language is the back-and-forth movement between concretion and abstraction. In general, it can be said that the need to salvage the world that has been destroyed, which includes a renewed encounter with the German language on the one hand, and with Jewish tradition and destiny on the other hand, is a key motivation for this complex language.

This article will focus on three aspects of this complexity in order to describe which meanings Celan fashions in the course of the incessant movement between embodiment and abstraction. The first aspect is the foundation of this interaction, language. Celan’s language reflects a strong awareness of the material qualities of words, and their evasion of concrete meaning. The second aspect is that of intersubjective relations. The paradox is that while Celan presents the addressee as a condition for stating his existence, he is unable to forge a real encounter with her. The third aspect is the movement between the speaker’s life in this world and the expectation of death. This aspect includes the metaphors that anticipate Celan’s suicide.

This article has a twofold aim: to demonstrate the movement between embodiment and abstraction in Celan’s poems and to highlight the points of transition between the two functions, which mark the shift between what can be transcribed and what cannot be transcribed (the sayable and unsayable, or the effable and the ineffable). At these junctures, Celan goes beyond the standard tools of cognitive linguistics: his poetry shows how language, no matter how concrete, can also suggest what transcends it and, accordingly, also what transcends the thought and experience of human beings. The fascinating existentialist discovery lies in the connection that nevertheless exists between the modes of embodiment and going beyond them.

1. The first aspect: Language as a system of expression and as a “ladder”

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) (Wittgenstein,

Tractatus

§6.54)

I find the connective which, like the poem, leads to encounters. I find something as immaterial as language, yet earthly, terrestrial, in the shape of a circle which, via both poles, rejoins itself and on the way serenely crosses even the tropics: I find ... a meridian. (Celan, “The Meridian” 54-55).

For Celan, poetry and language function like Wittgenstein’s ladder: they ostensibly lead in a concrete manner to an encounter, to a movement between two poles, as metaphor allows; but the concreteness is an illusion that soon dissipates. In fact, this is the internal movement that Celan refers to as a meridian. The movement begins in an inner language that is not material but is based on the speaker’s corporeality and his existence in the world. Celan describes this language as simultaneously abstract and rooted in existence; this is the spirit in which he formulates the metaphors in his poetry. In order to understand how this movement is possible, I begin by looking at the standard definition of embodiment and its three main channels:

Embodiment in the field of cognitive science refers to understanding the role of an agent’s own body in its everyday, situated cognition. (Gibbs,

Embodiment

1)

Embodiment means that parts of our conceptual system and therefore some aspects of our language are structured by the features of our bodies and the functioning of our bodies in everyday life. (Ziemke, “What’s That Thing Called Embodiment?”1134)

These two passages summarize the revolution launched by Lakoff and Johnson in their 1980 book,

Metaphors

We

Live

By

, and subsequently in

Philosophy

in

the

Flesh

(1999). Lakoff and Johnson showed the connection between thought, as a physical and neural activity, and language, manifested in the fact that every verbal expression embodies bodily processes. Later on, Lakoff and Johnson coined the term “conceptual metaphor.”This refers to a metaphor that is based on one of the following: the nature of our bodies, our connections with the natural environment, and our bonds with the members of the society in which people live. These experiences produce conceptual metaphors, some of which are conventional and universal, while others are created in a particular cultural context.The second type of conceptual metaphors may enlighten Celan’s metaphorical use.The methodology of the study of embodiment has developed since the start of the twenty-first century. Today there is talk of a “second generation,” whose analysis of embodiment is not limited to the body-mind nexus, as emphasized in an interview with Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer: “Since embodiment entails interaction in levels — bodily, socio-cultural, aesthetic, etc. — it rules out physicalist monism in the traditional sense” (Pires and Bittencourt,

Body

,

Language

and

Mind

21).

The foundation of the analysis of embodiment in a broader context than an individual’s bodily and neural processes has already been posited in the term “conceptual metaphor.” But this does not go far enough, because a reliance on social interactions does not directly explain processes of abstraction. In Celan’s poetry especially, there are so many metaphors that create abstraction that William Franke concluded that it focuses on the Unsayable (as well as some other existential themes).Franke refers to the “ineffability inherent in language itself” that marks Celan’s poetry. I would assert, however, that this ineffability is not the total impossibility of transcription. Instead, it refers to the impossibility of transcribing conscious embodiment. In other words, the content of the poem cannot be explained on the basis of known bodily processes, but only on the basis of unconscious processes, and that is how an abstract metaphor is created.An example of this is found in “Voices”:

