THE DISTANT EARTH: CELAN'S PLANETARY VISION

We have all become familiar, in recent years, with the image of a small, cloud-veiled sphere, seen against the vast darkness of space. As Jonathan Schell observed in his recent book, The Fate of the Earth, these photographs make us aware of "a new relation between ourselves and the earth....... we stand outside nature, holding instruments of cosmic power with which we can blot life out, while at the same time we remain embedded in nature and depend on it for survival."

The image of earth, seen from a distance, also appears in the poetry of Paul Celan. On the one hand this image symbolizes the question whether humankind can survive in the technological world, "overflown by stars of human manufacture"; on the other hand it represents the hope of a human response to this question. Not rockets, but anguish over the Holocaust and fear for the human future propel the poet to the "no-place" from which he looks back toward the planet.

Among poets, Celan was not the first in space; that honor, as far as I am aware, belongs to Dante Alighieri, who wrote in the twenty-second canto of the Paradiso:

It is clear that Dante overcomes Earth's gravity by means of the Christian evaluation of earthly life in relation to eternal life. The just man must deprecate earth, which represents the desires of the flesh; it is "the little threshing-floor which makes us so fierce." And yet Dante, even at this height, does not cease to concern himself with Earth and its problems. If earthly desires had left him, the concern for Earth had not. Thus the Christian formulation does not completely render Dante's feelings as poet.

In Celan's work the image of Earth first appears in surrealistic guise, in "Dunkles Aug im September" ("Dark Eye in September," 1948):'

Here the epithet "that drunken apple" recalls the story of the Tree of Knowledge and the view of Earth as source of temptations. But this view is not dominant. Earth suffers under the weight of this time, which presses upon it like a "helmet of stone." The apple is "turned brown by the breath of a sinful saying"ùthis recalls the Nazis with their brown uniforms and their "death-bringing talk," as Celan put it in the Bremen speech. Even if we say that it is the conditions of life on earth ("the little threshing-floor which makes us so fierce") which are ultimately responsible for these crimes, earth itself is "averse to the game" and may not continue to tolerate man's presence in the future whose reflection is already "baleful." This may be interpreted as a hint that the Holocaust was an anticipation of the approaching end of humanity. On the other hand, the fact the Earth is portrayed as a head suggests the hope that the consciousness of earth – a common consciousness of humans living on it – will awake. The poem "Zuversicht" ("Confidence"), from Sprachgitter ("Lattice of Speech," 1959) ends: "as if, because there is stone, there were still brothers."

The distant view of Earth does not appear again in Celan's first three collections, which trace the path of the poet within the post-Holocaust world. The favorite topos in this depiction is "stone": symbol of pain, of the hardness of the human heart, and at the same time of the world's objective existence, which might – perhaps – become the basis for mutual understanding among its inhabitants. In these collections the language becomes less and less lyrical, more and more precise, as if in an attempt to match the precision of technological language with a new precision of the spirit. In Sprachgitter (1959) one is struck by the frequency of geological terms; in the last poem, "Engführung" ("The Straitening," as Michael Hamburger translates it), it is precisely the contact with the stone which lets us break through to a mysterious, immaterial world which soon closes again before our eyes.

In the story "Gespräch im Gebirg" ("Colloquy in the Mountains," 1959) Celan summarizes his "geology." A Jew walks through the mountains, over the stone, accompanied by the anti-Semitic comments of an anonymous narrator, and meets a second Jew. The two start talking, "for when one Jew meets another, it's goodbye silence, even in the mountains. For a Jew and nature are two different things." Thus language represents the Jew's detachment from nature. One of the Jews says:

The earth's having folded itself three times recalls the Christian trinity (Dreifaltigkeit). The hardness of the human heart is also the silence of the non-human world, amid which human language sounds meaningless. The Jew talking to his alter ego in the mountains stands at the edge of the world.

This is the place – a place of exile, solitude, and despair – from which the poet breaks through, in "The Meridian" (1960), to outer space, when he says of art: "It is to step out of the human dimension, into a realm which turns toward the human an uncanny countenance." Whoever leaves the human dimension becomes estranged not only from nature but from himself. "Art creates a distance from the I." This is no impersonal process: it is one's own I that one is estranged from. ("Go with art into the strait that is most your own. And set yourself free.") Such estrangement enables the artist to "grasp the natural by means of art" – to grasp the objectivity and totality which, unlike the reality described by science, includes the poet himself and his fate. And the same time he is moving, along paths of language, toward the other as a creature also able to go out of himself or herself. The hope for an encounter in a place beyond humanity, a "U-topia," is also the hope for a new social consciousness by which, as from some "Archimedean point," the earth might be moved. Thus at the end of the speech, the image of Earth appears to the reader, when, at the end of the speech, Celan says:

The vision of Earth reappears in the collection following "The Meridian," Die Niemandsrose (The No-One's Rose, 1963), whose poem strongly recalls "The Meridian":

THERE WAS EARTH IN THEM, and

they dug.

