"Herm" by Keith Harvey

This is a photograph of a herm as it finally developed in Greece.

A herm as we discussed in several postings on Hermes was a marker. Originally, it was a pile of rocks, sometimes piled into a phallic shape, that marked a direction or a distance. As time passed, the Greeks refined and concretized the image to include the likeness of the god Hermes with a phallus scuplted into the base. The herm dramatically illustrates the mythic process. The inner psychological image and characteristics of the travelling god was thrown or projected onto the stone markers until an image, shared and discussed by the countless travelers passing by, concretized. Once concretized the image acted pictorially on the conscious mind of all future travellers, thereby adding to the inventory of stories and images associated with Hermes.

In a recent addition to my cycle of poems on Adam and Eve, the herm makes an appearance.



The Herm

Covered in crow feathers,
he danced on one foot
shaking his dried gourd,
singing a love song
until she disappeared
behind the yellow horizon.
He tired,
sank onto salt grass,
and listened to the cicadas’
vibrations rise and fall
like frothy waves.
On the second day,
he watched
a murder of crows,
so socially astute
that he felt an ache
like hunger,
circle and gambol
in the western sky.
On the third day,
he gathered stones
into a motley heap
and wove feathers
within the crevices
like fingers interlaced.
He inserted a twig,
its green point aiming
at his feathered back,
as he jiggled west,
chanting softly,
punching each step
with a comic slap.
On the fourth day,
she found the stones
and grunted
as she shifted the newborn
to her left hip.
As her magic,
she deposited
a sparrow’s wing
and a wasp’s nest,
before following
his crow feet prints
on red sand.

"Waiting" by Keith Harvey

Waiting

At dawn she wiggled from their nest of pine needles
and laurel leaves.
When he tried to rise,
she pushed him down
and shook her head.
She staggered from the woods,
her legs swollen and her feet
round like breadfruit,
holding her distended belly,
teetering with every step.
He hid his head among the leaves,
ashamed that she would suffer so.
He watched the morning light
strike her shoulders,
dabbing a halo of light around her dark head,
her hair cascading down her naked back.
She entered the bulrushes,
that marked the river,
and then disappeared.
He imagined her wading across the river,
climbing the red clay bank
onto the yellow grass of the savannah,
where the sun boils and the red lions hunt.
Once she was gone, he lay flat,
listening to the metallic rattle of the cicadas,
their noise roiling through the woods like waves
against pumice rocks on black sand.
He was now afraid.
To find solace,
he gathered crow feathers,
cracked a zebra’s femur,
smeared gelatinous marrow
over his pale skin,
and attached the feathers.
He painted his face black
with soot from last night’s fire
and tied a crow’s skull to his head
with a strand of his red hair.
He climbed a rock
and squatted.
Turning toward the south,
he shook a dried gourd
and cawed into the dry air.

"Wolf" by Keith Harvey

Wolf

Near a stone house,
in a shadowed
wood,
the wolf flees.

Hounds’ howl
and hunters’ horns
awaken the boy
within.

Inspired
he sings
in a nest of sheets
so soft and sweet
that the wolf,
curious,
stops
and mounts
the porch
to peer
through glass.

Startled
by his double,
his snout snaps
against the pane.

"Afterbirth" by Keith Harvey

Afterbirth

She braced herself
against the bark
of the baobab
and screamed,
her cries startling the hyenas
who chased their stubbed tails
around and around
until dust floated
over the sweet grass
of the savannah
and yellowed the child,
who fell toward earth
in a rush of blood and brine.
Here was her revenge,
her premeditated step
toward reclamation
of the Garden.
She gazed
upon the termite’s tower
that defiantly stood
against the blueness
of the sky
and knew
that this mound
of industry
would be his symbol.
She laughed
once he was free,
lying on the earth,
his uncircumcised member
pointing toward the stars
parallel to the termite’s spire,
because creators
often laugh
after creation,
just as He laughed,
when he pried her
from her man’s
red clay chest.

"The Cobra" by Keith Harvey

The Cobra

She sat,
her legs spread,
in the shadow
of a baobab tree
and rubbed her belly,
as the baby kicked
to the rhythm
of the cicada,
their sounds
cascading
through the heat
like shifting shells
in a dried gourd.
She focused
on a termite mound
rising from the savannah
to divert her pain.
Ants scoured the grass
around her feet.
She closed her eyes
and entered
the other world,
the home of the cobra,
who waited
and upon her entrance
rose up,
a temple
of scales,
and spread its hood;
its forked tongue
flicked
and stung her nose.
She recoiled
and cursed
as her water broke
and soaked the sand.

"Crow and Crane" by Keith Harvey

Crow and Crane

As she lay
on her side
spent
on ferns
full of him
she watched a crane
wade
through the shallows
at the river’s edge
snap a frog in two
with its beak
and swallow
with a forward thrust.
She closed her eyes
and saw crows
fly in parallel
a mating ritual,
a preamble
to the crane’s feast,
and she praised the crows
for their instruction
and worshipped
the whiteness
of the crane’s wing.

Rodin and Eve

I read the King James version of the Bible. That is is the only version I have ever read and it is frankly the only version I am interested in reading. I like the language and the images, the metaphors and the tropes. So when I started my cycle on Adam and Eve I turned to the Bible that I have carried since I was twelve years old to review the chronology of the story.

In the latest poem in my cycle, Eve becomes pregnant. The Biblical chronology is that first they are expelled from the Garden and then in Genesis 4:1: Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, 'With the help of the Lord I have brought forth a man.'

In my version Eve watches the animals and wonders why they are alone. When Adam is asleep, she initiates their mating and her plan to increase their numbers. However, later, when she is afraid she praises the Lord for her pregnancy, hoping that he will protect her.

In imagining Eve's pregnancy I studied several artists's rendition of the event and I found Rodin's unfinished sculpture, entitled Eve, the most interesting. I was happy to learn through reading Rilke that the model for Eve was pregnant at the time.

Rodin confided to Dujardin-Beaumetz: Without knowing why, I saw my model changing. I modified my contours, naively following the successive transformations of ever-amplifying forms. One day, I learned that she was pregnant; then I understood. The contours of the belly had hardly changed, but you can see the sincerity with which I copied nature in looking at the muscles of the loins and sides. It certainly hadn't occurred to me to take a pregnant woman as a model for Eve; an accident - happy for me - gave her to me and it aided the character of the figure singularly. But soon, becoming more sensitive, my model found the studio too cold; she came less frequently, then not at all. That is why my Eve is unfinished(H. Dujardin-Beaumetz, Entretiens avec Rodin, 1913)

Door Images in Paul Celan's "Grabschrift für François"

I heard an interview the other day with the poet Billy Collins, who said that the theme of all poetry is death. I am not sure that I believe that but in regard to Paul Celan it seems to be true. Recently, I discovered a new image, related to death, that possessed a certain resonance for me. It is the image of two worlds, two places, two doors, and a space in between. I noticed the image first in Grabschrift für François, a poem written after the death of his first son. However, there is an echo or a trace of the theme in a letter written to his wife Gisèle on January 7, 1952, almost two years before the death of François.

He begins the letter by saying, Maïa, mon amour, je voudrais savoir te dire combien je désire que cela reste, nous reste, nous reste toujours/ Maïa, my Love, I want you to know how much I desire that this remains, we remain, we remain always. As I read this I have the impression that he is afraid that the present moment, the moment in which they are in love and together, may pass. He continues with the image of doors slamming behind him as he quits a world and moves toward her. The question is, of course, what world is he leaving: the world of the work camps, the world of the refugee, the world of solitude. He explains by saying, car elles sont nombreuses, les portes de ce monde fait de malentendus, de fausses clartés, de bafouages [sic]/ because they are numerous, the doors of this world made of misunderstandings, false expressions, and nonsense.

In the first sentence of the poem Grabschrift für François, he writes that the two doors of the world stand open, opened by “you,” his son, in the “Zwienacht,” the “two night.” Here the dichotomy between life on the one hand and death on the other is emphasized, opening up a space, a space of existence for the “living,” the survivors, who hear the two doors slam (hit) and slam (hit). In the second sentence he says that “we hear them slam (hit)(schlagen) and slam (hit)(schlagen) and we carry the uncertain, and we carry the green in your always.”

The notes to the letter, composed by Celan’s son, Eric, state that the letter was written while his father was upset at the accusations of Yvan Goll’s wife that Celan had plagiarized certain poems. It is interesting to note that during times of extreme emotional distress that the image of the doors between worlds emerges in his conscious mind.

Crow as Image

As I began working on my cycle of poems about Adam and Eve the crow appeared. His appearance was not benign. In fact, the power of the image was so strong that I felt the crow taking over. It was also at this time that I discovered Ted Hughes' collection of poems entitled Crow, an event that I considered synchronistic in nature and effect. As I read through this collection, I will be discussing the poems.

The crow has always been important to me and for many years I thought of the crow as my totem. In alchemical terms, the crow is associated with the nigredo, the first stage of the great work that leads to the philosopher’s stone. The nigredo is black in color and symbolizes “putrefaction.” The Hermitis Trismegisti Tractatus Aureus describes the initial stage of death and dissolution, the preamble to the great work, as follows: “the First is the Corvus, the Crow or the Raven, which from its blackness is said to be the beginning of the Art.” In the first stage, “the old body of the metal or matter for the Stone is dissolved and putrefied into the first matter of creation, the prima material, so that it may be regenerated and cast into a new form.” Lyndy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, Cambridge University Press 1998.

