Justin Erik Halldór Smith

Paul Celan, Death Fugue (1948)

 

Black milk of dawn we drink it at evening

we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night

we drink and we drink

we're digging a grave in the airs where you won't lie too tight

A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes

he writes when Deutschland is darkened by your golden hair Margarete

he writes it and goes 'fore the house and the stars shine he calls for his hounds

he calls for his Jews a grave in the earth he leaves them to dig

he commands us now play for to dance

 

Black milk of dawn we drink it at night

we drink it at morning and midday we drink it at evening

we drink and we drink

A man lives in the house he plays with the serpents he writes

he writes when Deutschland is darkened by your golden hair Margarete

Your ashen hair Sulamith we're digging a grave in the airs where you won't lie too tight

 

He calls push deeper into the soil you and the others sing and you play

he grips at his belt for the iron his eyes are blue

push the spades deeper you and the others play on for to dance

 

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night

we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening

we drink and we drink

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Sulamith he plays with the serpents

he calls play death sweeter death is a master from Deutschland

he calls stroke the violins more darkly for you'll rise like smoke in the air

for you'll have your grave in the clouds where you won't lie too tight

 

Black milk of dawn we drink you at night

we drink you at midday death is a master from Deutschland

we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink

death is a master from Deutschland his eye is blue

he hits you with bullet of lead he hits you true

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

he sets his hounds on us he gives us a grave in the air

he plays with the serpents and dreameth death is a master from Deutschland

 

your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Sulamith 

 

To Enjoin a Double Law Upon My Sinews

I've been reconsidering my earlier attempt to characterize the distinction between philosophical interests and extra-philosophical ones. I'm finding my initial stab at it more than inadequate. I sought at one point to say that it lies in one's appreciation of res singulares, of singular things, and that, though natural philosophers in the past would have disagreed, one handy criterion we have today for distinguishing between the philosophical and the non- is to accept as philosophical only that which doesn't directly concern itself with this particular plant or country or river or planet, but always stays far enough away from the abundance of singular things to, so to speak, maintain its dignity.

There is something to that, but I think, at least historically, another more significant line of demarcation, one that extends back to Aristotle and that remains perfectly relevant today in making snap judgments about whether a blog is a philosophy blog or not, is the collaboration between the metaphysics of substance and the law of the excluded middle that compels all of us following in the tradition of Western philosophy to affirm that any given thing can only be the thing it is. This sounds easy enough to accept, and at little cost, yet it leaves us ill-equipped to deal, for example, with Ovid, or the Grimms, or Saxo Grammaticus (about whom more in a second). We are familiar with Aristotle's distinction between poetry and history, as between that which ranges over the possible and that which relates the actual (and the fault of Herodotus, unlike Thucydides, had been to fail to grasp this distinction), but there is an even more fundamental distinction between different conceptions of possibility, depending on which 'laws' one starts with, and here you could say that philosophy and poetry are both subdivisions of the sort of thinking that ranges over the possible, and the crucial difference has to do with each subdivision's stance on the identity of things over time. Philosophy wants fixed things, substances; poetry --a significant portion of which we now call 'mythology'-- allows metamorphoses. 

This is not at all a new observation; I am simply recalling it from my culture's storehouse of received wisdom in order to come to a clearer explanation than I was able to offer previously of why this is not a philosophy blog. It struck me last night as I was reading Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta danorum, a 12th-century compendium of Danish history and lore. In one incident recounted there, Hardgrep seeks the embraces of her foster son, Hadding. But she is descended from giants, and he complains that "the size of her body [is] unwieldy for the embraces of a mortal." Hardgrep assures him:

Youth, fear not the converse of my bed. I change my bodily outline in twofold wise, and am wont to enjoin a double law upon my sinews. For I conform to shapes of different figure in turn, and am altered at my own sweet will: now my neck is star-high, and soars nigh to the lofty Thunderer; then it falls and declines to human strength, and plants again on earth that head which was near the firmament. Thus I lightly shift my body into diverse phases, and am beheld in varying wise; for changefully now cramped stiffness draws in my limbs, now the virtue of my tall body unfolds them, and suffers them to touch the cloud-tops. Now I am short and straitened, now stretch out with loosened knee; and I have mutably changed myself like wax into strange aspects. He who knows of Proteus should not marvel at me. My shape never stays the same, and my aspect is twofold: at one time it contrasts its outstretched limbs, at another shoots them out when closed; now disentangling the members and now rolling them back into a coil. I dart out my ingathered limbs, and presently, while they are strained, I wrinkle them up, dividing my countenance between shapes twain, and adopting two forms; with the greater of these I daunt the fierce, while with the shorter I seek the embraces of men.

This kind of thing goes on more or less constantly in the world Saxo describes: humans coupling with relatives, with giants, with bears; being born from monstrous black seed, being kept alive by corrupt matter rather than blood. But none of this is ever really so damaging, since forms change freely, and there are advantages to being monstrous just as there are advantages to being comely. 

Now Saxo is a Christian, writing in Latin, and he wavers between denying that such transformations are possible, and affirming that they are possible, but denouncing them as sinful. As for me, I definitely do not believe they are possible, but I also think it is extremely important for a humanist to reflect on why, in the majority of times and places in human history, people have spoken as if they were possible. There is one tradition in human history --descending from Greece, reaching Denmark by the 12th century CE (even as it retains its memory of pre-contact ways of thinking) and now dictating the range of things that can be said at academic conferences, and in polite society, in Java, the Amazon, and the Arctic-- in which such transformations are explicitly not possible, and this is the tradition I work in. These transformations do seep back into this tradition at different times and places, but usually more as a threat or a taunt than as anything like a conceptual revolution; thus the natural philosopher Richard Lower allowed a brief whiff of Ovidian metamorphoses into philosophical debate in 17th century England by succeeding in transfusing blood between species; and arguably much of what seems so outré about figures like Deleuze comes down in the end to their daring to chicken-walk at the boundary between the two subdivisions I've described. But for the most part, philosophy continues to define itself as the tradition that can take no interest in Ovid or Saxo and their flights into the impossible. 