 

They dug and they dug, their day

passed in this way, and their night. And they did not praise God,

who, they heard, had willed all this,

who, they heard, had known all this.

 

They dug and they knew nothing more,

they did not grow wise, made no song,

they invented for themselves no language at all.

They dug.

 

There came a stillness, there came a storm,

there came the oceans, all of them.

I dig, and you dig, and the worm digs too,

and what sings there says: they are digging.

 

O someone, O no-one, O No-One, O thou,

where did it lead to, the road that led nowhere?

O you dig, and I dig, I am digging towards you,

and on our fingers awakens the ring.

At first glance the meaning of the word "Erde" in this poem seems to be "soil" rather than Earth as planet. But the "ring" which "awakens" at the end is the "meridian": it is language as that which connects the speaker with his hearers and gives rise to sympathy and identification across all interhuman boundaries. The victims suffered and "invented for themselves no language at all"; their road "led nowhere." Again we are forced to leave the human dimension: to speak of these things without consoling oneself, without deluding oneself, is in some measure to live the suffering and death of the victims: "they dug," therefore "I dig" and "you dig." The "I" and the "you" who dig their way toward each other are also in a sense dead. But, being annihilated, they meet in the "nothing," which in the Kabbala (The No-One’s Rose shows the influence of Gershom Scholem’s works on this subject) is also the eyn-sof (infinite), the primal essence of Divine being.

A poem toward the end of the collection, beginning "Crowned out,/spat out into the night," repeat this process and weaves into it the theme of erotic love. The poet again recalls the exile and humiliation to which, as a member of the Jewish people, he was exposed. Yet these humiliations were also the sign of a royal destiny (in Midrash, the Jewish people is often referred to as "a king's son"). But Celan, as a Jew living among Gentiles and writing in German, was partially estranged even from his own people. This ultimate exile leads to a meeting, in outer space, with the feminine principle:

Blue-gulf, into you

I drive the gold. Even with that

which was wasted on whores and harlots

                              (...)

With names, soaked through with every exile.

With names and seed,

with names dipped in all

chalices that brim with your

royal blood, Human – in all

calyxes of the great

Ghetto-Rose, from which

you look out at us, immortal from so many

deaths died on roads of tomorrow.

Again Kabbalistic associations occur: the union of the "I" and the "you" resembles that of Yesod (Foundation) and Malkhut (Kingdom), the last of the stages by which the Divine energy becomes manifest. Malkhut, also known as "the Congregation of Israel," "the bride," and "the Shekhina," represents community and is symbolized by the rose. (Dante's celestial rose is a Christian version of this symbolism.) Yesod is represented by the poet as one who has left the human dimension in order to speak of things that are beyond the human capacity to bear; thus Malkhut here is the reader as representative of the poet's audience as a whole. By means of the "you" a modulation takes place between the image of the "beloved" and the image of the "human" in general which looks out at us from the "Ghetto-Rose." One may say that an "I-thou" relation exists between the poet and every reader, and that the name "you" applies to all readers, who are to this extent united by a common identity and destiny. The logic of this union gives rise to a dream of world revolution which the poet, in his exile, cannot help dreaming: "And we sang the Varshovyanka,/ With reed-choked lips, Petrarca,/In tundra-ears, Petrarca.") From the no-place, the place of annihilation-and-identification, the Archimedean point, comes the promise:' æAnd an earth will climb up to us, our earth,/this one." Exile from earth, encounter at the "Archimedean point" with the "you," unification of those who answer to the name of "you," and "raising of the earth" by the force of love and wisdomùthis is the fundamental dialectic of Die Niemandsrose. This vision follows of necessity from the poetic process, from the faith in language, despite the despair with which the poet struggles throughout the collection. The last words of The No-One’s-Rose are "too late." But first, we have heard words like these:

The eye, dark,

what was, what still is, a world: the Wandering

East, the Hovering Ones, the

Humans-and-Jews,

the Folk-of-the-Clouds, magnetically

it pulls, with heart-fingers, at

you, Earth:

you come, you come,

dwell, we shall dwell...