No

voice-a

late-noise, alien to hours, a

gift for your thoughts,

here at last

wakened: a

carpel, eyesize, deeply

nicked; it

resins, will not

scar over. (Celan,

Selected

Poems

91,93)

The poem opens with a perceptual contradiction: “No/voice — a/late noise.” Readers do not know whether or not there is a sound, a phenomenon in the category of sense perception. The fact that the absent/present sound is “alien to hours” removes it from time, which is an additional category of perception. The present/absent sound’s evasion of time turns it into a gift for the thoughts of the addressee. The abstraction permits the dedication to thought, it too abstract, thereby creating “a carpel” from it. Despite the abstract mysteriousness, the poem expresses a metaphorical movement of poetic creation: its source is an experience with an inner voice, which cannot be measured using general criteria; it inspires the thought that creates a fragile and sensitive product (like the female reproductive organ in a flower), but one that can drip resin forever. In other words, even if descriptive words cannot be found, the poem demonstrates an internal process that has directionality, development, and purpose.

In

The

Meaning

of

the

Body

, Mark Johnson claims that meaning is indeed embodied, but its integration with an individual’s experiences can also create an expression of a possible future experience and not only a description of the past or the present.

Here one can see how a certain abstraction is produced in an expression of embodiment: when a reflective utterance is given verbal expression, especially with reference to the future, it appears as if our thought is taking place at something of a distance from concrete existence. Johnson stresses, however, that even the most abstract expression is derived from “sensorimotor interactions” and not from a “disembodied ego [or] an eternal soul” (273). Celan’s poetry challenges this explanation, because he sometimes employs an abstraction to describe an experience in the present, whose relation to embodiment is explicit and conscious. At the same time, though, it is difficult to locate the semantic fields of which the metaphors are composed. This is exemplified in the following poem, in which the voice is neither a word nor a thing. The poetic language embodies the speaker himself and is fully identified, with the speaker, with nothing coming between them.

WAN-VOICED,

flayed from the depths:

not a word, not a thing,

and of both the single name,

fall-fit in you,

flight-fit in you,

wound-wondrous gain

of a world. (Celan,

Selected

Poems

319)It is hard to find a semantic field that can explain the negations (“not a word, not a thing”). The common denominator of both negations is a specific name. The emphasis that the name is “the single name” (Einziger Name in the German original) suggests that the reference is to a person’s name. Because a person’s name is not bound by the rules of syntax (and therefore cannot represent syntactical break, here in the first stanza a singularity is formed, one that seems to lie on the boundary of private language. But the second stanza shatters the privacy and inaccessibility when it turns to a second-person addressee. What is more, the speaker “promises” that the poem is “fitting” for the addressee’s experience, whether of falling or of flight. The concrete opposition between falling and flight leads us, in the third stanza, to understand the quality of the language of the poetry as a gain. It rewards both speaker and addressee with and expression of the wound that

he

suffered in the world.The movement between abstract existence and concrete addressee is mediated by metaphorical action-nouns (fall, flight) that represent the possibility of action in imagination, action that is not bound by empirical rules. As Wittgenstein explains, “one can think what is not the case” (

Philosophical

Investigations

§95). The poem reflects the possibility of expressing the wound, evading an expression of meaning in everyday language but giving readers a feeling of concrete distress. Celan does this by creating original concrete expressions like “fall-fit,” “flight-fit,” and “wound-wondrous.” These metaphors exemplify Wittgenstein’s claim that “uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination” (ibid§6).In

The

Meaning

of

Poetic

Metaphor

:

An

Analysis

in

the

Light

of

Wittgenstein

’

s

Claim

That

Meaning

Is

Use

, Marcus Hester examined how a poet’s imagination creates a subjective effect of poetic rhetoric, even though he uses a common language, including the sounds and meanings of words (142). His answer is that a poet can choose elements of language that create individual words as well as unique descriptive structures (Hester 143). The poet’s unique perspective creates a certain aspect to which some people may be blind.It is interesting to note the similarity between Wittgenstein’s concepts and the contemporary cognitive discussion by Don M. Tucker, who described the manner in which abstract concepts are created.

In Tucker’s terminology, the speaker turns to the addressee in an expression of need and of compulsion that creates abstract metaphors “that extend over broad semantic domains” (204). Language, for Celan, is the medium in which he attempts to reestablish his world after it was destroyed.This language does not follow the normal routes, however; instead, it acts through poetry that has an addressee. Poetry’s quest for an addressee dictates a manner of describing and embodying reality that is different from the empirical manner in which phenomena are examined using technical instruments.

The attention which the poem pays to all that it encounters, its more acute sense of detail, outline, structure, color, but also of the “tremors and hints” — all this is not, I think, achieved by an eye competing (...) with ever more precise instruments, but, rather, by a kind of concentration mindful of all our dates. [...] The poem becomes [...] the poem of a person who still perceives, still turns towards phenomena [...] The poem becomes conversation-often desperate conversation. (Celan, “The Meridian”49-50)

The poem examines reality in a different manner than precise instruments do, a manner that creates a conversation based on the memory of dates. The mention of dates that are significant to the speaker and the addressee dictates the description of reality that includes embodiment and abstraction: on the one hand, an “acute sense of detail, outline, structure, color,” and on the other hand, “tremors and hints.” Even tremors and hints derive from sensorimotor processes, but these processes reflect the second type of embodiment that was mentioned above and will be discussed below: embodiment created as a result of intersubjective relations and not only as a result of bodily processes between the speaker and himself. The conversation does not always succeed and sometimes becomes desperate. In the next stage, I will examine how abstraction and embodiment are created in the process of turning towards the addressee and the dialogue with him or her and how they reflect a problematic that leads to that desperation.

2. The second aspect: Embodiment and abstraction between the first-person perspective and knowledge of the other

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. (Celan, “The Meridian”49)

In Celan’s poetry, there is a central tension between the poem’s object of creating an encounter, by focusing on the addressee, and the difficulty in understanding the Other and encountering him or her, in what Buber referred to as a “genuine meeting.”In the passage above, Celan uses the term “the mystery of encounter,” which Esther Cameron noted as unique to Celan, inasmuch as Buber used the words “mystery” and “encounter” separately and not in tandem (202). Cameron points out the description of the poet as carried along with his poem. For our purposes, I will emphasize the act of abstraction that makes the poet embodied in his poetry. The encounter with the poem is therefore also an encounter with the poet, according to Celan.

Nevertheless, the phrase “the mystery of encounter” reflects the experience in which, for Celan, an actual encounter remains in the realm of mystery and has not occurred in reality. The issue of “otherness” is particularly acute for the purpose of the discussion of abstraction and embodiment, because the Other is on the one hand an existing fact, present and concrete; but on the other hand, the possibility of meeting the Other is limited, especially if embodiment is the starting point. “Praise of Distance” is one of the clearest attempts to come close to the Other. It is no coincidence that Emmanuel Levinas chose the line “I am you, when I am I” (99) as the motto for the fourth chapter of his book Otherwise than Being. In this line, there seems to be a full symbiosis of speaker and addressee, but the poem as a whole suggests otherwise:

PRAISE OF DISTANCE

In the springs of your eyes

live the Madsea fishermen’s nets.

In the springs of your eyes

the sea keeps its promise.

Here, as a heart

that abode among humans,

I throw off my clothes and the glare of an oath:

Blacker in black, am I more naked.

Apostate only am I true.

I am you, when I am I.

In the springs of your eyes

I drift on and dream of spoils.

A net snared a net:

embracing we sever.

In the springs of your eyes

a hanged man strangles the rope. (Celan, Selected Poems25)

The poem opens with a genuine meeting. In the addressee’s eyes the speaker sees a reflection of the insanity that threatens him, which at the end of the poem will be reflected by the hanged man’s overcoming the desire to die, symbolized by the rope. The relationship between the speaker and the addressee does not include dialogue; the poem, as indicated in the Meridian address, carries with it the speaker, who meets the addressee in other ways. Each utterance in the poem, from beginning to end, moves between embodiment and abstraction in a manner that creates the same wordless intersubjective reality: in the first stanza, the addressee’s gaze includes, in addition to insanity, the promise of the sea: an abstract human trait (keeping a promise) is attributed to the concrete sea. In the second stanza, the speaker throws off his heart (an abstract metaphor), his clothes (a concrete description that turns into a metaphor because the place where the clothes are removed is the beach in the addressee’s eyes), and the glare of an oath. Not only is it unclear what the oath is and what its glare signifies, it is unclear what exactly the speaker removes, because the content of the oath remains unknown. In the third stanza, the speaker embodies his existence as “blacker in black,” but the color black symbolizes an abstract essence, it too unknown. The reference may be to insanity, to the menace of death by the rope of the last stanza, or to the results of abjuring the oath. The speaker formulates a paradox, a typical element of Celan’s poetry, which acts here on the abstract plane: he maintains his allegiance precisely when he is an apostate. This paradox can be interpreted in a manner that resolves it but also in a manner that preserves it and anticipates the closing line of the third stanza. The paradox can be resolved by interpreting his allegiance as allegiance to his internal truth. If so, his apostasy is the abandonment of faith in order to be loyal to his internal truth. On the other hand, the paradox is sustained if it is connected to the last line of the stanza: “I am you, when I am I.” Just as apostasy expresses continued allegiance, so too the speaker asserts that he becomes the addressee specifically when he realizes his own selfhood. In the last stanza, the addressee’s eyes offer a spark of hope, because in them the hanged man overcomes the rope and continues to live. What is the link between the experience of selfhood that moves between first-person speech and dependence on the addressee in order to realize his own selfhood?

