Honored and dear Paul Celan,

I began writing these notes in the week after a meeting on the evening of the day you would have been sixty years old. There were nine of us in the room; we listened to the record of your voice, and I felt the power of it more strongly than when I had heard it alone. For the first time I felt in full measure the regret at not having heard you read in person. Or did death add authority to your voice that evening? The words of a momentarily thunderstruck reader to whom I had shown oneof your poems, years ago, came back to me: "My God! What does he want us to do?!" And I thought: many questions have been asked of your work; this one, perhaps, has not yet been asked directly and persistently enough, although you were a poet with a distinct predilection for the imperative mood. And so I decided to try to write down what I understood of your will for us, from your words. I wrote it in the second person because I did not want to speak of you as if in your absence – an absence I do not accept.

*

When people speak of ethics, they seem to divide the subject into three parts. First, they inquire after the authority for their principles; second, after the principles and laws themselves; and third, after the promised result of applying the principles. In speaking of poetry this division is somewhat artificial, since in poetry the beginning, middle and end are continually coinciding; I shall use it nevertheless in order to organize the presentation, but will also deviate from it frequently.

*

You made your appearance as a poet shortly after the end of an event for which language, as you said, "gave forth no word." In that time it was not possible to speak of a mighty God who rewards good and punishes evil; the very vocabulary of moral indignation failed, for it is derived, so it seems to me, from the authority of such a God; it represents a threat. But your first mature work, Poppy and Memory, is marked by the experience of helplessness. In the "Death Fugue" the "man who lives in the house" finally appears as Death himself--almost no longer a human being one could condemn, but a part of a ghastly machine. But just as it is scarcely possible to condemn someone who is acting like a part of a machine, it is also impossible to identify with him.. The reader is forced to identify with the victims with their fear and pain, with their sorrow for their own being which is being annihilated ("your ashen hair Shulamith") This identification of the readers with the victims becomes a covenant from which the murderers are excluded. The poet has already given an example of this identification: one does not feel his personal presence, he has vanished into the chorus of the victims.

I believe that in this poem the strategy of your work as a whole was anticipated: you identified with the victims, represented above all by your mother, and tried to get the reader to identify with you and with them. This "you" which seems to mean by turns you yourself, your mother, and the reader, was a magical means to this end. Another was the present tense of the verb which can also be taken as future, and whose function is to present the effect you wanted as if it were already achieved. Still a third was your way of presenting images: they reach the naked eye without any narration of circumstances which would permit the reader to distinguish between his situation and yours.

What, then, are the images?

That which – each time uniquely and only now and only here – was perceived and is to be perceived.

Thus the bond between you and the reader and the dead is formed below the threshold of consciousness; it is prerational, like the bond between mother and child from which it is derived, and it is the source of all the values and commandments.

This bond or covenant seems not to depend on a belief in God; it seems purely human. And yet the first poem in Poppy and Memory ends: "I still pronounce the name and still feel the fire on my cheeks." In Judaism "the name" is a circumlocution for "God." Although the angels are "dead" and the Lord "blind," there is still an undeniable continuity. Your work led me to Hasidism and the Kabbala, as portrayed by Buber and Scholem; it led to new encounters with the patriarchs and prophets, with Job and the Song of Songs and to the "Sayings of the Fathers" – but it did not lead of the Orthodox belief in the Divine authority of the Torah. Rather, all of these sources seemed to relinquish their authority to the "radiant bond" "with the persecuted"– and to receive it back again, with some qualifications. The bond was also with the non-Jewish persecuted, as "To a Brother in Asia" makes explicit.

It is from this point of view that I understand both your inevitable attraction to revolutionary socialism and your equally inevitable distnace from it. Revolutionary socialism also struggles in the name of all the persecuted. But its organization is military, it presupposes external enemies and, the better to struggle against them, suppresses introspection. Your "communism," however, began in the inner world, in the communication with the beloved dead and with those among the living who also seek this communication. In this world the enemy is not an opponent, not even a villain, but a figure of nightmare. Usually he does not even appear; only the pain he has caused is evident. "The moon was hacked to pieces" – by whom, is not stated. In accordance with the ancient Jewish curse, the name of the wicked is blotted out.

The simultaneity of continuity and break with the Jewish tradition, in the sign of the relation to the mother, is explicitly portrayed in From Threshold to Threshold, in "Before a Candle": "Of beaten gold, the way/ you commanded me, Mother, / I formed the candelabrum..." By parodying God's instructions to Moses for the making of the menorah, you set your mother in the place of God and justified yourself in an action – did you know what you were doing? – which was a real and serious transgression of a prohibition of the Torah: the conjuring of the image of a woman and the pronunciation of a "blessing" which could equally well be called a spell.

The blessing is spoken "in the name of the Three." This recalls the Christian baptismal formula, "in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost." With the help of Lessing’s "ring" parable [see note at end], it is possible to show that the "three" are three religions: Judaism, Christianity, and poetry. The interpretations are not mutually exclusive: Judaism could be called the religion of the "father," Christianity the religion of the "son," and poetry the religion of the "Holy Spirit." In any case the Three are subject to the authority of the mother. It is said that they "feud with each other until! Heaven plunges down into the grave of the feelings. The "grave of the feelings" is a symbol of the mother, and also a symbol of human suffering, to which the presumption of the religions must bow down. At the same time, this "plunging down" is also a union; one is reminded of Kabbalisitic ideas about the redemptive union of the masculine and feminine principles in God.

I have a feeling you would have shied away from this interpretation. You were forced to write the poem somehow, the words came through you without telling you what they meant. But one can also be forced to interpret. I wanted to tell you what I understood of the content of your "blessing."

I speak you free [or: absolve you]

of the Amen that drowns out our voices,

of the icy light that edges it,

there, where it steps towering into the sea,

there, where the gray one, the pigeon,

pecks up the names

this side and that side of dying:

You remain, you remain, you remain

a dead woman's child,

consecrated to the No of my longing,

wed to a crevasse in time

before which the mother word led me,

so that once, once only

that hand may tremble

which grasps, again and again, at my heart!

The word "freisprechen" has here not only its usual meaning of "to acquit" but also its literal meaning of "to set free by means of the word"– by means of your word. But from what? "Amen" is the final word of a prayer, but as it "steps towering into the sea" it grows into the nightmare form of the persecutor. It almost seems as if you equated the power of the traditional God with the power of the persecutor. I think of the Gnostics, for whom the God that rules this world is an evil power. You did not give the figure you called up much of a chance against this power; you hoped only that the hand would tremble "once, once only." But for you freedom meant not so much the absence of outward force as the unconditional opposition to force. Later I saw this in your discussion of Lucile. Thus freedom equates with innocence, and the two meanings of "freisprechen" coincide. This refusal of the world of force must also be what is meant by the "No of my longing."