And anyway, to get back to the distinction I was attempting inadequately to make the other day: here I am very interested in giant women who wax into strange aspects, gods who appear as swans, &c. Which --and this is the key point-- seems pretty close to just another way of saying that this is not a philosophy blog.

German Poetry: Selected Translations

A Blessing for Horses (Pariser Handschrift, 12th century)

A man went his way ·
dragging his steed ·
There my lord met him ·
With all of his men ·

How · is it going · man?
Why aren't you riding?
How can I ride when ·
my steed is all stiff?

Just push at his flank, man ·
while whispering to him ·
he'll step with his right foot ·
and get along good ·

A Blessing for a Journey (Weingartner Handschrift, 12th century)

I want to see you · I want to send for you
with my five fingers · my fifty-five angels ·
May God send you home safe ·
May triumph's door be open to you ·
and to you the door of sailing ·
May drowning's door be closed to you ·
and to you the door of fighting ·

*

Heinrich Heine

 From Das Buch der Lieder (1827)

The Return

How can you sleep peacefully,
Knowing, I live still?
When the old anger comes again,
I'll bend this yoke to my will.

Do you know the old song:
How there once was a dead knave,
Who grabbed his beloved at midnight
And pulled her into his grave?

Believe me, you magnificent,
You all-too lovely kid,
I'm still alive, and stronger,
Than any dead man is!

The Homecoming

If you shall be my faithful wife
Then fortune on you shines.
You'll live a gay and carefree life
Of leisurely pastimes.

And if you scold and if you rave
I'll abide it all with pleasure.
But if my poems you will not praise
Then let us split forever.

*

Friedrich Hölderlin

The Ages of Life

You, cities of Euphrates!
You, alleys of Palmyra!
You forests of columns in the plain of the desert,
What are you?
The fire stripped you
Of your crowns as you passed
Over the border of the breathing
By the smoke of the heavenly beings;
But now I sit under clouds, in which
Each thing has its quietude, under
Well-ordered oaks on the meadow
Of deer, and strange to me
And dead to me seem
The spirits of the blessed.

A Fragment of a Hymn

What is God? unknown, and yet

Is the face of heaven full
Of signs of him. Lightning in fact
Is the wrath of a god. The more one is
Invisible,       the more one conforms to what one is not. But thunder
Is the glory of God. The love of immortality,
As ours, is likewise the property
Of a god.

*

Rainer-Maria Rilke

Judith's Return (1911)

Sleepers, black is the wetness still upon my feet, imprecise. Dew, you say.
O, that I am Judith, I am come from him, from the tent from the bed, his head trickling, thrice-drunk blood. Wine-drunk, drunk on incense, drunk on me -- and now arid as dew. 
Low-held head above the morning grass; but I, above in my going, I erect.
Brain suddenly empty, images flowing out into the earth; but I am still pricked in the heart by the whole breadth of the night's deed.
Lover that I am.
Horrors drive all the pleasures in me together, all places are on me.
Heart, my famed heart, beat against the wind: 
     as I go, as I go
and faster the voice in me, my voice, which will call a birdcall before the city of need.

From the Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)

A god could do it. But how, tell me, could
a man follow him through a narrow lyre?
His sense is discord. At the crossing of two
hearts' paths stands no temple for Apollo.

Song, as you teach it, is not desire,
nor the announcement of something finally attained.
Song is existence. For God it is easy.
But when are we? And when will he turn

the earth and the stars toward our being?
It is not this that you love, young one, even if
voice forces open your mouth, -- learn

to forget that you are singing yourself empty. This shall pass.
In truth singing is just another breath.
A breath for nothing. A sighing in God. A wind.

The Duino Elegies (1912-22)

The First Elegy

Who then, if I cried out, would hear me from the order
of angels? and supposing one of them took
a sudden interest in me: I should wither from his
more powerful being. For the beautiful is nothing

but terror's beginning, which we yet bear unbowed,
and we marvel at it, as it calmly disdains

to disturb us. Every angel is terrible.
And so I restrain myself and swallow down the siren call
of dark convulsion. O whom then are

we able to need? Neither angels, nor men, 

and the clever beasts note this well, 

that we are not so solidly at home 
in the world as construed. There remains to us,

perhaps, a tree on the hillside that we see again 
daily; there remain to us yesterday's streets, and

the loyalty, which is forgiven, to a habit
t
hat suited us well, and thus stayed, and did not go. 
O and the night, the night, when the wind, full of world,
wears down our faces--, for whom would she not remain, desired,

gently disappointing, she who lies painfully in store for

the solitary heart? Is she softer on those who love?
Oh, they only hide with one another in their fate.
Do you still not know it? Throw from your arms
into space the emptiness that we breath; perhaps 
the birds feel the expanded air with an inward flight.

Yes, the springtimes well needed you. Many a star
expected you to sprint. A wave 
raised itself up in the past, or,
so that you should drop by the open window,
a violin gave itself up. All this was the task.
But did you manage it? Were you not always
scattered in expectation, as a beloved heralded
it all to you? (Where will you hide her,
so that these great strange thoughts of yours 
should come in and out, and stay more often the night?)
If you must sing of lovers, still is their
famed feeling by far not immortal enough. 
You almost envy these abandoned ones, whom you 
found so much more loving than those who were appeased.
Always begin anew the acclaim that is never to be attained;
think: the hero maintains himself, even the downfall 
was for him only a pretext for being: his final birth.
But exhausted nature takes the lovers back
into her, as if the strength to carry this off
could not come twice. Have you thought enough
then of Gaspara Stampa, that any girl passed up
by her beloved, on the aggravated example
of these lovers, feels: that I might be like her?
Should these oldest pains not at last become
more fruitful to us? Is it not time that we lovingly
free ourselves from the beloved, and tremblingly withstand,
as the arrow withstands the string, in order in launching
to be more than itself? For remaining is nowhere.

