Recollection: Paul [Celan] coming back from London. – 'I have seen God, I have heard God: a ray of light under the door of my hotel room'. And later Paul recalls Kafka's formulation, 'Sometimes God, sometimes nothing'.

Cosmic dust covers us. The wind lifts the air. – 'I'm writing like never before', he says.

The poem he writes in the street and then telephones to her from a public phonebooth.

Why? I don't want to look anymore. I don't get the tone. The word no longer has tone. How would you say? How would you understand? – 'The secret is in these leaves. The secret is perhaps within us', he says to me. 'But we cannot understand at all. The world is empty. The sky is empty'.

'I have hidden the blood. My poems hide the blood. What do you think? I have paid … I have paid', he says.

stray paragraphs from Jean Daive's Under the Dome