It seems to me that all the negatives which in your work have a certain numinous radiance are related to this "No" which appears several times in your work as a substantive with "positive" meaning. It is not a purely intellectual negation; I hear in it an echo of the cry of the victim. It is the reaction of the soul in the face of a terrible reality--a reaction through which the soul obtains a certain independence, momentary though it may be.

In this poem freedom is also boundenness: "consecrated," "wed." This paradox is not without precedent in Jewish tradition, as I have since learned. The children of Israel were freed from Egypt only in order that they might take the "yoke of the Torah" upon themselves. Later, too, you spoke of the "untameable obedient free troop," you equated "the free" with "the bound." "Servir Dieu est regner..."

The mother as authority figure returns in the form of the "night" in the poem "Argumentum e Silentio" (an article by Elisabeth Petuchowsky drew my attention to this). This time it is not so much the mother as individual, but rather a common background – I am thinking again of the kabbalistic Shekhina to which you were trying to draw the attention of a brother poet. Again the mother's authority is opposed to a world of brute force.

To each his own word.

To each that word which sang to him when the pack attacked from behind:

to each the word that sang to him, sang and congealed.

To her, to the night,

the star crowned, the sea-rushing word,

the word, hauled in by silence,

whose blood did not clot when the poison-fang

bit through the syllables:

To her the world caught by silence.

There seems here to be an opposition destined to be bridged later, in the "Meridian" between the poetic word as utterance of an individual, and the word that speaks for something other: for the night, for the hidden community. Only the latter survives the poison of an evil time. As in "Before a Candle" you seemed not to have much hope for the future of humanity: "at the last, when only chains ring." (I am writing this at the end of 1980, 26 years later, and we are fairly close to that state; your premonitions of evil seem to find more confirmation than your word of the "heart-bright future" that I wanted to believe in nine years ago.) But even in the face of the final defeat of human freedom, the "word hauled in by silence" "bears witness" for the night, for the mother, as source of possible renewal:

who in the river basin of her tears

shows the seed to submerging suns

time, time and again(.)

Since I have started to discuss the question of authority in your works in their chronological order, I now come to Speech-Grille, although in this connection it seems to me the least informative of your books. For its theme appears to me to be: isolation in the present. In Poppy and Memory you spoke as if from a dream, in From Threshold to Threshold visionary encounters were still possible; but here you are surrounded by the things of the external world, on which the past has left only traces; even the "you" has frozen to a motionless eye into which you stare, and encounters do not occur but have to be projected with unspeakable effort. How can one begin to speak of ethics where the feeling of community is absent? First one must find out whether one is actually living in the same world with others! But in the introductory poem, anonymous "voices" demand that the identification with them should still take place. "Voices, from the path of nettles,/ come to us on your hands..." "Voice of Jacob..." "Voices within, in the Ark://Only / the mouths are/hidden. You/ sinking ones, hear/ us too." These are the voices of the Jewish victims. In the last part of the poem they fall silent and are replaced by a visual image: "No/ voice: (...) a/ carpel, eye-size, deeply/ scratched: it/ resinates, will not/ scar over." I see a great deal of your fate in these last lines: cut off from the community, you could represent it only by your sufferings as an isolated self. The final poem of the book moves in the opposite direction: it begins with a visual impression which you translate for yourself into a command: "Grass,/ written apart. The stones, white,/ with the shadows of grassblades:/ Read no more gaze:/ Gaze no more – go!" The way is a long associative journey to the "choruses," which, however, do not become audible but only "visible." And the end of the poem repeats the beginning: the attempt to renew the relation to the past as an individual has turned out to be a labor of Sisyphus. I think I understand now why the short story "Colloquy in the Mountains" was written in the same year. Suddenly you spoke not as a modern poet, but as an Eastern European Jew. You came late to this meeting, you had nothing good to say about God, you spoke of an occasion when the feeling of community had failed you even among Jews, but you came. "I needed to talk," you said. And although there is nothing about a Law in the story, this "Colloquy in the Mountains" has always reminded me of Sinai. But you came much later to Israel--too late.

I should not forget to speak of "Above, soundless," which, as I see, was written about the same time. There you also address yourself to a Jewish society, which is "ten in number." There appears also a "guest" with dripping garment and eye, who announces "insight," and who reminds me – now – of the prophet Elijah, who according to Jewish legend will return to proclaim the final redemption. But before I knew of this legend – I was born a non-Jew – the thing that struck me in this poem was the parenthesis about the "wells," which ends with the astonishing lines: "Water: what/ a word. We understand you, Life." Recently someone told me about the many wells in your homeland; on my first encounter with these lines I thought of the autobiography of the deaf and blind Helen Keller, the story of how her teacher, beside the well, spelled the word "water" into her hand and thereby opened up the world for her. And I find here--in close proximity to wells and water, which are maternal symbols – an unconditional belief in language. ("Only one thing remained attainable, near, and not lost in the midst of all the losses: the language," you said in the same year in your speech in Bremen. – strange to juxtapose that speech with "Colloquy in the Mountains.") And it was in Speech-Grille that you hit upon that play on words to which you owe my presence at this particular missed encounter, as I've already told you.

So I come to the "Meridian." On this rereading it struck me as closer, thematically and atmospherically, to From Threshold to Threshold than to Speech-Grille. It seems as if the encouragement of the prize, the possibility of public dialogue with a kindred author, had once again afforded you a freer access to the inner world. This continuity is especially visible in the figure of Lucile. Concerning Lucile' s suicidal outcry "Long live the King!" you said:

So we meet again the figure that rose from the candle, that was to be "spoken free" as counter- word to the "amen" of history. Here, too, freedom is gained by negation. But something else is gained here: the word "King," which you interpreted as follows:

...here is no tribute paid to any monarchy or any yesterday which might be "conserved."

Thus you came, for the first time as poet, to a word and concept – King – which in Judaism is one of the names of God. (Peter Horst Neumann noticed this.) In The No-One’s-Rose the king returns, with his crown, again and again. You took this word from the mouth of one who was not powerful, who had neither servants nor armies at her disposal: from the mouth of one condemned to death. "Your outlawed word." An awareness of this second origin accompanies the word "King" in its further occurrences.

In the almond--what is standing in the almond?

The Nothing.

...

In the Nothing -who is standing there? The King.

And your eye--where is your eye standing to?

Your eye stands opposite the almond.

Your eye stands opposite the Nothing.

It stands for the King.

To stand for (literally: "to") the King in the Nothing to be loyal to him means, once again, to be consecrated to a No. Kingship is not power, but opposition. (I am oversimplifying. The Nothing here must mean annihilation "Jew-lock, you do not turn gray" and to stand opposite [or: "opposed to"] the Nothing means to say No to annihilation; thus in a later poem which also has connections with "Before a Candle" the word "notnot" appears. In Genesis man is created in the image of God; here something is born from the creature's cry of protest which may someday be called God again.