Additionally, the crow in Amerindian mythology is sometimes a trickster, a demiurge or a god; in oriental mythology the crow stands for the yin, the feminine; in Norse mythology the crow is guide and companion of Odin; and in the Old Testament, Noah sends out the crow as scout before sending the dove.

Even our old friend Hermes is associated with the crow because it is the crow who reports to Apollo Hermes' theft of the cattle. See earlier posts on Hermes and Apollo.

The crows appear in my latest Adam and Eve poem-"The Plan."

The Plan

She was sore,
rubbed raw by pumice stone,
and pink from red water.
Crow feathers floated down stream
toward a blacker sea.
He lay beside her,
inert, unaware of her mission,
his mouth open,
snoring in the shade of the fir tree.
Yellow butterflies left pollen traces
on his ruddy brow
and ants crawled across his feet.
She compared the red lion
under the baobab tree
servicing his six females
with him
and judged him puny,
with only one mate.
As he slept, she hatched her plan
to make him powerful and rich.
She lowered herself onto him,
suspecting this was the way,
after watching the bison,
the monkeys,
and the eels mate,
after seeing the crows locked together
free fall through the white clouds,
and after listening to the angels gossip.
They fit;
she rocked like the limbs of the fir
swaying in the southerly wind
until he popped
like an oyster
in her salty mouth.

"Schadenfreude" by Keith Harvey

Starting in 1944, the B-29 Superfortress was used in the Pacific Theater. The most famous B-29 was the Enola Gray, which dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

Schadenfreude

Bottle flies buzz in September.
Bumblebees wallow in yellow flowers.

At the sound of the siren,
the matron orders,
you must slide from your seat,
shelter yourself beneath your desk,
plant your head between your knees,
and thread your hands over your neck.

Anna crouches
beneath her desk
and I see her white panties.

On the way home
butterflies dance from rose blooms,
hummingbirds drink from honeysuckle,
and mockingbirds trill in the oak trees.

We play in Anna’s shelter.
We lay on cool concrete
and imagine an after-world,
as mice scurry
behind cartons
of surplus K-Rations.
Our sweaty hands
reach for darkness.

At home I lie on my bed.
B-29s hang from the ceiling,
pieces of a half constructed B-24
cover my desk.
I hear the president on television
and I dream of the world after
with Anna and the mice
in the gray coolness
of the shelter
where our hands touch
the shadows.

Pearl Fichman, Paul Celan and reading Rilke

Recently, I discovered Pearl Fichman's unpublished memoir of her life in Czernowitz, entitled Before Memories Fade.

http://www.ibiblio.org/yiddish/Places/Czernowitz/Fichman/

I found it an interesting and touching story and I commend it to anyone intrested in knowing what Paul Celan's world was like before and during World War II. Further, Ms Fichman sheds a great deal of light on what happened to Celan's family and the members of their community when the Germans arrived.

There is also a charming vignette, describing Jewish teenagers on an outing, listening to Celan, then Paul Antschel, reading Rilke. She writes: We sometimes went on long hikes, to the woods around Czernovitz, a day’s outing. Everyone carried a knapsack on the back, wore shoes with heavy soles and white, knee-high cotton socks. The girls wore a "dirndl" which consisted of a white blouse, a flowered skirt and a little apron, adorned with lace. It was the way the Tyrolians dressed, an old Austrian custom. Sometimes, we would sit in a meadow and one or another would read aloud. Paul Antschel, who later changed his name to Celan, loved to read to the group poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, in German, of course. Sometimes we’d read aloud H. Heine poems and sometimes we’d sing.

"Thaw" by Keith Harvey

Thaw

I squat on clay, fishing.
Long hair bison graze on the opposite shore,
while red lions roar in the savannah.
Vultures circle on whispered warmth.
She approaches, crow feathers falling from her skin,
her face painted black with soot,
a crow’s skull balanced on her head.
I am hot and these feathers stink, she says.
She sinks into the red water and scraps black feathers
from her skin with a pumice rock.
She emerges pink and clean
and lays on fragrant ferns
beneath the fir trees.
I wade into the river and wash.
Winter is over;
the bushes droop with berries,
their cinnabar juice stains my lips,
their thorns tear my skin,
as bees covered with pollen
yellow the sky
with their hum.

"The Crow People" by Keith Harvey

The Crow People

The crows were the last to leave.
Even the snow leopard fled
when the snow turned blue
and the river shimmered
and sparkled like diamonds.
We huddled in our cave and debated
whether we too should follow the crows.
It was that night that we became the crow people.
We covered ourselves with feathers
And painted our faces black with soot.
We moved south following the droppings
of the long horned kine.
We cawed in the frosty mornings
and huddled in the branches of a fir tree
at night.

"Winter Plus One" by Keith Harvey

Winter Plus One


After the first smothering snow,
I swore it would not be colder.
She shrugged her shoulders
and shuddered beneath the leaves,
as I stoked the starving fire.
I was wrong;
it did get colder.
Ice blued
and scrapped the soil
like flint
scratches fat
from a goat’s skin
straining the earth
with a frigid fist
pushing the long horned kine
south with the crows.

Talking Drum in Paul Celan's "Sand from the Urns"

Before we move on to the fourth line, I want to concentrate on the image in the second and third line. A headless minstrel, turning blue, beats a drum made of moss and pubic hair. This is a vivid and precise image of a surrealistic phenomenon. In other words, it is exactly what a surrealist image should be. The minstrel is both a musician and an artist, just as a poet is both a singer and a painter of verbal imagery. As a minstrel, Celan is saying that he is servant or a performer in the service of someone else, someone in charge, someone superior. In this case, this someone is the unidentified “you,” a “you, who through the minstrel’s performance, grows through the performance. The painting or drawing within the poem occurs in the sand, the same sand that fills the urns. So through the painting in the sand the urns are filled and the “you” is nourished. More precisely, the minstrel’s performance is a celebration of the memory of the “you” in the face of the forgetting and thereby a remembrance and an enhancement of the “you”.

Additionally, the minstrel plays the drum for the ”you.” The playing could be an entertainment but also a communication. Drums were used in Africa to communicate over long distances and were called the “talking drums.” Interesting enough is the fact that the “talking drums” were shaped like an hourglass, a container of sand that measured time. The communication here is between the forgetting and the remembering.

Unconscious Mind in Celan's "Sand from the Urns"

Mondvogel, Edgar Jené 1950.

In the third line of Sand from the Urns, the minstrel, without a head, performs for the “you.” Er schlägt dir die Trommel aus Moos und bitterem Schamhaar;/He beats the drum of moss and bitter pubic hair for you. In using “pubic hair,” Celan situates the performance lower than the head, the seat of intelligence. The drum comes from the genitals, a more primal, less conscious region and the moist earth. “Moss,” “pubic hair” and “mold” seem to be connected through appearance and texture and align themselves with a lower more complex conciousness. We could list the comparisons, including, inter alia, color, texture, dampness, accessibility to light, fecundity, and smell. However, I believe he selected these terms for all those associations and also to create a Gothic sense of mood, to find words that would convey an expression of dampness, decay, seclusion, and earthiness and lead us to a deeper, non-rational meaning, a meaning that feels fecund and fertile.

Support for this analysis arises from Celan’s prose work-Edgar Jené und der Traum vom Traume, which appeared in 1948 as introductory text to a book of paintings and lithographs produced by Jené. See earlier post on Jené. Celan, in discussing the paintings, states that “But my mouth, which lay higher than my eyes and was bolder because it often has spoken in my sleep, had run ahead of me and called back its ridicule to me: . . . ‘You would be better off getting a pair of eyes from the bottom of your soul and placing them on your breast: then you will find out what is happening here.’”(Quoted and translated by Jerry Glenn in his Paul Celan, Twayne Publishers, Inc. 1973) Celan, first, says that the words spoken in a dream, from the unconscious mind, are wiser than intellectual analysis and, second, he calls for direct access to the heart, to the feelings. In other words, rational discussion through the intellect will not produce truth. One must contact the source of the image, the unconscious mind, to find images strong enough to perform for the “you.” The head, the conscious mind, is useless because it will try to bring order to the chaos of images. The unconscious mind, with its fecund images, conveys a more profound image, richer in quality, and fraught with the elements of depth, i.e. soul.

"Flesh" by Keith Harvey

Flesh


Snow slides still against the cave
as night slips away.

I stare into whiteness,
waiting for the snow leopard’s wail.

A goat’s death rattle echoes
as the leopard’s jaws crush bone
and munch marrow.

I finger flint that I fasten
as claws.
I mimic the leopard
but fear its tricks.

I find the half eaten goat
and tear flesh from its bones.

I return to her
with my offering
and we eat flesh
as we ate fruit
and lick blood and grease
from our fingers.

Headless Minstrel in Paul Celan's "Sand from the Urns"

This is a photograph of the monument to the White Rose in Munich.