Voices, voices. Hear, my heart, as else only
saints have heard: that they raised the great
call from the ground; but they knelt
again, impossible, and paid it no mind.
Thus did they listen. Not that you would bear
the voice of God, not by far. But listen to the blowing,
the uninterrupted news that is made up of silence. 
It is rustling now, from those young dead ones, to you.
Wherever you entered, did their fate not calmly 
address you in the churches of Rome and Naples? 
Or an inscription was loftily borne to you,
as of late that tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.
What do they want of me? Gently shall I 
shrug off the semblance of injustice that the pure
motion of their spirits sometimes hinders a little. 

It is indeed peculiar to inhabit the earth no longer,
not to exercise skills barely learned, nor to give
to roses, and to other things that promise themselves,
the significance of a human future;
not to be what one was in infinitely
anxious hands, and to leave behind
even one's own name like a broken toy.
Peculiar, to no longer wish wishes. Peculiar, 
to see everything fluttering that hung
so loosely in space. And being dead is laborious
and full of catching up, so that one gradually senses
a bit of eternity. -- But all of the living make
this mistake, that they distinguish too sharply.
The angels (it is said) would often not know, whether
they were moving among the living or the dead. 
The eternal current always pulls all the ages 
along with it through both domains,
and drowns them out in both. 

In the end they need us no longer, the early departed,
one is gently weaned of the earthly, as one meekly
grows away from the mother's breast. But we who need
such large secrets, for whom blissful progress 
so often springs from mourning--: could we be without them? 
The story is in vain, that once in the lament for 
Lino's daring first music, barren torpor crept in;
that first in the stunned space, into which an almost divine youth
suddenly entered forever, did the emptiness shift into that 
vibration, that now thrills us and comforts and helps.

*

Stefan George

From Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (1895)

Speak not always 
Of the leaves · 
Violent breeze · 
Of the smashing 
Of ripe quinces · 
Of the coming 
Of destroyers 
At year's end. 
Of the quiver 
Of the darters 
In bad weather 
And the lights 
With the flicker 
Transient.

From Der siebente Ring (1907)

May you still by night and day
Demand your share · you trace ·
In all my joys to have your place ·
From every yield to take your pay? 

My desire still awakens by your suck
Me, whose ore you scraped out ·
Me, whose wine you slurped out–
In the loss do I still shiver at my luck? 

Am I, now that you are slake,
Mean with what I gave?
Do I force you down in the grave ·
Do I drive through your heart with a stake?

From Der Stern des Bundes (1914)

Is this the lad of ancient lore
Who came from thence with flatterer's eyes
With rosy soft virgin's members
With sumptuous tissues enticing?
His trunk was slim and taut. He grasps ·
He tempts no more · has no jewels.
Shines with grit and lust for battle
His look . . his kiss is short and burning.
His seed now shot from the holy shaft
He pushes into pain and danger.

From Das neue Reich (1928)

The Man and the Faun

The Man

A waterfall blocks the narrow creekbed--
Who now extends a hairy leg
From this cliff's dribblingly fat moss?
A horn peeks from a bushy ruffled head . . 
For as long as I have hunted in the mountain forest
I have never met his likes… Be still
Your path has shifted • conceal nothing
Through a clear wave a goat's foot shows.

The Faun

Neither you nor I will be happy that you found me.

The Man

I knew indeed of your sort of people.
From tales of old -- but not that today
Such a needlessly ugly monster still lives.

The Faun

If you drive off the last of my kind
You will look in vain for noble creatures
You will have nothing but rodents and worms
And when you pierce into the deepest thicket
The spring you need most will be dry.

The Man

So far beneath me you deign to teach? Our spirit
Has brought down hydra giant dragons
Has cleared barren high forest
Where bogs stood fields of corn now heave
In the juicy green our tame cattle graze
And there is still enough forest for hart and doe--
We raised the treasures from sea and ground
Stones called out our victories to the heavens…
What do you want you leftover of cruel wilderness?
The light the order follow our trace.

The Faun

You are only a man .. where your wisdom ends
Ours begins • you see the edge only
Where you have been punished for crossing it
When your grain ripens your cattle flourish
The holy trees give oil and grapes
You imagine this comes only from your cunning
The earths that breath in the dull primordial night
Never perish • they are always disposed
They dissolve when a member escapes.
For a good while your reign goes well •
Now hurry back! you have seen the Faun.
You do not know your worst: if your sense
Which can do much is caught in the clouds
The bond has been broken with beast and clod--
Disgust and desire movement and such 
And dust and sunbeam and dying and growing
Can be comprehended in the course of things no more.

The Man

Who told you so? This is the concern of the gods.

The Faun

We speak not of them yet in your madness
You believe that they themselves help you. Unmediated
Have they never approached you. You become you die--
Whose true creature you are you never learn. 

The Man

Soon there will be no room left for your licentious game.

The Faun

Soon you will call inside what outside you malign.

The Man

You poisonous fiend with crooked mouth
In spite of your misshapenness you are too close
To us • otherwise you would get to know my weapon ..

The Faun

The beast knows no shame the man no thanks.
With all the arts you still never learn 
What you most need .. but we still serve.
So hear just this: wiping us out, you erase yourselves.
Where our tufts grow alone comes milk
Where our hooves kick not there grows no straw.
If your spirit alone had been at work: if long ago
Your beat had been muffled with all you had done
Your wood had withered and your crops gone to seed ..
Only by magic does life stay awake.

Found Poetry

So the other day I passed by Montreal's best bookstore, Le Port de Tête, and picked up a used copy of Tristan Tzara's 1931 epic poem, L'homme approximatif. When I got it home, I noticed there was a slip of paper inserted between pages 52 and 53, and on it there was an anonymous poem, typed out and printed in that mimeographic purple ink I recall from childhood:

Whom do I know?

Scattered nobodies.

Whom do I love?

Your mother.

What don't I have?

A brother.

And where did he go?

We don't know.

What follows the night?

Light.

And how should I write? 

(Slight):

As smooth as the silk of the worms of Cathay,

and as rhythmic as Edna St. Vincent Millay. 

I Googled various lines of the poem, and nothing came up. It's evidently just some amateur trifle, yet something about it sticks with me, even more than anything I've found so far in Tzara's own poem. What was it doing there, between those pages? Why was it mimeographed decades ago? Who is the questioner? Who the respondent? Wby should one write in the recommended way? I would be delighted if, miraculously, the person with the answers were to step forward.  

Y tú, bello Walt Whitman...

From Federico García Lorca's 'Ode to Walt Whitman' (1930).

Y tú, bello Walt Whitman, duerme a orillas del Hudson
con la barba hacia el polo y las manos abiertas.
Arcilla blanda o nieve, tu lengua está llamando
camaradas que velen tu gacela sin cuerpo.
Duerme, no queda nada.
Una danza de muros agita las praderas
y América se anega de máquinas y llanto.
Quiero que el aire fuerte de la noche más honda
quite flores y letras del arco donde duermes
y un niño negro anuncie a los blancos del oro
la llegada del reino de la espiga.

*

And you, beautiful Walt Whitman, sleep on the banks of the Hudson
with your beard toward the pole and with open hands.
In bland clay or in snow, your tongue cries out for
comrades to watch over your gazelle without a body.
Sleep, nothing remains.
A dance of walls agitates the prairies
and America drowns in machines and lamentation.
I want the strong air of the most profound night
to remove the flowers and letters from the arc where you sleep
and a black boy to announce to the whites with their gold
the coming of the reign of corn.

Stefan George, "The Man and the Faun"

From Das neue Reich (1928). For the German, click 'keep reading' below.

The Man

A waterfall blocks the narrow creekbed--
Who now extends a hairy leg
From this cliff's dribblingly fat moss?
A horn peeks from a bushy ruffled head . .
For as long as I have hunted in the mountain forest
I have never met his likes… Be still
Your path has shifted • conceal nothing
Through a clear wave a goat's foot shows.

The Faun

Neither you nor I will be happy that you found me.

The Man

I knew indeed of your sort of people.
From tales of old -- but not that today
Such a needlessly ugly monster still lives.

The Faun

If you drive off the last of my kind
You will look in vain for noble creatures
You will have nothing but rodents and worms
And when you pierce into the deepest thicket
The spring you need most will be dry.

The Man

So far beneath me you deign to teach? Our spirit
Has brought down hydra giant dragons
Has cleared barren high forest
Where bogs stood fields of corn now heave
In the juicy green our tame cattle graze
And there is still enough forest for hart and doe--
We raised the treasures from sea and ground
Stones called out our victories to the heavens…
What do you want you leftover of cruel wilderness?
The light the order follow our trace.

The Faun

You are only a man .. where your wisdom ends
Ours begins • you see the edge only
Where you have been punished for crossing it
When your grain ripens your cattle flourish
The holy trees give oil and grapes
You imagine this comes only from your cunning
The earths that breath in the dull primordial night
Never perish • they are always disposed
They dissolve when a member escapes.
For a good while your reign goes well •
Now hurry back! you have seen the Faun.
You do not know your worst: if your sense
Which can do much is caught in the clouds
The bond has been broken with beast and clod--
Disgust and desire movement and such
And dust and sunbeam and dying and growing
Can be comprehended in the course of things no more.

The Man

Who told you so? This is the concern of the gods.

The Faun

We speak not of them yet in your madness
You believe that they themselves help you. Unmediated
Have they never approached you. You become you die--
Whose true creature you are you never learn.

The Man

Soon there will be no room left for your licentious game.

The Faun

Soon you will call inside what outside you malign.

The Man

You poisonous fiend with crooked mouth
In spite of your misshapenness you are too close
To us • otherwise you would get to know my weapon ..

The Faun

The beast knows no shame the man no thanks.
With all the arts you still never learn
What you most need .. but we still serve.
So hear just this: wiping us out, you erase yourselves.
Where our tufts grow alone comes milk
Where our hooves kick not there grows no straw.
If your spirit alone had been at work: if long ago
Your beat had been muffled with all you had done
Your wood had withered and your crops gone to seed ..
Only by magic does life stay awake.

*

Stefan George, "The Path of God Lies for us Open"

From Der Stern des Bundes (1913)

*

Gottes pfad ist uns geweitet

Gottes land ist uns bestimmt

Gottes krieg ist uns entzündet

Gottes kranz ist uns erkannt.

Gottes ruh in unsren herzen

Gottes kraft in unsrer brust

Gottes zorn auf unsren stirnen

Gottes brunst auf unsrem mund.

Gottes band hat uns umschlossen

Gottes blitz hat uns durchglüht

Gottes heil ist uns ergossen

Gottes glück ist uns erblüht.

 *

The path of god lies for us open

The land of god is meant for us

The war of god unleashed upon us

The wreath of god is known to us.

The peace of god within our hearts

The might of god upon our breast

The wrath of god upon our shoulders

The heat of god upon our mouth.

The band of god has us encircled

The beam of god has shot through us

The hail of god is poured into us

The joy of god now blooms for us. 

Stefan George, Translation

From Das Buch der hängenden Gärten, 1895.

*

Streng ist uns das glück und spröde ·

Was vermocht ein kurzer kuss?

Eines regentropfens guss

Auf gesengter bleicher öde

Die ihn ungenossen schlingt ·

Neue labung missen muss

Und vor neuen gluten springt.

 *

Our happiness is stern and hard ·

What does a fleeting kiss enchain?

The gushing of a drop of rain

Upon the ground, an ashen shard,

Soaks it up, still unquenched ·

Leaving dry its empty veins

Until new fervors do it drench.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

The First Elegy

Who then, if I cried out, would hear me from the order
of angels? and supposing one of them took
a sudden interest in me: I should wither from his
more powerful being. For the beautiful is nothing

but terror's beginning, which we yet bear unbowed,
and we marvel at it, as it calmly disdains

to disturb us. Every angel is terrible.
And so I restrain myself and swallow down the siren call
of dark convulsion. O whom then are

we able to need? Neither angels, nor men, 

and the clever beasts note this well, 

that we are not so solidly at home
in the world as construed. There remains to us,

perhaps, a tree on the hillside that we see again
daily; there remain to us yesterday's streets, and

the loyalty, which is forgiven, to a habit
t
hat suited us well, and thus stayed, and did not go.
O and the night, the night, when the wind, full of world,
wears down our faces--, for whom would she not remain, desired,

gently disappointing, she who lies painfully in store for

the solitary heart? Is she softer on those who love?
Oh, they only hide with one another in their fate.
Do you still not know it? Throw from your arms
into space the emptiness that we breath; perhaps
the birds feel the expanded air with an inward flight.

Yes, the springtimes well needed you. Many a star
expected you to sprint. A wave
raised itself up in the past, or,
so that you should drop by the open window,
a violin gave itself up. All this was the task.
But did you manage it? Were you not always
scattered in expectation, as a beloved heralded
it all to you? (Where will you hide her,
so that these great strange thoughts of yours
should come in and out, and stay more often the night?)
If you must sing of lovers, still is their
famed feeling by far not immortal enough.
You almost envy these abandoned ones, whom you
found so much more loving than those who were appeased.
Always begin anew the acclaim that is never to be attained;
think: the hero maintains himself, even the downfall
was for him only a pretext for being: his final birth.
But exhausted nature takes the lovers back
into her, as if the strength to carry this off
could not come twice. Have you thought enough
then of Gaspara Stampa, that any girl passed up
by her beloved, on the aggravated example
of these lovers, feels: that I might be like her?
Should these oldest pains not at last become
more fruitful to us? Is it not time that we lovingly
free ourselves from the beloved, and tremblingly withstand,
as the arrow withstands the string, in order in launching
to be more than itself? For remaining is nowhere.

Voices, voices. Hear, my heart, as else only
saints have heard: that they raised the great
call from the ground; but they knelt
again, impossible, and paid it no mind.
Thus did they listen. Not that you would bear
the voice of God, not by far. But listen to the blowing,
the uninterrupted news that is made up of silence.
It is rustling now, from those young dead ones, to you.
Wherever you entered, did their fate not calmly
address you in the churches of Rome and Naples?
Or an inscription was loftily borne to you,
as of late that tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.
What do they want of me? Gently shall I
shrug off the semblance of injustice that the pure
motion of their spirits sometimes hinders a little.

It is indeed peculiar to inhabit the earth no longer,
not to exercise skills barely learned, nor to give
to roses, and to other things that promise themselves,
the significance of a human future;
not to be what one was in infinitely
anxious hands, and to leave behind
even one's own name like a broken toy.
Peculiar, to no longer wish wishes. Peculiar,
to see everything fluttering that hung
so loosely in space. And being dead is laborious
and full of catching up, so that one gradually senses
a bit of eternity. -- But all of the living make
this mistake, that they distinguish too sharply.
The angels (it is said) would often not know, whether
they were moving among the living or the dead.
The eternal current always pulls all the ages
along with it through both domains,
and drowns them out in both.

In the end they need us no longer, the early departed,
one is gently weaned of the earthly, as one meekly
grows away from the mother's breast. But we who need
such large secrets, for whom blissful progress
so often springs from mourning--: could we be without them?
The story is in vain, that once in the lament for
Lino's daring first music, barren torpor crept in;
that first in the stunned space, into which an almost divine youth
suddenly entered forever, did the emptiness shift into that
vibration, that now thrills us and comforts and helps.

Heinrich Heine, from the Buch der Lieder (1827)

Die Heimkehr

LXXII

Und bist du erst mein ehlich Weib,
Dann bist du zu beneiden,
Dann lebst du in lauter Zeitvertreib,
In lauter Pläsier und Freuden.

Und wenn du schiltst und wenn du tobst,
Ich werd es geduldig leiden;
Doch wenn du meine Verse nicht lobst,
Laß ich mich von dir scheiden.

*

If you shall be my faithful wife
Then fortune on you shines.
You'll live a gay and carefree life
Of leisurely pastimes.

And if you scold and if you rave
I'll abide it all with pleasure.
But if my poems you will not praise
Then let us split forever.

A Few More Notes on Poetry: Hallfred's Saga and Wallace Stevens

I came late to the realization that poetry is what matters most. I lived fully immersed in the era so well picked out by Walter Benjamin, das prosaische Zeitalter, and so I filled up my free time with novels: sentence after descriptive sentence, telling a story that read like a movie.

Nowadays, however, it's either primary or secondary literature either more or less connected with what in my line of work is called the 'AOS'; or it is poetry.

I would like to mention two very different poets I have been reading recently. The first of them is anonymous.

Now let me begin by saying I would be the first to bemoan the Christianization of Scandinavia. Had it not happened so early on, we would have had indigeneous, European pagans, with pagan religion and pagan customs, to marvel at and to study. What we have instead are a few properly pagan rune stones, but mostly just descriptions of the pagan era from the high period of medieval Scandinavian literature, which occurred already a couple of centuries after the mass conversion.

However, I have to admit that this renunciation of Odinism from the 10th-century Hallfred's Saga is one of the most beautiful accounts of conversion I have come across:

It's the creed of the sovereign
of Sogn, to ban sacrifices.
We must renounce many
a long-held decree of Norns.
All mankind casts Odin's words
to the winds. Now I am forced
to foresake Freyja's kin
and pray to Christ.