The thought that Lucile's "step" not only witnesses for the "presence of humanity" but also leads to an encounter with God, is developed in the "Meridian" itself. First you gave other examples: Lenz's wish that he could walk on his head or turn himself into a Gorgon’s head in order to hold the creature fast as a beautiful image, the barker's confrontation with the "apelike form," Valerio's with the "automatons." If I may rephrase this, as a geologist's daughter mindful of the recent discussions of our origin and heredity: You seem to me here to be looking for the point in which human consciousness confronts the determinism of human existence: ineluctably aware that it can be nothing but the consciousness of what has been determined, and yet, by that awareness itself, utterly different from the determined, perhaps even close to the consciousness of the Creator.

Perhaps your way of saying it was simpler after all:

...

Enlarge Art?

The "wholly other," as I have read somewhere, is a theological term for God. And the last sentence quoted reminds me of a psalm: "In dire straits I called on God, He answered me with enlargement." Moreover the "place" which according to your speech the poem is "seeking" is in Hebrew ha-Makom--another term for God. You see, I've found you out: you wanted to bring us back to the point where the prophet, without beating around the bush, could begin his speech: "Thus says God." True, the necessity of remaining "conscious of one's dates" is a caveat. The poet speaks out of his own personal history, his own unique experience. If you had had a different mother and a different father, you would not have been able to speak so. How should we, who have had other mothers and other fathers, believe you?

For this you had two answers, "close together." The "even yet" of the poem – that is, its unchanging essence – was for you

You said, in the first place: Yes, the individuation of the poem, of the poet, of the human being, is "radical." The poet is, as you said in another place, " a unique animate being." No other is like him. But as soon as this unique being begins to speak, language draws borders around this uniqueness and opens possibilities to it. By the very act of speaking one acknowledges a commonality with others. One leaves one's Self – and carries that self along into a space that is not only one's own space. In other words, in the poetic "step" not only the poet, but the language itself finds expression. Language could here almost be equated with the "wholly Other." And again I think of the duality of the poetic word in "Argumentum e Silentio," where the valid word belongs to the "Night," to the mother, to the language as matrix of poetic creation.

Your second answer I find in the words "angle of inclination of his creaturehood." "Angle of inclination" suggests a direction downward, the inevitability of death. This expectation is one thing, besides language, that we have in common. But "Kreatürlichkeit" is more than mortality: it brings to mind a Creator. If I may develop this thought, in a direction shown to me by Martin Buber's Hasidim: God created each person as a unique being and gave him a unique task. When one speaks as this unique being, one is close to recognizing oneself as an expression of God. Thus individuality is not only limited and liberated by language: it is already language.

So there seems to be a vanishing point in which your two answers coincide. But I feel here that I have to be careful not to encourage the acceptance of the world "as it is," of oneself "as one is," that is so popular today. The human being as message from the King becomes visible only in the step of "setting oneself free," in the "no" to the rule of brute force in the world. Without this "no" one remains subject to the "street corner gawkers and parade horses of history," or in daily terms the little intrigues and compromises of "survival." The "majesty of the absurd" is then obscured, language is falsified and emptied of meaning, because the speakers speak without bringing themselves into the space of language.

In your speech you wanted not only to speak against this, but to act against this. I recall having understood this, with some anxiety, upon a first reading which otherwise left me baffled. It was not only a speech, it was a scene, and you were playing in earnest.

The longing for "encounter," the premonitions of being overwhelmed by solitude, of self destruction, were all too plainly expressed. It was meant as a reproach. But it was also, I believe, action according to a principle. To remain "given" to one's poem, even at the price of one's life, means to pledge oneself to the identity of language and creature. You wanted to establish this as the duty of the poet. You wrote in a letter: "Only true hands write true poems."

One more observation on the figure of Lucile, to whom you returned as to the figure who most clearly represented that "something distant, occupiable" toward which you were trying to "steer." You praised her "step" as an "act of freedom," and the concept of freedom was extremely important to you – just how important, I realized only now, in writing down for myself all the passages in which the word "freedom" or "free" occurs in your work. But Lucile is free neither in the political sense of not being oppressed nor in the philosophical sense of being in control of her reactions and acting according to "reason." She is about to be arrested and executed, and she appears mad. She acts out of love. You gave a definition of the love which inspires her:

This is to perceive the other as speaking creature and thereby to approach the perspective of the Creator. Only the one who acts out of this love is free.

Not protest for its own sake, but protest in the name of the true life. To see oneself forced into self-destruction in order to express the value of life: that is a tragic paradox, but not wholly new in Judaism. It used to be called kiddush ha-Shem.

In The No-One’s-Rose, which was finished two or three years later, you drew upon the "Meridian" a great deal. You seemed to feel solid ground under your feet, even if that ground was the "abyss of heaven." After Speech-Grille, The No-One’s-Rose comes as a release and, yes, an enlargement. In many poems one feels the radiant strength of an unheard-of hope which had been muted since "Late and Deep" and "Water and Fire." You even dared, in "Huhediblu," to express your rage directly and to recommend "remorse" to your audience. In short, you spoke as someone who felt the authority of the king behind him.

This is continued in Breath-Turn – the title is taken from "The Meridian" – except that in this volume, which has the dark and cold of outer space, you seemed to understand your "stepping out of the region of the human" as final, and therefore confronted the human much more harshly.

WORD-ERUPTION, volcanic,

sea rush above it.

Overhead

the mob at flood

of anti creatures: it

signalled – semblance and resemblance

cross vainly timeward.

 

Until you hurl forth

the word-moon, whereby

the wonder of ebb-tide is worked,

and the heart-

shaped crater,

 

naked, bears witness for the beginnings,

the royal births.

The human being is supposed to have been made in the image of God, but people today (the word "cross" assigns the blame to Christianity) seem to be only "semblance and resemblance " – pending the "royal births," the recreation of the Divine image by virtue of the "word- moon," the poetic word. There is something terrifying in this poem, as in the following poem which is closely related to it:

"Truth," as Peter Horst Neumann pointed out, is the name which was written on the forehead of the golem, a name which belongs only to God. It is the Divine Image itself, the true human image, in the presence of which human beings pale to "metaphors." "Who shall stand when he appeareth?" It seems to me – although, from conversations that have been reported to me, you may not have wanted to admit it– that you had come through the eye of the wind, had passed through individuation to a vision of Divine unity which demands the reduction of the plurality of human subjects to a single consciousness and fate.

One and Infinite,

dissolved,

selved.

 

Light was. Deliverance.

"Light" and "deliverance": these words, the last words of Breath-Turn, do not lessen the fear. It is the light and deliverance of a messianic world, reaching us through the destruction of this one.

However, I believe that it is possible to interpret this destruction of the world not as physical destruction but as psychic breakthrough to a new life. Otherwise, it would not make sense to speak of your ethic.

One thing which strikes me in your later work is a certain approach to reconciliation with the male God-image of the tradition. As in the poem just quoted, which begins "Once/ I heard him, ~ this tendency seems to me generally related to the widening, soon no-longer-to-be-bridged distance and alienation from the life of this world.