In the last post, we concentrated on the color blue in line two of Paul Celan’s Sand from the Urns. Now I want to turn to the image of the headless minstrel. The second line reads- Vor jedem der wehenden Tore blaut dein enthaupteter Spielmann./ Before each of the blowing gates your decapitated minstrel turns blue. The most obvious conclusion is that a headless minstrel is no minstrel at all. In other words the minstrel has been silenced and the discordant image is that of a headless body, turning blue, painting the face of the “you.” As I said in a previous post, the minstrel is turning blue through the cold, his sadness, or his death. Through the use of the word, minstrel, Celan alludes to both a medieval servant, who entertains the nobility, or an American form of entertainment where whites performed in black face. Here, the minstrel has been beheaded. Decapitation has a long history and has been prevalent throughout western cultures for thousands of years. Additionally, severed heads play an important role in myths and folktales. However, in this poem we are not dealing with a talking head; instead, we have a headless body that performs its art without the benefit of its head. This headless minstrel, I believe, is to be seen as a political figure. As is well known, Nazi justice was dispensed to political criminals via the guillotine, the same form of punishment used during the French Revolution. The most notorious Nazi use of the guillotine was the execution of Sophie Scholl in Munich. On February 22, 1943, Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans, and Christoph Probst, stood trial before Judge Roland Freisler in Munich. Upon sentencing, they were quickly transferred to Munich-Stadelheim prison and within mere hours of their conviction executed via guillotine. Sophie Scholl was a member of the White Rose and she was arrested for distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets. The pamphleteer was silenced through beheading but the pamphlet took on its own life. It was smuggled out of the country and then distributed throughout Germany by the allies. In this poem, the minstrel, the poet, is silenced but its art continues through the strength and discordance of the image. We will explore this theme more in our continuing explication.

Blue in Paul Celan's "Sand from The Urns"

"Im Irisgarten", 1968
Christian Schad

I am back from a quick business trip and I want to continue our discussion of Paul Celan’s “Sand from the Urn.” In the last post we began a discussion of Celan’s use of color. More specifically, we concentrated on his painting the metaphoric "house of forgetting," “mold green.” In the second line he continues his use of color and develops his conceit of the “house of forgetting” by stating that it has many gates and that the gates are “blowing.” Vor jedem der wehenden Tore/ Before each of the blowing gates. Grammatically, the first sentence is tied to the second by the use of the pronoun “each,” which refers to the gates of the house of forgetting.

In my reading of the poem I imagine a large house, a chateau perhaps, with its windows, doors, and gates open and a frigid wind blowing from within the containment of the edifice. I imagine the wind as frigid because of the remainder of the second line- Vor jedem der wehenden Tore blaut dein enthaupteter Spielmann./ Before each of the blowing gates your decapitated minstrel turns blue. The wind, through the gates, turns the minstrel-the poet-blue. Blueness associated with cold seems right to me because coldness, as demonstrated through images of ice, snow, and glaciers are prominent in Celan’s poetry. However, I believe that blue here also expresses loss, depression, melancholy, despair, and death. The minstrel turns blue in multiples equal to the number of gates. I imagine an almost cubist painting similar to Schad's above. He might turn blue from singing the blues or his corpse might turn blue as it begins to decay, which aligns us once again with “mold green.” Additionally, blue is connected with the great deep, the feminine principle of the waters, and the Void, which connects us to the word "oblivion."

The image here is surreal in that a decapitated minstrel stands before each of the gates. In other words, the image is multiplied, as we apprehend many versions of the same minstrel before many gates. I believe the message is that the process of forgetting is on going and active and that the winds emerge from within the house, the edifice itself, creating a circular action. In forgetting, there is a process of remembering and in remembering there is a forgetting or a relegating of a memory to a place or a house.

“Your minstrel” stands before each of the gates, which situates the poem. The poem is addressed to “you,” and it is the “you” that is the subject and object of the minstrel’s art-his music or his painting. In reading the poem I have the sense that the “you” is female because the minstrel is male and because the “you” in most of Celan’s poems is an abstract feminine other. I believe the “you” is a expression of an ongoing psychological communication with Celan’s anima, reminiscent of the "you" in the Song of Songs’ Cantiques. In support of this proposition, I want to point out a quote from Andréa Lauterwein’s Paul Celan: Voix Allemand, Belin 2005, where she discusses the importance of knowldge of Celan's biography in reading his poetry: Il vaut mieux savoir notamment que l'omniprésence de la 'soeur' dans la poésie de Celan ne se réfère pas-comme chez Trakl- á une soeur de sang, mais plutôt a une altérité féminine de côté de la soeur du Cantique des Cantiques. . . . (It is better to know that the omnipresence of the sister in Celan's poetry does not refer-like the poetry of Trakl-to an actual sister but to a feminine other similar to the sister in Song of Songs.)

Tomorrow, I will focus on the image of the "headless" minstrel.

Color in Paul Celan's "Sand from the Urns"

The strength of the first line lies in the juxtaposition of the color-mold green-against the concept-the house of forgetting.

Celan begins the poem with the word Schimmelgrün, a compound construction that functions as an adjective, describing the house of forgetting. Mold green conveys a color and a tone. This tone is expressionistic in nature and presents a worldview and is also consistent with the themes found in the hermetic poets of the 30s. In other words the House of Forgetting or Oblivion is in a state of decay. It is important to note at this juncture that the word for oblivion in German is Vergessenheit, which Celan did not use; instead he uses Vergessens/forgetting. Oblivion is a state of unknowing, while forgetting is an active erasing of memory.

More specifically, the use of the world "mold" elicits a tone (somber, sinister, sad) as well as presents several alternate meanings that serve to deepen the complexity of the poem as well as unify the overlying theme. For instance, molds are fungi that cover the surface of something organic that is either in some stage of decay or moist. The fungi cover the surface in the form of fluffy mycelia, which produces masses of spores. These spores can be either asexual or sexual. The use of mold in the first line, then, raises Celan themes of decay, water, and sex, all of which are reinforced in the later sentences. This type of precision in word choice differentiates Celan from the surrealists and demonstrates his craftsmanship but also raises the specter of hermeticism, a term he did not like.

Our first image then is a house, a container of forgetting, mold green in color, decaying and dying.

Strange Attractors in Paul Celan's "Sand from the Urns"

Before we discuss the first line, I want to refer to several quotes in André Breton’s Manifestos of Surrealism, translated from the French by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, The University of Michigan Press, 1972, and a definition of “image” in mathematical form from John R. van Eenwyk’s Archetypes & Strange Attractors, Inner City Books, 1997.

Breton, at the beginning of his Manifesto cites Pierre Reverdy:

The image is the pure creation of the mind.
It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities.
The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be-the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.

I see the image as the basic building block of poetry. In that regard, John van Eenwyk defines image mathematically in his work and shows the basis or source of tension of images. First, he defines image as image=form + content. He goes on to say that when an image possesses value, it becomes a symbol. He defines this relationship as symbol = value + image. Of course this formulate begs the question-what is value? He then defines value as value = archetype + energy. Jung defines archetypes as “deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity . . . .a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas . . .. recurrent impressions made by subjective reactions. “ (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7, par.109.)

The energy referred to here is psychic energy and Jung defines psychic energy as “life energy.” Tension derived from polarity creates psyche energy; consequently, returning to Reverdy and the surrealists, we may surmise that the greater the distant between images, the greater the energy, the greater the energy the greater the impact on the reader. So when we read a surrealistic poem such as Breton’s A Nettle Branch Comes in Through the Window, we are struck first by an emotional response to the juxtaposition of the disparate images- The woman with the wallpaper body/The red snapper of the fireplaces.

It is just such a juxtaposition of images that creates the emotional resonance of Celan’s poetry; however, there is more going on in his poetry than surrealistic conjuring of discordant images. One of the dangers of surrealistic poetry is that if two images are too far apart, if the reader cannot maintain the connection, the images separate and the poem fails to move us. Instead, it appears as so much nonsense. With Celan's poetry, there is a juxtaposition of disparate images but there is also a conscious use of the poet's tools to make the poem adhere and hold. We sense a master working behind the images so the poem cannot be truly surrealistic. It may be more appropriate to say that Celan employs the surrealist's methods in a conscious and planned way.

The first line-Schimmelgrün ist das Haus des Vergessens/ the house of forgetting is mold green - provides one impossible image juxtaposed against an odd color. From a rhetorical standpoint, in my translation, we have subject + verb+ adjective. In German, it is adjective+ verb+ subject. Following the German order, the first word- Schimmelgrün – begins the poem and sets the stage. The House of Forgetting, or as Michael Hamburger translates it oblivion, is mold green.

This poem about remembering begins ironically with a reference to forgetting or oblivion. In addition, a psychical process-forgetting-is given a color-mold green. These two images juxtaposed create a polarity and an energy that animates the poem and makes it interesting and intriguing.

Paul Celan's "Sand from the Urns"

As I wrote on Monday, I want to spend some time dealing with Paul Celan’s poem Der Sand aus den Urnen. I want to understand its magic. In other other words, how does this poem mean and how does it convey that meaning?

In addition, I want to demonstrate and develop a method of reading poetry, a method that is similar to the way we deal with or interpret dreams, images or other flotsam and jetsam from the unconscious mind. This process will employ both a look at and discussion of surrealism, expressionism, chaos theory, rhetoric, and Jungian and Freudian psychology.

Let's begin our discussion by simply looking at the poem, walking around it, examining its physical and grammatical shape. It consists of six unrhymed lines. The six lines consist of five sentences. A semi-colon joins the third and fourth lines. Each line presents one or two strong images, usually in a declarative form, without any subordinate clauses. In this regard the poem, written in Bucharest in 1946/47 resembles the poetry of Georg Trakl. (See previous post.)