Here the syntax in German ("wohnen werden wir, wohnen") recalls a Hebrew construction (shakhon nishkon). The return of the Shekhina (literally, "indwelling") from exile is anticipated.

The hope for the return of the Shekhina, which is both the exiled feminine half of God and the Jewish (and, in Celan's extended meaning, the human) community, is bound up with a spirituality of a very particular sort – a terrestrial spirituality, which bridges the distinction between matter and spirit.

IN THE AIR, that's where your root remains,

in the air.

Where the Earthly conglomerates,

Breath-and-Clay.

This is not to be confused with the "return to the soil" or the "return to nature" in the primitivistic sense of an attempt to sink back into a preconscious state: here Earth itself as it were helps humanity to reach a consciousness so clear it is painful. In "Ice, Eden" the "eye-child" "sees, for it has eyes. that are bright earths." Moreover, the consciousness of earth is an ethical consciousness. In the poem "Huhediblu," we hear

the axle-tone deep

inside our star-round dwelling-place

Contrition? For

nevertheless it does move, in the heart's direction.

This recalls Galileo's famous under-the-breath retort – "Eppur si muove." Here, it is as if Celan sees in the earth's behavior, which conforms to physical laws, something which will eventually compel humans to repentance. In a letter to a friend written in 1962, Celan quotes a saying by Kepler which he "met" on his return from Darmstadt, where he gave the "Meridian" speech: "God is symbolized by the sphere. The cross-section of the sphere isi the circle. This circle is man." And in the letter Celan adds: "Yes, it exists, this circle. Long live the Meridian!" If for Kepler the sphere could represent God by virtue of its geometric perfection, for Celan this form was probably significant as the form of our "dwelling-place." Form means law and necessity, but it can also inspired love. In this perspective aesthetics becomes an inseparable part of ethics; it is nothing other than the search for the "constellation," as Celan says in "Booth Window," which we need "in order to dwell, here, among humans." Thus in Die Niemandsrose the language of earth is no longer "a language without I and without You" but rather "Language, language. Fellow-star. Neighbor-earth." As we saw in "Crowned out," erotic love is also connected with language, with the attempt to awaken the "You" to a consciousness of the global situation.

This effort is one of the main themes of Celan's subsequent collection, Atemwende ("Breath-turning," 1967).

ERUPTION OF WORDS, volcanic,

sea’s rush above it.

 

Overhead

The mob at flood

of anti-creatures: it

signalled – copy and counterfeit

cruise 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.

Here the "you" is identical with the earth; but it is a thinking earth, it must "hurl forth the word-moon" which will influence the "mob" of humans who, once mde in the image (Ebenbild) of God, have become mere "copy and counterfeit" (Abbild und Nachbild). In Atemwende, still more than in previous collections, there is an awareness that the poet’s work is not complete in itself, that he is waiting for a response, for a continuation of his speech on the part of his hearers, that there are thoughts which are scarcely thinkable by one mind alone. And will the answer he is waiting for arrive at last?

Huge as the apple of the world, the tear beside you,

shot through with noises, rushings

of answer,

answer,

answer.

The poem in which these words appear, "Give the Word" (title in English) opens with a quoation from King Lear, "Cut to the brains" (ins Hirn gehaun). Solitude, disorientation. "Where did the earth fall to?" At times the poet seems to be wandering in space, unable to find the way home.

If we take the image of Earth as a kind of touchstone of Celan’s work, the feeling is strengthened that – as Celan himself felt, according to the testimony of friends in Israel – in "Der Meridian" and Die Niemandsrose he expressed his fundamental vision, and in the five collections which he wrote afterward could only repeat his appeal to the hearers, invent variations – and make poetry, at least, out of the feeling that from here the road leads to nowhere. Among the last poems he wrote is one that begins: "Anointed away, outside," and ends "Under the left foot/ a window – of/ Earth?" This brief poem is little more than a repetition of "Crowned Out" – a faint and despairing repetition. In this poem there is no meeting in space, and no one to help him pull the earth upward; there is only "a window – of Earth?" – of a house not to be reentered. The way is lost; the end is known.

And yet not quite the end. For a continuation of the way of "Der Meridian" and Die Niemandsrose is possible if, in reading and studying Celan’s work, one recognizes the obligation, not only to admire and to analyze, but to respond as a human being to whom a plea has been addressed, and to seek out others who have done or might do the same. If we, the readers, can accept the obligations Celan’s poetry seeks to lay on us with all their consequences, we will be able to look on Earth with new eyes, and to awaken the consciousness of Earth in the soul of humankind.