OUT OF ANGEL-MATTER, on the Day

of Soul-giving, phallically

united in the One

– He, the Life giving Righteous One, slept you toward me,

sister –

The poem is very kabbalistic; the union of the lovers stands for the messianic reunion of all souls in God. Even here the "One" does not become a "You." But while in "Before a Candle" the recognition of the Three had the authority of the mother as background, here the encounter with the "sister" is decreed by the One.

Still another step toward the tradition is taken, in Thread-Suns, with the mention of the word Law:

The Law, braced, battling,

at heart-level,

son, prevails.

*

WHITE, white, white

as grille-whitewash,

the laws line up

and march

inward.

I am not entirely sure how you meant this second poem. The laws may be in opposition to freedom here, they may mean the conquest of the human by the alienated world: "The mined out heart,/ where feeling is being installed," as you wrote in another poem in the same volume. On the other had it may mean the growing evidence of the Law in the world, forcing people to recognize it. But the first passage is certainly meant in a positive sense: you prophesied that humanity, out of the insight of the heart, would acknowledge a Torah.

And in the last poem but one in Compulsion of Light – "Be thou as thou" – you joined the long line of prophets who have promised consolation to Jerusalem, the true community. "Even he who cut the tie to you (...) knotted it anew, in remembrance." I am trying to sound the depths of this image, I cannot. The consolation seems directed to the community, for its separation from God; to yourself, for the forcible separation from your mother; to every human, for the fact of having been born and thus separated from the Divine unity; and finally perhaps also to one who might still seek after you. In the interpenetration of these possibilities you are on both sides of the separation, which is thus – on the level of the word – annulled. In this poem there is both a great acceptance of fate, or of Providence, and also a great "presumption"; the first is not conceivable without the second. Thus in the preceding poem, "Barge-time," you wrote:

The De-exalted one, inwarded,

speaks mid the brows on the bank:

quits with

death, quits with

God.

"The De..exalted one, inwarded" a last designation for the "king" who is identifiable with no outward power, yet who is not merely a subjective image, but bound up with a community (the"brows on the bank"). At the same time I hear in this poem the tone of your own farewell. The farewell is still more clearly expressed in the last poem of this volume, which was to reach us only after your death:

WORK NOT AHEAD,

send not out,

stand

inward:

 

grounded through with nothingness,

stripped of all

prayer,

intricate, as

fore-written,

not to be overtaken,

 

I take you up

in place of all

rest.

"Inward": into that dimension of the world which was opened up by you poetry, to the "Inwarded," the "De-exalted." I cannot determine – I think you meant it to be undetermined – whether the adjectives in the second stanza apply to you or to us. "Stripped of all/ prayer" seems directed, like "quits with/ God," against a religious way of thinking that places God outside humanity in order to "turn to" him and thus evade the final reponsibility. The rest of the lines in this stanza seem to be concerned with the concepts of the Torah and of the human being, which, as in the Jewish tradition, are closely linked. It is said that the number of the commandments in the Torah corresponds to the number of parts of the human body, so that the Jew who observes all of them is indeed "intricately" "grounded through" with them. Here, what takes the place of the commandments is "nothingness," which means, assuming a continuity with the rest of your work, the experience of annihilation and the act of negation, which must transform life from its very foundations. Similarly the word Vor-Schrift (as/ fore-written) means literally orders, or commandments. It is not ordinarily written with the hyphen; the hyphen, without destroying the usual meaning, places the emphasis on the "Vor." In another poem you spoke of "Pneuma" that came to you "from the fathers" and "from beyond the fathers." This "Fore-Writ" would then be a Torah – a moral law and a truth, that would come from "beyond" the Torah given on Sinai. "Not to be overtaken": finally beyond the reach of time, of the tomorrow which refutes the yesterday. You knew that certain Kabbalistic thinkers had ventured to suggest that the Torah given on Sinai was after all not the original and final Torah, which would revealed only in Messianic times. The sentence in your handwriting in L’Éphémère, in the summer of 1970: "La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose": I read the word "poésie" also as "law." There is no one there who could force us to keep the Law, it can only be seen and accepted from the heart. And this acceptance is inseparably bound up with the act of poetry, as you described it to us.

Your "commandment," in this valediction, was accompanied by what sounded like a promise – "In place of all rest" – that you were not only "leaving" us your poem, but that you remain "given" to it, even now.

Yes, in the end you believed in such things, I think. "To be allowed to come and go among you" so you wrote in Croft of Time, that volume which, after Compulsion of Light can be read only as an epilogue. "The suspect,/ lost and found soul." I believe you are still here. Not only in my thoughts, as I write this, but you are really hearing me. You did not believe in a transcendental power that could not cope with reality, but – you believed.

Let me sum up briefly what I have understood of your concept of authority and the path of its development. You began from the feeling of a community defined by identification with the victims of force, a community beyond all hope of ever exercising force itself, and thus in a sense without an "outside," bound together through the inner life of the individuals. This community was represented by your mother. You tried to represent it and her through years of exile and solitude, of growing distance in time from your mother and from the community of your youth. In the course of these years you began once again to form a concept of God, a king who exercises no force, whose only function is to stand for the decision to represent the true life. At the last you were speaking entirely in the name of this king, and your step into nothingness ... "Only there did you wholly enter the name which is yours..." You wanted to not be, so that He, the Unimaginable, might once again acquire a form for us. "It takes away our breath and our word..."

It was not an entirely new decision for you. Even an early poem, which does not appear in Poppy and Memory, begins with the lines: "I have spun autumn in God's heart, Wept a tear beside his eye." And I am not the only one who has seen in you the form you were seeking. One who saw you read called you, though with the obligatory unseriousness, "the king of poetry."

Now that we have a king, we can ask about his laws.

Of course, a large part of your ethic was already contained in the foregoing section. Authority and commandment cannot be separated, the "king" can be imagined only through his command. But I shall now simply look at what was discussed above from another standpoint, starting from the idea of ethical values or commandments. Since for you the poem was "dialogic," there is no

poem in which you were not trying to influence the reader in one way or other. But I shall concentrate here on passages where the imperative form has an especially authoritative ring, or where ethically laden words occur, or where you otherwise seen to be urgently recommending a certain kind of behavior.

I think no one will deny that the central ethical concept of your poetry is truth. You said it in letters: "I am not concerned with euphony, I am concerned with truth." "Only true hands write true poems." It is also clear that the concept of truth for you was a thoroughly Jewish concept: truth not as abstraction, as an external goal, but rather the closest thing, which one is constantly tempted to flee from, a thoroughly human and perhaps for that very reason finally a divine presence. To stand in this presence, not to flee from it and not to repress it – this was for you the task of poetry and of humanity.

"Out of fists, white/ from the truth hammered out of the word wall/ a new brain blooms for you."