When I read the poem out loud, I am aware of the strong pause at each of the five periods and the shorter pause at the semi-colon. Because of their declarative nature, the lines seem to convey strength and integrity. The unity of the poem results from the use of two pronouns-"er" and "Du." There is no unity of action. In other words there is no narrative. Instead, the poem employs surrealistic images, without any apparent connection, to convey a mood or an emotion.

Although the odd juxtaposition of images evidences Celan's surrealistic influences, there is also a strong expressionistic tendency in the poem demonstrated by his use of basic warm colors-the mould is green, the headless minstrel is blue, the toe blackens and the lips are red. These strong colors are reminiscent of the colors employed by the Expressionist painters and provide a painterly approach to the poem’s expression.

The following translation is mine. I used the version of the poem set forth in Paul Celan Die Gedichte, Kommentierte, Gesamtausgabe, Suhrkamp Verlag, 2003.


Der Sand aus den Urnen/ Sand from the Urns


Schimmelgrün ist das Haus des Vergessens./ The House of forgetting is mold green.

Vor jedem der wehenden Tore blaut dein enthaupteter Spielmann./ Before each of the blowing gates your decapitated minstrel turns blue.

Er schlägt dir die Trommel aus Moos und bitterem Schamhaar;/He beats the drum of moss and bitter pubic hair for you;

Mit schwärender Zehe malt er im Sand deine Braue./ with festering toe he draws your brow in the sand.

Länger zeichnet er sie als sie war, und das Rot deiner Lippe./ He draws it longer that it was and the red of your lips.

Du füllest hier die Urnen und speisest dein Herz./ You fill the urns here and feed your heart.

Celan, Kiefer, "Shulamith"

A poem of Paul Celan’s from his time in Bucharest entitled Der Sand aus den Urnen/ Sand from the Urns demonstrates an exquisite blend of both expressionistic and surrealistic components. I will spend the rest of the week on the poem in an attempt to explain how these elements underline the impact of the poem and to describe the way in which he achieved its emotional tenor.

As I worked on the poem, I was struck immediately by its expressionistic quality and reminded of the paintings of Anselm Kiefer. In that I am aware that Celan's poetry informed Kiefer's work, I imagined, as I studied the poem, how an understanding of "neo-expressionism" could illuminate Celan's poetry.

If we understand that neo-expressionism exhibits, inter alia, a rejection of traditional design, an ambivalent emotional tone, a presentation of elements in a primitivist manner that conveys disturbance, tension, alienation, and ambiguity, then we can certainly identify a similarity between Celan’s work and the work of the neo-expressionists.

The painting above is Kiefer’s painting Shulamith, which owes its inspiration to Celan’s poem Todesfugue.

Lucas Cranach the Elder

One of my favorite artists is Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-October 16, 1553).

Recently, while in Frankfurt I was able to see several of his works and I reacted to them viscerally just as I do to the expressionists.

The painting included here is his Adam and Eve, which I saw at the Uffizi in Florence last year. One critic in the museum noted that this painting illustrates a "cold eroticism" and Eve's cruelty.

As I work through my Adam and Eve cycle of poems, I often imagine my characters just as Cranach presents them: sensual, exquisite, emotional, and cruel.

In that regard, I am including my latest poem in this cycle.

Winter


Winter falls as a flat frozen flake on her tongue,
and black birds strip the bushes of their berries.

I find a fish frozen in the mud of a beaver’s pond
and scrap it free from the clay with a clamshell.

She squats in a hedge for warmth
and moans, cursing the snake that betrayed her.

I gut the fish and spy a speckled star shaped shell;
I hold it to my ear and listen as the red lion roars
and three seabirds struggle over the offal.

The longhaired bison pass through the night
and awaken me from a dream. I pick up the shell
to listen to the north star whispering,
as snows smothers the earth.

Christian Schad

For over thirty years I have been interested in fauvist, expressionist and surrealist art. Fate seems to have encouraged that interest because I have repeatedly stumbled onto exhibitions at just the right moment.

In 2001, I was working in Paris and one free afternoon I set off on a walk. When I reached the Marais I saw a notice for a Giacometti exhibit at the Centre G. Pompidou. Once there I became fascinated with his systematic study of the human skull and I jotted down a sentence from one of his notebooks. I later used the line in my second novel: J’ai passé tout l’hiver dans ma chambre d’hotel à peine le crâne, voulant le preciser….

A few years later, once again in Paris, I was returning to my hotel when I noticed that there was an important exhibit of Picasso's erotic art. I spent the rest of the afternoon lost in Picasso's mythic universe. Since that time I have used his images of the Minotaur over and over again in my work. In fact, the character, Karl Wisent, grew out of my study of Picasso's Vollard Suite.

In the early 90's I was working for a major manufacturing company and I often accompanied the President of the company to New York. During this time I was studying Gustav Mahler and Oskar Kokoschka. One free afternoon as I passed the Guggenheim I noticed that the whole museum was featuring the works of Kokoschka. Fate once again was on my side.

Approximately, a year and half ago in New York, I stumbled onto an exhibit of Christian Schad's work. At the time I had no idea who he was but I was immediately struck by his images and the feeling tone of his work and I knew instantly that he would enter my pantheon of artistic gods. The painting above is one of his. I mention Schad because he, like Celan, was both an expressionist and a surrealist. He was born on August 21, 1894, in Miesbach. In 1913, he studied art in Munich. During the first world war, he fled to Zurich where he joined Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara. Together with Walter Serner he started the magazine-Sirius. From 1920 to 1925, Schad lived in Rome and Naples where he studied the Italian Renaissance painters and in 1925, he joined with Otto Dix and George Grosz to particpate in the Neuen Sachlichkeit.

Jené, Celan, and the Austrian Journey

For several weeks now I have been trying to imagine Paul Celan’s journey from Romania to Austria. Neither of the biographies that I have deals with this ordeal in any detail.

In my fantasy, I begin by remembering images from Carol Reed’s film, based on a Graham Greene script, The Third Man. I imagine Celan stealing away through ruined streets one frigid night, probably wearing a dark suit, hat, and an overcoat, and carrying a small cardboard suitcase. Somewhere in the dark he meets a Hungarian farmer who leads him and other Jews, who are hiding in the woods, to the Hungarian border, where they cross in a rush, wading through deep snow. Once across they work their way to a deserted train station where they wait for a train that may or may not appear.

Israel Chalfen in his Paul Celan, a Biography of his Youth, writes “with the help of Hungarian farmers, Paul crossed the Romanian-Hungarian border in 1947-the smuggling of people was well organized and proceeded undisturbed. On the other side of the border he joined up with a group of Jewish emigrants and tried to make his way to Vienna.” (Chalfen, 191).

Somehow I don’t find this description satisfactory or persuasive. At the time, the Russians occupied both Hungary and Romania and shared the occupation of Vienna with the Allies. Chalfen makes this journey sound almost safe. I imagine that they met with Russian patrols and were accosted, slept in barns and deserted stations. They must have been hungry and thirsty, tired and frightened. They traveled in groups for safety but these were the survivors, traumatized and barely recovered from the war. Celan writes that he was among them but not one of them: “I lay on a stone, back then . . . on the stone tiles; and next to me, there they lay, the others who were like me . . .my cousins; . . . they did not love me and I did not love them, because I was one, and who wants to love one, and they were many . . ..” (Chalfen, 191)

Nevertheless, the simple facts are that Paul Celan arrived in Vienna by way of Budapest on December 17, 1947, as a refugee. Shortly after arriving he became a member of an artist’s circle that met at the Agathon Gallery. The group’s leader was Leopold Wolfgang Rochowanski, who published the magazine Die schönen Künste.

One of Celan’s major supporters at the time was the painter, Edgar Jené. Jené was born on March 4, 1904 in Saarbrücken. He studied art at the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste in Munich and at the Ecole National des Beaux-Arts, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1928, he met the surrealists. The painting above, entitled Coco (1928), is an expressionist portrait of Jené's wife.

Later Jené was responsible for the surrealist renaissance in Vienna and Celan’s connection to him further illustrates his contact with the surrealists.

In addition to Jené, Celan also met Ingeborg Bachmann, who would become his lover and ultimately a friend for the rest of his life. More on her later.

"Nadja" by Breton

After finishing Nadja by André Breton last night, I closed the book, took a deep breath and then started over. I realized that I had not paid proper attention to the beginning because I am programmed to read a novel in an Aristotelian fashion. I also realized upon finishing that it holds the key to surrealism and only in the re-reading would I truly understand.

I see the novel expressing, inter alia, the idea that the random acts of life received raw, without the ever-gnawing desire to cook our experiences through will and ego, offer a panoply of possibilities that when studied in silence and in arrears hold meaning and significance. Most novelists in their desire to be god-like in their omniscience create a dead letter, which we rush through to the end. However, a novel like Nadja demands a rereading and another, just as the poetry of Celan demands a rereading.

I believe the novel also conveys the message that life received in the ultra receptive posture attracts all types of images and symbols that we usually ignore; however, if we pause and recollect, listen and mediate, we may come to see the beauty of the random act, which creates, as we discussed in earlier posts, depth. Our life could resemble a poem or a piece of art rather than misery and boredom if we were prepared to concentrate on the chaotic acts that occur daily and which we usually ignore.

More on Nadja in future posts.

"Ave Maria" by Keith Harvey

Ave Maria

Fat frozen drops fall
from bruised clouds
onto the Uffizi
and a tourists’ queue
stretches serpentine into rain
that soaks fur coats,
and stains leather pants.

Mother and child wait,
speaking French to one
and German to another.
The mother pulls her mink coat
against her body
and shrugs at the sky;
her child frowns,
moans and pouts,
her olive skin vibrating,
her black eyes flashing anger
as she begs to leave.

They stand before an altarpiece
by Martini, tempura on wood.

On golden board
the Virgin, with olive skin,
is so shocked
by the angel’s suggestion,
in gilded Greek
that her body recoils
from the words flying from his mouth
and her black eyes flash
as her mouth turns down to reject
impregnation through her ear.
As she refuses to relent and pouts,
the angel, with embroidered wings,
holds an olive branch as a bribe.
Recognizing her youth
he grows firm and resolute,
making his case until she
hears his potent words.

Doves gather and wait
like tourists in the winter’s rain.

Celan, Trakl, Bly

It is obvious that Paul Celan was influenced by surrealism but it is also equally clear that he was interested in and felt an attraction to German Expressionist literature. We know that he read Kafka and felt an affinity to him and that he also felt close to the German writer Georg Trakl.

John Felstiner quotes from a letter that Celan wrote to his friend, Sperber: “I’m much less attracted to Else Lasker-Schüler’s poems than to Trakl and Éluard, and also because I didn’t know what Ludwig von Ficker thought of her poems. But then Ludwig von Ficker took from his desk Lasker-Schüler’s latest volume, The Blue Clavier, it was a copy of the book published in Jerusalem, and began speaking of this poet in such a way that I saw she meant every bit as much to him as Trakl. He also thought Trakl himself was often very indebted to her. And he talked to me as if even I were one of them. What especially delighted me was that he really entered into the Jewishness of my poems-as you well know, that counts a great deal to me.”(Felstiner, 55)

Georg Trakl was an Austrian expressionist. He knew Kokoschka and was subsidized secretly by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Robert Bly and James Wright have translated some of Trakl’s poetry beautifully into English. Bly writes in his introduction: “In a good poem made by Georg Trakl images follow one another in a way that is somehow stately. The images have a mysterious connection with each other. The rhythm is slow and heavy, like the mood of someone in a dream.”

Here is the first stanza of a poem entitled “Summer” translated by Bly and Wright:

At evening the complaint of the cuckoo
Grows still in the wood.
The grain bends its head deeper,
The red poppy.

Donald Sutherland, James Burke and "Aurora Borealis"

Sometimes a film has a performance so riveting that it seems to stop the narrative flow. Donald Sutherland in James Burke’s Aurora Borealis, which I recently saw at the USA Film Festival, gave such a performance.

However, the narrative was not broken; instead, a spell was uttered, and we forgot that Sutherland was Sutherland. Perhaps, the magic was accomplished through the director’s unified vision and the superb performances of the entire cast.

The story is about Duncan Shorter, played by Joshua Jackson, a young man at a crossroads. He has failed at nearly everything he has put his hand to but when his dying grandfather (Sutherland) moves into a retirement home in Minneapolis with his faithful and loving wife, played by Louise Fletcher, Duncan, unlike his successful brother, takes up the burden of caring for them.

Kate, a health care giver, played by Juliette Lewis, provides Duncan a love interest. Juliette Lewis admitted after the film that the role of Kate was new for her. Kate is self-assured, self-confidant, and mature. As Lewis said, “she is a grown woman.” She also admitted it was a type of role that she hasn’t always played and that was what attracted her to the part.

Because there were so many minor characters, I feel that it necessary to emphasize that one of the film's greatest strengths is that it is even and well paced and that every minor character possesses resonance.

I had not heard of James Burke before I saw the film but he provided a mature and touching story.

Hermes, Hephaestus, Breton and the "ultra receptive posture"

In my last post I discussed one of the tenets of surrealism, the “ultra receptive posture,” and I said that this posture was ultimately hermetic in nature. In that regard, I was thinking of Hermes as the guide that leads us into unexpected, unknown regions of experience. New experience and new behavior are difficult to express in our society, where conformity is considered a virtue. The only way that we will follow Hermes and open ourselves to new experiences, new ideas, or new feelings is if we are receptive and willing to overcome our prudishness and our puritanical ideas and be ourselves, to find ourselves and speak of ourselves in a frank and honest way.

It is interesting to note that André Breton was the inventor of the game-Truth or Dare. It was a Dadaist strategy to break down barriers and expose the underlying psyche. Any one who has played the game knows that there must be a degree of trust but there must also be a willingness to accept certain unexpected results, which, in most instances, involve certain crudities, which we usually hide behind a patina of respectability. Hermes, like the Dadaists, was willing to express his desires openly and that is why he was the father of some of the most unusual children in mythology-Pan, Priapus, and Hermaphroditus.

An example of Hermes’ spontaneous and “ultra receptive posture” is found in Homer’s story of Hephaestus and Aphrodite in The Odyssey. In this story, Hephaestus suspects that his wife Aphrodite is having an affair with Ares. To catch them in the act, he devises an elaborate trap, which involves unbreakable nets. He traps the two in the act and then summons all the gods to see Aphrodite and Ares naked in his trap. The male gods show up and utter the usual epithets and censures of the immoral couple. Hermes, however, does not repeat the usual wornout platitudes. Instead, he says, “Apollo, my royal Archer, there is nothing I should relish more. Though the chains that kept me prisoner were three times as many, though all you gods and goddesses were looking on, yet would I sleep by Golden Aprodite’s side.” Rafael Lopez-Pedraza says of Hermes’ response that “Hermes is not at all bothered by revealing his fantasies in front of the rest of the gods.”

I am not calling for a revelation of our inner most thoughts to the world. Instead, I am calling for an investigation of our innermost thoughts rather than repressing or destroying them. If the psyche presents you with an odd or crude image investigate and expose it rather than quickly suppressing it. Because the fact of the matter is that it will not be destroyed; instead,it will simply sink back into the unconscious mind to grow stronger and uglier.

Breton and the "ultra receptive posture"

There is a story about André Breton that I like. In the early twenties he was living in a hotel and at night he would leave his door open, hoping that some stranger might enter and climb in bed with him.

Mark Pollizzotti mentions this story in his biography, Revolutions of the Mind, The Life of André Breton, Farrar Strauss Giroux 1995, while discussing Breton’s play If you Please:“More important the act foreshadows the more specifically Surrealist ethic of 'availability,' or 'receptiveness to chance.’”

Later, while discussing the play and the character Létoile, a detective, Breton states “It’s positively true that he’s not waiting for anyone, since he hasn’t made any dates. But, by the very fact of adopting this ultra-receptive posture, he intends to help chance-how should I say it-he means to put himself in a state of grace with chance, in a way that something will happen, that someone will show up.”

This concept of creating a “state of grace” with chance appeals to me both as a philosophical stance for life and as a strategy for writing because the concept of "availability" possesses, on the one hand, a mystical quality and a way in which to deal with experience , at least in a measured way, and, on the other hand, complies with some of Jung's ideas about the unconscious.

Specifically, on a creative level, if we place ourselves in a 'state of grace' or become available for images, they seem to arrive unbidden into the conscious mind like a stranger in the night. When these images surface we should greet them, meditate upon them and follow them, even if they repulse us, disturb us, or puzzle us. This type of receptivity ultimately is "hermetic" in nature and leads us back to Hermes, the guide (see earlier posts).

Celan, Auster, Cortanze

November 4, 2004
Hotel Bourgogne-Montana


I am across the street from the Assemblée National. A group of Palestinians have gathered outside my hotel room, upset about Arafat, who has descended into a coma.
I am on my way to Frankfurt but I decide to stop in Paris for a few days to search for evidence of Celan’s past existence on the Left Bank. I leave the hotel and turn left rather than right to avoid the crowd. I seem to always be in Paris when something is happening. I was here when the first Gulf War started. I was here when the second started and now Arafat. Because I am an American, I suddenly become a spokesman for all things American. What they don’t know is that I am the wrong guy to ask. I know little or nothing, just what I read in the newspapers like them.

I circle around the hotel and head east toward the Boulevard St. Germain de Prés. There is a small bookstore a few blocks from my hotel and I enter looking for books on Celan. There is nothing on Celan or any of the poets I am interested in; instead, there seems to be a large selection of Beckett and Céline, writers that I use to read but who don’t interest me now. They must be the owner’s favorites. On a table in the back I find several books on Paul Auster. Two are written by Gérard de Cortanze, which I buy.

I leave the bookstore and begin to think about Auster and his connection to both Beckett and Celan. In fact, as I walk, I believe that I saw a reference to Celan’s name for the first time in a book by Auster. Am I right, did a reference by Auster suggest my interest in Celan? It was in, I now remember, the Art of Hunger. Now looking for Celan I find books on Auster. I now want to read Auster again so I look for the Metro. I know of an English bookstore on the right bank. I know I can find Auster there or maybe I should read Céline again. I have an undefined hunger to read someone or something that will fill me up at this moment and it has to be someone unique because my tastes have become specialized and particular.

I descend into the underground and plot my way to the bookstore. As I speed through the underground, I begin to read the Cortanze book and then I feel the interaction of Paris, Celan, Auster, French, the Metro, and the grayness of winter, and I am aware of my hunger and my need to find in writing some solace, some companionship.

Depp, Gainsbourg and Attal

If there was any doubt that Johnny Depp is a great actor, it is dispelled in his virtually speechless performance in two scenes in Yvan Attal’s Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants (2004). He appears twice-once at the beginning in the scene at the Virgin Mega Store on the Champs-Elysée and again at the end of the film. He says very little in either scene and yet he steals both from Charlotte Gainsbourg. This is no mean trick because she is a terrific actress who in a matter of seconds in the scene with Depp shows us pain, happiness, loss, love and lust without uttering a word.

The silent Depp is simply the canvas upon which Gainsbourg paints all of her projections. He appears to us as vapid and unaware of the young woman’s desires. In this, I believe, Attal is quite perceptive. He knows that usually our fantasies of love are really directed to an ideal rather than to a person and the vapid and silent Depp, simply referred to in the credits as l’inconnu, underscores the capricious nature of human desire. I also believe that Depp in his sheer intelligence also understands Attal’s message and personifies in this memorable scene the unknowing unaware object.

This is the second full-length film written and directed by Attal and it proves that he is one of those self-conscious but wise observers of the human condition. Although his plots are somewhat predictable, his film contains sparks of genius. The two scenes with Depp and Gainsbourg illustrate Attal’s psychological depth and also predict a unique cinematic style.

For a clip in French: http://www.ilssemarierent-lefilm.com/flash.htm

"Sacrifice" by Keith Harvey

Sacrifice

I scraped the roots of a cypress tree and unearthed grubs
that tasted like metallic silver that stained the mountain.
She caught crimson butterflies and popped them into her mouth.
Afterwards she doubled in pain and threw up fragile wings.
They are too beautiful to eat.
We grazed on grass like bison but it too made us sick.
Starving, we followed the red lions
and stole their prey’s bloody remains,
even though flesh had been forbidden us.
It was she who devised our stratagem. It was always she.
We shall sacrifice one tenth of the kill to him
and worship the sacrificed. From then on we ate meat
and became one with the sacred kill.


Copyright © 2006 by Keith William Harvey. All rights reserved

"The Fourth Day" by Keith Harvey

The Fourth Day

At dawn she presses her pelvis against me, forcing me up.
I bring her stale water in a clamshell. As she drinks I pick up my tools-
a sharpened stick, a small rock with a tapered head, and a bag woven from reeds.
I stand naked on the ledge of the cave and watch the river run
to a sea that shimmers green blue in the distance
and hear the roar of red lions hunting across the veldt.
The lions have grown afraid and suspicious.
A great red one with a burgundy mane leads a pride
of six that follows me throughout the day. I remember him from the garden.
He, like us, is forgetting our time there.
Soon neither he nor I will remember our previous lives
when we spoke the same language and lived in peace.
We have become brutes in this new world and know not what we do.


Copyright © 2006 by Keith William Harvey. All rights reserved.

Water, Wave, Shipwreck in Paul Celan's "Love Song"

Yesterday, we discussed the first three lines of Paul Celan’s Love Song and focused on the image of the “walnuts.” Today, I want to look at line two and the first few words of line three and the water imagery that emerges. Once again the translation from the Romanian is by Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi.

You’ll juggle them and a wave will crash in through the window,
Our single shipwreck . . ..

The “you” is juggling the “chiming walnuts” or the “phosphorescent eyes.” In the word “phosphorescent, ” Celan provides an image that conveys a sense of burning through oxidation. This burning will not be extinguished by water, by inundation, nor will walnuts be drowned by a crashing wave.

“Water” here has an intrusive and destructive quality but “phosphorescent eyes” will continue to burn and “walnuts” will float. At dawn, after the lovemaking, “a wave” will crash in through window and reveal the “shipwreck.”

The image places them-the you and the I- floating on the sea. I believe that once again we have an image of stuck-ness. The poem’s location now is not up in the sky, not below at the bottom of the sea, but on the surface of the water; and, the surface of the water is not safe: it is the location of a “ship wreck,” a dangerous place where the participants might drown. People caught in a shipwreck find themselves washed up on beaches lost and desolate.

Additionally, there is something nonchalant and sinister about the “you” juggling the walnuts because through the juggling or because of it the wave comes through the window. There is an invasion of their containment, their space. With the invasion of the room by the wave, a split occurs, revealing yet another layer within the poem. Below their room is yet another room, just, as within the poem, there are additional layers of meaning.

Eyes and Walnuts in Paul Celan's "Love Song"

An archetype moves upward toward the world of ideas, images, and symbols and downward toward “the natural, biological processes-the instincts-it presents certain affinities with animal psychology.” Jolande Jacobi, Complex Archetype Symbol in the Psychology of C.G. Jung, Bollingen Press 1974.

An archetype manifests itself primarily through metaphors. Jung initially referred to archetypes as Urbild or urtümliches Bild or, in English, “primordial images.” Jacobi states that Jung meant “all the mythologems, all the legendary or fairy-tale motifs, etc., which concentrate universally human modes of behavior into images, or perceptible patterns.” (id. 33)

An archetypal symbol appearing in the here and now can be “felt” as much as known by the conscious mind because of the psychic energy that surrounds it. The word “walnut” in Paul Celan’s poem Love Song has a psychic charge to it. When we read the poem we feel its mystery and its weight as symbol and as sexual image.

The first three lines of the poem, translation from the Romanian by Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi, set the stage and presents the images:

When the nights begin for you at dawn
Our phosphorescent eyeballs will scurry down from the walls, chiming walnuts,
You’ll juggle with them and a wave will crash in through the window

In this image, we have eyeballs scurrying about and compared to chiming walnuts. This, of course, is a surrealistic device, using an unusual, discordant metaphor to shock and also excite us. The metaphor shocks us primarily because both eyes and walnuts have sexual connotations and a long history, primarily in Greek and Roman literature, as sexual images. However, the shock comes from the new-the comparison of the two.

The comparison, no matter how shocking is not illogical. Both images convey a sense of wholeness and sexuality. The eye was thought to be a symbol of the androgyne, which we learned in an earlier post, is a symbol of wholeness and the nut because of its roundness is a symbol of unity and completeness. It is perhaps because of these initial associations that the two symbols have also represented sexuality. When Oedipus commits a sexual misdeed, he puts out his eyes and “walnuts” were known among the Romans as “Jupiter’s nut” and the Greeks as Dios balanos or “Zeus’ nut.” A nut is the end result of flowering and the walnut because of its shape and size was particularly “phallic” to the Romans. Varro states that juglans is a derivation of Jovis and glans means, “nut.” We have taken the word “glans” into our language as both the glans penis and the glans clitoridis.

According to J. C. Cooper, the walnut “shares with all nuts the symbolism of hidden wisdom, also fertility and longevity; the walnut was served at Greek and Roman weddings as such.” An interesting fact is that not only did the bride and groom share a quince at the marriage feast but the guests also threw walnuts at the bride and grown, symbolizing the impending cracking of the shell and the hope for fertility through the planting of the seed.

Consequently, when Celan compares these two images-eyes and walnuts-he brings all of the underlying connotations, associations, and psychic energy with them.

In my mind, Celan accomplishes, where maybe some of the other surrealists failed, the mandate to reach the archetypal through the use of startling metaphors.

Metaphors and Archetypes in Paul Celan's "Love Song"

The imagery in Love Song, translated from the Romanian by Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi, is a triumph of surrealism because it moves from the personal unconscious of the poet to the archetypal and it does so through just a few key images.

Bill Zavatsky writes in his introduction to André Breton, Earthlight, Green Integer 102, 2004, “metaphor making, the dynamic principle that motivated Surrealism, asserts that all is connected, even if we must puzzle through a glass darkly.” He goes on to say that the purpose of this metaphor making is to penetrate to the archetypal. In this regard, I believe that Paul Celan is successful in connecting his metaphors and images, no matter how abstruse and difficult that they might be, and penetrating the archetypal.

In Love Song, Celan connects the primary images and metaphors: eyes, walnuts, hair, water, shipwreck, and vacant rooms.

The phosphorescent eyes are associated through their shape to the walnuts. Walnuts possess a sexual connotation, just as the other’s tresses do.

The lovers are up during the night but as dawn breaks they fall- tresses hang, walnuts chime and are then juggled, and the day brings a shipwreck.

From above they will descend but not all the way. They are stuck, shipwrecked, above the vacant room, above reality, above the everyday. They will not be saved; instead they will drown together.

Tomorrow I will discuss the symbolic and archetypal nature of the walnut.

Paul Celan's "Love Song" and the Archangel Rafael

Paul Celan as a survivor watched as the victims of the Holocaust died and rose to the heavens as smoke, as ash. As a witness, he is caught in a middle place, on his way, from the past to an unknown future.

In the prose piece entitled, The Next Day the deportations about to begin (translated by Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi), we feel the “I’s”stuck-ness between those that died and those that are alive without his memories and experience.

In the piece, written while Celan was in Bucharest, the archangel Rafael (רפאל, "God has healed") appears to the protagonist. He is there to help the people escape, which is consistent with the archangel’s role in the Book of Tobit: 3:17 -- And Raphael was sent to heal the two of them: to scale away the white films of Tobit's eyes; to give Sarah the daughter of Raguel in marriage to Tobias the son of Tobit, and to bind Asmodeus the evil demon, because Tobias was entitled to possess her. At that very moment Tobit returned and entered his house and Sarah the daughter of Raguel came down from her upper room.