*

The other poet I wanted to mention is Wallace Stevens. I had recently been mentioning to people whose tastes I respect (more or less) that I was enjoying going back to T. S. Eliot after many years, in particular to The Waste Land, which seems to me to be tinged with the occult in just the way modernist poetry ought to be: enriched by the Tarot and by chants of shanti in the same way that Rilke's poetry is enriched by angels. Enriched without existential commitment.  

But whenever I mentioned Eliot, I would hear in response something like: I'm more of a Wallace Stevens man myself. (As if we were talking about the Yankees and the Mets!) I had never read Wallace Stevens, and I didn't understand why he and Eliot were being juxtaposed in this way. Now I have read Stevens, and I still don't understand.

But anyway, for the most part I remain more of an Eliot man. Stevens is modern, but he is modern not so much like Bauhaus as like the Hartford Indemnity Co., where he spent his entire career. I almost feel like I could have guessed his place of employment, without having read anything of his biography, simply from the quality of the verses. There are, in particular, all the trips to Florida, which was not as awful in the early 20th century as it is now; but which was, if I may put it this way, already devoid of any qualities that might have set the poetic imaginations of Eliot, Auden, or Pound afire. Perhaps Ogden Nash could have come up with a clever rhyme about alligators.

Most of the time, his poems, like insurance forms, fail to hook me. There are a few exceptions, however, where, as if in spite of himself, an image floats up from the midst of a sea of un-followable words and strikes me, hard. This, for example, from "The Man with the Blue Guitar" of 1937:

Is the spot on the floor, there, wine or blood
And whichever it may be, is it mine?

Maybe it's the rhyme scheme manqué, the fact that if 'wine' and 'blood' had been reversed we would have had a pleasing, Nash-worthy rhyme. Or maybe it's that the question hits so close to home.

Stevens's grasp of French is so-so. He likes puerile onomatopoeia ('tum-ti tum-tum', and so on), and for some reason strongly prefers the sun to the moon. Much of the poetry is about poetry, and often what he takes poetry to be for remains, after reading, strange to me.

There is one striking exception: 'Men Made Out of Words', of whose year of composition I am uncertain:

What should we be without the sexual myth,
The human revery or poem of death?

Castratos of moon-mash--Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human

Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

This poem seem to explain how an insurance salesman in Hartford, Connecticut, who likes nothing more than his vacations in Florida, might nonetheless be a poet; and at the same time how I, in spite of the fact that nothing really happens in my life anymore, that in an important sense all experiences have been played out already, and from this point on it all really just amounts to management-- how I, in such a condition, could nonetheless come to believe that poetry is what matters most.

--

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T. S. Eliot: Philosophy and Genre

There was in the early 20th century a now largely forgotten American-English philosopher named T. S. Eliot. He published some scholarly articles, notably one in The Monist of 1916 on "The Development of Leibniz's Monadism." In general however he preferred to return to an older form of philosophical writing, also preferred of Parmenides, Lucretius, and Henry More: namely poetry. 

I would like to cite at length the final segment of Eliot's "The Dry Salvages" of 1940. It sums up perfectly my own views of religious belief, of the limits of human knowledge, and of our prospects for salvation, but that's not why I am citing it. I am citing it because I would like to then go on to make a point about the relationship between disciplines or domains of inquiry on the one hand, and the genres in which they are written on the other. So read it now. But really read it.

To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.
Here the impossible union
Of spheres of existence is actual,
Here the past and future
Are conquered, and reconciled,
Where action were otherwise movement
Of that which is only moved
And has in it no source of movement—
Driven by daemonic, chthonic
Powers. And right action is freedom
From past and future also.
For most of us, this is the aim
Never here to be realised;
Who are only undefeated
Because we have gone on trying;
We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil.

In the 14th-century Kerala School of mathematics in Southern India, mathematical proofs were, like "The Dry Salvages," written in verse. This delayed for some time the West's ability to discern within these lines of verse many discoveries that the West would take several centuries more to happen upon on their own using a more or less Euclidean style (dare I say 'style' instead of 'method'?).

Here, in Eliot, we are dealing not with mathematics, but with speculative metaphysics of the sort that also interested Leibniz (alongside mathematics): the relationship between the eternal and the temporal, the nature of corporeality, the prospects of surviving the corruption of the body, and so on. As I often say, if this is not philosophy, I don't know what is, and one hopes that the future's historians of philosophy will, in their surveys of the early 20th century, not consider only Carnap, Heidegger, and the rest of the usual canon of authors writing in the prevailing genre of that (but by no means of every) historical period, but instead will enrich their picture of the era by reading at least a few select poets.  The ones who contributed in parallel to philosophy's prevailing genre might yield particular insight, like Henry More in his day, who described the promise and limitations of 17th-century corpuscularianism both in poems such as the Democritus Platonissans as well as in straightforward treatises such as The Immortality of the Soul. 

Read, philosopher, I mean to say, T. S. Eliot, not as a curious reader who has finished his or her work for the day, but as a philosopher.

Defective Verse

I wonder to what extent the 19th-century philological treatment of the texts that would be used to build up national literary canons, together with the difficulty of dealing with damaged, destroyed, and partially absent sources, might have played a role in the rise in the 20th century of free verse, imagism, and other schools that strongly rejected the formal apparatus that had always been thought to be an ineliminable feature of poetics.

Reading Egil's Saga, composed in Iceland around 1240 CE, I am finding that the verses that capture my imagination most are the ones marked with the marginal note: defective. Take this one for example:

*

And...

...the pillar,

glorifier

of my deeds,

which...

...

...the scourge

of Halfdan's line.

*

Or here is one that begins to express a sentiment whose outcome is then lost to time:

*

I often feel

when the ruler of wealth...

....