The task of truth was not always easy for you either. Nevertheless, in your poetry truth, like freedom, is bound up with love. "The mouth speaks true"– this line occurs in "Corona." ~ "Husk, true and open" – this too in a poem which is a meditation on love. "All is true and a waiting/ for truth" these words too were spoken to a beloved. "You my soft voiced one, you my true one," "But you, Attained through sleep, always/ speech true in each of the pauses": thus you spoke to whoever could hear you. In your last volume the word again occurs in quite physical contexts, in the poem that begins "We, the ones true as the sea-oats" and in the lines "in the hollow of your neck! my star is learning/ how to bail out/and become true." And when in your next-to-last poem you speak of the "little sign sensitive exile/of a common truth", you surely also meant a love which, although not acknowledged by humans, nevertheless binds them together.

What does it mean to see love and truth "in one," – to use a favorite expression of yours? I think it must mean to acknowledge it openly, even publicly. In "Corona" you wrote: "We stand in the window embracing, they look at us from the street." In "Shibboleth": "Heart,/ make yourself known even here, / here, in the middle of the market." At the end time, as you imagined it in Thread Suns – but that end is present, in poetry, at every step of the way – "everything/ went around/ un-sealed, like us."

It was your most radical demand. You said once in conversation that you did not understand how there could be lovers in this time. This must mean that the spheres are no longer to be separated. One can no longer live for love in one's "private" life, without wanting to be reminded of the world's pain and demands, and then in society, in politics, in one's profession, refuse to be reminded that love exists. This demand surely contains an entire Shulchan Aruch!

The gap between the public and private spheres must be first bridged by communication. Therefore the poem itself is already an action, often one that costs pain. "Whosoever tears his heart out of his breast in the night, reaches toward the rose." To tear one's heart out of one's breast means, among other things, to drag to light and expose what one would gladly keep to oneself for the sake of self protection. But only such self exposure makes it possible to hope for the true human community which – as becomes clear in "Psalm," as the Jewish tradition has long understood – is symbolized by the rose. In this sense, too, I understand your repeated demands that the reader speak also. One must speak until one is stripped of one's shadows and becomes a fine thread on which the star can climb down into the world; even the terrible intimacy of the encounter with you in poetry is not to be kept a secret: "Tell your fingers, that accompany you! even into the defiles,/ how/ I knew you..."

If language is raised to an absolute principle in your work, this is because it is the bearer of communication, because it fixes this act and "witnesses" for it. This word "zeugen" (to beget/ to bear witness) – I believe you used it for the first time in "Argumentum e Silentio," where the word witnesses for the night, for the mother. Then, with Lucile's outcry, the "majesty of the word" "bears witness for the presence of humanity." The word comes back again and again in Breath-Turn: you sought for the "heart-shaped crater" that "bears witness for the beginnings," for a "word that would bear witness for us both," for the "breath crystal" that would be an "incontrovertible testimony." You despaired: "No one/ bears witness/ for/ the witness." In all this the physical meaning of the word "zeugen" is also present, as if you believed that the word could give life, could become flesh. The word was also a coin for you, a coin with the stamp of the king, that you could "break out of the air around you" and give to another: "Take this word..." The word was as solid for you as a sharpened stone, a pebble or shell you could pick up and hold in your hand. You felt it within you, as substance of your substance, "in the imagestream, bloodstream/ swum through by words." And in that line where the "stone" speaks, where being and language become one – "Spoke, spoke. Was, was." (Sprach, sprach. War, war.) – I hear in this line the word "wahr" (true), I hear the adjective sprachwahr (speech-true) which you formed for someone who lived for you in poetry.

Thus language, being and truth – these three are not to be separated. And when the stone speaks, one must also think of the tablets of stone which contain God's commandments to men. But in order to experience this, one must be prepared to speak "to the stone" – you recurred to this in The No-One's-Rose; one must be prepared to deliver oneself up, by means of the word, to one' s fellow-humans in all their hardness. And one must "remain given" to one's word – you also occasionally used the word "Treue," (loyalty) and its antonym "Verrat" (betrayal). "Half- and quarter/ allies on/ the losing side. Wealths of/ lost-embittered/ speech." Words that summarize the tragedy of your work. Without the possibility of a firm alliance with other humans, the poetic word is nothing, however splendidly it may flower in that nothingness.

Two years after your death I read in a poem by Jean Garrigue a German proverb: "Money is the devil's word." We had a saying in America, too: "Money talks." With just such force, you seemed to say, one should let language speak to and through one." "You shall breathe, / breathe and be thou." Really to be that to which language appeals, to be what the language which speaks from me needs you to be. I speculate: if one were really prepared to go that far, perhaps it would be possible to dream of an actual transformation of our substance, of a real, final liberation from the world of "betrayal and decay." To project the world, from within God, anew...

But I am not keeping to the thematic division, I am already talking about Utopia! So I return to the commandment of communication and to the difficulties one encounters when one tries to observe it, the pain one must be prepared to incur: to the resistance, to the stone. To everything which does not allow word and truth, being and language to come together in this world: to the silent, terrible force to which sometimes a language yields itself, "whored round by the flayers' ears"; which sometimes expresses itself in outbreaks of atrocities, but which is also present, like death itself, in the midst of ordinary, "peaceful" life. In our conversation you told me that you did not like this popularity of the "Death Fugue"; it had become for many an "alibi poem." In The No-One's-Rose you said: "I see the poison flowering./ In every word, every form." There is in every human being both a fear of other humans and the ability to take pleasure in suppressing others, as well as the wish – which expresses itself in infinitely ramified and camouflaged forms, according to the social situation and the degree of development of the individual conscience – to be on the winning side, to identify with the oppressor and not with the oppressed. These tendencies produce the anti-community and the anti-language which "croaks" at us from the "vocal sacs of the Klan poets" and is written with "mimetic bazooka claws" as "..lies blaze seven fold, daggers flatter, crutches swear false witness..."

You felt so isolated amid this social landscape that in spite of prizes and literary recognition you considered your word an "outlawed" word. You said once Dietlind Meinecke recorded it – that you had been "repressed" in Germany. But then she claimed not to know what you meant by that. Whatever they may tell about your "insanity" and the personal reasons therefor, I shall always believe that the main reason was this repression which was our doing. It simply is very difficult to know something when others will not help you know. The problem of repression is not quite the same in your work as in Freud's, from whom you learned so much; in your view the "repressed"was not so much aggression, sexuality and egoism– today these are more and more frankly expressed – but love, the longing for the true community, the identification with the victims. To "run up against" against this repression means: to look the growing brutalization of humankind in the face, but not to be part of this "wave of the future"; not to avoid feeling grief, not to turn away the beautiful and painful memory of what was lost; to condemn oneself to a futureless insight – and to take the first step which will lead to delivering oneself up to the stone hearts of humans. "Count the almonds/ count what was bitter and kept you awake,/ count me among them." "You, too, speak,/ speak as the last to speak,/ say your saying" – these two commandments are one. "There I saw one, he did not lie,/ standing home into his despair." "Come with the reading shimmer, / it is/ the barricade." The poet' s struggle for the poem, the reader's struggle to interpret it and to become a poet in turn, is the struggle for the true life.

