He thinks: I am a scream of God. A searching growl. Vacillation. Slowness. Perplexity. Different reading.

– But a scream can burrow into wound and scar. A kind of saliva, basically, that attenuates the pain.

– I believe the scream is the chosen stance of a voice evicted from itself, mortally wounded, silent, terribly, become non-instrumental from being dispossessed, blank. A drunken voice, crouching. That regards no one…

– A geometric scream.

 

He watches the goat tied to the biboquet. He watches it climb down the step-ladder to the roll of the drum. He smiles. There is applause. A crowd in purplish light. I ask him:

– How do you, Paul Celan, get from stammer to stutter?

– The stammer is linked to childhood, the stutter to knowledge.

– If I understand you correctly, your idea of stammer and stutter is close to Hoelderlin's idea of ideal states…

– That is…

– Hoelderlin says there are two ideals: extreme simplicity, childhood for you, and extreme knowledge, i.e. your stutter.

– Yes, the stutter is literally dumbfounded. He is 'stupid', that is to say aphasic, and we can think of Hoelderlin.

– The monkey is aphasic, therefore…

– Therefore he dances… he has seen the lightning. He is silent and dances.

 

[…]

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

[…]

– I have hidden the madness… My poetry masks the madness.

 

from Jean Daive, Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan