Author: Lars Iyer

Do not be deceived: this last lamp does not give more light – the dark has only become more absorbed in itself.

Our talk of justice is empty until the largest battleship has foundered on the forehead of a drowned man.

Paul Celan

Notes from John Felstiner's Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. My comments in square brackets.

[Celan, speaking to Bonnefoy:] You are at home within your language, your reference points, among the books, the works you love. As for me, I am on the outside.

[Celan, writing to Petre Solomon, 1957:] I've become neither European nor Western. Friends – I have scarcely any. The 'praise' you speak of – you can safely put that in quotes.

… Adorno thought Celan the only authentic postwar writer to stand with Samuel Beckett and made copious notes in his copy of Celan's Sprachglitter (1959).

[From the Bremen address:]

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.

A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the – not always greatly hopeful – belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland, perhaps. Poems in this sense too are under way: they are making toward someting.

He told an interviewer in Bremen, 'In my first book I was still transfiguring things – I'll never do that again'.

Celan writing to Gleb Struve, editor of Mandelshtam's works concerning his own translations from the Russian poet:

May I say even here, right away, that Osip Mandelshtam lies closest to my heart? … I know scarcely any other Russian poet of his generation who was in time like him, thought with and out of this time, thought it through to its end, in each of its moments, in its issues and happenings, in the words that faced issues and happenings and were to stand for them, at once open and hermetic. I'm simplifying – I know. Please just see in these lines … the impression of my encounter with Mandelshtam's poems: an impression of inalienable truth.

[Mandelshtam isn't someone who] wanted to make the Word 'thing-fast', so to speak – whether in that sense we may not often understand the Word under the sign of a 'last' thingliness. – But where in great poetry is it not a question of last things?

Celan's afterword to his Mandelshtam translations:

As for scarcely any of the poets who share his time and destiny in Russia […] for OSIP MANDELSHTAM, born in 1891, a poem is the place where what can be perceived and attained through language gathers around that core from which it gains form and truth: around this individual's very being, which challenges its own hour and the world's, his heartbeat and his aeon. All this is to say how much a Mandelshtam poem, a ruined man's poem now brought to light again out of its ruin, concerns us today.

[From Celan's radio broadcast on Mandelshtam:] Poems are sketches for existence: the poet lives up to them.

'I have a homeland': Nelly Sachs said this of Celan's Sprachgitter, when he sent it to her. 

Celan also linked his faith in poetry to "Kafka's statement, 'The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world, takes away out hope and gives us certainty!' I've always read that as if it gave grounds for being here, living, breathing".

… Heidegger had a "curious wish", as Ingeborg Bachmann described it. "For a Festschrift on his seventieth birthday he requested his publisher to get a poem from Paul Celan and one from me. And we both said no".

From a letter to Sachs, from 1960, and thinking of recent neo-Nazi outbursts:

What can I say to you? Every day, baseness comes into my house, every day, believe me. What is in store for us Jews? And we have a child, Nelly Sachs, a child!

Celan, writing to Hans Bender, May 1960, reacting to accusations of plagiarism:

Craft – that is a matter of hands. And these hands belong in turn to one person only…. Only true hands write true poems. I see no basic distinction between a handshake and a poem. […] We live under dark skies, and – there are few human beings [Menschen]. This probably why there are so few poems'.

To Nelly Sachs, August 1960:

It's going well for us, Nelly, really well…. Yes, it's bright again – the net, the dark one, is pulled away – isn't that right, Nelly, you see it now, you see you're free, in the clear, with us, among friends? … And I even see the words waiting for you, Nelly, the words you give life to with your new brightnesses – to all our joy.

As part of her reply, she writes: 'I so long for my beloved dead', and Celan replies:

You still know, don't you, when we spoke about God a second time in my house, how the golden gleam stood on the wall? … Look, Nelly: the net is pulled away! … Look: it's getting light, you're breathing, you're breathing free!

[Sachs undergoes a nervous breakdown] Celan went by train to Stockholm during the first week of September 1960 and stood at the door of her room, but either she did not recognise him or else would not admit him.

[Celan] went to Buber's hotel on 13 September. He took copies of Buber's books to be signed and actually kneeled for a blessing from the eighty-two-year-old patriarch. But the homage miscarried. How had it felt (Celan wanted to know), after the catastrophe, to go on writing in German and publishing in Germany? Buber evidently demurred, saying it was natural to publish there and taking a pardoning stance toward Germany. Celan's vital need, to hear some echo of his plight, Buber could not or would not grasp.

[After the plagiarism trouble began, he wrote to his editor:] The hopes I still have are not great: I shall try and hold onto what is left to me.