Raymond Gibbs, a noted theorist of metaphor and embodiment, describes the close connection between self-consciousness and the body and emphasizes that an individual’s humanity is expressed by the ability to adopt a “first-person perspective”:

A body is not just something that we own, it is something that we are. ... A human organism is a person by virtue of having a capacity to adopt a “first-person perspective.” A first-person perspective that allows me, for instance, to conceive of my body and mental states as my own, to have various intentional states such as believing, desiring, hoping, fearing, and so on. [...] From a first-person perspective, I can think about myself as myself. (

Embodiment

14)

Building on this, one can say that Celan’s poem enriches the first-person perspective because it is based on the eye of the addressee. The poem’s process focuses on the speaker’s self-constitution; he does not encounter the addressee as a separate subject. The function of the addressee throughout the poem is to allow the speaker to see himself. The addressee’s eye is a vessel, a mirror, and a space for action (thwarting suicide). At the end of the third stanza — the precise center of the poem — the two seem to merge. But this fusion is not a genuine meeting but rather a higher level of the speaker’s self-constitution in the first person. How, then, one can explain the addressee’s role in the poem? Why does the speaker need her so much that he merges with her? I would suggest that Wittgenstein’s concept of embodiment allows for a dynamic between embodiment and abstraction and illuminates the manner in which the speaker relates to the addressee:

The human body is the best picture of the human soul (

Philoso

-

phical

Investigations

, PPF§25).What interests us in the sign is what is embodied in the grammar of the sign (

Philosophical

Grammar

13).

The psychological processes which are found by experience to accompany sentences are of no interest to us. What does interest us is the understanding that is embodied in an explanation of the sense of the sentence (ibid. 45).

Meaning, in our sense, is embodied in the explanation of meaning (ibid. 60).

Wittgenstein pointed out two senses of embodiment: in the first, the body is a picture of the soul and the process of understanding moves from a concrete source field to an abstract target field. Grammar is abstract, so the symbols seem to express meaning or trigger an internal process that constitutes the meaning. In practice, however, the rules of grammar are what allow us to explain the meaning and sense embodied in the explanation. A sentence functions as one move in a more extensive game, and accordingly is a transformation or projection of rules that transcend itself (ibid. 153). These rules allow us to explain the meaning. Thus meaning is embodied in an explanation that reflects a specific understanding and not in a particular psychological process that accompanies the reading of the poem.

I will now return to the “Praise of Distance”; drawing on Wittgenstein, in order to understand the addressee’s role better. The poem’s starting point and repeated motif is that of the addressee’s eyes, into which the narrator gazes and in which meaning is reflected. This clarifies the first sense of embodiment according to Wittgenstein; namely, that the human body is the best picture of the soul, which in this case applies to the soul of the addressee and the speaker as one. The poem reaches its zenith in their fusion, as it were; in practice, however, through the poetic act that creates an addressee, the speaker encounters himself. Celan establishes his own grammar to describe the addressee, through her eyes, so that in practice she enables him to encounter himself. The meaning that is embodied in the explanation is that the speaker cannot directly perceive the man dangling from the rope, but only through the poetic utterance that creates the addressee, whose eyes reflect his own death wish. In the Meridian address, Celan asserted that a poem is designed to seek an addressee; working from this clue, scholars have focused on intersubjectivity in his poetry. In fact, after the Meridian address Celan clarified that the search for an addressee ultimately led him to encounter himself, while the addressee remained unknown or intangible: I had ... encountered myself. Is it on such paths that poems take us when we think of them? And are these paths only detours, detours from you to you? But they are, among how many others, the paths on which language becomes voice. They are encounters, paths from a voice to a listening You, natural paths, outlines for existence perhaps, for projecting ourselves into the search for ourselves ... A kind of homecoming. (Celan, “The Meridian”52-53)