I know you did not always feel hopeful about the outcome, in the dimension of time. And so you provided for a final determination:

TO STAND, in the shadow

of the wound mark in the air.

 

To stand for no one and nothing.

Unrecognized, for you

alone.

 

With everything that has room in there,

even without

language.

That is a silence which is no betrayal, because it does not pretend to itself to be a victory; it is the silence of those who are silent because the language of loyalty, and therefore the possibility of identification through languages, have been eradicated from the world. One isn't"with it." I think that in this poem you were drawing on the tradition of the "unknown just," the "thirty-six," by whose merit the world continues to exist. Because truth has been silenced in the world, they too are silent, they do not fabricate a non language to flatter the anti-community. They suffer; their silence is not an acceptance but a kind of prayer. Sometimes it is answered: the poem – "the word hauled in by silence" – born from it, and through it a connection with other humans perhaps sometimes occurs: you spoke to "one fetched by silence."

A few years ago I found a poster: a green sheltered glen with a waterfall. The caption: "If you do not understand my silence you will not understand my words." How not be reminded of you. But with you one could also say it the other way: your silence is also to be understood from your words.

It hardly needs emphasizing that for you it was as much of a commandment to listen as to speak; "open"– receptive – was one of your terms of praise. For you the willingness to listen was inseparably one with the willingness to speak. Only those who are prepared to transmit the true word, clothed in the substance of their own life, can hear it. This, I think, is the meaning of your lines: "Listen in/ with your mouth." Hence, too, your countless imperatives.

I think it was those imperatives that convinced me that you were, after all, a poet of hope. Even with all the grief, all the fear of what was to come, all the frustration and anger which your poems had to express. For without a belief in the ability of others to hear and to react, one does not give commands. I know, sometimes you were talking to yourself. But even to talk to oneself in the presence of others is to give the others the chance to identify with the "you" that is addressed.

Only in a very few cases, it seems to me, was the "you" addressed only to yourself, as in the poem "In Egypt." But this poem is in its own way instructive for us. It consists of a long series of sentences, all beginning with "You shall" (or: thou shalt), like the Decalogue. The content is, by ordinary standards, something extremely private: the decision to live with a "stranger," a non-Jewish woman. Against the commandment of the tradition, in the face of the suffering of your people. Your uneasiness over this was to be redeemed by the attempt at communication. One is conscious of all the meanings which the word "fremd" (strange, alien) has in your poetry, from "Ray of Night" on. It pertains to the situation of speaking in a community which is not yet secured by any covenant, in the hope that through such speaking the "strange land" might become a "homeland." One may surmise that this "Thou shalt" was not only spoken from you to you; something had spoken to you, as once to Hosea and Isaiah and Jeremiah: "You shall make your personal life a symbol of your message." For that is the highest level of belief in language.

Thus by allowing us to hear a command which was intended only for you, you did after all give us an example of a general principle. You showed us how we should listen. The command is a different one each time, one must remain attentive in order to hear it. Like the saying you quoted: "Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul."

There is something here, I must tell you, that bothers me a little. I have a predilection for systematic order, fixed expectations. Works like the "Mishneh Torah" of Maimonides, in which so and so many positive and so and so many negative commandments are enumerated at the beginning of each chapter, or Luzzato's "Path of the Just," which describes the way to God step by step, have a certain attraction for me, whereas I have always been repelled by Augustine's dictum, "Love and do as you please." I once even wrote a chapter of "halacha" for poets and readers, imitating the form of Maimonides. For it seemed to me that today’s literary institutions do not sufficiently respect the sacredness of the word and the I-Thou relationship between poet and reader. Was it not sometimes bitter for you too to "make yourself known" "in the middle of the marketplace"? Where the sacredness of the word is violated, the trust of the human community in itself is also endangered. It seemed to me that to remedy this poets and readers must take a stand: set ourselves tasks that must be worked on continually, draw lines that must not be crossed even for the sake of the survival of one's own work. Just as the Jewish people managed to endure by setting itself tasks and limits, forbidding certain things even at the price of one's own life.

On the other hand: Luzzato, who was also a poet, sensed that no preordained system of commandments can ever exhaust the possibilities of life. In the end many things, perhaps the most important, remain masur la-lev, entrusted to the heart. If one does not hear the word at the right time, if one refuses to answer a call, one is not doing one's part. A year after your death, I happened to read a collection of Celtic legends, in which the term "geasa" occurred several times. It meant a kind of command which people gave each other, not as representatives of social authority, but as individuals. There was no "enforcement," only a general feeling that one could not ignore them without being untrue to oneself. The thought pleased me very much and helped me to hear you in this way. "If you were my pain once more, true to yourself" – I accepted that equation. I thought I knew what you wanted of me – of every "you," of a dream or

fantasy-image with which I identified, of the individual whom you once, at a cafe table in Paris, actually called by name. And I was willing to do it, I did not consider whether it was in my power, I promised on behalf of others too. And I still think that if it could be admitted in principle that there is such a thing as "geasa" – commands that are given by one person to another, and accepted, out of poetic insight – we would be considerably further along.

Further along in the direction of Utopia.

*

I think now that I have gotten through the chapter on the commandments, and can go on to the third part of my not- very-strict thematic division: the question of the promised result of ethical action. But I must begin this part by discussing one further commandment:

This was certainly intended as a hint to the "Celan scholars" who had already begun their work in your lifetime, not to treat you only as a poet of death and despair, although the confrontation with death and despair was a necessary precondition of your work, and perhaps of its interpretation. We have seen Hell; it is time inquire after the way to Paradise. Right? I can hear you say:

But I think – and this thought will not scarcely surprise you – I think that it was always part of the hope of the poem to speak, precisely in this wise, on behalf of something alien – no, I cannot use this word any more – on behalf of something other who knows, perhaps on behalf of something wholly other.

This "who knows" at which I now see myself arriving is the only thing of my own that I can add, here and today, to the ancient hopes.

I still don't fully understand why they didn't jump to their feet: "Man! You have something of your own to add to the ancient hopes? Say that again!" But you were careful. You knew that you were speaking to a time that was not very receptive to good news, and hadn't deserved it either; so you said. it in a negative form. You wanted to let us search for the hope a little, so that we could feel it was ours.

You continued:

Perhaps, I must now tell myself – perhaps even a coming together of this "wholly other" I call a familiar phrase to aid me – with a not too very distant, a quite near "other," is now conceivable, conceivable always and again.

In still more familiar terms, you wanted your poem to arrange a meeting between God (the "wholly other") and the reader ("the quite near ‘other’"). My remarks on the subject of "geasa" were based on such an occurrence, and from the thought of a new encounter between the human being and God – a God of love, but also a God who gives commands – stems the thought of a new religion of humanity. You said it at the end of your speech, under cover of irony, labyrinthine syntax, and an allusion, which the reader can easily overlook, to Valerio's (in the original certainly sarcastic) curtain line: "...and then we'll lie down in the shade and ask God for classical bodies, musical throats, macaroni, melons and figs, and an comfortable religion!" You commented:

And here, with the last two words of this work, I must restrain myself.