'Pallaksch. Pallaksch' [quoted at the end of one of Celan's poems]. A senseless term that Hoelderlin was given to uttering in his late years, sometimes it meant Yes, sometimes No.

Though he never made any religious profession, as did Franz Rosenzweig returning to Judaism after a Yom Kippur service, Celan's writing cut its own covenant.

From a letter to a Russian critic, from 1961:

Like almost no one else, you've recognised that to me, Mandelshatam means an encounter, an encounter such as one may seldom experience. He was, from quite far away, that which is brotherly …

Writing to Federmann in March 1962, Celan called himself 'an out-and-out Ashkenazi Jew', noting that 'I have – witness Blok, Mandelshtam, and Esenin – a Russian (read: Jewish) great-grandmother'. 

[When Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, who had brought out his first two books, published a book of ballads which had thrived under Nazism, Velan switched to S. Fischer Verlag.]

[When he received the Buechner Prize, he said they had chosen him] so that, having gotten this alibi, they could all the better run me down.

[In 1962, he writes of] a psychological pressure, over the long run intolerable.

[In September 1962, he writes to Nelly Sachs] All things are unforgotten.

[He writes in 1963, looking back, of his severe depression around Xmas 1962.]

Early in January 1963, reading a book on the Bible, he put nine scorings next to the Law of the Stranger: 'The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as a hom-born, and thou shalt love him as thyself'. In the same year, Bonnefoy remembers how Celan burst into sobs when discussing the Goll plagiarism campaign.

[In (late?) 1963, he suffers a nervous breakdown.]

[In 1965, Adorno republished his essay in which he called it barbaric to write a poem after Auschwitz. This essay was used against Celan by a journal – specifically, against 'Todesfuge', against 'despair turned "beautiful" through  art …']

[Entered a psychiatric unit outside Paris for a few weeks in May 1965. Read Shakespeare's plays.] Whenever he lit on anything about madness, fools, betrayal, slander, or suicide, he underlined it and noted it in the back of the volume. […] he wrote about Lear 'Hewn into the brain'.

[Goes back to the clinic in December 1965, this time for seven months. Breaks with his publisher.]

[In 1966, Adorno writes 'Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as the tortured have to scream, hence it might have been wrong to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.]

[Spring 1967, amidst drug and shock therapy, Celan is writing a poem a day.]

[1967. He and his wife decide to live apart. Petre Solomon, visiting him, says he found his old friend, at 46] profoundly altered, prematurely aged, taciturn, frowning … 'They're doing experiments on me', he said in a stifled voice, interrupted by sighs … Paul wasn't depressed all the time, sometimes he had moments of great joy – very brief, it's true, and punctuated by a nervous laugh, shrill and broken'.

[July 1967, visits Heidegger. Celan reads in Freiburg, with the philosopher attending, and refuses to have his photograph taken with him.]

[During May 1968, he turns to Kafka's diaries.]

[In 1969, in Jerusalem, he meets Aharon Appelfeld, born in the same street in Czernowitz where Celan lived from 1935 on.]

[Feb 1970, to Ilana Shmueli:] the doctors have much to answer for, for every day is a burden, what you call 'my own health' is probably never to be, the damage that reaches to the core of my existence…. They've healed me to pieces!

[April 1970. Celan commits suicide by drowning.]

I say we, because I believe I can speak for a handful of people inseparably linked by a bond of political friendship, who shared a common knot of problems as 'lived thought'. For us, the classic political friend/enemy distinction was not just a concept of the enemy, but a theory and practice of the friend as well. We became and have remained friends because we discovered, politically, a common enemy in front of us …

… the boys who stood outside the gates of the Mirafiori factory in Turin in the early morning went home at night to read the young Lukacs Soul and Form. Strong thought requires strong writing. A sense of the grandeur of the conflict awoke in us a passion for the Nietzschean style: to speak in a noble register, in the name of those beneath.

… we brought together a fine old madhouse. During our meetings, we would spend half the time talking, the rest laughing.

… such selfless public interventions, free of all personal ambition; such a straightforward sense of commitment; and not least, such a disenchanted, self-ironising way of sharing collective work.

Mario Tronti, Our Operaismo

A typical sense of 'abandonment' was revealed by a subordinate when Vice Admiral Ugaki, who had been in charge of kamikaze operations from Kyushu, left for his own suicide sortie on the very last day of the war. The senior officer of the Fifth Air Fleet staff, Captain Miyazaki, had tried to dissuade Ugaki on the grounds that such an attack was now inappropriate, but the Admiral was adamant and told him to follow his orders. Shortly afterwards Ugaki went to the airfield, carrying only his samurai sword and a pair of binoculars:

Captain Myizaki had been standing by quietly and solemnly, but finally, unable to restrain himself any longer, he stepped forward and said, 'Please take me with you, Admiral'.