So the encounter with the self passes by way of the addressee, and this passage expresses the broader framework of embodiment in his poetry: because a person sometimes finds it difficult to decipher his own feelings, he embodies them in an intersubjective design, in the form of an addressee. The addressee allows the speaker to understand his feelings and explain them, as seen in Wittgenstein’s remark about the sign and how it embodies meaning. In addition, the other person embodies a complete and broader system, which allows the first-person speaker to articulate his own experience. Wittgenstein describes how, starting in childhood, a child learns how to use language to identify our physical reactions:

A child has hurt himself and he cries; then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour. “So you are saying that the word “pain’ really means crying?” — On the contrary: the verbal expression of pain replaces crying, it does not describe it. (

Philosophical

Investigations

§244)

From a certain stage onwards, it is difficult to determine whether the bodily sensation precedes the verbal expression or formed in the moment the sensation occurs. Moreover, Wittgenstein’s followers disagree as to whether the verbal expression merely replaces the sensation or forms it in the first place. This dispute is especially acute regarding the form taken by Holocaust memory in the various arts, as Henry Pickford astutely showed (Pickford172-176). Drawing on Bernard Williams, Pickford argues that “one can narrate what one imagines while point-by-point removing from one’s consciousness the mental content of one’s visualization” (170). In other words, memory can resemble imagination. Furthermore, a person can activate three types of imagination: objectual imagination, propositional imagination, and participal imagination (Pickford170-171).

This bridging function is accomplished insofar as metaphors are used to connect: 1. Abstract entities [...]; 2. Abstract concepts to sensory-perceptual experiences [...] 3. Perceptual experiences belonging to different sensory modalities. In synaesthetic metaphors, for instance, words that pertain to one sensory modality (e.g., perception are extended to express another sensory modality (e.g., audition). (121) Metaphor’s ability to mediate between abstract entities, between abstract and tangible concepts, or between concepts associated with different forms of perception, illustrates how the gulf between belonging and separateness is embodied in Celan’s poetry. This description contributes to a better understanding of the paradox of intersubjectivity there. It is precisely in the poems where Celan documents conversations with a concrete addressee, which apparently should have come closer to realizing their dialogic vocation, that an unbridgeable divide gapes wide. This divide is itself an abstract entity, just like the idea of dialogicity. The manner in which metaphor mediates between two abstract entities can be seen in the following poem:

Zurich

,

At

The

Stork

(

for

Nelly

Sachs

)

Our talk was of Too Much, of

Too Little. Of Thou

and Yet-Thou, of

clouding through brightness, of [“of how clarity troubles”]

Jewishness, of

your God.

Of

that.

On the day of an ascension, the

Minster stood over there, it came

with some gold across the water.

Our talk was of your God, I spoke

against him, I let the heart

I had

hope:

for

his highest, death-rattled, his

wrangling word—

Your eye looked at me, looked away,

your mouth

spoke toward the eye, I heard:

We

really don’t know, you know,

we

really don’t know

what

counts. (Celan,

Selected

Poems

141)

The title of the poem places readers at an inn, The Stork — a real place where the speaker (Celan himself) and Sachs met on May 25, 1960.

The meeting was a milestone in their many years of correspondence, and embodied both their ongoing dialogue and their disagreements on the possibility of Jewish identity after the Holocaust (Celan could not understand Sachs’s ongoing commitment to the Jewish God and tradition). The speaker refers to three bodily organs that are strongly involved in the dialogue: the heart, the eye, and the mouth. The argument between the speaker and the addressee originates in the heart, which is a metaphor for faith (for the addressee) or for the speaker’s hope for the word of God. The speaking eye is a metaphor that moves from the concrete to the abstract: “Your eye looked at me, looked away.” This is followed by the mouth, in a synaesthetic metaphor. Instead of addressing the heart, as would be natural, the mouth “spoke toward the eye.” The speaker’s reaction returns to the original mode of sensation: “I heard.” Thus the eye functions as a bridge concept, and the gaze does effect a slight change in the speaker’s position. At the start of the poem, the number of words they use reflects the mismatch between the two speakers (“Our talk was of Too Much, of/Too Little”); but it ends with the realization that, for both, “We/really don’t know/what/counts.”

The poem expresses the speaker’s desire to believe, oscillating between assigning God to his female interlocutor and his heart’s hope that the word of God will be revealed to him as well. More importantly, though, the poem presents an uncertainty that is easier to maintain because of the interlocutor. The two quibble in their attempt to find the appropriate words, in terms of quality and quantity, and gaze at each other but also into the distance, in the hope of finding an answer. Thus the eye of the female speaker does not function in a manner that creates an ethical demand, as in Levinas, but rather as a mediating concept between communication on the sensory plane and communication on the abstract plane.