I must refrain from following the example of Karl Emil Franzos, the editor of that "First Critical Edition of Georg Büchner's Complete Works and Posthumous Papers," which was published by Sauerländer eighty-one years ago in Frankfurt am Main – I must refrain from following the example my here rediscovered countryman Karl. Emil Franzos and reading that word "commode" (comfortable) as "kommende" (coming)

And yet can one not find precisely in Leonce und Lena these invisible half smiling quotation marks around the words, which are perhaps to be understood not as "goose feet" but rather as "rabbit ears," as something not quite fearlessly listening for something beyond itself and. the words?

So that was your announcement of a new religion.

"These invisible half-smiling quotation marks around the words": I always think of a smile which I saw the day of our conversation, and which, to my sorrow, I can no longer remember visually; it seems to have slipped back into the invisible brightening of the air around those words. It was when we were walking over the bridge, and you pointed to a statue in the distance and said, "That's Ste. Genevieve. She saved the city from the Huns." "When was that?" I said, in order to say something. "In those days," you said, with that smile. I understood immediately that you meant "utopian" time, It was not important whether that had occurred, only that the legend – that is, the ever recurring possibility – existed.

And the "meridian" you found at the end of your speech was something similar. The place of your and Karl Emil Franzos' origin was not to be found; you could not return to your native country. But this "Franzos" ("French") was a countryman, by name, in a new homeland, and he had brought you a word you needed for the occasion. Once again language had borne witness to the interconnection of humans, had proved itself to be the first and final homeland of us all, circling the earth, making it comprehensible, graspable. Whenever I read this conclusion I see the earth standing beside you.

"In the air, that's where your root remains, there,/ in the air,/ Where the Earthly conglomerates,/ breath and clay." So it returns at the end of your next book of poems. It was sorrow for your lost

homeland, a place which we, too, must now seek for; but it was also something like acceptance of that fate – is it permissible to say this aloud? – if it was necessary for the"return home" – a word which occurs both in the speech and in the poem – of humanity.

They just haven't believed you yet. They still keep saying your word was too dark, too incomprehensible, capable of too many interpretations, to mean something to a people. But in "The Bright Stones" you protested against this. You believed that at least one person would be able to understand you, and this person could then make it clear to others:

I see you, you are picking them with my

new, my

everyman's-hands, you set them

in the renewed brightness no-one

need weep or name.

"That, ladies and gentlemen, does not have any name that is fixed for all time, but I believe it

is...poetry." Poetry as human consciousness, as a renewal of human hope, as a "coming religion" that would also be a "comfortable religion,"in the sense that it would really be suited to humanness and would not give occasion for more human tears. It would have no "name" in the sense that the names which people give to their religions separate them from each other and drive them against each other. In the face of "the majesty of the absurd, that bears witness to the presence of humanity," this would no longer be possible.

I believe it was your hope that, through your understanding of the world, people would gradually find the way to one another. It takes time, but one need only know that nothing else is necessary.

And there will climb upward an earth, our earth,

this one.

And we’ll send

none of our own down

to you,

Babel.

"We": the speakers and hearers, whose mutual understanding consitutes reality. "Babel" – society in which no one understands anyone else's language – will not be able to destroy this true community. It is not necessary to overthrow anything, only to hold on, not to leave the center of truth.

The One Mystery

mixes itself, forever, into the word.

(Whoever falls away from it, rolls

under the tree without a leaf.)

Again and again you described the process of formation of the true community, whose central symbol is the rose.

Whosoever tears his heart out of his breast in the night,

reaches for the rose.

...

Hush! the thorn pierces deeper into your heart:

it is in league with the rose.

...

Growth.

Heartwall on heartwall/

adds its petal.

...

A nothingness

we were, we are, we will remain, flowering:

the nothing, the

No-One' s-Rose.

 

With

the pistil soul-bright,

the stamen heaven-desolate,

the crown red

with the crimson word which we sang

over, 0 over

the thorn.

"Hush" is perhaps a love-poem in the narrower sense of the word, while "Psalm" is apparently in memory of the victims. But in the symbol of the rose this distinction is annulled. More convincingly than the rabbis with their interpretations of the Song of Songs, you succeeded in portraying love between individuals as the symbolic fulfillment of the community. You succeeded, I believe, thanks to the openness and truthfulness which you demanded from love, thanks to the identification of humans with each other through the word which you wanted to see in the surrounding society. You seemed to have in mind something like an "Earth household":

dwell, we shall dwell

...

...in

you,

Beth: that is

the house where the table stands with

the light and the light.

Behind the table with the Sabbath candles I can see the form of your mother. You thought of an ordering of the world in her spirit, an order in which people's feeling of belonging together would find expression in care and attention to the needs of each individual.

SOUND-PROOF SISTER HOUSING,

let in the dwarf-sounds,

the ones exhausted by questioning:

they mumble the Bigheart together

and carry it pickaback to every

need, every need.

Did you have a mental picture of the institutions in this new world? For when people talk about Utopia, they generally mean a projection and depiction of other social forms. I could not find many such images – only this one:

They are all coming, not a one is missing.

(Siphets and probyls are among them.)

A human being comes.

Why was that an insane idea, why did the poem in which these lines occur have to begin with a quotation from Lear's mad scene? It is the simplest thing in the world!  I am sure these lines were in my mind when I wrote a poem which is an invitation to such a gathering – a gathering in which people could speak the truth to each other and contemplate together the task of tikkun ha- olam, repair of the world. The gathering would take place regularly on the Sabbath...But you only lead up to the threhold of such thoughts, you stopped short of developing them. Perhaps such a development would have been too close to Mercier's "Elargissez1'Art," which in the end you could not agree to. You were perhaps afraid of an egoistic expansion, a superficial mode of action, the betrayal of the ideal in the execution, which you had already observed in the socialistic movements. You preferred to remain with your thoughts in the realm of the invisible, in a "back room' where you felt something was being prepared:

...

...

Detour-

tickets, phosphorous,

tapped, far behind here,

by many ring-fingers.

 

...

...

beside us, beneath

white

Perhaps somewhere, perhaps even beyond language, the connections among us are being made. "Metastases": an involuntary growth in many places that are somehow in communication with each other.

And yet – again and again – the demand for a conscious, practical application of your insights:

take me down,

get serious

with us.

In the end you must have placed your hopes in us – us, your readers: that with the help of your words, spurred on also by our grief for you, we should now go together into the "narrows" in order to be set free and "enlarged"; that just as you, "clamped into your deepest," projected a fate for yourself in poetry, so we should now project the forms in which we could live in fidelity to your insights. "Swarms of eyes pass the narrows..."