Ugaki answered him sternly, 'You have more than enough to attend to here. You will remain'.

This refusal was too much for Miyazaki. He stopped in his tracks and burst into tears, crying openly and unshamed as the others walked past.

This, like the preceding posts, comes from Ivan Morris's The Nobility of Failure

Do I really believe that suicide attacks are effective? Aren't they, in fact, a foolhardy enterprise for flyers like us without any escort planes or any armaments of our own? … Is it true that self-sacrifice is the only thing that gives meaning to death? To this question the warrior is obliged to reply 'yes', while knowing full well that his suicide mission has no meaning,

Lieutenant Nagatsuka, recalling his last thoughts as he sat in the cabin of his Ki-27 fighter, Japanese air-force, World War II.  He was given the signal to turn back, because heavy rain and fog obscured his target. He reflects:

I experienced no real sense of having had a narrow escape. Still less did I feel the slightest joy on finding myself back at base. With an empty soul I followed the path that led to the underground barracks. I made no effort to avoid the puddles, but trampled right through them, vacant, distracted, totally unaware whether I was walking or reeling like a drunkard. The wet cornfields stretched out far into the distance. I saw their green tapestry without looking at it – that green which I had never expected to see again. Yesterday it had been friendly and familiar, but now it was almost hostile. Surely it was reproaching me for having failed in my mission. At this thought a great sadness filled my heart: the corn had the right to continue growing, at least until autumn, whereas my own existence was undeserved and provisional.

Dear Parents:

Please congratulate me. I have been given a splendid opportunity to die. This is my last day. This destiny of our homeland hinges on the decisive battle in the seas to the south where I shall fall like a blossom from a radian cherry tree….

How I appreciate this chance to die like a man! I am grateful from the depths of my heart to the parents who have reared me with their constant prayers and tender love. And I am grateful as well to my squadron leader and superior officers who have looked after me as I were their own son and given me such carefree training.

Thank you, my parents, for the twenty-three years during which you have cared for me and inspired me. I hope that my present deed will in some small way repay what you have done for me…..

Matsuo Isao, Kamikaze pilot, of the  Heroes' Special Attack Unit, World War II

Dearest Parents:

Please excuse my dictating these last words to my friend. There is no longer time for me to write more to you.

There is nothing special that I can say, but I want you to know that I am in the best of health at this last moment. It is my great honour to have been selected for this duty. The first planes of my group are already in the air. These words are being written by my friend as he rests the paper on the fuselage of my plane. There are no feelings of remorse or sadness here. My outlook is unchanged. I will perform my duty calmly.

Words cannot express my gratitude to you. It is my hope that this last act of striking a blow at the enemy will serve to repay in small measure the wonderful things you have done for me….

… I shall be satisfied if my final effort serves as recompense for the heritage our ancestors bequeathed.

Lieutenant Nomoto Jun of the White Heron Special Attack Unit, a Kamikaze unit, during World War II

History can  only be interpeted if one admits that man has been marked by evil since the beginning. He is condemned, he's cursed. The profoundest book that was ever written is the first book of the Old Testament, Genesis. Everything is said there. The whole vision of human destiny, of man. The very fact that God is afraid of man, that's what is so fantastic.

There's an amazing story in the Koran: when man made his appearance on earth a fish came up aout of the water and a vulture came down from the sky, and they said, 'The danger has come', the catastrophe. And the fish dived down to the bottom of the waters and the vulture flew away into the sky.

Man is accursed. History is at once demonaic and tragic, the whole history of the world.

[Ionescu] is a profoundly unhappy man, and success has only aggravated his misery. Which is what I like about him. Instead of coming to terms with life, he has never despaired as much as since he's been famous. For years we spoke on the phone almost daily. One can die of laughter with him, even when he's in despair. He's a man who is haunted by the idea of death, much more than I. With age, for me, this obsession has grown weaker. With him, it's the contrary. It's not that he's afraid to die. He has a sense of the ephemeral, of things not lasting, and his work is an expression of it. One might even say that is humour is somewhat the disconsolation of dying.

[…] I developed an interetst not so much in religion itself as in mystics. Not because of their religious faith but for their excess, their passion, their inner violence. So I began to read the great mystics, and I soon understood that I could not have faith. But it interested me because the mystics lived a more intense life than others. And too, because of their kind of extraordinary pride, me and God, God and me.