The poem’s language plays the role of an intermediate space only in part: on the one hand, the problematic nature of finding the correct words to express the content is stated explicitly, and the metaphors create an atmosphere but make no existential claims. On the other hand, the language also illustrates the abstract hope for the word of God, which is “his highest, death-rattled,” and “wrangling” word (In the original German: “sein h?chstes, umr?cheltes, sein / haderndes Wort”).

The dialogue makes it possible for the speaker to assign tangible form to the divine word that is concealed from him, by attaching adjectives appropriate to human beings to it and thereby personifying it. However, in order to maintain the distance between God’s word and human speech, Celan inserts his own coinage (umröcheltes) between the other two modifiers. His chosen adjectives create a sense of a conflict between the poet’s language and God’s language, in which there is no winner or loser, because the divine language, too, is dying, just like the speaker who is tormented by God’s “wrangling word.” But alongside the disappointment with that word, the very existence of the dialogue reflects the hope that the speaker allows himself because of his interlocutor’s existence.

This hope arises, not coincidentally, precisely during the dialogue, and generates uncertainty, even if it cannot forge an agreement.

3. The third aspect: Embodiment and abstraction in the dynamic between life and death

The poem “Speak, you too” binds together the three parts of this article. Its point of departure is the language act, which can be paradoxical: “No” is not disconnected from “Yes,” life awakens as a result of death, and the speaker describes the addressee as shriveling up until he turns into a thread upon which the star can descend to Earth. The language sustains paradox, simile, and direct contravention of reality. The poem creates meaning by turning to the addressee, but the meaning it constitutes is the tidings of looming death:

Speak, you too

Speak, you too,

speak as the last,

say out your say.

Speak —

But don’t split off No from Yes.

Give your say this meaning too:

give it the shadow.

Give it shadow enough,

give it as much

as you see spread round you from

midnight to midday and midnight.

Look around:

see how things all come alive —

By death! Alive!

Speaks true, who speaks shadow.

But now the place shrinks, where you stand

Where now, shadow-stripped, where?

Climb. Feel yourself upwards.

Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer!

Finer: a thread

the star wants to descend on:

so as to swim down below, down here

where it sees itself shimmer: in the swell

of wandering words. (ibid. 77)

At the start of the poem, the embodiment is expressed in the imperatives directed to the addressee, who is instructed to be the last to have his say. But instead of giving the addressee the floor, as it were, the speaker continues with additional instructions, which progressively restrict the addressee’s ability to be active: from the command to speak, through the methodical instructions about how to speak and how to allow shadow to accompany speech; after which the speaker modifies the command to require the addressee to look at the broad space in which death and life are intermingled.

The command to look around is the point of transition between activity and passivity: the look around at intermingled life and death increasingly narrows the addressee’s space. The addressee is told to bear witness to this, but not to do anything more. The speaker describes how the addressee becomes smaller and smaller until there is no room left for him on earth and he can move only “upwards” and then connects with the star. The end of the addressee’s life is represented by the star’s replacing him, “wanting” and as “seeing-as”: he “sees itself shimmer”—an activity appropriate both to a star and a human being. The poem’s conclusion also links the human and the star: The “wandering words” allow the star to be embodied on earth (even though its place is in the sky) and these words are, of course, the work of the poet.

“Speak, you too” is a relatively early poem by Celan (published in Von Schwelle zu Schwelle, 1955). This poem, where Celan links death to an addressee who may be his doppelganger and may be someone else, expresses a sort of embodiment that results from his shared experiences with others who were in the death camp. But when Celan refers to his future death, the embodiment changes and turns into an abstraction that gives readers a sense of a private first-person experience that cannot be conveyed to another. One of the poems in the collection Sprachgitter, published several years later (1959), is “Voices” (Stimmen in the original German). The first part of the poem anticipates Celan’s suicide by jumping into the Seine, slightly more than a decade later (in 1970):

1

Voices, nicked into

the smooth water’s green.