*

The complete verses are beautiful too, untranslatable, and thus endowed with an extra layer of strangeness when translated. But it is defectiveness, or the points at which philology fails, that seems to yield, unintentionally, a distinctly modern aesthetic effect. I'm sure someone, probably French, has written about the aesthetics of defectiveness; here I just wanted to mention that I've noticed it in some of the fragmentary parts of the Icelandic Sagas.

Rilke: A Translation

Judith's Return

Sleepers, black is the wetness still upon my feet, imprecise. Dew, you say.
O, that I am Judith, I am come from him, from the tent from the bed, his head trickling, thrice-drunk blood. Wine-drunk, drunk on incense, drunk on me -- and now arid as dew.
Low-held head above the morning grass; but I, above in my going, I erect.
Brain suddenly empty, images flowing out into the earth; but I am still pricked in the heart by the whole breadth of the night's deed.
Lover that I am.
Horrors drive all the pleasures in me together, all places are on me.
Heart, my famed heart, beat against the wind:
     as I go, as I go
and faster the voice in me, my voice, which will call a birdcall before the city of need.

*

Judith's Rückkehr

Schläfer, schwarz ist das Nass noch an meinen Füßen, ungenau. Tau sagen sie.
Ach, dass ich Judith bin, herkomme von ihm, aus dem Zelt aus dem Bett, austriefend sein Haupt, dreifach trunkenes Blut. Weintrunken, trunken vom Räucherwerk, trunken von mir - und jetzt nüchtern wie Tau.
Niedrig gehaltenes Haupt über dem Morgengras; ich aber oben auf meinem Gang, ich Erhobene.
Plötzlich leeres Gehirn, abfließende Bilder ins Erdreich; mir aber quillend ins Herz alle Breite der Nacht-Tat.
Liebende, die ich bin.
Schrecken trieben in mir alle Wonnen zusamm, an mir sind alle Stellen.
Herz, mein berühmtes Herz, schlag an den Gegenwind:
    wie ich geh, wie ich geh
und schneller die Stimme in mir, meine, die rufen wird, Vogelruf, vor der Not-Stadt.

--Rainer Maria Rilke, 1911

Notes on Anne Carson

The secret formula, soon no longer to be secret, of my intellectual formation, is that it  has for the most part consisted in a succession of remote tutelages under women a generation or so older than I, who work in no easily categorizable genre of scientific or literary or creative production, and whom I aspire, in certain ways, to be like. It is something like a unidirectional erotic distance-learning, a mixture of Plato's Symposium and the University of Phoenix. Here, the erotic, I should probably have to underline for you modern readers, is not some sexual pay-off, but an impulse, an aspiration-towards.

Anne Carson is perhaps foremost among these ideals. Here is what I like about her: she goes down into the language that goes down into the real predicament to which poetry is a response. Consider these lines from her 'Glass Essay' of the early 1990s:

I saw a high hill and on it a form shaped against hard air.

It could have been just a pole with some old cloth attached,

but as I came closer

I saw it was a human body

trying to stand against winds so terrible that the flesh was blowing off

the bones.

And there was no pain.

The wind

was cleansing the bones.

They stood forth silver and necessary.

It was not my body, not a woman's body, it was the body of us all.

It walked out of the light.

'Silver and necessary' made me think of walking through snow-covered meadows between my office and home, on moon-lit nights, and of how my bones are always there on these walks, and part of the very same composition. With this phrase alone she left me convinced me that I am myself a mediocre poet precisely to the extent that I had hitherto failed to notice that it is bones, and not ideas or sentiments, that reveal what a human life is like, or rather what is necessary to a human life, as well as the luminescent qualities of that necessary thing.

Carson goes down into language that goes down into being, but it never stops being, at the same time, a joke. This is most clear in her 'Book of Isaiah', which tells, more vividly than scripture itself, of the peculiar triangulation of God and man and woman, all with Carson's characteristically funny and enviable understanding of the insides of ancient languages:

Notice whenever God addresses Isaiah in a feminine singular verb

something dazzling is

about to happen.

Isaiah what do you know about women? asked God.

Down Isaiah's nostrils bounced woman words:

Blush. Stink. Wife. Fig. Sorceress--

God nodded.

This is no 'women's poet', Anne Carson. This is a poet who not only faces up to, but draws her very force from the accrued stereotypes and prototypes of millennia of violence, of men against men and of men against women (quite a bit less of the third possible form).

Carson understands that in order to descend into the language that descends into the predicament that necessitates poetry, one needs to descend into the body and its excretions. The culmination of God's peculiar and dysfunctional relationship with Isaiah comes when the latter is transformed (reduced) to the feminine state through the onset of lactation, a power that in the end will serve as a life-force that courses through all of nature. The comical travesty (in the proper sense of that word, that lies hidden in the way we speak of RuPaul and Divine) of a man condemned by God to sprout jugs, turns into a celebration of nature's own self-generativity:

Isaiah sank to a kneeling position.

New pain! said Isaiah.

New contract! said God.

Isaiah lifted his arms, milk poured out his breasts.

Isaiah watched the milk pour like strings.

It poured up the Branch and across history and down into people's lives and time.

The milk made Isaiah forget about righteousness.

As he fed the milk to small birds and animals Isaiah thought only about their little lips.

God meanwhile continued to think about male and female.

(Incidentally, I myself have written about a case described by the 16th-century physician Santorio Sanctorius, in the annals of early modern medicine, of a widower with an infant child who, by force of imagination, caused himself to lactate.)

Carson calls the collection I've been discussing Glass, Irony & God. I take it that the glass is the words like 'silver' and 'necessary' and 'bone', the words by which Carson descends by language into the predicament to which poetry is a response. The irony is the grasp of language, and the way she never lets you forget that as she descends into the silvery and necessary, she is always just playing with language, playing, that is, as a virtuoso performer, on the foundation of a rigorous mastery of the classical languages. (God seems to move between these two poles: something that has mostly to do with language, something ripe for a good linguistic joke or playful mixing of speech registers, even if tradition portrays Him as something of silvery necessity.)