Each one of us obviously knows extreme states of solitude, where nothing exists anymore, especially at night when one is absolutely alone and there is always the difficulty of speaking with oneself. So, I've defined God as the partner in moments of extreme solitude. One thinks of God when one can think of nothing else anymore, of no other person. It has nothing to do with faith in my case, it's solely a pretext for dialgoue. It's a monologue, but because everything else has vanished, one clashes with God, the last companion in solitude.

The existence of God doesn't even interest me.

Yes, why do [the mystics] write, since they're writing for God. God doesn't read.

I should have been a sage, but I couldn't. I wanted to be one, but I couldn't manage it, so I wrote books. Everything I've done has been the result of a spiritual failure. But for me, that's not necessarily a negative concept.

E.M. Cioran, interviewed

It's when I finished studying it, at the point where I stopped believing in philosophy, that I began to read Nietzsche. Well, I realised that he wasn't a philosopher, but was more: a temperament. So, I read him, but never systematically, now and then. But I really don't read him anymore. I consider his letters his most authentic work, because in them he's truthful, while in his other work he's prisoner to his vision. In his letters one sees that he's just a poor fellow, that he's ill, exactly the opposite of everything he claimed. […] His work is an unspeakable megalomania. When one reads the letters he wrote at the same time, one sees that he's lamentable, it's very touching, like a character out of Chekhov.

It was, if you like, the disappointment of philosophy that made me turn to literature. To tell the truth, it's from that point on that I realised that Dostoevsky was much more important that a great philosopher, And that great poetry was something extraordinary.

[Severe insomnia] was the profound cause of my break with philosophy. I realised that in moments of great despair philosophy is no help at all, and offers absolutely no answers. So I turned to poetry and literature, where I found no answers either, but states of mind analogous to my own. I can say that my sleepless nights brought about the break with my idolatry of philosophy.

Normally, someone who goes to bed and sleeps all night begins the next day almost a new life. It's not simply another day, it's another life. And so he can undertake things, can manifest himself, he has a present, a future, and so on. But for someone who doesn't sleep, the time from going to bed at night to rising in the morning is all continuous, with no interruption, no suppression of consciousness. So, instead of starting a new life at eight in the morning, you're still as you were at eight the evening before. The nightmare contintues uninterrupted and, in the morning, start what, since there's no difference since the night before? That new life doesn't exist. The whole day is a trial, it's the continuation of the trial.

In my opinion, almost all suicides, about ninety per cent, say, are due to insomnia. I can't prove that, but I'm convinced.

I quarreled with everyone. I couldn't put up with anything. And I found everyone idiotic. Nobody understood what I understood. It was the feeling of not belonging. Then too, this feeling that everything is a comedy and makes no sense. The future was meaningless for me, the present as well. And so, philosophically, because one is always a philosopher, it's a sort of exasperation, an intensification, of the state of being conscious. Not self-conscious, conscious. The state of consciousness is the great misfortune, and in my case, the permanent misfortune. Normally, it's the contrary, it's consciousness which is man's advantage. Me, I arrived at the conclusion that no, the fact of being conscious, of not being oblivious, is the great catastrophe.

The drama of insomnia is that time doesn't pass. You're lying down in the middle of the night and you are no longer in time. You're not in eternity either. Time passes so slowly that it becomes agonising. All of us, being alive, are drawn along by time because we are in time. When you lie awake like that, you are outside of time. So, time passes outside of you, you can't catch up with it.

[…] consciousness of time proves that you are outside of time, that you've been ejected. One could really call it a philosophical or metaphysical experience.

Everything I've written, I wrote to escape a sense of oppression, of suffocation. It wasn't from inspiration, as they say. It was a sort of getting free, to be able to breathe.

[…] a writer needn't know things in depth. If he speaks of something, he shouldn't know everything about it, only the things that go with his temperament. He should not be objective. One can discuss a subject in depth, but in a certain direction, not trying to cover the whole thing. For a writer the university is death.

Q. Do you have particular writing habits or conditions when you can work? A. I've never been able to write in a normal state. […] I always had to be either depressed or angry, furious or disgusted, but never in a normal state. And I write preferably in a state of semidepression. There has to be something that's not right.

Suicide gives me the idea that I can leave this world when I want to, and that makes life bearable, instead of destroying it.

I considered life as a mere postponing of suicide. I had thought I wasn't going to live past the age of thirty. But it wasn't from cowardice that I was always postponing my suicide. I exploited this idea, I was its parasite. At the same time, this appetite for existing was also very strong in me.

… I read also in order not to think, to escape, to not be me.

Q. You've often expressed in your books your interest in biographies. A. Above all I like to see how people end. When you read about someone's life, you see what illusions he started out with, and it's very interesting to see how they fail him.

E.M. Cioran, interviewed