When the kingfisher dives,

that instant buzzes:

What stood by you

on each of the banks

steps

mown into another image. (ibid. 89)

This poem illustrates, better than the previous one, how the use of the second person, i.e., direct speech to the addressee, may reflect an internal reflection that the speaker finds to be impossible, for whatever reason, without the use of the vocative. Wittgenstein defined meaning as embodied in grammar. Both of the last two poems, as well as the next one, show clearly how direct speech to the addressee can produce certainty about unconscious cognitive processes. Poem No.1 in “Voices” depicts a scene that takes place in the speaker’s consciousness, a scene that is at once concrete and abstract: the voices (which pertain to hearing) are engraved on the green of the water (which pertains to vision). The synaesthetic metaphor suggests to readers that this is a movement in consciousness that is imaginary rather than the result of sense perception. This movement leads to the ostensibly simpler picture of a diving kingfisher. A bridge is erected from a source domain that is natural to a target domain that is both abstract and concrete: “that instant buzzes.” The embodiment in metaphors creates the underpinning for the moment when the second stanza takes place: a transition between similes. The transition is not smooth and harmonious, however, but sharp and strong: “steps/ mown into another image.” In a low-key and introverted manner, Celan describes the transition between life and death as a transition between images. If one did not know how Celan ended his life, one could interpret this poem in another way, despite the hint about a “violent death.” What is important to stress is how the movement between the concrete and simple (the river, the kingfisher, the water’s green) to the abstract (the mental movement from life towards death) takes place. Water represents life, the two banks of the river represent the speaker’s indecision between life and death, and the poem concludes with a decision to cross from one bank to the other. This is both a realistic expression of crossing a river and a metaphorical expression of the passage between life and death. Hence this poem offers an especially clear example of the movement between the concrete and the abstract as an embodiment of states of consciousness. To this poem, which, as stated, prefigures Celan’s death, I juxtapose Celan’s last poem, written on April 13, 1970, a week before his suicide:

VINEGROWERS dig up

the dark-houred clock,

deep upon deep,

you read,

the Invisible

summons the wind

into bounds,

you read,

the Open ones carry

the stone behind their eye,

it knows you,

come the Sabbath. (ibid. 377)

The most prominent linguistic phenomenon here is the series of words that begin with a capital letter: Invisible, Open, Sabbath. These words direct the reader towards the poem’s secret destination, which cannot be revealed. In an article on this poem, Felstiner (“Translating,” 22) claims it was particularly difficult to translate; at most, he could be only an “ideal reader.” This is because it is impossible to understand the meaning of any stage in the poem: Why do vinegrowers dig up a clock? What is the “Invisible” that “summons the wind into bounds”? Who is the reader, and most importantly, what is the role of the Sabbath in the ineffable context of the poem? The last question is particularly acute as Sabbath is one of the most accessible and understandable ideas of Judaism.

To conclude this article, and in an attempt to answer Felstiner’s questions, I would like to suggest that in this poem Celan brings the encounter between embodiment and abstractness to a climax, inasmuch as the poem expresses the encounter between life and death, or between the vitality embodied in the poetic act and the death wish embodied in the feeling that the wind, which is the speaker’s spirit, is being summon to its bound. The bound, as Wittgenstein claimed, is the subject:

The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world. (

Tractatus

§5.632)

If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts-not what can be expressed by means of language. (ibid. §6.43).

It was, as you see, event, movement, a being underway, it was an attempt to gain direction. And if I inquire into its meaning, I believe I must tell myself that this question also involves the question of the clockhand’s direction. For a poem is not timeless. Certainly it lays claim to infinity, it seeks to reach through time-through it, not above and beyond it. (Celan, “Speech on the Occasion”396)

At the start of this article, in our discussion of language, I stressed its centrality in Celan’s poetry, despite the tension between the sayable and the unsayable. Celan’s last poem demonstrates his ars-poetic claim in the Bremen speech that the language of poetry acts within the framework of time and cannot go beyond it, such that the tension is not only internal to language but also goes beyond its bounds. This transcending is subject to what Wittgenstein refers to as “the facts,” as opposed to “the will.”

On the one hand, Celan’s last poem abstracts his impending death to the point that it completely disappears from the content of the poem. On the other hand, every description in the poem incorporates a concrete element and an abstract element, which prevents readers from compre-hending it fully: the vinegrowers dig—but the clock that measures the time spent digging has no hours; what calls the wind to bounds is unseen; it is unclear who the “Open ones” are and what stone they are carrying. At the end, the stone is personified and “knows you,” the addressee, but it is unclear what it knows, and what the Sabbath is doing here.

Conclusion

In this article, two types of embodiment were examined in order to clarify Celan’s combined use of embodiment and abstraction: the first type has its source in conscious and unconscious sensorimotor processes that occur both in humans individually and as part of their interactions with others. The second type of embodiment, articulated by Wittgenstein, is created through processes of understanding and providing meaning and illuminates the poetic language’s unique ability to create meaning that is sometimes totally absent from everyday uses of language. In Celan’s poetry, with its frequent mixture of everyday language and unique collocations, this form of embodiment is especially acute.