In the prose piece, Rafael’s gaze creates a leaf (Apollo’s gift to the poet) that falls on the forehead of the “I,” thereby granting him a poetic voice. However, because he is to speak, he does not rise with the others. He says, Hours pass and I haven’t found anything. I know: down there the people gathered, Rafael touched them with his thin fingers, and they lifted off, and me, I’m still rising.

This same stuck-ness manifests itself in Celan’s poem Love Song. (Paul Celan, Romanian Poems, translated from the Romanian with an Introduction by Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi, Green Integer 81, 2003). The poem situates the participants, the lovers, in a middle place, a ghostly mid-world: Our single shipwreck, the translucent floor through which/ we’ll peer at the vacant room below our own.

This feeling of stuck-ness supports our discussion in an earlier posting of Celan’s verticality, the movement within the poem between the sky and the earth or sea, and his horizontal movement between the past and the future.

Although this poem is purportedly about love, the tone of the poem is not much different from the prose piece. Melancholy surrounds the lovers and their love making fails to relieve them of their angst.

Paul Celan, Chestnuts, Walnuts and Love

Two and half months ago, I prepared an outline of topics for this blog. The list had twenty subjects and so far I have only covered one or two of them. One thing is clear to me, however, but may not be clear to you, and that is each of the topics is interrelated. You might ask, what has Paul Celan to do with your meditation on Hermes, and the answer would be-he is a hermetic poet. What is a hermetic poetic you might ask, and I would say I have not yet reached that point in our discussion.

Today, I was going to discuss the myth of Hephaestus and Aphrodite but instead, over coffee, I became interested in the first line of a Paul Celan poem and I rushed off to see if I could figure it out. The line is from a poem written in 1940, entitled Drüben: Erst jenseits der Kastanien ist die Welt/ Only on the other side of the chestnuts is the world.

I was interested in this line because I have been preparing an explication de texte of one of Celan’s Romanian poems, entitled Love Song, which begins

When the nights begin for you at dawn
Our phosphorescent eyeballs will scurry down from the walls, chiming walnuts

(Translation by Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi in Paul Celan Romanian Poems, Green Integer 81, 2003)

The Romanian word in the original is noci, “nuts.” Why did the translators choose the word "walnuts" rather than nuts or chestnuts for that matter?

We have already dealt with image of nuts in an earlier blog; however, is there any connection between the chestnuts of 1940 and the noci in 1947? Is there any relationship to the “love song” of 1947 and Drüben written during the war? Is Love Song really a poem about love?

Nevertheless, I am fascinated with the image of nuts, walnuts and chestnuts.

What was happening in 1940 to Paul Celan?

Because of the war, Celan could not return to his medical studies in France and he was forced to remain in Czernowitz. He, therefore, made the decision to enroll at the local university to study French language and literature.

On June 28, 1940, Russian tanks rolled into Czernowitz with little or no opposition.

Upon their arrival, the Romanian teachers fled to Bucharest and later the Russians installed their own teachers at the university. Out of necessity Celan began to study Russian.

A few months after the Russians' arrival, Celan was heard to say “Jetzt bin ich Trotzkist,” just as André Breton had declared in Paris when he learned the truth about Stalin.

During the summer of 1940 Celan met Ruth Lackner, an actress in the Yiddish Theater, and in September he met Rosa Leibovici. He was fated to have a romantic relationship with each of them.

With the stage set, I will begin a discussion of Love Song tomorrow.

"Nekyia"

Nekyia



Blood flows-
A mixture of
Salt and water,
fats and minerals,
Imagined,
In dream, vision, and thought,
Illuminated
Across a horizon
Of a sulfurous sea,
Seen,
In the center,
An archipelago,
Where a severed head,
Like a pirate’s rum cask,
floats its metaphors into
an alchemy of fluids
That lubricates
the crossroads
where outer meets inner.


Copyright © 2003 by Keith William Harvey. All rights reserved.

"First Days" a new cycle of poems

I am currently working on a cycle of poems that follows the first family from its expulsion from the Garden to the murder of Abel.

I am using this story to explore several psychological themes and images that concern me.

In working with these images I am reminded of several paintings that I admire, housed in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. I have stood for many hours studying them.

One, Deux Mères by Leon-Maxime Faivre, 1888, upsets our expectation of the vagaries of primitive life and romantically and dramatically pictures a woman engaged in mortal combat to protect her children.

First Day

I sharpened a stick and burned the end black outside the gates.

She squatted and pissed on the trail. I groaned and growled
Disappointed that she would so defiantly mark our way for the giants.

We dug potatoes from the black earth with my stick and picked berries.
Black juice ran down our faces. I cooked potatoes in the ash of a dying fire.

We slept together, our naked bodies pressed
against a limestone rock, while frigid winds tore at my back.

Wolves howled louder than the night on the green plain.

Copyright © 2006 by Keith William Harvey. All rights reserved.

"Home" published by Spiky Palm

I want to thank Carol Cotten and Chuck Wimple, editors of Spiky Palm, for publishing my poem "Home."

It always makes the day special to receive an acceptance letter and a copy of Spiky Palm.

If you want to order a copy of the Spring 2006 issue check out their website: http://www.tamug.edu/spikypalm/

Petronius and Paul Celan

As we said in an earlier post, Paul Celan left his home in Bukovina for Bucharest in 1947. Bucharest was only a way station because Celan intended going on to Vienna.
However, because it was difficult to obtain a visa, Celan ended up spending two years in Bucharest.

During the two years in Bucharest he supposedly had numerous amorous experiences.

Israel Chalfen writes that “The taboo of the feminine, established in his childhood, began to lose its force, and he no longer struggled against the experience of his own sexuality. From time to time, he would complain to a friend that the easy girls with whom he came into contact were awfully primitive, but this fact did not keep him from their company.” Israel Chlafen, Paul Celan: A Biography of his Youth, Persea 1991.

In Czernowitz, Celan had fallen in love with Rosa Leibovici and he, later, persuaded her to join him in Bucharest. However, once there something happened and they broke up after a few months.

With this historical or biographical context, we will explore a few of the Romanian poems that purportedly deal with love.

John Felstiner said of these poems that they were looser and perhaps happier. I am not quite sure that this summary is accurate. In a prose piece written during this time intimations of the suicidal Celan are present and within the context of poems of love we see image after image that foretell doom and destruction.

For instance, in Those were Nights, the “I” of the piece says ”those nights it was cumbersome to open your veins, while the flames engulfed me.” He goes on to say, “I was Petronius and spilled my blood again among the roses.”

This reference to Petronius is enlightening, considering what we know about Celan’s future actions.

Petronius was a Roman writer during the time of Nero and his one famous work is the Satyricon.

According to Tacitus, Tigellinus was jealous of Petronius’s lifestyle and success. He made an accusation against Petronius to Nero and Petronius was compelled to commit suicide.

According to an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica: “He did so in a way that was in keeping with his life and character. He selected the slow process of opening veins and having them bound up again, whilst he conversed on light and trifling topics with his friends. He then dined luxuriously, slept for some time, and, so far from adopting the common practice of flattering Nero or Tigellinus in his will, wrote and sent under seal to Nero a document which professed to give, with the names of his partners, a detailed account of the abominations which that emperor had practised.”

As we work through some of the Romanian poems, let's remember this image of Petronius.

Verticality in Paul Celan's "Encounter"

On March 30, I began a discussion of Paul Celan’s poem, “Encounter.” I am not sure that we have come to a conclusive determination of its meaning but at least we have made friends with the poem, entered and felt it. I don’t believe the poet ever intended us to do more than to feel its tone and its sadness.

Today, I will end my discussion with a final observation and look toward the next poem in the collection of Celan's Romanian poems translated by Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi. My observation, I hope, will act as a transitional device.

In reading the poem over and over, just as Celan instructed us to, I noticed that there is a movement downward and then back up. This movement is vertical and I believe that verticality-through descent and ascent-provides a prevalent image in his poetry and provides a sense of movement. This movement is transcendental or symbolic of certain psychological as well as religious concepts of development.

The poem begins with rain falling onto the “dunes of limestone.” We begin with the sky, clouds and falling rain. The movement is from the sky to the earth.

The rain falls and transforms the “wine preserved” and “douses” the eyes and causes “hair to drip out of mirrors.”

Then the poem, in the last stanza, turns back and looks up toward the sky where the memory of the dead resides. The hair blankets the “region of air,” and the poet climbs a “belated ladder.”

From the rain that falls onto the earth, the poet, now remembering, climbs up to the sky, where the smoke of the burning bodies rises and memories live and fall from time to time onto the earth.

The Leaf that Speaks-Paul Celan's "Encounter"

The “I” in Paul Celan’s poem “Encounter” has recaptured a memory and from that memory, the poet or the “I” or the “leaf that speaks” will set the “autumn on fire.”

The rain on green limestone sets the transformative power of memory into motion and produces a series of images that reflect the poet’s duty to awaken and swallow the wine of sorrow and memory.

The dead have risen, like smoke from a funeral pyre, and blanketed “the regions of air” and the poet must climb his “belated ladder” to “take a bite from your head.”

The poet must, like “a human tongue,” trumpet “audacity in a helmet.”

The “leaf,” delivered in a funereal urn, will speak for the angry trees, full of fury.

Recaptured Image of Shulamith in Paul Celan's "Encounter"

We have been discussing Paul Celan’s poem “Encounter” for almost a week and the meaning still runs ahead of us, refusing to be trapped or captured.

The translators chose the title-Encounter-while the Romanian word “regasire” could also be translated as “recaptured.”

What has been “encountered” or “recaptured?”

In an earlier post, I felt that the poem was once again addressed to Celan’s mother. The reason that I turned so quickly to that was the references to death, the military images, and, most importantly, the image of “hair,” which seemed to point toward her memory.

Celan has used the image of female hair numerous times when discussing the events of the Holocaust. The best-known reference is in his most famous poem-Todesfugue. (Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng. Your ashen hair Shulamith we scoop a grave in the air there one lies freely.)

Shulamith is the "black and comely" princess in the Song of Songs in the Old Testament, whose name holds echoes of the Hebrew words shalom for peace and Yerushalayim for Jerusalem. According to Felstiner, the name Shulamith stands for the Jewish people themselves. John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, Yale University Press, 1995), p. 38.

When Celan, in the third stanza, writes “your hair dripping out of the mirrors will blanket the regions of air," I feel that the “regasire” is the captured image of the mother, frozen in the mirror, of memory; and when he writes in the second stanza-“let it douse in your eyes, so I’ll think that we’ll die together”-he is referring to her death and his desire to think that they will die together, not apart and alone.

Celan, Surrealism, and "Encounter"

Celan’s poem, “Encounter,” demonstrates certain surrealist elements. Images such as “your hair dripping out of the mirrors” and “with a hand of frost, I’ll set an autumn on fire” remind one of surrealist art.

Surrealism attempted to express the workings of the unconscious through the use of fantastic images and strange alliances of content. André Breton was one of the main proponents of the movement and Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Lautréamont were its precursors.

Celan was aware of the surrealists as early as 1938 and he read Verlaine and Rimbaud, while in high school.

Later, while a medical student in Tour, he was exposed to the surrealists.

Israel Chalfen, in his Paul Celan, A Biography of his Youth, Persea, 1991, postulates that Celan’s introduction to French surrealism was through a French literature student that Celan called the Trotskyite.

Chalfen writes that he was “also aware of the connection between the surrealists and Trotsky; indeed, André Breton and Trotsky met in 1938, and in the same year the Féderation de L’art révolutionary indépendent was founded.”

Celan left France and returned to Czernowitz when the war began.

By 1945, the Soviets controlled his hometown.

In order to escape the Russians, Celan traveled to Bucharest in April 1945.

John Felstiner, in Paul Celan, Poet, Survivor, Jew, Yale University Press, 2001, states that the “Years in Bucharest, from April 1945 until December 1947, were not wholly wilderness years. Paul saw them as a transition, a time to earn money toward resettling in Vienna.”

As soon as he arrived in Bucharest, Celan found himself attracted to the thriving community of surrealists working in the city.

Chalfen reports that he “experienced the highpoint of his social relations in the circle of Bucharest surrealists around Ghérasim Luca, D. Trost and Paul Paun. Whereas Luca, who founded the circle in 1939 after his return from Paris and maintained contact with André Breton, published theoretical books in French, Paun wrote Romanian verse.”

“Encounter” was obviously written under the influence of the surrealists.

As Felstiner says of the poem, “chalk dunes might have appeared in Celan’s earlier poetry, and wine and bell, but not green chalk dunes or wine in a dead man’s mouth or bells with a human tongue.”

Daphne, inspiration, and the laurel in Paul Celan's "Encounter"

I sat down this morning to continue with the explication of Paul Celan’s “Encounter,” intending to write about Celan and Shakespeare; however, two images-“the leaf that speaks” and “my short laurel”-stymied me.

Before I proceed, I present the third stanza translated by Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi.

Your hair dripping out of the mirrors will blanket the regions of air,
Where, with a hand of frost, I’ll set an autumn on fire.
From the waters imbibed by the blind my short laurel will scurry
Up on a belated ladder, to take a bite from your forehead.

Yesterday, I thought I controlled and understood the image of the “leaf that speaks,” but today I am not so sure. I am compelled to look back at the first stanza, where the poet writes, “a human tongue will trumpet audacity in a helmet,” and associate that image with the “leaf that speaks.”

My first impressions are of the funeral urn, filled with ashes. Leaves in the fall are burned and people in camps are ultimately burned or their remains are covered with quicklime. People standing on ladders harvest fruit in the fall. Autumn, a time of harvest, filled with colors, will progress into winter, a time of frost, to death.

Then, I ask, who will set the autumn on fire?

Perhaps, it is the poet and he will “scurry” “set fire” and “bite” through the use of his “laurel,” his poem, his poetry.

For an explanation, I turn to Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, a Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1999, where he discusses the laurel: “Apollo, though the God of Poetry and the leader of the muses, did not, yet, however, claim to inspire poems: the inspiration was still held to come to the poet from the Muse or Muses. He had originally been a mere Demon whom his Muse mother had inspired with poetic frenzy; now he required that, as the Nine fold Muse, she should inspire individual poets in his honour-though not to the point of ecstasy. These poets, if they proved to be his faithful and industrious servants, he rewarded with a garland of laurel-in Greek, daphne.”

Following Graves’ lead, the poet chews the laurel leaf and becomes inspired and immortalizes his subject, his mother, who is dead.

The source of the laurel or the poem is from a drink from the waters imbibed by the blind, which I believe is an allusion to the land of the dead and the scene from the Odyssey, where Odysseus draws the dead to him by offering them blood. He speaks with Teiresias, the blind seer.

The “you” of the poem is female because of the reference to the hair, and is the "I's" muse and his Daphne.

Daphne, a wild virgin huntress, in an attempt to avoid rape by Apollo prayed for help from her father and was metamorphosed into a bay-tree.

Has the poet in a belated attempt to save his mother from ravishment and death metamorphosed her memory into a poem? Is the mother both muse and subject?

Macbeth and Malcolm in Paul Celan's-"Encounter"

Today, I will continue with the second stanza of the Paul Celan poem-Encounter- written in Romanian and translated by Julian Semilian and Sanda Agalidi.

And thus the trees will arrive in fury
To wait for the leaf that speaks, delivered in an urn,
The heralds of the coast of sleep sent off to the tide of
banners
Let it douse in your eyes, so I’ll think that we’ll die together.

Sea, coast, container, and military imagery unify the first stanza with the second. The image “dunes of limestone” relate and reflect “the coast of sleep” and the “tide of banners,” while “banners” connects with “trumpet audacity in a helmet” and “bell,” “helmet,” and “urn” carries the sense of container. The phrase -“trees arrive in a fury” -seem to allude to Shakespeare's play Macbeth, where the attackers cut limbs off the trees and march toward Macbeth, disguising their number. The connection to Macbeth is also made in the first stanza, last line, “a human tongue will trumpet audacity in a helmet.” In Macbeth, an armored head, conjured by the witches, predicts the end of Macbeth, while a third apparition, a child with a tree in its hand, predicts that Macbeth will not die until the forest comes to his castle.

Third Apparition

Be lion-mettled, proud; and take no care
Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are:
Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until
Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill
Shall come against him.

Descends

MACBETH

That will never be
Who can impress the forest, bid the tree
Unfix his earth-bound root? Sweet bodements! good!
Rebellion's head, rise never till the wood
Of Birnam rise, and our high-placed Macbeth
Shall live the lease of nature, pay his breath
To time and mortal custom. Yet my heart
Throbs to know one thing: tell me, if your art
Can tell so much: shall Banquo's issue ever
Reign in this kingdom?

Before the end of Macbeth, however, Lady Macbeth dies (Act V, Scene V). Scene V begins with a description of banners on the wall.

MACBETH

Hang out our banners on the outward walls;
The cry is still 'They come:' our castle's strength
Will laugh a siege to scorn: here let them lie
Till famine and the ague eat them up:
Were they not forced with those that should be ours,
We might have met them dareful, beard to beard,
And beat them backward home.


Remembering that limestone made up the “dune” of the first stanza and “tide of banners” on the “coast of sleep” is the situs of the poem’s action in the second stanza, there is a sense or an impression of “castle,” knights,” heralds,” “invasion,” and “war.”

When I first read the poem I had the impression that the “leaf” that speaks, is almost like Henry speaking to his troops before battle, but instead I believe that the leaf is the “I” of the poem, a representative of the forest that comes to displace the murderer within.

As I said above, Scene V of Act V heralds the death of Lady Macbeth and Macbeth’s famous speech.

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.
Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

After the speech, a messenger comes and announces the approach of the forest.

Messenger

Gracious my lord,
I should report that which I say I saw,
But know not how to do it.

MACBETH

Well, say, sir.

Messenger

As I did stand my watch upon the hill,
I look'd toward Birnam, and anon, methought,
The wood began to move.

MACBETH

Liar and slave!

Messenger

Let me endure your wrath, if't be not so:
Within this three mile may you see it coming;
I say, a moving grove.

If Celan were thinking of the play Macbeth, the “I” of the poem is not Macbeth but Duncan’s son, Malcolm.

The “leaf” that speaks is the son that speaks for the father, who has been murdered. However, in Celan’s poem, the one murdered is the father and, also, the mother.

The mother will appear in stanza three, which I will discuss tomorrow.