The "single flood tide": it would have to be a flood of tears at first. But it is also light, insight, common vision. The rock on which people have placed their bets ("gesetzt") against themselves: I have always understood this as a materialist world view which denies human dignity and freedom. I see now that "gesetzt" suggests "Gesetz," law the law of nature perhaps. But "the rock," as I have since gathered, can also be a name for God, in which case "gesetzt" might well suggest the traditional view of Torah. We have seen this ambiguity before, and it is not accidental: you could not get along either with materialism or with a God on whom one could "rely" and thus shuffle of the final responsibility. The rediscovery of the "suspect, lost and found soul" was to make possible a free, responsible way of acting in concert.

There will be a striding, a wide striding,

far over the boundaries

they draw for us.

The boundaries: these are also the boundaries of individualism. It should now be possible for a human individual to act on behalf of something Other.

*

I wanted, as the last thing, to discuss with you the question of your relationship to the land of Israel. For this is where I am, after all. I am here because you said to someone I would have liked to be: "Say that Jerusalem is." Thus you called the capital city of Utopia – that city which had been Petropolis, Paris, perhaps also ("toskanisch") Florence, which was perhaps for you always a memory of Czernowitz – by its most ancient and rightful name. And in the meantime I had learned from other sources that your dream was at home here.

...

sown from the east, to be gathered in the west, co-eternal

This tremendous gesture of gathering which your poems carry out again and again: it originated with the prophets of Jerusalem, that last line is almost a quotation from Isaiah. And the dream of a "pure language" by which humans will serve God "with one shoulder": that was the prophet Zephaniah.

And yet the one time you came here, in the last year of your life, you could not stay.

All sorts of things may have contributed to it. But I think the main reason can be seen in your Tel Aviv speech, in that remark about the "calm and confident resolution to hold one's own in the region of the human" with which you tried to connect with the reality here. A brief speech, which to my ear has a strangely embarrassed ring.

I came to you, to Israel, because I needed to. As seldom before I have the feeling, after all I have seen and heard, of having done the right thing – not only, I hope, for myself. I think I have some idea of what Jewish solitude can be, and I also understand, among so many, the thankful pride in every bit of green one has planted oneself, to the refreshment of all who pass by: as I understand the joy in each newly acquired, self-filled and fulfilled word, that comes to strengthen the one who turns toward it – I understand this in these times when the alienation from self and obliteration in the mass is growing everywhere. And I find here, in this outer and inner landscape, much of the compulsion to truth, the self-evidence and the onceonliness-open-to-the world of great poetry. And I think I have conversed with the calmly confident resolution to hold out in the human.

I thank all this, I thank you.

But a few days later you said to a friend: "’The Meridian is my confession of faith.’" And in "The Meridian" you had said:. "That is to step out of the human..."

Perhaps one could put it this way: The state of Israel was founded in the hope of continuing to live here – in this world, not in Utopia – as human beings – even as all-too-human beings. Without going too deeply into the terrible questions about human nature, about the relation between God and the human, which the Holocaust raises. Today no one looks with great conüdence into the future of that hope; it is too clearly bound up with the future of this world.

The logic of this world, the logic of betray-al and entropy, force and destruction, will take its course here too, unless a stand is made against it. If we cannot say a resolute, final "No" to these tendencies – but that means to step out of the human – then there is probably no future for

what we would like to call the human – "the presence of the human." I didn't believe it from your words. Your death told me.

But – in the end I must admit it and say it to you – I now hear in your Tel-Aviv speech another note: "Among so many..." Would you have been willing to give up your solitude? I see you, coming back from the alien land where you word, the word of one cut off from Israel, had not succeeded in establishing a common ground. You came back and – the community was already there, it had not waited for you. You do not want to acknowledge it, you pay our homeland the compliment that it has "must of the compulsion to truth, the onceonliness-open-to the-world, of great poetry" – that is, you want to retain poetry as the absolute standard, even here. And when you went away, when you went to your death instead of coming here – could it have been in order to evade an encounter that called your lifelong enterprise into question?

Forgive me. I should not say it, perhaps, since you can no longer defend yourself. But I have to say it, if I did right in coming to Israel, to some extent on your behalf. For the tradition teaches that the student can make up for the omissions of his teacher. Here, in this country, I stand before the great question of the relationship between poetry and Torah, a question all the more urgent for me because as a proselyte I have taken on the "yoke of the commandments." One of the greatest thinkers of the last generation, Rabbi Abraham Yitzchak Kook, struggled with this question, and certain thoughts that your word suggested to me apparently also occurred to him. But he too was unable to decide the question what place should be granted in the life of Israel to a word that does not rely on the tradition as authority but rather appeals to the evidence of words and things. And I, who now see how much pride and self-delusion can go into the poetic word, have often enough asked myself whether I am not trying to offer alien fire to the God of Israel.

And this "evidence of words and things" – is there such a thing? Is there for you, for any poet, a common hearing, a communally binding understanding, or only interpretations that fly apart? I do not know, only time will tell, time and life in this preexisting community.

But precisely here, in this country, where so may ways cross, some things have come my way that speak for you. A poem from a young poet who was deeply affected by you. A recollection from a woman who knew you as a young man, who described you as you were before the catastrophe: so full of the joy of life that you had to turn everything into a joke from sheer high spirits, and "abnormally beautiful- literally like a young Greek god." She described how once, under the trees at the edge of a meadow covered with flowers as blue as the sky--it was called "Paradise Meadow"- you read Rilke aloud in a group of young people.

Strange: someone once described for me Sylvia Plath, who took her own life at thirty and whose work came to me like a premonition of yours, as "the prettiest, happiest, sweetest child I have every seen." Dante said it: the closer a being is to perfection, the more keenly it feels both good and ill. And I know: it was not the pain in your voice that drew me. For there is enough pain and terrible news in this world. It was the memory of being young when beauty was still possible, of a perfection of life which perhaps has seldom been seen in this world. Even before I heard this memory, it had occurred to me that in poetry, perhaps in your poems especially, something of the original perfection of the human image is preserved. But now this memory is, in a sense, also mine. I intend to hold onto it, I will draw it here in the air and build steps leading up to it and a colonnade around it.

And then I will imagine that others also see it and strike out in its direction. And we stand in it together and someone reads a poem aloud which I once encountered in a graduate seminar. We did a lot of guessing then as to whom Hölderlin meant by the "prince of the feast," I remember the names Christ and Napoleon. Strange: when I visited you in Paris I noticed that just that week all the magazines on the kiosks seemed to have pictures of Napoleon on the cover. But we were going to forget all that history, just listen to the poem, just the first stanza:

THE FEAST OF PEACE

 

 

Of the celestial, softly-echoing, quietly-pacing notes

full, and well-aired, is the hall built of old

and blissfully inhabited; the green lawns breathe

clouds of joy, and far and wide stand glistening,

full of maturest fruits and gold-wreathed goblets,

well-ordered on all sides in splendid row,

rising from even ground, the tables.

For here, come from afar, at the hour of evening,

loving guests have foregathered.

Will you come too?

NOTE