Embodiment was examined in the context of three central aspects of Celan’s work: In the first aspect, I showed how language as a system both creates and reflects experience, so that its use makes it possible to have an experience of an incomprehensible reality. In the second aspect, I showed how Celan constitutes an intersubjectivity that in practice demonstrates the experience of the first-person speaker and thereby acts to remake the self that fell apart in the Holocaust. In the third aspect, I demonstrated how Celan’s poetic language approaches the most abstract experience of all, death. The anticipation of his suicide and the description of crossing the bounds of the wind, from a world of time to the world that has no hours, embody in metaphor that is simultaneously both concrete and abstract: The Sabbath. The untranslatability of this metaphor, as Felstiner has noted, makes concrete for readers—paradoxically, as is Celan’s wont — the abstracted embodiment of his poetry.

Notes

① This assertion underlies their two important books: Lakoff & Johnson’s

Metaphors

We

Live

By

(hereafter

Metaphors

), and Lakoff & Johnson’s

Philosophy

in

the

Flesh

(hereafter

Philosophy

).② “As rich as [...] experiences are, much of the way we conceptualize them, reason about them, and visualize them comes from other domains of experience. These other domains are mostly sensorimotor domains [...] as when we conceptualize understanding an idea (subjective experience) in terms of grasping an object (sensorimotor experience) and failing to understand an idea as having it go right by us or over our heads. The cognitive mechanism for such conceptualizations is conceptual metaphor” (Lakoff and Johnson,

Metaphors

45)③ “Universal early experiences lead to universal conflations, which then develop into universal (or widespread) conventional conceptual metaphors” (Lakoff and Johnson,

Metaphors

46). On metaphor as a cultural product, see in the next section, in the quote from the interview with Mark Johnson.

④ “Celan and Jabès write fundamentally about what cannot be said” (Franke, “The singular”622).

⑤ Lakoff and Johnson noted that most processes of embodiment occur unconsciously; hence what we see as processes that do not directly derive from the sensorimotor system are in fact processes that occur in our brain/body in a manner that is not known to us or, alternatively, to which we have no access (

Philosophy

556).

⑥ “Meaning is embodied. It arises through embodied organism-environment interactions in which significant patterns are marked within the flow of experience. Meaning emerges as we engage the pervasive qualities of situations and note distinctions that make sense of experience and carry it forward. The meaning of something is its connections to past, present and future experiences, actual or possible” (Johnson273).

⑦ “Could there be human beings lacking the ability to see something as something — and what would that be like? What sort of consequences would it have? — Would this defect be comparable to color-blindness, or to not having absolute pitch? — We will call it ‘aspect-blindness’ — and will now consider what might be meant by this. (A conceptual investigation.) The aspect-blind man is supposed not to see the A aspects change” (Wittgenstein,

Philosophical

Investigations

, PPF§257).

⑧ “Even though the mind emerges from its bodily roots, it cannot be reduced to those roots. [...] To understand the more complex products of human intelligence, we must comprehend how abstraction emerges from the concrete boundaries at both the shell and the core. At the shell, it is obvious how the operations are concrete. Perception must interact with specific sensory data. Actions must be effected through the muscles ... At the core, concreteness is similarly enforced by bodily reality. [...] Through the fog of motive blindness, needs and urges achieve their effects on the mind, and in our experience, reality is changed. [...] Abstraction allows concepts that extend over broad semantic domains. An abstract idea stands above any specific fact or event and thereby captures the meaning of many specifics” (Tucker203-04).

⑨ “Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech [...] In this language I have sought, during those years and the years since then, to write poems: so as to speak, to orient myself, to find out where I was and where I was meant to go, to sketch out reality for myself.” (Celan, “Speech on the Occasion” 395-96).

⑩ “The great characteristic of men’s life with one another, speech, is doubly significant as a witness to the principle of human life [...] Genuine conversation, and therefore every actual fulfillment of relation between men, means acceptance of otherness. When two men inform one another of their basically different views about an object [...] everything depends so far as human life is concerned, on whether each thinks of the other as the one he is [...] The strictness and depth of human individuation, the elemental otherness of the other is then not merely noted as the necessary starting point, but is affirmed from the one being to the other [...] Human life and humanity come into being in genuine meeting. There man learns not merely that he is limited by man, cast upon his own finitude, partialness, need of completion, but his own relation to truth is heightened by the other’s different relation to the same truth [...]. Men need [...] to confirm one another in their individual being by means of genuine meeting” (Buber68-69).

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