The dependency of the classical themes of poetry upon the contingent features of language --a dependency that cannot but be generative of humor-- comes through most vividly in what I believe is my favorite piece by Carson, her so-called 'Drop't Sonnet'. The poem concerns the extinction of a special form for the second-person singular pronoun in English, and how this prevents her from refering to 'the streaming downspout of voodoo pine' that she had experienced in a love affair as --in relation to the lover-- thine. Languages are always changing, but a poet can't help but experience the present state of her language as impoverished, as in need of revitalization by an excavation of the past. No one of late has undertaken this excavatory task more rigorously than Carson.

November (2004)

So you think you've got a handle on the causes of the scandal
that has tainted half the roster of our guild?
And you think you know the reason why in leaf-removal season
no one weeps to see mass graves get chlorophyll'd?
And you think you've got a fix upon the timing of our dicks
all going limp as pickled tongue?
Well I've got a sinking feeling (though we're floating toward the ceiling)
that a dirge might be most seasonably sung.
By which I mean each autumn we go scraping at the bottom
of the barrel of the reasons left to live.
And to think! The very gall! Now again, as every fall,
the barrel has a stale little reason left to give.

Thursday Translations, #14

Two Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin

The Ages of Life

You, cities of Euphrates!
You, alleys of Palmyra!
You forests of columns in the plain of the desert,
What are you?
The fire stripped you
Of your crowns as you passed
Over the border of the breathing
By the smoke of the heavenly beings;
But now I sit under clouds, in which
Each thing has its quietude, under
Well-ordered oaks on the meadow
Of deer, and strange to me
And dead to me seem
The spirits of the blessed.

*

Lebensalter

Ihr Städte des Euphraths!
Ihr Gassen von Palmyra!
Ihr Säulenwalder in der Ebne der Wüste,
Was seid ihr?
Euch hat die Kronen,
Dieweil ihr über die Gränze
Der Othmenden seid gegangen,
Von Himmlischen der Rauchdampf und
Hinweg das Feuer genommen;
Jetzt aber siz ich unter Wolken, darin
Ein jedes eine Ruh hat eigen, unter
Wohleingerichteten Eichen, auf
Der Haide des Rehs, und fremd
Erscheinen und gestorben mir
Der Seeligen Geister.

**

A Fragment of a Hymn

What is God? unknown, and yet
Is the face of heaven full
Of signs of him. Lightning in fact
Is the wrath of a god. The more one is
Invisible,       the more one conforms to what one is not. But thunder
Is the glory of God. The love of immortality,
As ours, is likewise the property
Of a god.

*

Was ist Gott? unbekannt, dennoch
Voll Eigenschaften ist das Angesicht
Des Himmels von ihm. Die Blize nemlich
Der Zorn sind eines Gottes. Jemehr ist eins
Unsichtbar,     schiket es sich in Fremdes. Aber der Donner
Der Ruhm ist Gottes. Die Liebe zur Unsterblichkeit
Das Eigentum auch, wie das unsere,
Ist eines Gottes.

From the Archives

Emmer, Einkorn, and Spelt

Crex crex, crake. Crex still more.
The quern has no corn in it.
Ergo the ergot · ergo the spore.
Siskin stole a radish ·
Aurochs dropped a perfect pat ·
Boar bled and stank and was, well, fat ·
Bear saw to the law of the cycle of gore.
Crex crex, crake. I'm hungry too,
and eating is a form of war.
But I'll have my store, and I'll have my pelt.
Stay 'round, and peck, and you will be dealt
a crake's share of emmer
and einkorn and spelt.

(Anatolia, April, 2003)

Translation

Rainer-Maria Rilke, from the Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)

A god could do it. But how, tell me, could
a man follow him through a narrow lyre?
His sense is discord. At the crossing of two
hearts' paths stands no temple for Apollo.

Song, as you teach it, is not desire,
nor the announcement of something finally attained.
Song is existence. For God it is easy.
But when are we? And when will he turn

the earth and the stars toward our being?
It is not this that you love, young one, even if
voice forces open your mouth, -- learn

to forget that you are singing yourself empty. This shall pass.
In truth singing is just another breath.
A breath for nothing. A sighing in God. A wind.

*

Ein Gott vermags. Wie aber, sag mir, soll
ein Mann ihm folgen durch die schmale Leier ?
Sein Sinn ist Zwiespalt. An der Kreuzung zweier
Herzwege steht kein Tempel für Apoll.

Gesang wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr,
nicht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes;
Gesang ist Dasein. Für den Gott ein Leichtes.
Wann aber sind wir ? Und wann wendet er

an unser Sein die Erde und die Sterne ?
Dies ists nicht, Jüngling, daß du liebst, wenn auch
die Stimme dann den Mund dir aufstößt, - lerne

vergessen, daß du aufsangst. Das verrinnt.
In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch.
Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind.

Thursday Translation, #8

Stefan George, from Der Stern des Bundes (1914)

Is this the lad of ancient lore
Who came from thence with flatterer's eyes
With rosy soft virgin's members
With sumptuous tissues enticing?
His trunk was slim and taut. He grasps ·
He tempts no more · has no jewels.
Shines with grit and lust for battle
His look . . his kiss is short and burning.
His seed now shot from the holy shaft
He pushes into pain and danger.

*

Ist dies der knabe längster sage
Der seither kam mit schmeichler-augen
Mit rosig weichen mädchengliedern
Mit üppigen binden im gelock?
Sein leib ward schlank und straff. Er greift ·
Er lockt nicht mehr · ist ohne schmuck.
Von mut und lust des kampfes leuchtet
Sein blick . . sein kuss ist kurz und brennend.
Hat er besämt aus heiligem schoosse
Drängt er in mühe und gefahr.